Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2021
Do you ever wonder where your books end up after they leave your shelves?
At one point in my career, I would leave some of the novels I’d finished in airplanes or airports. I realised that English language books ended up in other language skips so I only left them in English speaking destinations.
The summer weather has not been kind here in Dublin. In a mock despair, we ended up doing a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table while it lashed rain. The puzzle took several days and it made an interesting photographic challenge once completed. How do you make a jigsaw interesting but different to the picture on the box? There are hundreds of ways but I wanted to do it with a tilt-shift adaptor on a 50 mm manual lens. I really like this photo with a focal emphasis on two tourists in front of an iconic London bus. It was raining there too.
Three words to start today. Skiing came to mind when I was listening to a discussion about the Andean Condor on the car radio the other day. The enthusiastic recommendation was to go see a Condor on your travels. The reason the Condor was being discussed was the recent publication of studies based on GPS tracking plus a motion sensor that counted the bird’s wing strokes. There’s a science alert you can read on this subject if you want more. Meantime, for me, the most interesting part is not that a condor flew for more than five hours without beating its wings once. Sure, it flew over 170 kilometres using nothing but air currents. I’m pretty sure this has been happening for millions of years. What I want to know if it ‘sees’ the thermals or relies on something else entirely?
Albatrosses fly huge distance too. Same kind of problem. Dovetail this with how both species manage to stay aloft and you have an interesting chance to find something new. New ways of seeing our world perhaps?
The moth is still on our window, clinging on in death.
It seems to me, somehow, that the dust of death is enough for one journal.
[Read more…] about The MothRichard Brautigan once misled me back in 1974. I enjoyed Trout Fishing in America so much that I read everything he wrote. At one point, he wrote that he didn’t write. His mental blocks were such that he typed, stopped, scrunched up the paper and threw it into the wastebasket. There, in the basket, the words reassembled themselves into a story he never wrote. I put many words in a bag and despite nearly thirty years of incubation, nothing much has hatched.
The lake has gone. And with it, an oral culture that lasted thousands of years has evaporated too. Lake Poopó is no more. 3680 metres above sea level, 1000 sq km of water has become a story of evaporation, desiccation and devastation.
A lasting memory is the shimmering pink line at the furthest edges of my sight. The heat haze rising from the salar distorted the lines of flamingoes diligently feeding on crustaceans whose pigmented carotenoids tinted their feathers pink. An earthly aurora andinus is gone. So too is the oral culture of honking birds that pre-dated the arrival of the humans that silenced them.
