A Ticket to Space?

The Pacific Ocean Viewed From Outer Space, a photo by BlatantWorld.com on Flickr.

“What’s the most you’d pay for a ticket to visit space?” you ask.

“About a buck-thirty, maybe a buck-seventy-four … but no more,” I say.  No need to buy a ticket; I visit space every day, wherever I am.  I like my space.  I like some public spaces.  And I LOVE fresh air space, especially that of the mountains where there are chill streams flowing with power and thunder or trickling and gurgling among pebbles and boulders.

Another space I enjoy as often as possible is the space where my bicycle takes me as I stroke the pedals with a firm, circular cadence. That space includes the whistling of wind in my ears, the rush of wind through my helmet and the rush of blood and oxygen through my brain, my muscles, heart and lungs singing with elation even as they sometimes cry out in momentary pain on a challenging climb.

Or there are the big spaces and tee-ninecy spaces where my camera lens takes me. I sometimes have to squeeze and squinch to get in there, or hang over a barrier, or climb up onto a precarious ledge, or backpack for miles to camp and wait for just the right light conditions.  But once I’ve ‘clumb’ up there and snagged the shot — the space, that is — on my SD card for transport to my computer and the world, I have no need to even think about outer space. That’s for another photographer — and more power to her/him.

My own space is fine … terra firma.  Love it.  Outer space is intriguing, especially from the standpoint of stars, novas, supernovas, and all the other systems of planets, etc. I enjoy photos taken in outer space, photos from the Hubbell telescope and other traveling tools of science and exploration.

But my heart is in my own space, and that tiny bit of space has more miracles of adventure, beauty, enjoyment and love than I can exhaust in this lifetime.

Carpe diem. Vita brevis!

© April 24, 2012, by Michael E. Stubblefield.  All rights to my original work are reserved.

Talking Trees

An answer to a Plinky Prompt: “How do you spend the majority of your online time?”

This (below) is the right image for my answer. I like trees. Not a tree hugger in the political sense, but I’m always inspired by trees. I respect them, admire them, appreciate their complex beauty that’s all wrapped up in apparent “simplicity.” Particularly the older ones in their endless variations (and I think it’s always been that way for me; even when I was still wet behind the ears, I listened intently to my great-grandmother, my grandmothers, my great-uncles, my parents). What’s that about?

Controlling IT Costs; Enterprise Architecture (EA) strategy, a shared lexicon, and enforced change

Writing. Whether researching, responding to email, posting or commenting on social media, 90% of my online time is consumed with writing. I am crafting sentences, phrases, snippets, or other combinations of letters, words, paragraphs and punctuation to communicate with my fellow human beings. Some of them, the humans, are like the aged trees. Maybe I am, too. It’s in weathering, and storms. The stories thus born are often more current, more relevant, than the media “news” that’s cranked out ad nauseum day after day.

Trees inspire me — often, to write. I photograph them, too — frequently – the ones that I find special in one way or another, and have accumulated a considerable ”tree” collection. With time, I’ve come to note that it’s never, or rarely, the young saplings that attract me. Hope for them, wish them well and trust that they’ll be properly watered and fed, protected and pruned. But they’re not the ones that “grab” me. The older ones always commandeer my undistracted observation, the ones that have been twisted and shaped by assailing winds, captured and then released by storms, wounded or nurtured by passing humans, stunted and spurred by alternating deprivation and abundance.

It’s in their stories. Stories that I get to imagine, if not to hear — to weave a thread at a time, to discern through focused study, observation, palpitation, or listening. Trees are unique in that respect. They “hold still” for you. And if you listen and observe long enough, they’ll tell their stories. They’re compulsive. Subtle but clear — IF you’re listening. It’s in their nature to talk — to “write”  – the chronicle of their existence. Their gentleness or toughness, their true nature, may be disguised in the camouflaged exterior of all they’ve seen, endured, dealt out, accepted, and synthesized into their grain, knots, limbs, healed-over pruning cuts, storm-broken limbs, and other scar tissue that gives them their unique character. Character that the worker of fine woods — the craftsman — values most.

