In my haste I allowed the filter to slip out of my fingers in the wet conditions, striking the rock with a force no filter was designed to sustained. One look at it confirmed its days of usefulness were at at end, and in a moment of anger and frustration I chucked it as far as I could see. Jess saw what I had done and raced over to scold me, and she was right. I had littered the forest, though that wasn’t my intention and the consequences of what I had done didn’t even pop into my head at the time. But as I said before, I was angry. (There’s a popular saying that it’s impossible to hike in the woods and be angry. That person clearly never hiked with a photographer).
Tag Archives: long exposure
2017/10/15 – Darnell Creek and Glen Falls
I was nervous. Scared. We were in our distinctly non-four wheel drive Toyota Corolla (though I scarcely think I would have felt comfortable in any vehicle). We were on a narrow, gravel, one-lane road heading up a mountainside to God know’s where. And we were in completely over our heads.
The young man on the four-wheeler had passed us and we asked him if there was a turnaround point. He said something along the lines of not really. I said something along the lines of shit.
2017/10/14 – High Falls State Park
I felt a pop in my hip as my right leg hit the ground with a lot of force. Clumsy me, I had tried to get out of my chair quickly and tripped over the mobile home sized box of Gold Fish I had left sitting on the floor. With my cat-like reflexes, I kept my balance and managed to avoid tripping. Unfortunately, I didn’t have cat-like joints, and I placed far more force on my hip joint than it was designed for according to the owner’s manual. I didn’t feel any pain, but I knew from the pop and knowing how hard I had landed that I might have an issue on my hands…er well..hip. But as I stated before, I’m clumsy, and I combine that superpower with what doctors have told me is a high pain tolerance. At any given time I generally have between 2-5 potential injuries, none of which ever really hurt that acutely, and I can usually only tell the bumps and bruises from the tears and fractures after 4-6 weeks of things kind of hurting for a bit. I logged that pop and new weakness in my hip in my mental inventory of potential injuries and moved on with my life, knowing that a genuine injury was bound to find a way to distinguish itself and make its mother proud.
J. Parker Nature Stories 