more ice, more bread

Our ice exercise on Dana Creek near the crest of Yosemite National Park ends in a losing struggle with warm weather. Too warm. Mindful of the last year's November ice orgy along the same creek we try to photograph the ice forming overnight, but this year's crop is thin and mostly featureless. We heard about the freezing blast of Arctic temps pummeling the eastern chunk of the U.S. and think: these folks do not need it. We do.

But we linger for a few daybreaks and look for ice crystals painting their cold magic around dark boulders in mid-steam and breath-stopping white lace lining the banks. There are a few, and we descend on them hungrily. John mounts his tilt-equipped camera on a tripod, while I, always reluctant to lug around any heavy equipment, rely on my steady hand and the workhorse lens I like best. This means getting close, bending over the icy objects of my desire, and not breathing while pressing the shutter.

It also means scrambling over slippery and badly anchored boulders until it happens: a small dark rock rolls under my left foot, my balance goes all to hell, and I fall like a sack of something stupid with no control. My left femur bone screams: noooooo! and keeps screaming while trying to outdo my screaming calf abrasions.

I lie back on the rolling wet rocks with my feet touching the creek ice and breathe. Did I fracture something again? John fetches some ice, saying apologetically: "It is so thin it may not work" but I hold the ice right over my femur where the screams come from. The cold melt drips down my leg and it feels good. "You want to go back to the camper?" he asks but I stagger upright and tell him idiotically that just like riders who fell off their horses I am getting back in the saddle. I return to my ice crystals but by early evening my left knee refuses to bend and a huge hard swelling pops out just above my kneecap and laughs.

Wonderful. How may times have I done exactly that? Walked around so absorbed in my search of subjects I failed to watch for stuff which could -- and did -- trip me up? I swallow a bunch of Advil, promise myself to stay out of slimy rocks, briefly admire my audacity of attempting to fool myself with this promise, and fall into a nasty pain-studded slumber.
Next morning a fanciful mare's tail of a cirrus beckons and I am back on Dana Creek.
There is all of it at once: brilliant crystal bridges, dark and gurgling water holes, spiky ice daggers, gently rounded corners and other fine details. But a few loud cracks of rapidly warming crystals tell me to back off, and this time I am paying attention.

And then we drive down Tioga Road, skirt the Sierras and climb steep coastal hills of Southern California to find Benji. A climber and a sailor who teaches courses for National Outdoor School of Leadership, he was just hired as a tree specialist to help a nonprofit to restore its land ravaged by a massive wildfire two years ago. The Thomas Fire, one of California's worst, fueled by dry vegetation and hot Santa Ana winds, raged across almost 300,000 acres of hills and valleys in December 2017 and charred much along its path, including the Ojai Foundation. Well known for its programs helping people who seek "ways to deepen relationship with self, each other, and the natural world" the nonprofit lost 24 structures and its 36 acres were covered with charred debris.

No longer. Benji takes us around and we see nature triumphant: the tall feathery grasses are up, the flowers are blooming, and massive branches of California's live oaks are flexing their woody muscles.  Small aloe plants look happy, too, and so do rambunctious trees walking along the ridge.

All we may need is love but some bread would be nice, too... and, like other alternative communities, Ojai has a few bakers who believe that flour, yeast, water and salt produce wonder loaves. All that other stuff, notoriously used to make what we call "imitation bread" or "toilet paper" we see across the country, is bordering on offensive. We buy a sackful of crusty  fragrant loaves -- for us and for friends we will see soon -- and Benji and John use a couple as their evening bread faces.



The night arrives, with Great horned owls nailing it to every star. And soon the sun is scrambling through the ground fog again, licking the charred trunks already festooned with new leaves and tall grasses turning bright in the pale light.



©Yva Momatiuk

Ditches

John and I wake, once again this antipodean spring, in a scraggly grove of young gum trees. The small trees are patiently peeling their bark skins and scattering them over the sandy soil. There is also a multitude of sticks, just your ordinary twigs which lost their moorings. And many fire-darkened tree stumplets, small and hard to see in the brush. The sky is flat and hard to see through the glare, and the air smells of eucalyptus perfume. There may also be some spring flowers, the joker card of tourist brochures which herald their profuse seasonal blossomness in Western Australia but they are so well hidden in all this brushy stickiness it takes an overwhelming faith in remote possibilities to drag our cameras out.

When it comes to such abiding faith in spite of all indications to the contrary, John just shines and grows to be eight foot tall. Maybe taller. He extracts his tripod, puts together an intricate combination of a lens, a tilt and only John knows what else, and goes to work in the nearest ditch. And unless there is a pronounced reason to stop, he may continue his quest for a long time. He can, I know, also drop it all if need be, grab any camera and run to capture something happening NOW. But this is what most photographers can do, including myself, and it is his intense focus on possibilities and the stubborn pursuit of them which often takes my breath away.