Maybe trees are more adept than homo sapiens at communication.

Carpe diem.  Vita brevis!

© May 10, 2011, by Michael E. Stubblefield.  All rights to my original work reserved.  Photo courtesy of Plinky.com.

The Eye of the Beholder

An answer to the Plinky Prompt, “What are your favorite things to photograph?”

My favorite things to photograph? How can I limit it?  Why should I limit it?  Some photographers specialize in one subject or another and become renowned experts in the bargain.

Take Ansel Adams’ work, for instance, or Graham Watson’s. Adams’ landscape images, most of them black and white, are the stuff of legend; he was and still is among the great masters of landscape photography. By contrast, Watson specializes in capturing enduring images of bicycle racing, and mostly in color. I greatly admire the work of each, and for entirely different reasons. Adams worked with what most would now, by comparison, call “Neanderthal” photographic equipment and he likely labored harder than today’s average photographer to get to where he needed to go with his bulky, heavy equipment. On the other hand, Watson is our contemporary and has the advantage of lighter digital equipment and easier transportation, but he’s still a master of what he does — several steps above most photographers.

But I’m not a specialist by instinct or practice — not in photography or almost anything I do. Meticulous planning and execution are great attributes with big rewards. But serendipity has its place, too, and seems to fit quite well on the “uncut” side of the camera lens.  Where photography is concerned, I love a good surprise or unexpected sighting.

I don’t search for it, else it wouldn’t be serendipitous, would it? But when it happens along, ”chance” can be so rewarding in its uniqueness, its character, it’s ability to warm the emotions and the spirit to create a lasting memory.

Human Embryo (7th week of pregnancy)

Almost anything, as long as it has vibrant color and/or strong contrasts (e.g., b&w), exciting action, or some inherent beauty, is a subject ripe for the photographer’s eye. Those qualifiers encompass a wide range of easy-to-find photo subjects — human faces, landscapes, kids at play, animals at work or play, birds, flowers and insects, seascapes, sports, human surprise and happiness. Capturing the image — and capturing it well — requires a combination of timing, just the right light, and a bit of luck thrown in. After all, if what you are shooting appears or occurs when you’re NOT there or not ready, then you don’t capture the moment.

Consider the image in this piece, photographic evidence of human life in one of its early stages of development. Notice the stark contrasts, the uniqueness of the life-sustaining environment, the vivid colors and unusual shapes. See the tail? Doesn’t it almost look like a stinger?!

Is this image the result of the photographer’s planning and execution? Perhaps. Serendipity? Perhaps, too. The photographer could have planned diligently to capture an image of this particular baby, but the baby could have turned its back at just the “wrong” moment.

In either event, what a dramatic, endearing, inspiring and enduring image – forever on “film”! Maybe this embryo, with what appears to be an eye trained on its own tail, is another photographer — a great photographer of the future — waiting to be born, to find its own favorite and unique things to photograph.

Carpe diem. Vita brevis!

©  May 5, 2011, by Michael E. Stubblefield.  All rights reserved.  Photo courtesy of Plinky.com

Yokohl Valley Killer

Yokohl Valley Killer

[NOTE:  Double-click the photos for a larger view]

When our group of ten riders parted Exeter that February Saturday noon, it was still foggy and gray, as is usual that time of year in the flat farmlands of Central California, but about three-quarters the way up the mile-long Rocky Hill climb, we broke into unabated, welcomed sunshine that continued as we zipped down the backside through the two 90-degree turns and into Yokohl Valley.  Forming our paceline, we turned and pedaled eastward out through this spectacular rolling valley toward Blue Ridge and Springville.  The remote area is dotted with a few working cattle ranches, lots of hills and increasing forest as we neared the steep Blue Ridge climb with its switchbacks.  Normally, this road is little traveled by automobiles other than the ranchers’ trucks and stock trailers and the occasional adventurer.  But this day we saw quite a few scattered cars (four or more — unusual) parked along the roadside, their occupants standing along the shoulders gazing at the greening hills, cattle, and birds.  Clearly, humans needed a break from the fog and gloom of the San Joaquin ag-lands in winter. 

