by aramatzne@gmail.com | 17 Apr 2023 | Musing, Roads Taken
On the bank
Along the bank of a Labrador river on a late October day, the sound of a splash rose into the blue autumn sky and reached me. We were hauled out, Joe and I, our canoes resting on their sides on the bench above the beach. The stove was going, and it was teatime. Joe, ever the old Canadian trapper, was having a smoke, waiting for the water to come to temperature. I stood, binoculars in hand, crept to the water’s edge, and looked up the beach.
Barely a foot wide against the vast flow of river, the beach was a long step down from me. A tree had fallen off the bank and into the water. Just this side of the tree, ten meters from me, was a wolf casually traveling unimpeded by the dense forest above. It had walked into the water to skirt the downed snag.
It was searching the sand, sweeping its gaze from bench to water. I inhaled one very small, sharp gasp. The wolf stopped, looked up. Directly into my eyes. Gold. This is what I remember. A black wolf with gold eyes. We didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
But holding my breath didn’t change the outcome. After a long moment, the wolf turned and bolted. I dropped to my knee, lifted my binoculars, watched the wolf retreat. Reaching the snag, it fled into the depth of the forest rather than be further exposed crossing into the water.
The wolf didn’t know we were there, having come in from the water with the wind coming downriver. Even in this remote place, it knew that humans were trouble. It knew that to be tethered to this species, the kind with two legs, was not the safest option.
Of course, I didn’t know the wolf was there either, having only mere human senses. Yet despite the opposing lore that wolves are trouble, I have been tethered these many years. It is the only option.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 3 Apr 2023 | Roads Taken
Chimney rock to cliff dwellings
Blue sky and snow squalls. Rock condos and sheer walls. Things you find in the desert.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 21 Mar 2023 | Roads Taken
I needed to see the sky
I found some other things along the way.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 16 Jan 2023 | Roads Taken
Missing water
The days of water seem far away. From one extreme to the other – the wettest place I ever lived to the driest. Surely there is a happy medium somewhere.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 21 Dec 2022 | Roads Taken
Another spin around the sun, and the light returns as promised.
May 2023 be a spectacular year full of joy and satisfaction.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me. xoxo T
Doors with opposing handles
Roadside bar reimagined
Standard Oil Products
The Pipeline Fire
Badgers!
Sheep Mountain View
Shelf cloud rolls ahead of the rain
Oh, yeah, Namibia boys
It’s a long walk
New Mexico from 12,000 feet
A view of the pond from the house I can’t find again.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 5 Dec 2022 | Roads Taken
The desert always holds the unexpected.
A coal, oil, lumber train lumbering through sage and creosote.
Great blue herons wading through a still Rio Grande channel surrounded by autumn cattails and reflected in rain-muddied water.
A fall watercolor of saltgrass to sage, sage to willow, willow to cottonwood, the details of texture and color fuzzy, delicately bleeding onto the page.
Subtlety is an art form.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 24 Oct 2022 | Musing
Only a couple of months ago. The South Atlantic in Namibia. The cold water, the cold air, the African sun. Pebbles like rolled glass. I collected some of these against my better thoughts. The pier with hot chocolate for the KilcherKinder. Wine for me and Constantin, a different form of warmth on a cold day. African winter, not something one believes in. Barefoot in the cold sand, the high surf, tide. Flamingos in flight, their pink bodies, kinked necks, and streaming legs like an afterthought, “Don’t forget us!” Houses, building at the beach’s edge. Too close, too certain. Is there no storm surge, no risk?
This ocean I see daily, the ocean of desert, the ocean of grass, cholla, juniper, and pinyon. It is not lifeless as many think. No more lifeless than the oceans of water. We dismiss too much. The surface belies nothing of what lies underneath. If we can’t see it, does it not exist?
The ocean, power, depth, crashing waves, fluid, flowing, cleansing. What does it know? What does it see? What do we deny?
My mind stalls. The ocean draws me. Always has. Yet I have no more words to express, explain desire, need, floating, held, drifting to the lulling, the rhythmic calm of ocean. Sensory overload via deprivation.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 10 Oct 2022 | Roads Taken
It has been a long slide from Africa to October – at least the length of a giraffe’s neck.
A few photos to stem the tide… I won’t promise soon, but sometime, there will be more for you here.
In the meantime, a little scale…
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 5 Sep 2022 | Roads Taken
Africa in retrospect
My gear is mostly clean and stored now. A substantive layer of red grit has been rinsed from the bathtub after scrubbing boots, duffel, and backpack. I am getting used to the sun being in the southern sky again. My hands no longer look like worn stone and I seem to have finally lost the sand in my teeth after face-planting on the downslope of the famous red dunes. This was not an easy trip, long days, difficult roads, heat, cold, wind, and dust.
What’s the difference between this and fieldwork in New Mexico?
Space, time. People. Attitudes. Beliefs. Distances, geographic and human. Colors. Textures. The light. Elephants. Hyenas and lions.
My camera stopped working early in the trip. Although disappointed and frustrated by the sudden lack of this visual extension of myself, it gave me permission to see. Instead of looking quickly and then taking photos, I watched the landscape; I observed the animals. I saw more and saw it more viscerally. I picked up my cell phone to take a photo and realized the futility of trying to capture something so distant and obscured, or so intimate and detailed, and put it down again. Slowly shifting away from the thought that poor resolution was better than none.
I have much to process, the photos I did take with my camera and phone, and the images my head holds. These latter are somewhat out of order and are filtered through a light I can’t recreate on a different continent, with colors faded and intimacy lost.
Here are a few landscapes from South Africa and Namibia before the camera quit.
More to come. Stay tuned.
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by aramatzne@gmail.com | 22 Aug 2022 | Roads Taken
Life is in the details
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