This was supposed to be a post about cows, but wouldn’t you know it, they vanished.
My wife came home around lunchtime and told me there were trucks with cattle trailers parked just down the road and cows all over the place. There’s an old corral down there, and once or twice a year it fills up with brutal mooing New Mexico mountain cattle and their spindly offspring. How one grows up to be the other, I’ll never know. Cows up close are like a whole other universe with horns. How can anything be that big? More to the point, why does anything that big stand around in its own shit behind a fence all day and chew on hay? No wonder they let themselves get beamed up into UFOs and creatively lasered. It’s a wonder there are so many left.
I do like cows, though, probably because of my great-uncle Herbert in New Hampshire. He only had a few, or maybe just the one, but I remember how warm and wide her back was. He showed me how to milk her out in the barn, hot milk steaming in the frosty air. I do believe that was the first and last time I ever held a cow’s teat in my hand, and I wasn’t even of kindergarten age yet, but I remember, oh yes.
So after supper I grabbed my trusty Pentax *istDS (yes, that’s what it’s called, including the asterisk) and took a stroll to get some mutant bovine closeups in the setting sun. But as soon as I reached the top of our driveway and couldn’t hear a thing, I knew they were gone. (Yup, and not a sign that anything was ever there.) As it was a fine and pleasant evening–no snow or dust storms for a change–I lingered in the quiet, taking pictures of abandoned cars and ancient farmy junk. I was amazed. There are extra-dimensional sinister energies, ineluctable qualities of being, unbearably nuanced hints and promises, all around us: looking through the lens of a single lens reflex camera, zooming in and out, you can find this stuff!
On the way back home I saw my first hummingbird fight of the season. Yes, they’re back, and you’re in trouble. I could take pictures of hummingbirds all day, that’s why. Mix hummingbirds, a slick DSLR, and me, and what do you get? DIGITAL ZUCCHINI! You don’t have to eat it, but I need to give them away, figuratively speaking.
I stood there maybe six feet away, holding the camera up to my eye and ready to shoot. The only way this works is if you’re patient. So long as I stand still, they’ll show up, wary but hungry, and dive for the feeder. Sometimes the “clack” of the shutter scares them off the perch for a second or two. This actually good, because the camera captures moments that you never see, or at least it might. Trying to shoot a hummingbird in focus is like photographing ghosts or hunting for diamonds in the dark: you can’t tell if you actually caught anything until after you’re done. But when it works, oh man, what a joy. The first two in this search string from last year are pretty decent, and so is this and the one with the cat.
Back in San Cristobal we had typical New Mexico windows without screens, and sometimes a hummingbird would fly into the kitchen and go berserk. I’d have to stand on a chair to grab it, when it finally huddled up beside the light fixture, and carry it gently back outside. I remember the first time I did this: it was like holding a bit of warm bright nothing in my hand!
Quite the important magical experience, as far as I’m concerned.
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Heh, digital zucchini. I’m using that, without attribution.
Be my guest!
“Holding a bit of warm bright nothing in my hand” – a good description of what we’re all trying to catch and hold on to for a little while before the darkness takes us down. Birds have always been emblems of the human soul on account of their plumage, tunefulness and freedom from the constraints of earth. It appeals to my taste for paradox that these bright ethereal creatures derived from reptiles newly arisen from mud. We should remember that slugs and lizards are also us.