lens, with occasional kayak

of course it's blurry. it's a flying bird.

one frog

we've been taking the kayaks over to a fat part of the east branch delaware river the last few weekends. the water is slow and wide and shallow, full of green waving plants that tickle the bottoms of the kayaks. overhead there are hawks, herons, red winged blackbirds, eagles and the occasional osprey. underwater are pickerel and not much else. roaming around at the edges are the best of animals. frogs and turtles. 

because the sweetie trusts me more than he should, given my track record, he has encouraged me to bring along the pretty new birthday camera. it lives in a very nice waterproof bag that clips onto the edge of my kayak and it is safe as long as it stays there, sealed up and still. but that is not the point of a camera.

two frogs

this is where the struggle begins. taking the camera partway out of the bag, slipping the neckstrap over my floppy-hatted head, getting the camera the rest of the way out of the bag, removing the lens cap without dropping it into the water (i've only dropped it once) and remembering to turn the thing on takes up enough seconds that most of what i want to take pictures of has already flown, hopped or swished on past by the time i get the focuser focused.

that's just fine, though. there's enough wildness out there that something else always makes its way in front of the lens if i just sit there a minute or two. and that is what i do, mostly. paddle along a while, then sit back and float with a camera pointed at nothing in particular. it is the sort of kayaking i like. it is the sort of photography i like, too.

one more frog

the sweetie fixes himself in some spot he determines is attractive to fish and he casts and reels in, casts and reels in. he will do this for hours if left to his own devices. and while he sits quietly i paddle around, eyes peeled, looking for wildness and trying to make it stand still.

forget-me-nots

what you need to know is that i am not at all skilled at wildlife photography. i cannot believe the animals i see don't want to sit themselves still and pose for me. i take hundreds of photos each time we go out, insisting that somewhere in all that volume will be a perfect photo of a dragonfly resting on a twig. i have, at last count, close to fifty photos of dragonflies. none are in focus.

the sky in the camera

but i do not care. i press on. i am the sort of person who wants to touch and hold and cuddle up on all the animals i see and this is my compromise, keeping them in this fashion, slightly out of focus, not quite properly composed, unevenly lit.

the sky looking like it does in real life 

i am, after all, taking photos from a moving craft. from a moving craft powered by mostly me and a little bit the most sluggish current in the entire catskills. i do what i can but when the paddle is lying still across the kayak and the camera is squished up to my eye, the water makes its own decisions, floats me by swamp irises just starting to bloom, by masses of forget-me-nots standing knee deep in still water. i snap and snap and snap pictures until the sweetie says how many pictures of forget-me-nots does one person need? all of them, i think.

the sweetie suggests i try the polarizing lens. i am supposed to turn it while looking at the sky to grab those clouds and make them look real, to bring out their ominous glory. it is one more thing to add to the whole routine that starts with balancing the paddle across the kayak and ends with a blurry photo. i cannot convince the sky and the land to work together yet, but i like parts of every picture.

lens

click and enlarge. the camera wants you to.

the sweetie got us a new birthday camera. because our birthdays are right up next to each other. now, i love the cameras and we have most forms of the technology from start to finish. pinhole to digital. but i am a lazy photographer. i have been uninterested in learning light and shutter speed and apertures. the sweetie does not believe this at all and so the birthday camera arrives with enough dials and buttons and lights to maneuver a space shuttle through a fairly sophisticated obstacle course.

he tells me about all the camera words, about how to make a dark room light and how to slow down a speeding bird. i do not listen. i set the button to auto and the camera rears up like an angry horse. this is not what cameras do and i am surprised. the camera is unhappy. it refuses to cooperate. my photos are dull. uninspired. mean. i recall something the sweetie said about opening the eye of the camera. letting in more light. making decisions about things. i try it, reluctantly. petulantly. i sigh and use the viewfinder which does not give me an automatic practice version of my photo before i shoot. my face is up against the little rubber eyepiece and there are numbers in there all along the bottom. the camera tells me things. it wants to help, but i have to do a little my own self.

