I Want a Camera; Nay, Need

This is driving me crazy. As I border on being hypergraphic, it seems I also border on being hyperphotographic. (I made that word up. I wanted something clever with a suitable Greek etymology and that was the best I could do because "photograph" was already the best word.)

I'm over-using the "hyper" part.

An interurban in hyperspace

Yesterday I stood between rows of almond trees, their white trunks growing out of knurled walnut stumps, and marveled at the beauty of the low autumn sunlight as it poured down the eastern slope of the Coast Range and washed up on the short green grass and multicolored leaves of my uncle's former almond orchard. The scene wanted catching but I had no more than my eyes and a phone camera and the latter was just not up to it.

"Former" not only because he's dead but his daughters and heirs sold it to the farmer whose land surrounds it on all sides. We are allowed access to this fine-burning nutwood as a sort of courtesy to heritage but I don't know how long that will last. Awhile, perhaps, as the pile I drew from was about ten feet high and a hundred feet long, and it seems always about that large no matter what time of year I go there, or pass it on the freeway whence you can see it if you know in exactly which half-second to look. Probably they sell it in bulk now and then but a few truckloads leave nary a dent so I'm hoping that the gentleman farmer with the interesting Afrikaans accent will let us keep coming for it so long as we can invoke the name of his old friend my uncle; and I met the foreman who came by to see who the hell we were and what we were doing, so there's another name to drop if need calls for it, though his English is sparse at best.

California farming is a fascinating spectacle of languages beyond Spanish. In discussing a bittersweet reunion with a lover from just before her ill-stared marriage, my cousin's conversation drifted from his struggles as a college professor of buraku origin whose indifferent wife allegedly has Yakuza ties, to a local Japanese family who still owns many hundreds of acres but farms none of it (all tenanted by some corporation, no doubt). One needn't drive far to find farmers who are Sikh or Hindu either, all belying the standard city dweller's image of who the farmers really are in this country or at least this part of it. These facts do not take root in my brain to inform some essay on twenty first century demographics, however. There's a lot of fiction in there waiting to be written and filled with detail that delights, well, me, if no one else. Don't hold your breath, however. Life seems to be happening while I make these other plans.

 

Such as attempts at camera repair