Panorama Views On The Hidden Pasture Trail In The Little Rincon Mountains by kenne
Images by kenne
There’s a special place on the east side of the Rincon Mountains, named “Happy Valley.” A primitive road goes past ranches as the terrain and vegetation evolve, creating a picturesque kaleidoscope of nature’s beauty.
The road slowly narrows with several curves lined with large cottonwoods, oaks, and sycamore trees, forming a belt along a fence-line above the trees.
On a previous trip into Happy Valley, we had identified a lone railroad post as a marker on the fence above a grove of trees where we could leave our car. Approaching the marker-post, we hiked the fence-line up through waist-high thorny bushes till reaching the gate to the Hidden Pasture Trail. Located in the Little Rincon Mountains, the trail slowly leads us through a maze of beautiful rock formations and scenic views.
The trail is not heavily used and can be difficult to follow, causing frequent misdirected diversions — not a problem as long as we followed a line parallel to Ash Creek, which snakes up the canyon below North Star Peak.
“Spring On The Rocks” (Sabino Creek near the dam.) — Image by kenne
“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion.
It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water.
Its color is silver.
And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it.
The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking.
Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird That suddenly above the bees is heard, The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love, The which it is reserved for God above To sanctify to what far ends He will, But which it only needs that we fulfil.
Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse Village, Cape Elizabeth (1929)
Maine house, 1998, by Michael H. Coles
There is so much I love about the art of Edward Hopper, which is why I continue to turn to his work — so on the pulse of us as Americans. I have never been to Maine, let through painting like Lighthouse Village, I feel as if I grow up in Cape Elizabeth — his inspiration allows my imagination to capture reality.
“I once told Hopper that he shows us who we are,” said poet William Carlos Williams. “He’d have no part of my enthusiasm, or extravagance. ‘Yes, I try,’ he said–and then he spoke about ‘light,” how hard he looks for it. He told me to go ‘hunting’ for light, and I liked hearing him use that word–seeing his face get lit up as he spoke!” (“Seeking Maine’s Light,” DoubleTake, Winter 2000)
The Michael H. Coles photograph of a Maine house taken not far from where Hopper painted Lighthouse Village illustrates how Hopper was able to capture the light.
kenne
Edward Hopper, Self-portrait
Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925)
by Edward Hirsch
Out here in the exact middle of the day, This strange, gawky house has the expression Of someone being stared at, someone holding His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;
This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed Of its fantastic mansard rooftop And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.
The House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper 1925
But the man behind the easel is relentless. He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes The house must have done something horrible To the people who once lived here
Because now it is so desperately empty, It must have done something to the sky Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant And devoid of meaning. There are no
Trees or shrubs anywhere–the house Must have done something against the earth. All that is present is a single pair of tracks Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.
Now the stranger returns to this place daily Until the house begins to suspect That the man, too, is desolate, desolate And even ashamed. Soon the house starts
To stare frankly at the man. And somehow The empty white canvas slowly takes on The expression of someone who is unnerved, Someone holding his breath underwater.
And then one day the man simply disappears. He is a last afternoon shadow moving Across the tracks, making its way Through the vast, darkening fields.
This man will paint other abandoned mansions, And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered Storefronts on the edges of small towns. Always they will have this same expression,
The utterly naked look of someone Being stared at, someone American and gawky. Someone who is about to be left alone Again, and can no longer stand it.
We live in the Sonoran desert. For most people, when they hear the term “desert” they picture a dry, desolate wasteland. However, the term defines a wide spectrum of diverse landscapes, plants, and animal populations.
“A concise nontechnical definition of a desert is ‘a place where water is severely limiting to life most of the time.'” (A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert) The Sonoran desert is divided into seven subdivisions based on the diverse vegetation found in 100,000 sq. miles that include much of the Mexican state of Sonora, most of southern Arizona, southeastern California, and most of the Baja California peninsula.
Tucson and most of the Pima county area are in the Arizona Upland subdivision, which is the highest and coldest part of the desert — also called the “saguaro-palo verde forest.” The diversity of this area is partly explained by the two equal rainy seasons.
