Regular Life

(Note: This is the second post in my San Antonio Riverwalk Series, shot during a recent work trip.)

(click pic to enlarge)

The majestic bald cypress trees along the Riverwalk are Nature’s most visible holdout against an onslaught of man-made tidiness. Some are hundreds of years old, while others have been planted, and reach up to 10 stories high.

I look at the two trees of the same species in my front yard, planted about five years ago, and cannot imagine that they will last long enough to look like these. Anybody from the year 2300 want to get back to me on that?

Details:
Camera: NIKON D50
Lens: AFS-Nikkor 18-70mm 1:3.5-4.5G ED
F-stop: f/9
Shutter Speed: 1/40 second
Exposure Program: Aperture Priority
Flash: No Flash
Focal Length: 18mm (about 27mm on the digital body)
ISO: 200
Metering Mode: Spot

(Readers of “Shootings,” please hang in there. The next chapter is almost half way complete.)

I see the first scene here on my way home from work at about 4:30 p.m. Monday. Waiting for the red light to change to green, I crank my camera’s aperture down to the tightest it will go, then open my window and poke my lens out into the spitting rain. I snap off two frames. (click any pic to enlarge)

The story is a bit different for the second one.

Less than half an hour after I get Benjamin to bed, I sit in our computer/guest room waiting for a customer to get a few users off the remaining server we have to update. I hear my wife’s voice whisper to me from the doorway.

“Psst, hey, honey, you gotta come see this rainbow.”

I leap from my chair and follow her, sure to stop and grab my camera from the kitchen island. We make our way to the back door, off the dining nook, and there it is, just over the back fence.

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(Those reading “Shootings” probably will want to continue to Part Eight)

Winter tries its best to rob trees of perhaps their best argument against the creeping concrete jungle.

Leaves.

Leaves add color to a landscape that is barren where not covered by buildings. They mute the cacophony of cars while hiding highways. They offer up a variety of greens in spring and summer, and a firestorm of reds, oranges, and yellows in fall.

Leaves give voice to the wind, and applaud loudly when it’s strong enough.

Despite taking all this away from trees, Winter fails. Stripped bare, trees sketch skeletal reminders that they are alive, intricate Silhouettes against the horizon of sunrise and sunset.

The bony branches also serve as reminders that the leaves will return to add color to the world, dampen urban white noise, and ask for nothing but our exhalations in return. Houses and office buildings, colleagues and friends, come and go, but the loyalty of leaves is unflagging.

After Benjamin finished wallering around with the Girl Scouts, I noticed that the bed in the miniature truck was full of fossils. As I called him to take a look, State Park Lady came over and provided detailed descriptions of various extinct Nautilus ancestors, trilobytes, fossilized coral and sea worms.

“The parrotfish lives in the coral reef, and it bites the sea anemone to eat off the algae,” Benjamin said. My eyes widened a bit. Despite my asking him what he learns at school each day, he reveals nothing until it’s relevant, and he never stops surprising me.

I wasn’t surprised that his attention wavered when State Park Lady explained how petrification is different from fossilization, using phrases like, “at the cellular level.” Lady, he may have sounded great with that parrotfish stuff, but they haven’t quite covered cells in his first-grade science curriculum.

(video clip and pics after the jump)

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He set his tiny feet on the first rock and wobbled against the water rushing over his knees. I stepped onto the downstream side of the same rock and braced against the cold and the current. Standing firm but paralyzed, he turned his head and looked up at me, but his words weren’t needed.

After our first day at Dinosaur Valley State Park, when I could no longer resist my somnolence in the face of the awful Battlefield Earth, I lifted the sleeping boy from next to his mother and tucked him into the pallet we had made on the floor, then climbed into the hotel bed.

Despite the time change overnight, Benjamin woke me in his usual 6-7 a.m. range asking, “Daddy, will you play with me?”

I got dressed and took him downstairs to scope out the coffee situation. The breakfast buffet, a $10.95 “convenience” easily skipped, did not distract me from the free coffee (despite its inferiority to the fresh-ground I brew at home).

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Opportunity. She knocks, yet too many don’t bother looking through the peephole, and spontaneity isn’t even given a chance.

And to think, they could have walked in the footsteps of dinosaurs.

At 8:30 on Saturday morning, Benjamin and I had spent about an hour and a half building with Wedgits, eating breakfast, and just hanging out.

“Would you like to go hike a trail?” I said. It began innocently enough.

“Yes.”

“Please go tell your mommy it’s 8:30.”

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(Click to enlarge)

I ran and grabbed my camera and took a few shots through the boy’s bedroom windows. My subject moved a few houses down the road. “Hey, Benjamin, I need to go outside for a better look. You want to come with me?”

“Yes.”

“You need to put on some shoes.”

“Well, I’ll just watch you from here in my room.”

I dashed outside, but before I got to the right house, I heard a familiar voice from behind me. “Daddy,” Benjamin whispered. I signaled for him to come along, but quietly.

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Click to enlarge.

 
This is the view south from our backyard Saturday evening. Specifically, it is the view from atop the retaining wall border between our backyard and the former cornfield behind it.

Notice the distance to the nearest large trees (lower right corner), and the lack of dimension in the landscape. As someone who grew up in and lived most of his adult life in the Ozark foothills (where the altitude never pokes above the tree line), I can both appreciate and loathe the wide open spaces prevalent in what is, in effect, our son’s hometown.

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