Breaking with routines and walking casually through the park. Summer reading list. Thoughts on lazy days.

 

I tend to stay busy. Sometimes too busy. I've been hitting swim practice six days a week for months on end and this morning I woke up, turned off the alarm clock (the one I never fully utilize since I wake up each morning ten minutes before it goes off) and went back to sleep. I got in an extra couple hours. I needed it. It's been a long week. 

I keep reading that it's really good to be out walking in nature. Better for your psyche than walking through the city looking for mannequins and outrageous posters. I thought I'd put it to the test by doing a loop around the hike and bike trail in Zilker Part. And instead of walking for "fitness" I thought I'd try out this whole new idea of being relaxed and...what's the word? ..... Oh yeah, mindful.

Every job I've done this year has been about making portraits. Environmental portraits and occasional studio portraits. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to try making not-portraits for the morning. I was so unserious that I didn't even strap on the walking shoes or the hiking boots or the "trainers" (a U.K. translation of  "track shoes"....). Naw, I walked for a couple hours in a pair of Birkenstocks equipped with "rugged" soles. They were fine. I could have been walking around town in them for decades. What was I thinking?

It's been Wild Kingdom in the land surrounding my house. The property is fenced in with high, wooden, privacy fences but nature's little rascals have discovered so many secret passages ( = holes in the fence and tunnels underneath) that I think getting into the yard is easier than breathing. This morning I was sitting in the dining room having a casual breakfast. Casual breakfast mostly means that the food is inconsequential as long as it's accompanied by coffee. Or vice versa. 

We have a ton of squirrels who camp out in our trees and bushes. I like them. They seem to have remarkable senses of humor. Sometimes they come by and hang out on the little stone wall just outside the french doors to the dining room. I eat breakfast on the other side of the glass. I guess I am the one in the terrarium... 

So, I'm sipping coffee and looking at the opening of the equities markets on my dining room laptop and I perceive a blur in my peripheral vision. I jerk my head to the side and look out the window. The blur is a fairly good sized hawk and he's jetting down to catch a squirrel who has let his guard down. It all happens so fast. And just like that the hawk leaps back up into the air with one of my furry little mammal pals clutched tightly in his talons. Jarring but I guess it's the whole Circle of Life thing. The hawk has now claimed a low branch in one of the live oak trees in the side yard as his observation post. The squirrels have decamped to the other side yard. Strategizing; I hope. 

When I went outside to get into my car and drive to the trail I had to shoo away a doe and two fawns from my driveway. I didn't get too aggressive because I noticed a ten point buck just across the street. He was keeping a sharp eye on my intrusion into his serene morning of plant chomping. Later in the day, around dusk, B. directed my attention to a skunk transiting the yard. No doubt heading for the gap between the bottom of the fence and top of the grass, just on the far corner of my office building, navigating out of the yard and heading off toward the green belt that intersects with a dry creek just a few houses down. Later in the evening the two owls that hang out in one really tall elm tree towards the back of our property started up with each other. Domestic dispute among owls or just two birds mimicking the loud and insensitive conversational style of American adults? 

The final act of the wildlife parade for the day was the almost ritual crossing of our yard, and on to points just south, by three raccoons who, on the surface, seem quite well behaved and almost jocular --- except I'm not really anxious to meet them face to face and get to know them. I've heard full-sized male raccoons can be aggressive and prone to thinking they are always right. 

I haven't mentioned them but we also seem to have three or four variations of non-predatory birds in residence as well. They come and go but this season we seem to have a full contingent of blue jays, a smattering of robins, flocks of finches and several of the usually testy and anti-social grackles. It's a fucking zoo around here. Don't try to pet the coyotes though. They are serious contenders. 

I was still recovering from Animal Kingdom: Squirrel vs hawk when I drove out of the neighborhood and headed toward town. The car purring beautifully and someone on the radio (NPR --- send them a donation if you think of it...) was talking about how many lies per minute one GOP candidate perpetrated in a speech yesterday and then offered a tally of how many democrats today are trying to kick their candidate off the ticket. None of it was light-hearted or amusing so I turned the radio off and instead started playing Billie Elish's latest album. I like it. But of course I like it since she also did the music for the last big James Bond movie and I'm such a fan.