Once he gets intrigued by his idea of a picture, John can stand riveted to one place for hours. If the flowers are too widely spaced, he may just bring them gently together and persuade them to stay put. If their planes of focus differ too much to render them all sharp, he takes many exposures and combine them. If the light goes all to hell, he waits for it to improve. If he needs to pee, he ignores it.

It is different for me. I need clear impulses, visual upheavals, sudden prompts of emotions and naked jolts of beauty or drama. I need nature to speak to me and not the other way around. Speak, damn you. Yell, if need be. Drag me out and into this dry, sticky and thoroughly nondescript place, and I may switch into my usual photographic mode: driven, careless, and prone to mistakes. I just need a glimmer of hidden surprises and my adrenaline will surge and do its erratic best.

Right now I am ashamed of my passive wait: all I have to do is kick myself into our well practiced "ditch" mode. We are both good at stopping along an un-busy ribbon of a road to explore its ditch riches. A leaf here, a rock there. A clump of ferns over yonder. And once, a lone hitchhiker.

So I go and sniff around; good dog. More broken sticks. More hidden flowers. More bushy plants made of grey dust. Nothing. But wait! What are these corrugated balls, as hard as iron? I touch them and try to figure their biological function. 

Giant seed pouches, as in tree testicles? Hidden fruit for jaws made of titanium? To investigate further, I try to twist one of them off, then another, but they seem welded to the branches they grow on, and the branches (I do try to break one, too) are as hard as marble. Iron, titanium, marble? What the hell?

And I suddenly remember an Aboriginal painting at the National Art Gallery in Canberra we saw recently with John's nephew, Dave. Textures, dust and lines. Points. Dry dry dry. Both the painting and these hard orbs emerge straight from nature and share the same unforgiving hardness and its mystery.

Eventually we leave our scraggly sticks and near a coastal lake we spot paper bark tea trees dangling over calm water. Named Melaleuca quinquenerviain Latin, they have thinly layered trunks and pale paper-thin bark peeling like mad, neatly stacked and ironed by time.

Like this, maybe?

We drive down to the coast to the place called Little Beach. We first saw it nine years ago after another photographer directed us this way, and at that time it was infused with light and color. But today is overcast and dull, and the usual aquamarine sea is dark and nearly flat.

I walk and discover a narrow gap between giant boulders and a white sand pocket which will vanish once the tide comes in. The sea will fill this space with its powerful milky presence of many bubbles. Only the rocks will stick out, darkly.

Like this?

© Yva Momatiuk

always look ahead

Graham -- all 6'-5" of his lean tanned self -- is striding toward us across the short dry grass. We hug him, then Rel. We have not seen him or her, John's first cousin and his wife, for eight years, but he does not waste time.

"You must know it right away and then we do not need to talk about it," he says. "When you walk around here, always look six or eight feet ahead of you. Do not just walk and look up at a bird: stop first, look at the ground, and then at your bird. Never the other way around."

Queensland, Australia, has been baking in high temps for some days now, piling them on top of several years of hard drought. But this is September and early spring, and even here in semi-tropics most snakes should be hibernating just a bit longer.  Yet they are not.  And -- according to Graham and Rel -- they are all out by now, driven out of their dens and tree hollows by heat. Hungry and active. Aggressive.

"Let me tell you what you do when you meet one," Graham continues. "You stop. Then you reach, very slowly, for your hat. Take it off and toss it between you and the snake. Not at the snake; this will only annoy him. Toss it on the ground between you and him. He will concentrate on your hat, and you back off. Slowly."

Got it. But what about their dogs? We already know they have two, Billie Jean and Roger. Do the dogs just walk, too, and stop and look?  No: they run. And Rel, who talked to a local vet after they settled on this hilltop two years ago, knows that one day the dogs may also run out of luck.

To double check, I ask if all local snakes are venomous and turns out they are, except for some pythons and tree snakes. And if I want their names, common and otherwise, Graham is ready with a list of the species which frequent his short grass yard and his and Rel's flower and veg gardens. There is Death alder with its stubby tail, and glossy Small-eyed snake, and pretty Red-naped snake, and aggressive and ever ready Tiger snake, and deadly Coastal taipan, and Red-bellied black snake, and Eastern brown snake and Rough-scaled snake. The last one is nocturnal which is not very helpful if you want to stroll around after the heat releases its grip and the stars nail the night sky.