Bird songs were plenteous in this beautiful upland retreat, and the chill air that brought them to us was stimulating.  As we passed the old dynamite shack before the sharp curves and climbs begin, some of us stopped to watch a high-soaring Bald Eagle.  It was hypnotic to watch as it soared, its white head and tail clear in the brilliant sun.

We pedaled on up the valley to the Blue Ridge crest, rested a little with our pocket snacks of Power Bars and bananas and our water bottles as we exchanged friendly cycle-banter, then turned and headed toward home via the same route.  There was still one car remaining in the valley as the sun began to drop – its apparent owner a father with a large, professional-looking camera and zoom lens, accompanied by a small son who was very enthusiastic about the outdoors.  We exchanged greetings as we rolled past, then settled into our usual routine of breaking the pace line and taking our own individual speeds home. 

A friend and I broke off the front and gained a quarter mile or so, maintaining that pace as we entered the last long straightaway to the “T” where Yokohl Drive meets Myers Road to take us up the backside of Rocky Hill, the last barrier and endurance challenge between us and home.  My buddy was about thirty feet in front of me, tracking safely down the yellow centerline, and we were cruising at about 23 mph when my peripheral vision picked up sudden movement from the right.  As a rabbit darted out to the middle of the road from the grass on the right shoulder and sat down in the paralysis of fear and watchfulness, I saw a diving raptor close in with a short, ear-piercing “keeee” as it just barely cleared the top of the barbwire fence at high speed.  I yelled to my friend, “Watch out!” because it looked like the bird was going to take him out, but it was closing on him rapidly at a diagonal from his right rear and only about four feet above the ground – almost a certain collision course – and my warning appeared to be too little, too late.  The attacker was a big bird – a Golden Eagle – with a wingspan of over six feet.  And in an amazing show of agility, its talons snatched the coney from the middle of the road just a few feet in front of my buddy’s path, then the hunter climbed and turned right in front and flew back over us.

What a stunning and exhilarating sight!  It wasn’t the natural killing that was exhilarating; it was the adrenalin rush of near collision combined with the startling aggression, precision and speed of the eagle on its hunt.  A timeless display of the basic course of nature, untrammeled by mankind and our late-breaking, politically-correct queasiness about anything killing anything.  But this was the fine art of hunting, natural-style, and performed with facility and urgency born of a core need.  All creatures have to eat, and we all kill to do so — even if it’s only a leaf stalked by an aphid.  I’ve seen raptors successfully hunt before, but not from such a close and unexpected vantage point.  I won’t soon forget the experience and regretted not having a video camera with me.  But not many cyclists I know carry them.

The Yokohl Valley is a beautiful treasure-trove of raw, rugged nature and abundant wildlife.  I’ve frequently had coyotes cross the road right in front of me (ho-hum by comparison to the hunting eagle), and I’ve often stopped to watch the work of keen-eyed, smaller raptors such as Red-Tail Hawks, Prairie Falcons, and others.  Members of my riding group have twice seen bobcats cross the road.

But even without such spectacular evidences of wildlife, Yokohl Valley — albeit a “killing field” of sorts — is one of the most peaceful places on earth.  Very often there’s nothing but the sound of the wind, abundant lark songs and chirping ground squirrels, the occasional lowing of cattle, and the gurgle of the streams as one climbs up through the golden summer hills toward Blue Ridge.  I’ve moved away now and miss the privilege of my frequent rides there. But Yokohl Valley is about far more than just a wonderful place for a relatively few bicycle and photography enthusiasts to enjoy nature, along with the differing enjoyment and perspective of the few cattle ranchers who make their living there and whose compatible presence I especially appreciate as another last bastion against the dying of the old west.  These are not feedlot operations, but open rangelands grazed by sturdy beef cattle and often dotted with beehives for harvesting the abundance of wildflower honeys produced.  Another of those retreats that’s a rapidly vanishing part of the American landscape and the west, a place where parents can take their kids to introduce them to the sights, sounds, smells, feels and life cycles of largely-undisturbed nature.  Oh sure, kids can watch the Discovery Channel and other sources of wildlife film footage, but those are paltry substitutes for the firsthand experience.  “Nature-behind-a-zoo-fence” is little better than soup in a can.