i am not perfect and this is disappointing. all my photos are a little soft. i take countless pictures of swimming ducks and floating ducks and flying ducks. all of them are just smudges against sky and water.

 the sweetie changes lenses. he gives me an old lens from a real live film camera. i now point frankenstein's monster camera at everything. the two pieces communicate in broken images. halting. unsure. everything becomes a guess and attempt and another guess and attempt. the sweetie says i will get a feel for it.

he gives me a lens longer than my own arm that pulls birds right out of the sky and turns water droplets into whole worlds. at first i cannot see anything through the massive lens. i cannot take a picture of any object in the same room with me. not even in the same yard. i try to show the massiveness of mountains and get three trees huddled together. i do not understand the lens and its awful grabbiness. until a snail moseys by. slime-bellied and slow-moving, he is trying to figure out a flower. and the camera does what it does which is let me see right up inside the snail. it scoots up so i can see the dark lines of the thing's blood or maybe his optic nerve. stalk inside a stalk. 

i learn about depth of focus. i learn that the long lens has a very short depth of focus. probably. that is likely what i learn. two scraggly weeds living right next to each other cannot both be in the same shot at the same time with the same focus. no way. i learn that it is pretty to have one tiny thing sharp as a needle in front of the rest of the soft focus world. 

the sweetie shows me how to use the pretty lens. he catches two bees considering the same flower. he gets one of those same bees seconds later shaking grains of pollen- actual grains of pollen- into the air. each grain flying loose on nothing. floating out there. all of them separate dots of honey. 

i try to do things the camera doesn't understand. it is upset when i try to focus on a fish hook dangling in front of some roses but after twenty seven attempts, the lens bends to my will. and then i run wild. i capture every flower, every snail, every butterfly and bee in my little section of the world. nature is no match for me. i capture things i can't even see.

but my photos still are a little soft. i am not yet able to frame an image, think about light, dial everything in and then click without something slipping a little. something gives every time. birds still fly just a bit faster than my finger can hit a button. i am better with unmoving flowers and slow-moving snails. but the sweetie, as always, is right. i am smitten. i click the shutter when i exhale like a sniper.

i will not throw over the pinhole camera sitting on the kitchen table in front of four packs of polaroid film. i will not always want so many choices. but this new camera, with so many lenses and gadgets and buttons and dials is not what i thought it was. it is not a set of rules. it is not a new pile of ways to be wrong. it may be more choices than i'm ready for just yet but i will figure it out.  i am learning to see things with new eyes.

year book, 1968

it all happened because i forgot to get dog food on the way home and the sweetie and i wandered down to the corner store after dinner to get some. really, though, it started last week after classes when three girls wander in to visit. there are a few other students there and another teacher. the girls stop by sometimes, always together, a small flock. one of them asks about a word and i haul the second half of a massive dictionary over to a desk so she can find out about it.

ring molecules

i don't know right up until then that she is one of us. the sort of kid who stands in a classroom after classes are over and most students have gone home, staring at the bible-paper pages of a dictionary older than her parents, swooning over the illustrations. she hovers over the book and from time to time calls out discoveries. her friends look up and smile. the other students, scattered around the room doing work, look up and smile. the other teacher and i smile. from time to time she finds something they're willing to look at, too, her friends. we should get you a dictionary for your birthday, one of them says, laughing. it is not the laughter you'd think, though. not the usual laughter of tenth grade girls that slides out of them like a slap, meant to hurt. it is the laughter of someone watching a kitten with string and wishing she had more string to offer. she is serious about the birthday dictionary. the girl reading looks up, eyes glittering, and points to an image on the page. her friends fall into the page with her.

i am thinking about the discussions we've been having in class about technology, about how children get information. this other teacher and i spent some time trying to explain to the children the idea of an encyclopedia and i have been pining all week for the set my parents had when i was a child. i even mention to the sweetie that i should call the parents and see whether they've got the books stored somewhere in their terrifying attic.

interest rates. interesting.

