by aramatzne@gmail.com | 25 Sep 2017 | Musing
While children play, the Knight in Wellies stands watch.
There’s one in every class. You know the kid, the one who is always just on the fringe. Not quite fully accepted- and sometimes not fully interested in being accepted.
They keep to themselves. They have their own drummer. While other kids stick out their tongues and jostle each other, they stand guard in their knight’s helmet and Wellies.
I took this photo in Scotland’s Balvenie Castle adjacent to the Balvenie distillery. This is something one may imagine they have seen after a dram or two of good single malt whisky, but I was stone cold sober. And I did not attempt to fit in by donning a lampshade.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 23 Sep 2017 | Musing
Morning clarity in the rearview mirror.
The rain moved ahead of me. It passed through town and across the plateau before following the river west. The same route I was taking.
Summer rain in the sagebrush desert is something worth celebrating. It washes the dust out of the air. As the air warms again almost immediately, it smells of earth and water and life.
It is unmistakable. It breaks through the dust in my brain to remind me that time and space are ever fluid. That whatever may settle here now will wash away with the next downpour.
I took this photo as I entered the storm, the Columbia River bluffs and calm water behind me, foretelling the clarity that comes with the passing rain.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 22 Sep 2017 | Musing
Cascade color
Today is the autumn equinox. Halfway between the light and the dark, three-quarters of this year’s spin around the sun.
The sun seems as reluctant to rise in the morning as I am. And sets again too soon. In exchange for less light, there is more color and the forest is once again vibrant with the autumn rain.
I took this photo when the trees were half red, the sky half blue. Together they made the day wholly perfect.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 21 Sep 2017 | Musing
Dive through the window
I took this photo but I didn’t eat a single thing.
They must have been closed.
I can think of no other explanation.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 18 Sep 2017 | Musing
Fall caching; squirrel on the move.
This is a cautionary tale.
A chipmunk spent its morning trying to pilfer any bit of food it could find from my campsite. The food was packed, hung, and covered. There were no bits lying around, no dirty dishes, no tossed veggie scraps. The chipmunk tried every angle, checked every stuff sack and container to no avail.
Meanwhile, a squirrel spent its morning dashing through the campsite. It collected cones in trees near the lake, ran through camp with a cone in its mouth, and then into the alders along the edge of the lake’s outflow meadow. A few minutes later, having stashed the cone in some secret place, it would run back to camp, stop to look at me over my pack or across the fire ring, and then continue on its path. It didn’t disturb any of my things or even sniff at the stuff sacks. Every five minutes it made another roundtrip through camp.
After a couple of hours, the chipmunk was still angling for something easy and free, although it seemed to have less enthusiasm at this point. It stopped to scold me occasionally as if to say, “How dare you! Where is my breakfast?” It would disappear for ten or twenty minutes and then reappear to once again check every item. Just in case.
The squirrel also scolded me but it was because I inadvertently stepped into its path when it was crossing camp. Halfway through the morning, the squirrel stopped for a snack – a cone he found near one of his supply trees – and then went back to work.
Returning to my briefly unguarded teacup, I found two tiny droplets on the rock next to it. Inside the rim of the cup, there were two little, wet paw prints. The cup was otherwise undisturbed, not knocked over, no floating debris, just two perfect paw prints.
I took this photo by predicting the squirrel’s movement along the same path through camp. It was reliable, as is his winter food supply. The chipmunk only got wet feet for his morning’s work.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 17 Sep 2017 | Musing
Twilight on the surface
The main stem of the Columbia River has 14 dams on it, including the largest dam in the United States. Within the entire Columbia basin, more than 400 dams generate almost half of the hydropower in the US.
Ship locks at several dams and channel dredging allow navigation from the Pacific Ocean to Lewiston, Idaho – more than 400 miles inland.
In the late 1800s, half a million salmon were caught for canning and export in one season. Today four of the 400 dams have fish ladders.
The river irrigates 670,000 acres of sagebrush desert in Washington. As many as 100 illegal dams on private property irrigate an unknown number of additional acres.
Hanford, a Cold War plutonium production site, is the most contaminated nuclear site in the US. For 27 years radioactive cooling water from the eight plutonium production reactors was released back into the Columbia River. The federal government did not disclose this information until more than a decade after the discharge ceased.
Today, an estimated 270 billion gallons of groundwater have been contaminated by high-level nuclear waste that leaked from Hanford’s storage tanks. A million-gallon plume of that radioactive groundwater is expected to hit the Columbia River within the next 10 years at the earliest and 50 years at the latest.
I took this photo in the fading evening light of a typical Columbia River day. Train tracks, carrying coal and oil trains, parallel both banks; grain and coal barges ply its waters; Interstate 84 flanks its south shore; thousands of wind turbines, just visible on the far shore, stand sentinel to the north and south; the slow, warm, slack water impounded behind another dam holds fish that can’t move downstream fast enough and can’t move upstream at all; the final ingredient in the cocktail is three decades of nuclear waste in the water and sediments. The calm water and the pastel light are a lovely façade on a tenacious, living body of water that miraculously continues to survive.
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