in which he has music and muses

Hopelessly passing your time in the grassland away
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air
You better watch out
There may be dogs about
I've looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel
What a surprise

      -- Sheep, Pink Floyd,  Raving and Drooling, Sheep, Live, 1974

Muse -- Greek mythological goddesses of inspiration, a person who inspires an artist, the act of thinking deeply

Note: this is my 40th narrative. And here it is.

Out here, in the high desert, a deep rain is an event, a deviation from the norm. This one began sometime before midnight. We knew because the summer’s accumulated heat, having retreated deep into the rock, allowed for open windows. There is a specific kind of restfulness that comes from listening to a firm, gentle rain while you are lost in sleep, a sound that is both a presence and an absence. Of course, it has its other side. The sound is a lullaby, but the water itself can be a menace. When the ground becomes saturated, it sheds the excess into the arroyos and canyons, filling them with a sudden, churning anger. Rain muffles the world, smothers sound, and in doing so can drown out the warning of a predator skulking near the edge of the light.

The distances here are geological. Roads run straight and long, engineered lines across immense, unpeopled landscapes where you can legally set a cruise control at eighty miles per hour and travel from one nowhere to the next in the time it takes for a memory to pass. I tend to listen to music on these transits. It is a way to key out memories, to entertain the solitary mind, for on these photographic journeys I am almost always alone. The GMRS radio is on, scanning, its occasional squawk of chatter an interruption that pulls me out of my musings and back into the truck, a useful anchor. There are, after all, many realities. When you are moving at eighty miles per hour in a truck that is a quarter-century old, it pays to check in with the immediate one before drifting off again.

The audio system in the T100 recently had to be replaced. Its predecessor, a Kenwood unit, finally succumbed to the accumulated heat of countless desert crossings. It died with a certain integrity. The controls on the faceplate all went numb at once, a complete systems failure. The problem was a mix CD, one I’d been playing with the volume set high enough to feel the bass through the floorboards. With the controls inert, the only way to silence it was to kill the ignition. For a few days, before I found the time to pull the dashboard apart and unplug the harness, any trip was accompanied by thirty-eight minutes of unalterable, high-volume rock and roll. It was good rock, fortunately, but at town speeds it was loud. My apologies to anyone who was around, particularly on nights when I’d roll into the drive late. Raccoon-time late.

I photograph, and when I am running across the desert in the pre-dawn dark, waiting to point a camera into the morning light, I often contemplate the persistence of this compulsion. The why of it. A large part of it, I know, is the sense that I have captured an instance, pinning a single moment against the vast volumes of time laid out before me. Time, history, rock—it is an inescapable theme. Each sunrise adds or subtracts from the ledger; a new layer of aeolian sand is laid down, or a few more chips of an old one blow away.

You can see how a grain of sand was captured by striking a rock a good whack with a hammer, revealing a fresh face. A single grain contains a surprising volume of information, and the stronger the hand lens, the more you can learn. The story is written on its surface. Pock marks tell you it was aeolian, blown by the wind, its journey a series of tiny, abrading collisions with other grains. A deeper look, through a microscope, reveals the conchoidal fractures typical of quartz. We know them as percussion marks. If the grain is smooth, shiny, and round as a marble, it was tumbled in the surf, perfected by the back-and-forth scour of waves on a long-vanished beach. This is how you read the rock. There are many stories to learn to be able to know a grain of sand.

The patterns of deposition—how those sands were laid down—tell you still more about the paleoenvironment of those accumulated moments. Sand blown by the wind but captured in a lake will be cemented with clays. The cements in paleodunes speak of the water that flowed through them over millennia, concentrating minerals, binding the grains together. The stories are all there. You learn the themes, identify the minerals, trace your way up and down a formation. The pages and narrative are complete, waiting to be read.

When I am out there, seeking the moments I wish to photograph, I listen to the silence. It sharpens my concentration. It allows me to hear the ravens and the raptors on their hunts. Ravens, in their curiosity, will often swing by close, blessing me with the leathery swish of their wings as they pass. In the parks, they are assessing me for the possibility of food, of shiny wrappers and the droppings of tourists.

Now, a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder comes with me. I’ll set it on a tripod and let it run as I work the light. I have found that listening to that recorded sound takes me back to the environment where I stood with the camera helps me in the editing. My goal in editing is to reproduce what I was seeing, and for me, seeing is an act colored by emotion and illuminated by light, by the musings I have as I watch my muse—the view that is inspiring me. Listening to the audio of those moments flowing by, the wind in the junipers, the distant croak of a raven, helps recapture the daydreams I had behind the camera. It brings back the whole memory, now frozen in the moments of a dream. In these pages the dangers are real.

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

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