and then i forget the dog food. so we put on our shoes and lasso the dog and step out into the nicest evening we've had all year. on the way back, a block from home, i see four stacks of books on the sidewalk. abandoned books. free books. the most delicious kind. when we get close enough to see that they are, in fact, a magnificent set of encyclopedias, my chest tightens. i can smell the old bookness of them. the sweetie knows what is in my head and he says no just to get the word out there. no we cannot drag thirty or so books home when we're also dragging along a lassoed hound and a bag of dog food and a pint of lemon sorbet. our arms aren't big enough.

chess match

i do not pout. i do not sulk. i am too miserable to do either. i know if i stop looking at the books they will disappear, so i just stare at them. i can feel my insides crumbling. i can see the waste of leaving them there. but before i die of my booklessness, the sweetie hands over the dog and the food and leaps around the corner. now, this is where i may have to explain a little about brooklyn parking. unless you are fancy, you park on the street. we are not fancy. if you park on the street, you have to move your car at least once (usually two or three times) during the week to allow for street cleaning. our car is visible from the corner where i am standing, heart-wilted, with a brown dog and a bag of dog food and ever softer sorbet.

the sweetie is in the car before i realize what he is doing. he sees a parking space that will keep us from having to drive around for twenty minutes trying to find a space later in the week. and this is nice. what is so much better than nice, though, is that the space is right there directly in front of four stacks of books. right there. he pulls the car around the corner and snugs it up into the space. and there is our car with the big, empty trunk, steps from those books. he takes the dog and the food, tells me i have to carry my own books. i grab them and slide them into the car and he looks along the spines, counts to see what's there. all twenty six volumes. an index. and four yearbooks. the inside of my head is full of sparks. my chest is full of birds. could it get any better?

potash surplus

the oldest yearbook is from the very first year i wandered around on this earth. 1968. it is clear these books have been waiting there on that sidewalk just for me. and the next year is 1969. and then 1970. the fourth book, of course, is 1971. the year the sweetie came to the world. we settle the books into the car and i pull out the 1968 and 1971 books to take in. the sweetie locks the car and shakes his head. he laughs a little and he is not at all surprised. he has known all along we would come upon just these books sometime and we would have to take them. even when he said no he knew this.

mentors, men, mustaches

you get everything you want, he says. and this is true. the things i pine for seem to stumble into my path fairly quickly after i begin my pining. there is nothing i can do about this so i sit on the couch with the sweetie and the dog and i open the book that says 1968. there is a chart of all the minerals produced for each state in the union. doctor king looking toward the sky. a lockheed c-5a galaxy dwarfing the rest of the world. janis joplin, described as a "tough, plain-spoken girl, who drinks hard, lives hard, and gives the impression that like an operatic heroine she may burn herself out before she ever grows up". a graphic in blue of the three theories of the universe: steady state, oscillating and big bang.  a photo of a woman sitting behind newly designed "safety pillows" for cars- the same pillows that would keep my own parents alive and moving around more than forty years later, just last week. a chart of the world production of agricultural commodities in thousands, including grains, fibers, dairy products, meat, oilseeds, fruit and beverages. there is a heartbreaking image of bobby kennedy in an open car, charming the camera, surrounded by black men, one with an arm around his waist holding him steady. it is a photo taken maybe the day i was born. maybe a day or two after.

i do not know how anyone could give up so much but i am grateful for the gift.

water

i read about the little lake in one of those guidebooks. i look for an easy trip because the sweetie is willing to kayak class 5 rapids (class 6 rapids offer a constant threat of death and extreme danger) and i want to avoid this while offering him something fancy enough to be worth the bother. the book promises a little lake and a river flowing into it and then out of it down a mile and a half to a waterfall (class 5 rapids are full of waterfalls!). it promises an easy time with something to look at. so we put the kayaks on the car and squeeze ourselves into our fake-seal pants and we go.

we walk the kayaks down to the dock, which is a floating platform alongside a three foot wide channel in the weeds and muck. the water is too low for the dock to be useful, but the way it leans suggests maybe we wouldn't want to use it even in higher water. we put the kayaks at the edge of the water and move, one after the other, down the narrow channel with the funhouse dock looming over us.

