Cosmos

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"At Riobamba, the town about a hundred miles south of Quito where the disastrous earthquake of 1797 had been centered, the travelers stayed for a few weeks.... Here Humboldt had the opportunity to inspect some sixteenth-century manuscripts written in a pre-Inca language called Purugayan, which had been translated into Spanish.... [T]he manuscripts related the dramatic story of a volcanic eruption and the religious and political significance that the local shamans had ascribed to it....

"The priests of those ages [Humboldt wrote to his brother] possessed sufficient knowledge of astronomy to draw a meridian line and to observe the actual moment of the solstice."

--From Humboldt's Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich

Plenty of people still believe that natural phenomena like floods and earthquakes are some sort of divine retribution for their sins (or someone else's sins). And we can't just write off such belief as a mark of stupidity, as evidenced by Humboldt's shaman astronomers who could ascribe religious significance to an eruption on one hand and calculate the solstice with the other. There is something deeply human about our sense of connection with the world, a connection that has both physical and psychological dimensions.

How do you feel when you're alone in nature? Do you feel invigorated and at ease, or constrained and anxious? Physically, the environment is the same whichever way you feel about it, but psychologically, your thoughts are busy coloring the landscape. These colorations, or projections, seem real, and we believe the place itself has attributes that exist only in our imagination. One place makes us feel at ease and happy, while another makes us feel anxious and troubled. We believe our "sixth sense" -- or maybe even our so-called common sense -- is telling us something true about our surroundings.

I like to do a little test when I have these feelings. I try to let go of whatever I've been thinking about. Just be there with my senses alert, letting the world inform me rather than coloring it with my own thoughts and ideas. Nine times out of ten, whether I'm in nature or in the city, I find the sense of foreboding was a projection of my own thoughts or bias, that my anxiety was unfounded. 

Once I was in a wilderness skills class where we were going to kill a couple of chickens by wringing their necks. We had only two chickens, so only two of the dozen or so students were going to do the deadly deed while the rest of us observed. It was a sunny day in a rural part of Santa Cruz. Birds were calling in the woods. Down in front of my feet, ants were hauling grass seeds toward their subterranean nest. A gentle breeze blew. I wondered if nature would react to our killing of these chickens. 

The killing time arrived, and the chickens' necks were broken. Their bright, beautiful combs faded and wilted as they perished. But the breeze did not change. No cloud obscured the sun. Songbirds did not fall silent. The earth did not tremble. The ants marched on with their seeds. Nature did not pass judgment. It neither condoned nor condemned our killing. If nature inflicts moral judgments on people, it does so simply and without malice. Over-consumption of natural resources leads to depletion and scarcity that affect human lives. Injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere changes climatic regimes that can turn cities into swamps and bread baskets into deserts.

As for my sixth sense, I sometimes wonder if it is actually a subconscious awareness of physical phenomena rather than some sort of supernatural communication. So much is always happening around us that we can't possibly put our mental finger on it all. Our sixth sense alerts us to some danger, whether small or great, that we then manage to avoid, and we believe we have been favored by supernatural means. 

It might have been luck, but it doesn't feel that way. We feel like we were tipped off -- and I believe we were tipped off, but I believe what happened is that we became subliminally aware of physical cues. Sounds that vibrated our eardrums, light that struck our retinas, molecules that sailed into our nose. And all of it acted upon by a body that wasn't about to wait around until it could put the whole thing into words for the benefit of consciousness. Interrelatedness happens.

You could say I'm a strict materialist. But if you look at what we know about material these days, you find that trouble abounds. The more deeply we probe into matter, the less "material" it becomes. That pair of jeans you like? It's just atoms, subatomic particles, and forces. And according to our own modern mythology, before there was any material, there was an infinitely small "thing" called a singularity. A singularity cannot be imagined. How can we imagine that the germ of 100 billion galaxies, including the one we're riding on right this minute, was once an invisible little speck? Even if you do away with the mathematical concept of a singularity (since infinities are generally taken to be errors), or trade it in for "space-time foam," you are still left scratching your head about how "all this" -- the entire cosmos -- came from basically nothing.

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End O' July

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I just finished reading The Invention of Nature -- Alexander von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf, and I so enjoyed reading about this interesting naturalist that I also just picked up Humboldt's Cosmos by Gerard Helferich. Cosmos was the name of Humboldt's 5-volume magnum opus on the world of nature. He finished the first two volumes in 1847 but decided there was more work to do and wrote two more volumes before he died in 1859 at the age of 89 (the fifth volume was published posthumously). The San Francisco Public Library has a copy of Cosmos that can be viewed only in the library, and one of these days I'll have to make the pilgrimage.