I love snakes and want to hold one who will love me back just a little. Hard call: the best I can hope for is a Carpet python which resides at a nearby reptile oasis and can be handled. We pile in the new shiny family ute with Rel at the wheel, and drive a mile down the road. For her, Graham and John, this is purely a friendly gesture to please one crazy Pole.

The snake I am allowed to hold -- named Joe -- has already eaten and is used to crazy people. He is long and thick, with pronounced olive markings, longitudinal stripes and a cream belly. And he feels like a lovely cold compress around my neck. I imagine he may -- in return -- like the high temps of my overheated body. I stand in the shimmering shade of a wattle tree, smell his smooth scales and feel his head slithering back and forth across my left shoulder blade. I let him slither as long as he likes.

And then we drive home across dusty groves of avocado, macadamia nut and mango trees, greet the dogs, open a bunch of passionfruit globes full of sun, and wait for the night.

©Yva Momatiuk

squeegee

We take our old Radisson canoe named Edy to check out Esopus Creek flowing through Kingston, NY, and further north until it joins the Hudson. As we paddle on, we pass great fallen trees almost blocking the stream, one skittering muskrat and a lone Great blue heron loudly concerned by our presence. Sporadic noises of internal combustion engines carry over from the nearby NY Thruway and a string of tents hidden in streamside bushes behind a new car dealership mark an encampment of the city's homeless. A few days later we learn one of the residents was found dead, stabbed many times, under his collapsed tent. The police came and did the usual: had the camp cleared of all its residents. Would they also vacate an apartment building after someone committed murder on its 13th floor?

But for us it is still a gentle morning, spent between a clear sky arching above our canoe and a layer of silky mud passing under its bottom. Soon we meet another creek traveler -- a rare breed on weekdays -- in his own old Radisson he purchased for $200 after he dug it out of his neighbor's garage and removed the cobwebs. His name is Miron and he appears to be innocent of the basic "J" stroke which would keep his canoe tracking like a good sled dog. Instead, he paddles rapidly on one side and then on the other, sending his boat in different directions with every stroke. Hard work, this, but Miron is making progress.

Further south we find a log wedged across the creek and boisterous thickets of poison ivy crowding both banks. Portage -- and go on? Noooooo... we are both allergic, and I am already raking my forearms marked by last week's ivy encounters. We turn back and remember we need to send some books to my brother in Poland, so we drive to our post office. Not long ago, the building suffered some damage after one of the ancient Hurley residents rammed its front wall with his pickup. The local paper briskly reported:

No one was injured in the accident at about 11:15 a.m. after the elderly male driver of the truck parked in a space in front of the building went forward instead of backward, according to postal clerk Diana Cline. Cline said the unidentified driver told investigators his gas pedal stuck...

The note failed to mention we only ram buildings if we park our cars with noses pointing at them and then turn the ignition on and put our cars in the forward gear. The stuck gas pedal is a mere afterthought and should not be blamed.

After the front wall was replaced and enhanced by a great expanse of windows, we congratulated our P.O. clerks: finally, they had a lovely view of the sky, the neighborhood trees and more cars attempting to ram their building. The clerks agreed. But within a few days the new windows were blocked by cardboard boxes and other postal supplies, and that was that. Perhaps it is better not to see another pickup coming, with the gas pedal stuck to the floor?

John goes to mail the books. I walk to our gas station -- which is, as usual, trying to hire anyone willing to sell chewing tobacco, Wonder Bread and lukewarm pizza all day long -- and collect a tired squeegee: I may as well wash our Toyota's grimy windows. On my way back I see another Hurley ancient heading for his old red Chevy parked next to our car. The man notices me, too. He seems confused.

"Sorry," he says. "I see you want to clean my car's windows but I do not need it. They are dirty but I always find a part I can look through. So... no, but thank you very much. Not today."

Hm? Now it is my turned to be confused until he reaches into his pocket and fishes out some change.

"Here," he says. "I hope this helps. Please take it."

And suddenly I know: he thinks I am a "squeegee woman" because I am holding the right tool and remind him of many "squeegee men" who used to work street corners in New York and wash car windows stopped at the traffic for a bit of change. I look the part, too, with my messy hair and ratty paddling clothes. The man probably used to live in the city for many years before he retired, moved upstate and slowly became truly ancient. Never mind there were never any squeegee men in our village with its historic Huguenot houses and tidy gardens now crowded with triumphant day lilies in bloom.

I thank him, decline the change and get into our Toyota. John gets in, too. But on our way home I realize I may have done something else: take the money -- I think it was a couple of quarters -- and let the man feel he has actually helped someone.

©Yva Momatiuk