Carmen rides a little bike; frog appears; in the long but waning light of early summer, one can feel the approach of winter

Yesterday afternoon when I pulled into the Metro drive through, I saw Carmen, pedaling through the parking lot on Branson's bike. Hence, the above study:

Carmen in the Metro Parking Lot, Study, #52: Carmen transforms into a little kid.

I ate lunch in the back yard, so that Jimmy could spend a little time outside. A frog appeared - the biggest I have seen around here in a long time - the body must have been nearly three inches long - and around here, that is a huge frog.

While the frog population appears to be much smaller than it once was, one must still be careful walking in the backyard, because these guys are well-camouflaged and easy to not see and so step on.

It is an awful thing, to step on a frog.

I took this picture well after 10:00 PM, as I was riding my bike down Church Road. When I looked up and saw these clouds, I could feel the impending darkness. This may seem absurd to people in lower latitudes who have never seen the night sky look like this, but up here, many of us get this feelng the day after summer solstice:

The dark of winter, coming on.

Yesterday, I found fireweed in bloom. The blooms start with the bottom flowers and then progress upward as we move through summer. When the top flowers bloom, it is said that summer is over.

Summer is wonderful right now, and yet I can feel its end so strong.

The feeling is made all the worse by the fact that I have a great deal of production work to do this summer, and that work must all be done inside, at my computer.

I have long had this theory that I should not have any production work to do in the summer. Summers should be spent outdoors, shooting. Winters can be spent inside, producing.

Yet, somehow, I always lose a signficant portion of my summer to production.

Right now, I am producing work based primarily on images that I shot during the winter. So, except for a few fleeting moments, I am pretty much stuck inside this summer. Fish are running, animals moving and I am pretty much stuck inside, producing work built of the images of winter.

Everything is backwards of how it ought to be.

This must be the last such summer.

Next summer, I must be free to spend most of my time outdoors, shooting, living. No more of this summer production work!

An hour or so a day producing this blog would be okay, but that's it.

Next summer!

This one is already lost - mostly. I will still ride my bike most everyday that I am home. I might get in a short canoe trip, a hike, I might catch and cook a fish and next week I do plan a field trip north and at least part of that will be outdoor work.

But I should be able to be outdoors, everyday, most all the time.

Here I am, on my bike, late at night, corner of Seldon and Church. A light rain has fallen. The air smells sweet, and fresh. It is wonderfully cool against my skin.

I bike through a late night sunbeam, down by the Little Susitna River. My shadow follows.

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Happy Father's Day, Son!

Lavina had a health fair to do in conjunction with the Chickaloon and Knik tribes at the Palmer fairgrounds, so Margie and I went and picked her up when it was all done, about 4:00 PM. Jacob and the boys came out about two hours later. The boys were asleep when he arrived and so we left them that way.

We took turns peeking into the car to see when they might wake.

Jobe woke first. He reached for me, right away.

In the past on this day, I have paid tributes to the fathers from whence we come. Today, I pay tribute to the fathers who descend from us and since one of those is my oldest son, I focus that tribute on him.

Here he is, yesterday evening, tossing my middle grandchild Jobe into the air.

Now he shows him the first frog of the season. It used to be that our yard teemed with frogs - one could hardly walk without stepping on one.

Now a frog sighting is an occasion to take note of.

Jobe does take note. 

As for the oldest grandson Kalib, he still sleeps in the car.

In time, Kalib wakes up and comes back, too. The frog is still hanging out nearby, so Jacob shows it to Kalib. He invites Kalib to touch it, but Kalib is wary.

To demonstrate that this frog poses no harm, Jacob gives it a kiss. 

A bit later, Jimmy begins to wander too far away for my comfort, but I am entertaining Jobe and Jobe does not want me to leave, so Jacob goes and hauls him back.

Well, I took a lot of pictures last night and my computer is acting up big time - it is headed to the repair shop tomorrow or Tuesday and if I could afford to I would just replace it because I am spending maybe 30-40 percent of the time that I work with it - and sometimes, all of the time for an hour or two straight - watching the spinning color wheel go round and round and suffering mulitiple freezeups and forced shutdowns, so it is just too exasperating to try to look at the photos I took.

It was possible to navigate my way through the spinning color wheel and crashes to the toss and frog shots, because they were clear in my memory and I knew just where to find them, and the two shots that wrap up this series were at the end of yesterday's take, but it is too much of pain to search through the others.

This one, however, just popped up on my screen as I was swearing and cursing at my computer and it was so damn cute I just grabbed it.

There are some serious people within the photographic community who dismiss cute photos as irrelevant and facile, but, damnit, cute is part of life, too.

Please take note: I am a very serious photographer and this is a very serious photograph of real and true life.

More serious stuff - my son, the dad, with his entire family, his wife and three children. Jobe is taking an ever greater interest in spatulas.

Wait a minute, the astute reader protests... your son Jacob has only two children, Kalib and Jobe... why do you say, "three?"

Remember when Jobe quit breast feeding and I noted that Jacob and Lavina had been using the breast feeding method of birth control and it would soon become apparent how well that worked out?

See that little bulge in the tummy, right behind Jobe?

That is how well that worked out.

Very well, indeed!

So here is my son, the dad, with his wife, his two children that the light now falls upon and the one that is scheduled to make a first appearance in the light of the delivery room in October.

