“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” — Emily Dickinson
(Content warning: spider photo ahead)
Exactly one year ago, i was camping with my parents & my partner at Bay View State Park on Padilla Bay. I had no idea i soon would be moving away from the sea or that when i moved, it would be to this awkward junction between desert, prairie, and forest.
Moving here was a good idea, for many reasons. I don’t regret it. But sometimes when i am looking at photos of coastal environments for The Deadlands promo graphics, or for drawing reference, a sad little flower sprouts inside me, jailed by my ribs. It’s too dry here; the wilderness is dusty and beige. Everything is too spiny to go barefoot when i hike. Even the rocks are jagged.
It rained all day Saturday, so i went for a run for the first time since i moved. Even at its wettest, this forest is like a mummy someone put in a jacuzzi hoping it would wake up. It just gets slimy, and then it dries out. It can’t revive.
I miss dense, wet foliage. Moss dripping from the trees, the scent of black loam and running water, cannibal saplings and ferns spilling out of crumbling nurse logs… even that invasive asshole, Himalayan blackberry, curling in on itself in a thorny circus of leaves and vines. All of it wreathed in fog and mist, so the farthest trees could be ghosts.
My memories of that morning on Padilla Bay remind me of everything i miss about the coast.
I saw a quote recently that i can’t quite remember. It was something like “I used to think this place was ugly, until i looked closer.” I’ve been trying to train myself to “look closer,” and specifically, smaller.
Putting myself through drawing drills every morning gives me an especially good excuse to wander out and capture flora (and fauna) with my pencil and my camera. These plants are strange to me. I’m still learning them.
The older i get and the more i read, the more i appreciate the things i don’t know, the thrilling unmapped wilderness of the red pie slice.
I don’t know what that plant is, but the long silver hairs on it are gorgeous. It’s not edible; you can see where curious deer took a bite out of it and then decided against any more of that particular snack.
This one grows in our yard in the some of the places where the cranefly larvae (and the inexorable heat) have destroyed the grass. It makes leaves like rabbits make kits, constantly and desperately:
Even the birds won’t eat these berries, which is kind of disturbing. Does anything really need to be that poisonous? Isn’t it overkill, Nature?
I teased this mystery spider (species still unidentified) to get her portrait. Sorry, my eight-legged darling, for poking your web with a blade of grass to mimic a struggling insect. I was waiting for her to come out for such a long time that when she finally rolled out of bed, she gave me an effing heart attack.
…If you take a closer look at the web, you’ll see Darling is a messy eater.
Last, on one of our morning walks this week, we saw some old, dirty spiderwebs on the sidewalk getting ruffled by the breeze. I made it into a .gif:
I will leave you with a puzzle: one photo in this post doesn’t have a filter on it; the others all have a Photoshop color lookup called “foggy night.” Which one is natural light?