We had only been in Arizona for a couple of days, and like many
sun-starved Northerners, Mrs and I wanted to just lay by the pool
and soak it all in. We had suggested to my daugher and her husband
that perhaps we would wander on down to their house later in the
day so that we could all go to the art fair in Scottsdale.
Our pool side sunning was interrupted by a phone call. "Why
aren't you guys here? If we don't leave soon we will miss everything
because the fair closes soon.
Oops!
Since we were quite a ways north of Scottsdale we did a quick 2
step shower thing and the lead foot thing and headed on south to
the fair. We told my daughter to head on off to the fair and we
picked a place to meet.
I'm used to free fairs, so six bucks a head to just wander around
seemed like a bit of a hold-up, but this isn't the Old West any
more, and the council for the arts does have bills to pay.
You
might imagine what I like to look at when I do wander through an
art fair. And yes, it's the photography. I do however, feel a bit
guilty looking sometimes at the images for quite a long time. I
feel guilty because I've never been willing to part with any cold
hard cash for someone else's images to hang on my walls. To be sure,
I've found images that I'd love to have hanging either in my office
or my house, but generally they are priced well over $500 and that's
just been out of my mental reach.
I also am quite sure that trying to make a living sitting in a
booth at an art fair is not in my cards. I think that after a day
or two I'd be found running around looking for a tall building that
I could leap off of. But at the Scottsdale fair there was one particular
booth that really caught my eye, staffed by a pair of photographers
that run their own nature workshops right there out of Scottsdale.
(web site is www.natureworkshops.com).
I stood and talked for a few minutes to Roger
Devore about an image that he had full of Arizona wildflowers.
It was a really great shot of some indian ruins framed in the front
with a carpet of vivid wildflowers. Roger mentioned that he was
taking out a group in a couple of weeks to shoot wildflowers and
I asked if there was anywhere near Phoenix where he thought I might
find some.
He mentioned that just a couple of days earlier he had been out
on a scouting trip out east of Phoenix and had found fields of wildflowers
out at a place called Florence Junction. I wrote down the directions
to Florence Junction and thanked Roger for the advice. I shared
my enthusiasm for a trip out to the junction with my son-in-law
and daughter and was met with, "you want to go where to take
pictures of flowers? Surely we can find flowers closer than Florence
Junction. That's way out in the middle of nowhere, and besides,
there is really nothing there."
Well I thought, what about the flowers.
The
next day we fit in a soccer game, lounging at the pool and headed
on out for a dual purpose trip, to find some flowers "closer
to town" and to also check out some open houses in the area
where we want to live.
But as you can read in the entry about Eagle Eyes, it was the bird
that stole the show, not the bees nor the flowers.
We saw a couple of nice houses, and we saw the Bald Eagle, but
we saw almost no flowers.
Saguaro lake was nice, and I was able to capture a nice panorama,
but the only flowers we found there were tucked away in the late
afternoon shade.
"See," I pointed out. "Those are the flowers I'm
looking for, the yellow ones are California poppies, I'm not sure
what the blue ones are."
As the evening drew to a close, I figured that we just might be
able to see some of the flowers on our next day's drive south to
Tucson.
But I was wrong, there were no flowers to be seen. As a matter
of fact, for large stretches of the highway approaching Tucson I
thought that the road had been laid through a garbage dump, and
that the median was some kind of special collection site for all
of the trash that one could collect between Phoenix and Tucson.
I saw a jet graveyard, but no flowers.
We took a tour of the Saguaro national forest and you gessed it,
no flowers there.
We spent about three hours in the desert wildlife museum, and finally,
there in the middle of the zoo/museum, was a really nice patch of
flowers.
But I wanted to see a carpet of flowers, and not try and shoot
around the garbage cans.
I've not really seen many carpets of wildflowers, save for one
very memorable trip in the north of Israel in the the spring. I
lay in the fields there and shot a roll or two of images of the
red poppies, but set the camera down for a moment and it was stolen.
That's the only roll of film I've ever lost in my life, and I still
remember those poppies.
But you know what?
By the time we returned to Phoenix on Wednsday, I was a bit frustrated
about the whole flower thing. So Thursday afternoon, while Mrs was
doing the continuing education thing, I pointed the car out highway
60 in Mesa and then kept on going another 13 miles after the freeway
ended.
They were there alright, and they did the carpet thing in glorious
yellow and blue.
The wind was very stiff even by Arizona standards, so the challenge
was to try get the images I wanted while the flowers danced.
At the end of the day I can say that I was quite happy to have
all the time I wanted to sit and crouch in the dirt right down there
with all that color. I'm sure that if I had a car full of people
waiting on me that I would have never been satisfied, and I would
have always wanted time to shoot just one more.
As it was, I needed to head on back after a short while so that
Mrs could use the car for her interview later that afternoon.
What's a hundred and twenty mile round trip drive, when you get
a screen background or two for your computer?
Oh yes, lest I forget. They finally called today about the interview.
Mrs was told that they were anxious out there in Arizona to have
her start work and they are flying her back out in a couple of weeks
for the final interviews.
I guess you'd call that a buying sign.
And although it's not yet an offer, I hope that I now know for
next year, where to go find flowers.