The Creek Journal

March 27, 2013

This certainly is a day worth wasting everything else.
Except this day, of course.
Windy, sixty degrees, bluest of skies.
But the point is that I've intentionally wasted the doing of so many obligations: I needed to read more of David Hume, I had a poem I've been needing to write, and there must be half a dozen watercolors left undone back up there in the house where I had gone even so far as to set up three sheets of paper, the big jar of water, and the memory of specific colors poised to wash over the daunting whiteness. So many duties, and they all have been forsaken by a walk to the Creek.
Because the wind is whipping the grasses with a certain dedicated righteousness all its own, I can't very easily take those kinds of photographs. But I carry the camera and its tripod to remind me to do what's already on my mind: slow down. A few steps at a time. Kneel. Wait. I take rolls and rolls of digital images of rock texture, color, form. Some in half-shadow cast by what's left of an angled winter-spring sun.
I love collecting images of stones. And boy do we have the stones. About an acre of dry creek-bed before you get tot he actual creek, and in the bed lie a randomness of stone species like I've never seen before. Some with fossils. Some of at least several ages of limestone, shale, sandstone, Mississipian, Pennsylvanian, streaked, solid, dark, red, white, angled, rounded, too heavy, and tossible.
Its a slow walk away from every responsible duty known to man.
Also seen: white egret thirty or forty feet high in a swaying tree, keeping balance while its snowy feathers bend backwards in the wind; kingfisher; red tailed hawk; sphinx moth; minnow; cricket frogs; water striders (Jesus bugs!); unpretentious gray spiders; damsel flies; sunning turtles; yellow sulpher butterfly; grass carp.

On a windy March day, we take photographs of rocks and things that don't blow easily. Like sky, too.

Stones under a shallow piece of water.

Some rather beautiful sky above all these stones.

February 3, 2013

[i forgot to post this a little more than a month ago]

First Week or So of March

Not last year's drought, but the drought year before that, one might recall that we lost an estimated ninety percent of the juniper up on the hillside above the Creek. That's about five acres of brown-to-graying going on up there. I'm clearing some of it.
But we need a cool, windless, humid day that I'm not already working on the ambulance if we're going to burn that stuff. Yesterday was the first day to meet all these criteria.
Beginning at about seven-thirty, I parked the pickup near the deer blind a hundred fifty yards above the burn area so it and a couple cans of gas and chain saw fuel would be safe. Even though a mist fell gently all day long, the dry cedar ignited easily and burned with flames till about four-thirty. The coals lasted the night.

All day, huge white ashes fell slowly, swinging gently in the air as they dropped. The devil's snow flakes, lighter than air for a brief few seconds, and then cooling and falling on me and the dark wet stones around the fire. As long as the wind didn't blow, I knew these ashes would pose no problem of starting a flame elsewhere.

So I spent nine hours cutting boughs and stumps and tossing most of them steadily onto the flames. One of the joys of this sort of work is what I was able to see in the process. Ferns, lichens, and mosses are taking advantage of the wetter weather. I saw, too, a flower I don't remember ever having identified before: Nemastylis geminiflora, sometimes called Celestials. This one grows only half a foot tall.

When I had tired out nearly completely, I carried the shovels and chain saw back up to the truck through a cool rain. And the pickup looked as though it had been shat upon by a thousand incontinent grackles angrily perched overhead. Indeed, an imperceptible wind had carried the ashes all over the hillside, leaving white streaks all across our shiny gray truck. Safely.

A couple weeks ago we got threats of a storm, but no rainfall like yesterday's .1 inch.

On the fifth of March, we planted asparagus roots:

every eighteen inches, in two rows

Thanks to Harlin for the images below, beginning with an old stalk of a Spanish dagger yucca:

He suggested the creation of “Smilax bona-nox Leaves Day” for February 23 in honor of the changing colors of the greenbriar:

End of January 2013 with St. Francis, George Harrison, and Monet

This little one-room Creek house has turned out to be surprisingly comfortable during our coldest hours. We turn on a couple of the stove's gas burners for a brief five minutes, and the small space of air warms above sweater-weather. And the many windows quickly give us sunlight enough to feel comfortable for the hours after about eight-thirty or so when the sun can be seen rising over the ridge opposite the Creek.