Nature Photography: August 2007 Archives

This is a short fictional piece I wrote earlier this year. It's intent is to capture a sense of the place in which it is set, Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont, CA. It's a bit raw, but I'm thinking of taking this into something larger. Photos follow.

    The Babies

    They were born under bald, green hills on the edge of the Bay, under steep red paths to the treeless hilltops, aside flat brown geometries of salt ponds, in distant view of the low arch of a homely bridge.  They stuck close to their mothers in the steady summer wind.  The first few days, in the crook between two hills, the jostling of the herd and the sounds of the other goats surrounded the babies and filled their long ears with comfort, so they could sleep snug under the stars.
    At first the black dogs frightened them and they shook like stringy little leaves.  But the wolves stayed, and after a time the babies understood, the wolves would just orbit the herd, and not penetrate it. 
    The man in the red and green bandana stepped out of his white teardrop trailer and drank a cup of coffee.  He watched the herd, counted the babies, watched the dogs circle around.   Before the sun rose over the hills the wind was light, and the little ones stepped out beyond the protection of the herd. A red and white baby, four tiny white legs, enormous eyes, stumbled this way and that onto the dirt road behind the trailer and stopped in the middle to look east. There was another green hill, two or three wind-shaped trees, and a glittering lagoon framed in living cattails.  The baby's eyes followed the cattails in the morning breeze. 
    The man set his coffee cup inside the teardrop trailer and picked up his aluminum shepherd's hook.  He walked across the grass to the road, where he stood beside the baby, watching the cattails. A mile on the other side of the lagoons he could see square laboratories and warehouses, and a few miles beyond those, Mission Peak, spring green until the rains stop.  The baby, too short to see anything but the cattails and the tips of the mountains, turned and galloped back to her mother. 
    Bushes rustled just down the road.  The man raised his hook above his head, shook it, and shouted in the language of a man who lives alone.  The bushes stilled for several minutes.  He watched the bushes as the black dogs watched the goats.  Finally, a sleek blond cougar crawled away to the farther hills while the babies huddled in the fold of the herd.

As I build out the infrastructure of Mackerel Street, I'm putting together some links resources that offer a little more than a bare list of links. Check out the new Great Literary Blogs page (link in right column as well), with blogs, news sites, and other literary goodies.  I'm adding links that are compelling and current, and giving you a little info before you click. Feel free to make suggestions--contact info is on the page.

I'm diving into writing a new short story, starting at ten below in the parking lot of a Minnesota big box store. Here is a picture I took this summer that is exactly the opposite of that.

My home town is Arcata, California, deep in the redwood Empire and the County of Humboldt, set along a marshy coastline, filled to the brim with brightly painted Victorians.  In its middle is a grassy plaza with a statue of a dead president and herds of errant hippies. Up and down the coast are empty beaches that are sometimes foggy, and sometimes not, and when you are away from Humboldt, far away as I am now, you wonder if it is even real.  At least I know Robbie the dog was there with me, though I wonder if his memory of the place has also started to fade like a beach in the fog.

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Was the fog coming in or out? Am i forgetting Humboldt, or just beginning to remember it?

 

Having grown up in the redwoods, I'm quite familiar with summer green, but where I come from it was in the treetops, not on the ground.The California hills dried gold each summer of my early childhood in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and though things were wetter and greener deep in the redwoods, the Mediterranean climate prevailed by late spring of each year. It was the winter time when California was really green.

Here in Minnesota the seasons are reversed.  The green explodes in springtime, bursting out of every crack in every country road.  By midsummer the state is awash in waves of green prairie grasses, black-eyed-susans scattered to the horizon. The leaves of deciduous trees grow huge by August and look as though they will never fade; the lilies float in every pond, yellow-green duckweed rippling with the ducks.   Last weekend I spent an afternon with my parents at Lake Rebecca Regional Park in Greenfield, Minnesota, west of the Twin Cities.  A breeding ground for Trumpeter swans, we caught the giant birds in their nesting pond.

 

 In the wintertime, Minnesota goes brown.  Then, if we're lucky, brilliant white.