it is a small lake, more pond, really, but if you want to know the truth it's just an open space in the wetlands. because that's what it is all around us. swamp. marsh. pine barrens without the pines. tall, stick-straight trunks of trees stretch upward with not a leaf or branch to them. desert. waste land. we paddle left toward the river outlet and pass an old camp's dock. it is bedraggled, with unrecognizable watercraft tied to it. pogo sticks on floats. there are broken shacks up the land a bit, then the camp itself, low and ugly and empty. ghost town. abandoned summer camp. yes. of course. i look across the lake the other way. to the razor wire. to a tall building that looks like something from an old strip mining venture in my own hometown. a concrete rectangle reaching up several stories past the other buildings, with two or three windows to break the flat surface. the blades of the wire glitter out there in the sun like sparkles on the water. it is a saturday around noon and nobody is outside.

so this is where things stand. we are floating on the surface of a small lake/large pond/space between cattails. to the one side is an abandoned summer camp, complete with broken down docks. to the other is an equally abandoned, though likely very full, prison for children ages 12 to 18. babies taken away from their own families with the idea that raising them here, all together, might work better than what is happening at home. i am waiting for the monster that most certainly lives in the bottom of this murky lake to leap up and swallow me, kayak and all. there has to be one, right? water so cloudy you can't see a bright yellow paddle once you dip it under the surface.

i want to be clear of the buildings on either side of us. the camp. the other camp. we paddle toward the river and a great blue heron flaps big, slow wings up and lifts itself out of the marshgrass where the book said there is a rookery. it flies down the river, away from the buildings, flap. flap. too slow to stay up in the air, if you ask me. it goes low along the water at first, then rises up over the spindle trees and cattails and beaver dams. it flies a long time with sticklegs hanging down below it and i watch until i can't see it.

there are beaver dams everywhere. tall mounds of sticks, five, six feet up and big enough around to let a substantial group of friends sit down to dinner inside. the sweetie rows over to one and sniffs. he has read somewhere that there is an oil the animals leave all around their homes to let others know who lives where. he says it is supposed to smell wonderful, that it is used as a flavoring in foods. i doubt this and say as much. i know that all mammals using scent glands keep those glands tucked neatly up as near as possible to where the tail lives. that is not a good place.  i paddle on by him.

we thread our way around sunken logs and shallows and the terrifying withered roots of dead water lilies, floating like mummies here and there. there are more broken down docks along the way, some nearly indistinguishable from the cattails and quiet tree stalks around them. they jut out into the water from nowhere, from more water. but i have spent enough time with a man who wears a gila monster on his arm to know the desert isn't as ugly as it looks first glance. i look up quick enough to see another of those herons floating overhead and figure maybe that's a start.

the water doesn't seem to be moving the way a river would. the wind pushes us upstream fast enough we have to put some effort into our paddling to get downstream. but we do. and pretty soon there are little jewels everywhere. we round a curve in the water and there are trees shaped like trees now, rather than sticks. the land grows a little more solid and rises up out of the water a little more real than it had in all that murk.

we don't talk much. there's not much to say and the wind grabs every word and strangles it anyway. we paddle on into the very real world. the sweetie finds the waterfall first. we are upstream of it and i have imagined more than once this trip that we will roll over it without warning and will plunge to our untimely deaths.   turns out it's not that sort of waterfall at all. it is a series of short, wide drops that finally let that lazy marshwater go wild. there are remnants of stone walls all along the falls and there's a big, flat rock ledge where we pull the kayaks up and step out.

 we walk carefully over the mossy rocks on downstream a bit. we stand a while and watch the water tear over the rocks with a small, quiet frog who does not seem entirely committed to his color choice. spring is confusingly early this year and he is not quite sure what to do with so much early april at his disposal. we walk on past and he keeps his eyes on the water. when we head back to the kayaks i keep my eyes on the shifting rocks under my feet. this turns out to be a very good idea because there are trilliums stretching themselves out from the rock crevices and into that same sun the frog has been using.

