Blue

Randomly, I once typed my favorite color, blue, into Google image search. As I recall my experiment, I was testing a theory about adjectives, that they are merely commonly-held generalizations that "pretty up" writing and make it suspicious. Adjectives and adverbs are not to be trusted, I believe. Nouns are stronger.

Google's results for "blue" included a lake in southern Oregon, Crater Lake. Now I'd some vague notion of what this lake was--wrong--that somewhere in California a large meteor had hit the earth creating a big hole and a big lake. Throw in a cooked-up perception of mystery, possibly coupled with Martians landing there or some such, and that was my idea of Crater Lake. I always find it amusing that apparently what I don't know I will make up--wrong. Crater Lake was not caused by a meteor, I read. However, the image of this lake, like sapphire under a gloamy sky brooding deep in a volcanic caldera, not only defined for me why I love blue, but intrigued me. The link for "Crater Lake" I cut and pasted into my "Things to do someday" folder that I keep on my desktop computer.

So someday arrived. (I love it when that happens!) Crater Lake is blue. (Adjective) It is beautiful. (Adjective) It is friggin big (6 miles across). It is deep (Approximately 2000 feet at its deepest.) It is surrounded by 2000 foot drop, glaciated cliffs (even in July), and around 2 million damned mosquitoes, many of whom are fattened with my DNA now. The landscape going up to it is decimated, pumice dessert caused by an eruption approximately 8000 years ago. Another baby volcano (Wizard Island) has pushed up from the depths of the lake. I photographed Crater Lake at sunrise, at noon, at dusk, and I never remotely captured anything about it that shows how it makes you feel--like the Grand Canyon--it's pretty much indescribable. My photographs are pitiful.

Along with this, A. and I camped under the stars. Clothes smelling of woodsmoke, skin sweetened with Off, I ran screaming from, I thought, a bear and landed back in the tent on my ass in the middle of the freezing night, we ate bacon and eggs, we smoked out, I listened to the 9th symphony while laying on a picnic table looking at stars so bright I could touch them. I am burned a little from the sun, my hair is frazzled from bug spray, A's feet are covered in bug bites, but....it was beautiful. Adjective and not a lie, my friends. :)