I got a new camera. It takes good pictures. Click (or tap) to embiggen, you might agree. While out for a walk with The Dog the other day I captured her (the girls are larger than the boys), hunting. Probably not an area where you’d want to walk an especially small dog. Just sayin’. During the next couple months I want to get well practiced using this rig, in preparation for a bucket-list adventure overseas we’ve signed up for, which promises intimate photo ops of wildlife and other natural wonders aplenty. At sea and on land. No, we have no interest in going on a cruise. For the 50+ of you who received our annual newsletter (The Nibblet), you know where.
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I would say Je Suis Los Angeles if I felt I had a deeper feeling of solidarity with the place, as HW and I felt we had with the idyll that was Lahaina. I have no words for the scale of the tragedy going down in LA. We have close friends who live in the high desert, well north of the fires. We chatted the other day. They are out of harms way and safe – for now. Beyond that, and being honest, I feel about LA like I feel about any other area of the world and its people devastated by natural disaster, numb and helpless. A charitable contribution may help salve the conscience, but not much more. The World Wide Web has connected all the people of the world now, but for all its promise to do so, it has served to deliver exactly the opposite experience for many people, loneliness and despair. No geography is forever safe from nature. And if what happened in LA was not “natural” but instead caused by an arsonist, then look away when justice is meted, it will be ugly to watch. Even where we live now, with our above average annual rainfall and proximity to the ocean, the ubiquity of water can lull one into a sense of complacency regarding the threat of devastating fires. Yet, we are surrounded by fuel. One hundred year old Western Cedar trees and Douglas Fir trees are magical, yes, until the forest floor ignites. Pacific Palisades was on the ocean, too, although I read they haven’t seen a drop of rain in over eight months. So water is protective, but it matters where, precisely, it resides. And just as soon as you become cozy with ocean waves gently lapping the shore outside your VRBO beach house, unbeknownst to you a deep sea quake occurs, and minutes later you’re facing an unimaginable wall of water coming ashore. Savior turns murderer. The earth is dynamic, mother nature has been fouling her own nest for hundreds of millions of years. The rest of the natural world shrugs, “Get used to it humans, your recent existence has only made things worse.”