Humboldt's work and ideas inspired many scientists, artists and other interesting people of his day, from Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz to Frederic Edwin Church and George Catlin to Henry Thoreau and John Muir. He was greatly interested in America's new, free republic and was a friend of Thomas Jefferson (whom he admonished against slavery). If, like me, you've never really heard much about Humboldt -- whom King Friedrich Wilhelm IV dubbed "the greatest man since the Deluge" -- blame may go in part to World War I and the ensuing fear and loathing of everything German. Some 2,000 Germans, including 29 members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, were sent to internment camps, and numerous German-owned businesses -- including woolen mills worth $70 million -- were seized.

I've been wondering what inspiration I can take from Humboldt's life, whether I could apply anything to my jaunts to Mt. Tam and other nearby locales. The way he looked at the world as a whole of interrelated parts was an inspiration to many, as were his exotic adventures in South America.

I still remember when Mt. Tamalpais seemed exotic to me, and I wouldn't mind getting that feeling again, if possible. There are many other places I'd like to explore, and I hope to have the ability to do so someday, but for the next few years I'm going to be content with photographing close to home. Even Humboldt had to spend many years -- decades, even -- simply making a living when he'd rather have been exploring.

Today I ventured out once again on the Matt Davis Trail. The grasses were still tall and bowed across the path, but this time the fog was much lower and the grass was dry as tinder. I didn't get wet at all, and it was actually quite sunny and warm. I was glad to have gotten out early, before the heat and bugs would become a nuisance. I wasn't sure I was actually still going to be interested in the backlit thistles that I enjoyed seeing when I recently hiked past here without my camera, but they were okay, if nothing to get too excited about, and I enjoyed the hike in any case.

This is a view down one of the ravines along the trail. I had to descend just a bit to get an unobstructed view. There was a second ravine I wanted to explore, even steeper, but I was too lazy to climb down into it. I find that I sometimes want the perspective of a longer lens, but holding that lens horizontally doesn't give me as much vertical coverage as I want, as was the case from this viewpoint using a 105mm lens. The solution (when there is little or no wind) is to hold the camera vertically and shoot several frames across the field to be stitched together as a panorama.

Getting back to the car I picked up my trail camera (where the water hole likely dried up two weeks ago; see my previous post), then drove down toward Stinson Beach to see if I could catch any fog beams. I was lucky to find a pull-out where the beams were coming through the forest canopy near a patch of showy flowers.

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Summer Cam

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At Home & Abroad from John W. Wall on Vimeo.

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Bear Cam

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"All the truly living, at least once, are born again."

--Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Beautiful Struggle

The live web cams from Brooks Falls are mesmerizing.

A sockeye salmon swims up from Bristol Bay to spawn in the Brooks River, a short run of water that drains Brooks Lake into NakNek Lake, but it's caught by a grizzly bear and never gets past the falls. Padding through the water with the determined fish still flapping its tail from between its teeth, the griz reaches an island of sand and pebbles. The bear sets down the salmon and, keeping one paw on its head, strips off sheets of skin and chews off chunks of flesh, tossing the pieces into its mouth to be swallowed.

The fish kicks in silence. The bear bites again. Skin peels off, the body of the fish is ripped apart by unstoppable jaws, but it somehow continues to flop on the ground under that giant paw. Even if the salmon somehow escaped at this point, what good would it do? Its drive to spawn is so powerful that even half-eaten, its will to press on upriver is undiminished.

The mercy of death finally comes to the salmon, and the bear turns back into the rushing river to catch its next meal. One of its cubs, still too green to catch its own fish, walks to the small pile of remains and eats what's left while attending gulls swoop in, hoping some little piece will float their way.

The bear feeds on the salmon without mercy. It is easier to see things from the bear's perspective than from the salmon's. To watch from the salmon's perspective is too awful to contemplate. We want to turn away, turn off our empathy before the fact of the salmon's violent death sinks in too far, becomes indelible. But to become among the truly living, we have to surrender to the larger story and experience what we thought was too awful to bear. If we can set just one foot through that door, we will see that it wasn't too awful to bear. Indeed, we will enter a new world, rich with possibility.

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Summer Fog

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I started hiking this morning on a thin dirt trail on the windward side of Bolinas Ridge. Visibility was probably around 100 feet, and the trail was covered by a golden-brown archway of knee- to hip-high grasses -- all of them heavily burdened with dew. My legs, shorts, and shoes and socks became completely soaked in very short order, and I had a long way to go. I stopped to take stock while a cold wind blew and reluctantly decided that to continue, to insist on reaching my intended destination, was untenable.

I was glad I hadn't brought my wife up to hike the route I did last week -- Pantoll to Stinson Beach via the Matt Davis Trail, then back up via Steep Ravine. It was foggy last week, but it was a relatively dry fog, with no dew-soaked grass or dripping forests. In fact, the morning light had been beautiful at a particular point along the trail, and my plan this morning had been to hike out to the same spot with my camera.

I've been taking a bit of a break from blogging and other online activities and have been making a few prints to better enjoy the fruit of my labor. I've made a few 8x12 and 16x24 metal prints, four 24x36 glossy prints mounted on gator board, and a 20x80 glossy panorama that I simply tacked to the wall. They all look great, if I do say so myself.