I decided on my walking route, a three mile loop that runs around both sides of Lady Bird Lake. It has tons of tree cover and it's mostly insulated from the rampant urbanism of downtown. Today I brought along a camera that hasn't gotten enough love lately. It was the Leica SL2 and I cleverly outfitted it with a 40mm f1.4 Voigtlander M series lens --- via an adapter that was more expensive than the lens. Imagine that. The lens, being fully manual, provides the needed friction...

I had on an odd costume. Prana tech shorts in olive drab, a long sleeve, button down dress shirt with a small pattern to it (mostly blue) and one over-the-top hat in bright dirt color from my burgeoning collection. A collection of hats that grows and grows as I try endlessly to find an exactly perfect, all weather hat. It's probable that there will never be a resolution of the hat conundrum but they are all relatively cheap and sometimes I bring along one that I'm not very attached to and give it away to a stranger whose scalp if being fried by vicious sun rays. The outfit was capped, as I might have mentioned earlier, by Birkenstock sandals. My advice? Break them in quite well before committing to multi-mile hikes in them.

It was hot and sweaty out on the trail today but nothing existentially dangerous. After last Summer's long stream of temperatures near 105° every day this Summer seems, and actually is, mild by comparison. Today it was in the mid-80s when I walked the path. The big trees on either side of the trail provide good cover and the more frequent rains this year have ensured some thick and healthy canopies. 

The camera rode over my left shoulder and I stopped frequently to snap a frame. Most frames didn't make the cut but these below did. 

So, was walking in nature at a casual clip really rejuvenating? Relaxing? Calming? Sure, if you don't count the folks having loud conversations on cellphones --- which they hold at arm's length while using the speaker function. I almost snatched one especially loud person's phone out of his hands and tossed it into the lake. But the overall dosage of relaxing prevented what could have been a very nasty interaction. Instead I just tried to give the loud, loutish buffoon my most powerful withering glare.

Cellphones should be treated like masturbation. Use outlawed in public. And publicly frowned upon by society. Practice cellphone use in private to your heart's content.... Loud and loutish cellphone abusers tend to ruin the calm of nature for.....everyone else. Why are these nasty devices so addictive that no one seems able to leave them behind in their cars? 

Ah well, the shutter click of the SL2 was demure enough to draw no attention to my camera. And that's the way it probably should be. Cellphones? No!!! Cameras? Sure.

My takeaway? Walking in nature= good. Shouting on cellphones = bad. SL2 = very, very good. VM lens? = pretty good. Birkenstocks? Just fine.

Many parts of the trail are covered by shade trees.

Everywhere I look, in the middle of Summer, there is nothing but green. 

And we've barely had to use sprinklers for our lawns and gardens.

A sign on a pillar that supports the pedestrian bridge across the lake. 

A good sentiment to live by. 

The ancient Lamar Blvd. bridge over Lady Bird Lake.

Texas skies in full bloom. 

Seen on the way to the lake. 

Ancient swim towel. Time to throw in the towel?

And just where do we throw it in?

I have tons of towels that I take to the pool. Towels with Marvel Comic characters on them. Pokemon themed towels. Beach towels. Plain towels. In the summer towels are less important. One will mostly dry off between the showers in the locker rooms and the car in the parking lot. Shower, toss on your shorts and t-shirt while wet and use evaporative cooling to both dry out the clothes and cool you down. In winter the towels rise to the occasion. But towels give out over time. They get ragged, develop holes, and the graphics fade. 

The one just above has graced my swim bag on and off for over a decade. It looks as though its time has come. I'll be sad when the day comes (soon) when it's too ratty to use and too thin to be effective. 

Books: I've just finished reading four books that I liked very much. And re-reading one that every photographer might like. More in the next post.