Carpe diem.  Vita brevis!

© February, 2006.  Michael Stubblefield

Foto Faves: Postcards from the Edge … of California

Channel Islands Harbor sunrise

Off Anacapa Island

And she’s thinking, …

Mist Falls on King's River, King's Canyon

Wildlife in Yokohl Valley

Gulf Fritillary or “Passion butterfly”

A maze – California Buckeye in fall

Walter chillin’ on his porch

Beach sausage at Carpinteria

Mist Falls on King’s River, King’s Canyon

Into the waves we go!

Brrr! Cold water!

Beach animals

Off Anacapa Island

Great day at the beach

Channel Islands Harbor sunrise

Ahhh! Just what I needed!

Perfect day for sailing

Fiddlehead

Unfurling fern

Gulf Fritillary or Passion butterfly (Agraulis vanillae), a striking, bright orange butterfly --family Nymphalidae, subfamily Heliconiinae.

Gulf Fritillary feeding on Lantana blossoms

Saturday: Signs of the Times

What?

Signs of the times are everywhere.  Most of them are so boring that after a while I quit even noticing them — the boredom of familiarity bred by overexposure.  Nobody much wants anything that’s overcooked, whether it’s a steak, a politician’s message, a sales pitch, or a 15-inning no-run baseball game.  It’s partly this public boredom that keeps ad people in business — too much of a good thing is not a good thing.

Other signs are boring from the “git-go” because they’re unattractive,  or maybe they’re offensive, carry a message or draw attention to something we’re not interested in, are made with the wrong colors, the wrong fonts, the wrong arrangement or some other flaw that just bothers us for reasons beyond our own finite ability to elucidate — even if we’re highly educated.  As the US Supreme Court’s Justice Lewis Powell once said in a decision, “I cannot define obscenity, but I know it when I see it.”

Signs that are in this group may include an emerging social trend that just gets off all wrong with us.   We say to ourselves (or to others), “This is a bad sign.  This is not gonna work.  We’re goin’ from bad to worse.”  For example, that’s the way I sometimes respond, at least internally, to the current trendy sign of people with way too much flesh exposed by their clothing choices.  I feel like I’m seeing something akin to a can of biscuits that has popped open and is running over the edges — it’s not what I want to see.  Know what I’m talkin’ ’bout?  I’m not talking about morality here, I’m talking about distraction of an ilk that can cause other problems, like running into other signs.  It just gets to be too much of a good thing (like I already said).

But every now and again, if I’m in the right mood or on my game, I’ll spot a sign that raises my interest.  And sometimes even less frequently, one grabs my attention for reasons having little to do with my susceptibilities to its message, product, layout, color scheme, social trend or cleverness.  Take the sign above, for instance.  Do you wonder exactly what the sign’s maker had in mind?  What s/he was attempting to say?  I do.  Beyond the obviously unattractive terseness, layout, colors and partial defacement, I’m unsure about the intent of the message, which is helped only a little by knowing — as I do — that it’s in front of a driveway into an elementary school’s parking lot.  I can bring students, but I can’t drop them off?  Why bother to bring them?  Think I just wanna drive through the parking lot with them?  Is that supposed to be fun?  Am I not here to get rid of them for the day?  Or does the sign refer to the fact that there is no “student drop-off” (as opposed to a student drop off –what’s that?  A chasm that will swallow the poor kiddies as soon as they alight from my car?)  I need some clarification.  Or at least some testing of the sign’s content against proper spelling/punctuation/usage rules.  Hmmm, another sign of the times?