Something weird has been going on with the blog since around the beginning of summer. I'm not a stat-hound or anything, but I've noticed over the years that I tend to get around 30-50 pageviews a day. All of a sudden I'm getting 1,000 to 1,200 pageviews a day, and it's been going on like this for weeks.

Lots of bicyclists on the mountain this morning, and they were getting a nice little soaking as they passed beneath the redwoods on Bolinas Ridge. Reminded me that the Tour de France riders are about to climb into Switzerland. My camera and I got pretty soaked while I made a few compositions in the rainy forest. I headed home with my shoes and socks still soaked, about four hours after they first got that way.

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Solstice Sunset

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On June 11, two weeks before summer officially arrived, Mt. Tam experienced a ridiculously early "red flag" fire hazard day that closed the mountain and forced cancellations of both the Mountain Play and the Astronomy Program. This evening the only fire in the sky showed courtesy of the most incredible summer solstice sunset I can remember. As I biked home from work I thought the clouds looked promising for a nice sunset, but I perished the thought. San Francisco doesn't get great sunsets in the summertime.

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Palomarin Reef

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If you haven't been out to photograph on the reef in a while, as is true in my case, the reality of doing so takes very little time to catch up with the fantasy. The fantasy is that the reef is going to be teeming with interesting plants and critters. The reality is that one's poor eyesight is going to make a trial out of seeing any of it. If only there were more critters like the Hopkin's Rose nudibranch to bring fantasy and reality a little closer together. Despite its small size (~ 2 cm) even I could see this guy from twenty meters away.

Other than a raccoon, whose tracks I could just make out, and a possible bobcat, whose freshly twirled scat in the center of the thin trail marked its passing, I was the first large mammal to make it to the beach this morning. Sometimes you can tell you're the first to pass because you get a face full of fresh spider webs, but I could tell this morning because I was collecting all the dew as I hiked along the overgrown path. By the time I made it down to the beach I was completely soaked from the hips on down. For the last hundred yards, I could barely see the trail at my feet. Poison oak wasn't a problem, but watch out for the stinging nettles.

In looking for a new direction to occupy myself on weekends, I thought it might be fun to really learn about the reef -- get to know all the usual suspects, both plant and animal. I know that this will not be easy, and I wonder if I can stick with it. I thought it might help to think about how best to photograph the variety of species, and I sort of punted the idea down the road, thinking that I really need an aquarium for staging my images. Otherwise, how do you tease out the identifying characteristics of a mat of algae into a pleasing image? After this morning, I am certain only that more thought will be required.

This was one of two bat stars I saw on the reef. Both were on the small side, definitely not full-grown. I also saw several Pisaster sea stars, all of which were blandly ochre-colored, and one of which looked like it was in the process of succumbing to wasting disease.

In the Introduction to The Intertidal Wilderness, Anne Wertheim Rosenfeld writes, "In their natural habitat many sea anemones are calculated to be at least five hundred years old." She gives no reference for that statement, and I can't find anything online to back it up, but at least some cnidarians (a group that includes sea anemones) are said to be immortal, showing no sign of senescence even after many years.

In order to make things easier, I brought my camera and only one lens, a 105mm macro. Nevertheless, it is never truly easy to photograph on the reef. I bloodied my knees as I pressed closer to the nudibranch while a hermit crab scuttled by (they seemed to ignore each other as best they could, like a Muni passenger squeezing by to get off at the Civic Center). Tripod legs don't anchor as easily as they do on dry land either, what with the uneven and slippery surfaces, and not to mention the little aggregating anemones who don't appreciate getting a tripod foot planted in their gullets.

This nudibranch was in the same tidepool as the Hopkin's Rose. I'm sure I'd never have noticed it if I hadn't already been drawn close by the bubblegum 'branch. There was a second specimen at the bottom of the pool, but it stayed put, well out of range. A critter this small needs to be very close to the surface to be photographed well. If it's more than an inch deep, especially on a windy day (there were small craft warnings in effect today) the distortion will be awful. This 'branch is known from Duxbury Reef south (Palomarin Beach is north of, but basically contiguous, with Duxbury Reef).

One novelty of the morning was having direct sunlight on the reef. Not only did I drive all the way to the beach after sunrise -- a novelty in itself -- but I had abundant natural light and no fog. Nevertheless, it was breezy and cool, and sometimes I couldn't see well enough to compose an image because of watering eyes and a sniffling nose.

Brilliant camoflage. Like sparrows gleaning seeds along the trail, you don't even notice them unless they move.

Although I wandered around quite a bit, I ended up returning the way I'd come and chanced to find the very same Hopkin's Rose I'd photographed earlier. It was now completely exposed to the air, the water level several inches below. It had taken up residence in a shallow hole in the rock and looked like some kind of anemone.

Low tide didn't last long. It was a minus tide with a minimal swell, but the reef was only well-exposed for about an hour on either side of the low.

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