we paddle back upstream, away from the waterfall and the living trees and the high banks. we make our way back through the cattails and beaver dams and the great blue heron rookery. the sweetie startles a beaver surfacing near the shore and the animal warns his kin with a sharp slap of the tail that sends water spraying high into the air and sounds like lightning striking a tree. the sweetie, undeterred by the lack of desire animals in nature have to spend time with him, paddles over to get a closer look.

the bedraggled docks slide into view and then the low, ugly buildings. the cement tower. the glittering razor wire. there are more boats on the lake now, fishermen mostly sitting still near the shore, but also a group of five or six folks kayaking together, heading out to where we have already been. they cut across the middle of the lake like a flock of geese. we wish them a good trip. beautiful day, says one of them as their boats pass ours. we nod, both of us, back at him. it is a beautiful day. all of it.

revolution

this week we started reading ray bradbury. last week was midwinter break. the week before, we wrote a little:

fifteen years ago mr. gil scott heron broke my heart and shook my hand all in one evening. he promised me the revolution would not be televised. he was right about that. 


but that may be partly because there's not a working television in any public school in brooklyn. the revolution will put you in the driver's seat, he said. the revolution, he insisted, will be live. and it was. it will be. it is. i had the good fortune to see the first glittering sparks of revolution today and can tell you all you've heard and all you've thought about the shiftlessness of teenagers, all you've heard about how they don't know how to work together or think or act is probably about as far from what i saw today as possible.


it turns out when you give kids some time to think and ask them a tough question or give them a deep statement, they'll ask you what it means first, but when you tell them you don't know,  they'll try pretty hard to figure it out for themselves. and even if they're not sure, even if they don't get it quite right, they'll get pretty riled up if they think someone is listening. and i will tell you, right here and right now, that if you are a grown up person and you say to them i am listening they will say something. and even if it isn't what you want to hear, even if it sounds silly to your own grown up ears and even if it isn't as articulate as you think your fancy self could be in the same situation, you will hear something impressive if you listen.

we give the kids a slice of a poet's brain: if they give you ruled paper, write the other way. the poet is a man named juan and we ask what they think he means. we ask the tenth grade. the whole tenth grade. five classes of thirty. and we say it like this: what do you think? they do not like this because they think it is disingenuous. they believe that when someone asks them, tenth graders, teenagers, what they think, what those people really mean is what do i want you to say? and i suppose most of the time that is true. but we press on. no, really. what do you think? and they think maybe it means a person should be a little more rebellious. they think it means a person probably doesn't have to let other people determine his or her limits. they think. it is a struggle, but they do it.

and we talk some more. about the occupy wall street protests, which they see as a colossal flop. why, they want to know, with all the world watching, didn't those people say something? as people who are adept at being ignored and discounted and dismissed by those in power, they know a missed opportunity. they know exactly what they would do with an audience. they know what they would do if someone shoved microphones in front of their faces.

and we figure, a handful of teachers who are always looking around for a way to get a kid to read or write or think, we don't exactly have a microphone but we know they know how to get attention. so we scheme. and each class schemes a little differently but everyone has the same message. we're going to write the other way. and they write it down. on post-its and posters. it should not be missed here that every time they write their message they write it the right way. every time. they arm themselves with paper, with words. they are ready to go out into the world with a message. but we've got more than paper in mind. we know how they communicate.

in each class, all five, we ask them to take out those precious phones. it is against the rules. it is so against the rules. they begin to glow, the children. one child says he is confused. a girl giggles nervously. slowly, agonizingly slowly, they type the quote about the paper into their little phones. and then, in each class, thirty kids and two teachers, more or less, send out a text to at least five, and in many cases all, of the people they have listed in their phones. if they give you lined paper, write the other way. hundreds of texts like electronic confetti flying through the air. they cheer. they change their facebook statuses. i do not even know what this looks like, but they do it. status: writing the other way. status: disturbing the universe. status: participating in the revolution. they step out into the halls with their fists full of words, their stomachs fluttering wild butterflies. we could get in trouble for this. all of us. this is real. this is the revolution. they stick the words onto doors and walls. they put them on the time clock in the office. they fold words and cram them into grates and wrap them around door handles. they cover the school with their demand. if they give you lined paper, write the other way. do it, the little papers insist. look at things differently. do not let anyone ever limit you.