And then look at this sign from the same parking lot, within 25 feet of the first one.  Why didn’t they use the same wording, just dropping the “No”?  This is absolutely crazy!  I can’t drop off my kids (presumably they’re the students, right?), but they can drop me off  there?!  This is weird! Who’s going to drop off their parents?  (Where was this sign when I was a kid?  I might’ve dropped off mine — at least for a day!)  But really now, think about this: Elementary students are going to drive up to the elementary school and drop off their parents?  If I were a California lawyer, I’d be hanging out at that parking lot to pick up a handy personal injury lawsuit or two.  Negligent parents letting their students drive them to school, where the parents are dropped off (or step into the drop-off) while the kids go joy-riding for the day?  And then they’ve gotta come back and pick the parents up — that’s what the sign says.  But notice the inconsistency between “drop off” and “pick-up.” The sign maker apparently was beginning to think about the situation with the sign’s message, but was unsure of “no hyphen” or “yes hyphen,” so did one each way.  Now that’s enlightening!  Maybe someone should apply a common-sense axiom at this point:  “Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them.” — Albert Einstein

Okay, enough about school ignorance (Does something seem inherently wrong about that?).  Here are two of my favorite signs from my cross-country bike ride back in 2004. 

This is no joke, folks.  A road sign in remote southwest Arizona.  I happen to be from Arkansas and know there’s a small municipality there named Hope.  Remember William Jefferson Clinton?  Remember Mike Huckabee?  But the sign above referred — or so I thought, at the time — to a small town as I rode eastward through a scorching, table-top-flat desert between Quartzite and Wickenburg, Arizona along US Highway 60 near its intersection with State Road 72.  Strangest thing, though, was that a town never appeared.*  I just saw the road sign on the left that indicated Hope, then a mile or so later the sign on the right indicating I was “now beyond Hope.”  For a fleeting second I began to feel that way, until I realized I could move on down the road and not get stuck there for the rest of my life — beyond hope. In the background you can see the Little Harquahala Mountains — and a whole lot of sand, ocotillo, cacti and brush.  In the foreground is Yours Truly, decked out in riding togs including mesh helmet cover with rear neck protector (no, that’s not my flowing white hair!) to keep my neck from burning and drying to leather under the relentless sun.  But Hope had no entertainment to speak of either, beyond the natural beauty of the scenery.  I rode through such towns as Brenda, Harcuvar, Salome, Wenden and Aguila (“Eagle”) before reaching Wickenburg.  Do any of those places sound like jumping tourist havens?  Not!

Another puzzling sign from the same trip:  What kind of church would necessitate a highway sign like this one in the Sam Houston National Forest of east Texas?  This was a small county road with almost no auto traffic.  The sign tickled my funny-bone at the time, and having nothing else to do as I pedaled my loaded bike along, I mused about the sign’s possible implications for many miles more than it was probably worth.  Came up with some amusing theories, none of which really bear repeating — unless you’re reading this on a very long bike ride or as an antidote for sleeplessness.  Give me a call if you really want to know more.

A church in Louisiana had the following on its marquee:

I got a little serious about that sign; kept analyzing it as I rode, wondering what motivated its author to make such a statement; whether the statement was true or false, useful or not, and how I could prove either proposition.  One of the points I did conclude was that it’s this kind of philosophy or statement that sometimes causes non-church people (or even those who are of faith) to get upset or frustrated with the Christians who post such signs.  Maybe the creator of the message intended it as some sort of backhanded or subtle way of inspiring hope.  But maybe not.  We cannot know.  I recommend being more careful — and precise — with words.

Finally, I leave you with this sign.  Another in my portfolio of shots from the ’04 cross-continent bicycle trek.  This one stands for several propositions — or raises several questions — in my mind. Broken dreams? Failed ambitions? People don’t always keep their promises?  The fragility and tragedy of life?  Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see?  Things are not always as they appear?   Poor planning?  Forgetting the essentials?  The best-laid plans of mice and men …

Carpe diem. Vita brevis!

Michael

*  And sure enough, if you go to an internet map of Arizona and drill down on the highway intersection I’ve cited, you’ll see “Hope,” but no town.   It’s just an area on the map.  And having ridden through there on a bicycle (I think it would seem similar in a car), I don’t see much that’s hopeful about it — unless you think to yourself, “I hope there’s something up ahead!” 

©Aug. 15, 2009 by Michael E. Stubblefield – all rights reserved