Picture Lake earns its name...

One of the most photographed spots in North America is 120 miles northeast of Seattle: a small alpine lake about 5200 feet up Mount Baker. (This factoid about the lake's 'photographability' comes from Life Magazine, and I guess they oughtta know.) It's one of my favorite places on the planet. I've photographed this lake in spring, summer, and fall. I've picnicked on its banks, plucked huckleberries for ice cream and pies from its fragile meadows, and imbibed intoxicants to the point of roaring drunkenness on the dock you see here on a variety of national holidays, including Labor Day when I watched snowboarders in cut-offs haul themselves further up snowpacked cliffs for a day of play in bright sunshine. It's a beautiful spot.

Aside from its showy prettiness, another reason I like going to Heather Meadows is that I never know what the lake will be like when I make the drive, which is exquisite itself. It's a place out of season, just as likely to be frozen over in July as October, and about half the time I've tried to get there, I couldn't make it--roads will be closed to vehicles without chains or piled so high with snow they are impassable in June. I'm not sure why I went this day, except that I recalled once I had gone on October 31st-precisely-in 2004 and found brilliant scarlet, orange and yellow woods filling with delicate snowflakes as they danced in the woods all around the lake. It was one of the most sublime and beautiful spectacles I've ever seen, and I saw it alone. The picture shows I was rewarded today. By chance. Just above the lake, literally just above, the snowline is creeping down. Another week, the possibility of seeing it this way will likely be gone, and I was reminded again at how brief are the opportunities life affords us sometimes.

It's hard to imagine sadness in such a spot, but that is how I felt. I'm a brooder sometimes, I guess. Today, I kept looking at the empty dock and thinking it should not be empty. A thermos of hot coffee and a friend to share this with me would have been nice. Ah, well. This shows the spot along with some additional facts, proof that while I might have been lonely today, I'm not alone in my fascination with this tiny, unpredictable spot tucked in the northern Cascade mountains.

Imagine the waste...

Imagine - four years you could have spent travelling around Europe, or going to the Far East, walking Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted them at college. -- Shel Silverstein

One thing I know is that journeys begin in the mind before a step is ever taken. Whether that’s an eight year old drawing pictures of Berber goat-herders as she imagines obscure villages in the Atlas Mountains north of the Sahara or a thirty-something woman perusing pictures of India’s Holi, coming to believe the festival followed by a trek through Tibet would be the perfect antidote to a gloomy Pacific Northwest winter, the journeys I’ve made began first in my mind. Some journeys are a long time coming and some never happen, I suppose, no matter how much we might want them. An unused and quite beautiful visa to India is still in my passport, since expired, but the intent hasn’t left me. I wrote here first that I am still confident I shall go to India some day and drown in color, but I had to revise this, for it was a lie. I am no longer confident. And more and more the trek through Tibet—with a bum knee and difficulty traversing even the hills around Seattle, much less the highest plateau in the world—it seems unlikely. But I had a heart that wanted it is all I can think to write, and wanted it badly, even if it hasn’t happened and never happens. That is all I can think to say about it right now.

I quit writing because things became too hard to express. My mother was failing—I felt this—I have a photograph of her in front of a crumbling, old building in San Antonio as she looked away from the camera and into the distance. It was the last picture (except for her cat) at her memorial, so I am glad I quit my job to take her to the sea and glad, I guess, I didn’t wring that laundry out in public, even though some of it spilled here. And I wrote nothing of Africa, even though I went and remained there for some time. I was ambivalent about a lot of the trip, but there are sweet memories I have.

But of Africa…The house I was staying in and the bedroom I slept in opened over extensive and lovely gardens the likes of which I had never seen at a private home. Below the opened windows was the aviary. I’d lay in bed there feeling warm, loved, content and hear the caged canaries and finches, begin an aubade as the sun rose, their song mingling with the cheeps and chirps of other birds that lived freely among the trees in the garden there, and realize I was not home. Africa sounded so very different, so sweet and exotic behind those high, thick stone walls that guard the home. I could have dreamed in the warmth of that bed, the smell of those gardens and the bird song through those open windows forever. But it was seductive and lulling. Sometimes I felt like, I guess, I could have sank into it, but…it was disturbing in a way that I never quite understood at least then. But there is more I want to say in practicum about Africa, rather than ruminating.

So going to Africa, other than the getting there, is quite inexpensive. Most of the safari packages sold to unsuspecting Americans and Europeans are a complete rip-off as I know now. Game park entry fees are nominal, hiring guides into the bush inexpensive, and even staying inside the parks, almost free if you go for modest accomodations. If you see game outside a park, it’s even less expensive. The truth is these packages are bundled up for those overwhelmed and unfamiliar with Africa and desirous of security that in most instances isn’t needed, depending on where you go. You could pay 3-4,000 USD for something that might cost you $300, if that, once you get there. I did have the opportunity to go to a couple game parks and photograph big cats. The one above is my favorite. I wasn’t quite as close as this photo makes it appears. Cheetahs are an animal I’ve always been fond of, starting with Cheetos. Now how strange is that?

I’ll keep writing. Or start. Love, Beth