More and more, biologists are concluding that the Arizona Upland’s climate, vegetation density, and biodiversity resemble a thorn scrub biomes more than desert biomes, which might explain why many refer to this area as the “lush” desert. By any name, this is a very special place. Still many people who visit and/or move to Tucson complain about what they see as a lack of seasons, when in fact the Arizona Upland has five seasons: summer monsoon; autumn; winter; spring; foresummer — they’re just more subtle.
The defining form of the Arizona Upland is the saguaro cactus. I first fail in love with the area and its giant saguaro cactus in the late ’60s, during which time I read of the imminent demise of this iconic symbol of southern Arizona. Upon my return, some forty years later, I learned that such impending doom was no more than a modern myth, although soundly refuted refuses to die. As written in A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert, “The misinterpretation might be analogous to a situation in which extraterrestrials briefly visit the earth and collect a sample of people from a nursing home.”
Like with most species of desert plants there is an ebb and flow in the ecosystem. Declines are often caused by severe freezes or droughts. Since much of the west has been in a ten-year drought, it is not surprising that a decline may currently exist. “In the occasional wet years, mass recruitment reverses the trend of decline with a reproductive boom. In the case of saguaros, these episodes of net recruitment seem to occur less than a half-dozen times per century in the Saguaro National Park (west), and less often in the drier regions.” (A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert)
“Funeral — St. Helena, South Carolina” (1955), from Robert Frank’s book The Americans — Source: The New York Times
Rodeo — New York City, 1954 (from The Americans) — Robert Frank
I love photography, therefore I read about photography and photographers. One photographer that many feel changed the world of photography is Robert Frank. The book that had this kind of impact on photography was The Americans. Published in 1959, the book of photos taken from trips across America in the mid-fifties.
Not highly thought of in the beginning, because they were not the idyllic images Americans were used to seeing in popular magazines — Popular Photography magazine derided Mr. Frank’s black-and-white pictures of isolated individuals, teenage couples and groups at funerals for their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness” (NY Times), but in the sixties his photos began to influence other photographers to take socially conscious material.
Over fifty years later the images in The Americans remain very topical. “I’m very proud of this book because I followed my intuition,” Frank said in an interview for a New York Times article (December 12, 2008) on a comprehensive publication, “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’ ” that was to go with a major exhibition in Washington at the National Gallery of Art in January, 2009.
“It’s tempting to draw associations between Mr. Frank’s trips and Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” another cultural artifact from the period, which came out two years before “The Americans.” Kerouac wrote the introduction to “The Americans,” but the two men did not meet until after Mr. Frank’s journey.
Still, Mr. Frank’s picture of a man at the wheel taken from the passenger seat of the car, “U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho,” might well double for a portrait of the characters in “On the Road.” He was quick, however, to dismiss that association, remembering the men simply as “hitchhikers I picked up,” adding, “We were going to Butte, I think.” (Snapshots from the American Road, by Philip Gefter, NY Times)
Take me back, way back
to the quietness
of a summer evening,
watching the moths
circle the lights, when I was young.
A time when
everything was
black and white,
when I was only
beginning to test the gray,
where Jackson’s filling station
was the center
of what was happening
in my world —
a place where I could
get what I needed,
before I knew
what I wanted, but still meet my connection . . .
take me back
in the nighttime
I still hear the moment,
“We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”
— Andy Goldsworthy
As we neared the top of Leopold Point off of Lower Butterfly trail in the Santa Catalina mountains, these beautiful Rusby’s primrose wildflowers seemed to jump off the rocks. — Images by kenne
“Spring On The Rocks” (Sabino Creek near the dam.) — Image by kenne
Mountain Marigold
“Happy Bees” — Images by kenne
Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse Village, Cape Elizabeth (1929)
Morning Sea Serpent (1999) — Image by kenne
“Funeral — St. Helena, South Carolina” (1955), from Robert Frank’s book The Americans — Source: The New York Times
Images by kenne
Giant Mesquite Bug — Images by kenne
Images by kenne
I tried to identify this flower in fireflyforest.com, but no luck. — Images by kenne
Beach at Toms Cave on 
Yellow Salsify — Images by kenne
Becoming is Superior to Being 