Urban poetry

It's the sad anniversary of 9/11, and classes start tomorrow and I'm nervous about how I'm going to manage with limited mobility, so here's some serenity: a tree and a tree house in 6BC, a community garden in the East Village.

More Avebury

The UK is having their fifth heat wave of the summer, and I wish this kind of summer day for all of them, with cool breezes and maybe some much-needed rain. (It was actually quite warm the day I took this picture but it looks more like a classically English summer day than it actually was.)

I love Oxford but I am happy to be back in the land of strong coffee and air-conditioning any time I want it.

Flashback: Clava Cairns

The most famous of a group of cairns around Inverness. I posted pictures at the time (here, here, and here) but here's another that really shows the ring of standing stones around the cairn.

Saturday reflections

The Cherwell by Magdalen College in Oxford last summer. The floating leaves on top of the reflection make a nice effect.

Approaching Denali

After we left the airfield, we flew over tundra approaching the mountains. The Alaska Range is not part of the Rocky Mountains, though both are part of the American Cordillera; it stretches 600 miles across south-central Alaska into the Yukon.

Flashback: Mirror Lake

And that's it for New Zealand—one last scenic stop on the South Island.

Flashback: Standley Chasm

Many of the remaining pictures from the outback are landscapes of red sand with rocks and a few unhappy trees, and I think you get the idea without having to actually see them.

But I liked these pictures from Standley Chasm, near Alice Springs, because of how green and (deceptively) cool the landscape appears. You still needed a face net for the flies.

Saturday reflections

(Posted late because last night I felt like lying flat on my bed and watching television was too exhausting.)

The Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street—not to be confused with Holy Trinity Church a few blocks south—as a winter afternoon slides into twilight.

What this photo lacks is the soundtrack of drip drip drip from snow melting off the eaves, which was an unpleasant reminder of what was going on at that moment in my apartment a few miles away (now apparently resolved, though I still have some painting/repair in my future.) Another blizzard is on the way, with up to two feet of snow expected. Can I just say—Yuck!

Black and white Black Hills

 

The Black Hills

Since I was looking at South Dakota anyway...

The Black Hills are a national forest rather than a national park. I was expecting some interesting geology, because I never knew that the “black” in the name refers to how the hills are so covered with trees that they appear black. (Well, if you say so.)

But it is quite beautiful, and very different from the eastern half of the state.

Long ago and far away

That's how it feels, anyway. But this was less than two months ago, in South Dakota.

This is Spearfish Canyon, in the Black Hills. The waterfall was a short hike through some beautiful forest.

The unexpected rusticity

Another bench I passed along the way, and grasses growing along a small stream. The crowds and traffic on the High Street seem very far away here; even the college itself, with its quads and spires, feels miles away.

There are allegedly otters and kingfishers in these woods, but I didn't see any. I had to look hard for the deer!

Addison's Walk

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

That's from a poem by C.S. Lewis, a Fellow of Magdalen College, referencing this footpath in the college, where he often walked. (There is a plaque with the poem on one of the gates.) Unlike the walk around Christ Church Meadow, it's not open to everyone; it's inside the college and you have to buy a ticket to visit.

I went there early on a Saturday morning, and while the other tourists clustered in the quads, I mostly had this walk to myself, through these long tunnels of trees around the water meadow where the college's herd of deer live in the summer.

Because of course they have a herd of deer in the middle of the college in the 21st century. Christ Church College has cows, doesn't it?

Somebody's watching me

You do sometimes feel like the castle buildings are just always there. Here, behind a group of buildings by the river (under a truly ominous sky) and later that afternoon, behind the fountain commemorating Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee, across from the Alexandra Gardens.

The henge

Taking a walk along the henge to circumnavigate the site was optional. I did it, but it was more of a trek than I'd anticipated. It was hot and a long section of the path was chalk, which is rocky and crunchy underfoot.

Our archaeologist guide told us about one of her students, who had scoffed when she repeated an old saying that “the ditch isn't meant for humans” and insisted on walking around the site through the ditch rather than up on the bank. When he finally emerged, he said it had been one of the worst experiences of his life, though not for any supernatural reasons. The ditch is wet and muddy, full of midges, thorns, and sheep droppings, and so any elemental powers warning you off are actually doing you a favor.

Windbreak

I didn't find this drive boring at all; although there definitely weren't a lot of landmarks or flashy geological formations to admire, I enjoyed how different it was from anything I'm used to. Like these trees, which act as a windbreak for the house behind them. Or the fences set back from the highway, which are there to catch the snow and prevent it from drifting into the road.

This is the real Big Sky Country. When nothing obstructs the horizon, the sky takes up a disproporionate amount of what you're seeing.

A Møøse once bit my sister...

And I segue seamlessly from Monty Python to early morning in Glacier, where we had been hoping to see moose. (Or møøse.)

More badlands

Between and beyond the buttes is just more flat prairie, with (if you look very closely) maybe one or two lonely trees to break up the horizontals and signal a possible source of water.

Saturday reflections

Palm trees reflected in a car window in Berkeley.

Botanical Gardens

I was happy to wake up Wednesday to blue skies and warm temperatures—if you have to spend time in Florida, at least the weather should be nice—and I decided to go to the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens, which was about a thirty minute walk from the hotel.

The gardens were surprisingly small, and full of jungly greenery and few flowers—I had to keep reminding myself that I was back in the Northern Hemisphere, and Florida or not, it was still winter. But there were butterflies, and yellow warblers high up in the trees, and I savored having bare arms one more time before heading home to winter weather.