Happy Father's Day, son!

I don't know how you ever got to be such a good dad. You didn't have the greatest example to follow and you were kind of wild there, for awhile. Yet, an excellent dad is what you have become. A little overindulgent at times, perhaps, but overindulgence is love, and infinitely superior to neglect. These kids of yours are pretty damn good kids and that didn't just happen.

I love them.

You make me proud.

And so does Lavina. Even though this is Father's Day, not Mother's Day, it has to be said.

Happy Father's Day!

To all you good dad's out there!

Young dads, old dads, dead dads like my good dad - all dads.

Happy Father's Day to you all!

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Cibecue Creek, part 3 of 4, possibly 5: We happen upon a frog, experience a bit of adventure, then hike into a place of magic

I will begin with the frog, which we happened upon shortly after we started to hike. As you can see, it was a tiny frog, but it brought to mind a bigger frog that I encountered very near to this place over 30 years ago. On March 10, I wrote a bit about my friend Vincent Craig, who was fighting the cancer that on May 15 took him.*

One of the experiences that I recounted was a nighttime rescue that he led that took place in a canyon cut out by one of the creeks that flows out of the White Mountain Apache reservation into the Salt River.

Perhaps it was this very creek, Cibecue. I cannot remember for certain, as we did the hike in and out and scaled the cliffs from which two waterfalls fell in the darkness of night. I have no visual memories of the terrain through which we hiked.

This creek does lead to a couple of falls, however, and it is a creek that is sometimes visited by non-tribal members, such as the blond woman who fell on the cliff and broke her leg.

There is another creek further upstream that also does. So it could have been either one. Somewhere, I have it written down and stored away, but that document would be hard to find and I haven't the time to look for it.

Near the beginning of that rescue hike on that night three decades ago, I was stumbling about on the rocks as we worked our way upstream when suddenly I felt something cool and clammy plop down upon my left wrist. "Snake!" was my immediate thought - "rattler" in particular. I let out a little shriek, but kept enough composure not to jerk my hand away until I knew what was on it and what it was doing.

I transferred the beam of my flashlight from the rocks below my feet to my wrist and there saw the startled eyes of a big frog, looking back at me.

Lisa holds the frog out for Kalib to see. Kalib cautiously touches it.

From the moment we came upon the creek and I looked at the walls rising into mountains on all sides of us, this line from Vincent's song, Someone Drew a Line, came into my head: "Between The Four Sacred Mountains we lived in harmony..."

These were not The Four Sacred Mountains that Vincent wrote about, yet, in their way, I believe all the mountains to be sacred and so it seemed appropriate. This song would stay in my head throughout the hike - for every minute of it, every second. Not for a moment would it leave me.

Sometimes Kalib hiked on his own power. Sometimes, he would be carried - either by his dad or his uncles, Caleb, Rex and Charlie.

Due to my shoulder, I could not carry him.

Mostly, we hiked through water. Before we started to hike, the heat had felt oppressive and I had wondered how we were going to do it. The water mitigated that heat. It turned out to be no problem at all.

Jacob trips and goes down while carrying Kalib.

Jacob gives Kalib an assist up a boulder, to his waiting mother.

There, atop the boulder, she changes his diaper, then helps him into a new one. Let no one doubt - she will pack the dirty diaper all the way up and all the way out. Other than temporary footprints, we would leave no sign of ourselves behind.

Kalib splashes water.

Jacob and Lisa hiking up Cibecue Creek.

Lisa comes to a big rock. She debates whether to go over it or around it.

She chooses to go over it. I walk around and get this picture of her as she tops it.

Although everyone had spread apart, we somehow all came together at this point. Something in the sky then caught everyone's attention.

It is a magnificent bird - a turkey vulture. At this moment, I kind of wished that I drug along my big cameras and my 100 to 400 zoom, but it was really nice to hike with a just a little tiny camera that I could slip in and out of my t-shirt pocket.

As everyone was gathered in one spot, we decided this would be a good moment to make a good group portrait - sans me. Kalib had grown hungry and so dug into his nose to see if might find something good to eat there.

He did. And he ate it.

Rex carries Kalib as we continue on.

Jacob and Lavina, hiking through the water.

Lavina and Jacob, stepping out of the water.

Melanie pauses by a big rock.

Kalib rests upon a rock.

Jacob and Rex survery the terrain ahead.

Jacob climbs over a rock and comes upon this drift log, wedged into a crevasse. "It looks just like a big b..." he exclaimed. I will leave the "b..." to your imaginations.

I will probably get in trouble with some of the female members of the family for even having said just this much.

Jacob climbs out onto the log and waves at Kalib, who is still working his way in this direction.

Uncle Caleb assists nephew Kalib as he works his way over a series of big rocks alongside water that was too deep to walk through.

Kalib tops the rock. Caleb offers him a "high-five."

Melanie finds a very pretty rock, which she shows to everybody. 

She by-passes a deep pool via a well-scuplted boulder. By now, we can hear the distant roar of a water fall. It sounds kind of like a jet.

As we move upstream, past cutouts in the rock, the roar of the falls grows louder.

And here it is, the lower of the two Cibecue Falls. It feels as though we have hiked into a place of magic.

Tomorrow: We frolic in the place of magic.

*Today, June 6, would have been Vincent Craig's 60th birthday. Today, his mother Nancy Mariano passed away, also from cancer.