and nobody is really sure what to do. students are whispering in the halls. some teachers glare out doors as swarms of thirty tenth graders blankets the halls with a call to action they are still not quite sure they understand. but some teachers open their doors, stand there in the doorway with smiles that reach way back into their eyes. some teachers encourage their students to look at us. one teacher has tears in her eyes, good tears, she says. she is proud of what she sees.

late in the day, the very last period before the bell rings and the doors open and the wildness pours into the streets, the last class of the day steps out into the hall, walking three or four abreast, carrying the words on big slabs of poster paper. they chant, they say the words loud, all together, insistent. their voices echo through four floors of the old building and just like with each class before, with every step they take, a little of the fear and nervousness dissipates. they are surrounded by each other and they feel the strength of their numbers. i see them on the last leg of their journey. they are marching toward an administrator who steps out into the hall at the corner where they will turn. he watches them. he is a good man and he understands what they are doing but it is his job to keep the peace. he stares at them. they do not waver. they march right up to him, chanting, and turn the corner. he nods at them. they understand what he has done. they understand the impression they have made. they are down the stairs and gone.

it is not clear, however, that all of them understand what they are doing. it is not clear that all of them will be able to explain what has happened. but it has happened. it is happening. and they are planning what to say next. because they know something. they know people hear their voices. they know people in this school know they have something to say. they are starting to believe it, too.

field survey

some days after breakfast the sweetie and i walk down the steps of the caboose and we head up the railroad tracks a little, walk the right-of-way through the trees and around the curve, past the field with that one cow on the east side of the rails and the wrung out land where the river came up to the west. but today i am restless and want to walk the other way, over the two lane road we call highway 28 and down behind the post office, toward the depot at the edge of town.

i know what is there, know there are trains on those tracks, art deco passenger cars, boarded up cabooses, steam engines and coal engines and all sorts of monstrous beasts smelling of oil and metal. we walk down the tracks past the bbq and the auction. we  cross over the highway and find ourselves very quickly among little yellow rail repair vehicles. there's an old handcart sitting low and still. behind the post office are the first big cars, covered over with dark strapped-down tarps.

we roam around. i tightrope walk along a rail while the sweetie tries to pace himself with the ties. they do not match his stride and he kicks around the outside of track closest to the water, right where the bush kill crept up during the flood.

the sweetie finds a few bones along the track, shining white ribs and slices of spine, an animal dissolving into the dirt. we look at them a while, but they are nothing big. small pieces of a deer, probably hit by a car at night there on the dark curve just above the rails. the sweetie abandons the bones, slides down the bank a little more recklessly than a man with so far to fall really ought to and is out at the edge of the water, skipping fat rocks across the ice.

i am not the sweetie, barreling headlong down a steep slope like a madman. i pick my way through the piles of leaves and loose stones to where the ground levels out and small trees huddle in clumps. i watch where i put my feet, try to avoid thorny vines that snag at my legs anyway. generally this cautiousness simply leaves me behind the sweetie on hikes, trailing him, being always not the first to see anything.

but today because i look down to be sure my shoe doesn't slide into the soft, sandy mud near the water there is a gift. because of the storm, because of the flood and the meanness of water, there are things strewn all along the valley up nearly as high as the banked tracks some places. propane tanks. a mug handle. the sole of one shoe. and because we walk along the water from time to time i'm learning to ignore the bits of bright things caught around the bottoms of trees. there is a layer of the unnatural over the rocks, the plants, the broken branches that will be there a while.

but this is different. a white triangle bigger than all the smashed pieces of things and brighter than any twisted, tree-snagged plastic bag. i lean down and think back to when i was pining for a deer skeleton we saw by the side of the road. it stayed where it was on the side of the road but this new skull is there, loosed from the rest of its bones, waiting for me to pick it up and take it home. waiting for a place with the rest of the ridiculousness we drag in.