Field Work for the Agorophobic

I read once that the reason so many nature writers were men was that nature writing demanded solitary excursions into the field and women weren't comfortable with that. The world outside was too hazardous for women to venture out unchaperoned. I challenged that assumption when I was younger, often going out on my own, nothing but a notebook, watercolors, pen and a camera to keep me company. I was one of the brave, like Dorothea Lange, like Georgia O'Keefe. I cherished the images of these women sitting atop their old cars, out in the middle of nowhere, doing art. As a younger woman, I traveled to other countries alone, wandered empty desert roads alone, lurked about looking for places that moved me, that had not only natural beauty, but the beauty desolate abandonment creates and that I have always found alluring. Unnoticed beauty, the kind that hard living and loss can give to a human face or a landscape.

But then. But then, what? Perhaps I lost my reasons for wandering. Home for me used to lack permanence, lack warmth, so I traveled. But over the years my wanderlust has been supplanted by a contented kind of nesting. I got married, bought a house, had kids, got pets, planted a garden. Staying put had both purpose and reward. And the world outside in the mean time became more terrifying. My family genes carry in them code for restlessness and reclusivity. I always thought I had only the itchy feet gene. To my surprise I am slowly retracting, like a hermit crab into her shell, using my home to shield my soft and vulnerable parts.

Here's the challenge. How do I do the field work that I have always loved without leaving my house and garden? I have developed a skill set and passions well-suited for back-roads and empty deserts, but I can't just pack up a knapsack and head out the door anymore. Who will clean the cat box, wake the children, cook dinner? I like taking care of my family. Abandoning them is not an option. And for the past year I have been seasick for reasons doctors haven't yet ferreted out. I grew up by the ocean, was a SCUBA instructor, have been sailing plenty of times, and only twice got seasick (once on a ferry from Santorini after a week of living on bullion (my big fat Greek diet) and then having Greek men blow tobacco smoke in my face for ten hours while the boat pitched in immense swells; and then on the Great Barrier Reef in rocky seas, after watching the Captain barf over the gunwale). Now I live in the desert, hundreds of miles from salt air or surf, and I am constantly seasick-- nauseous, off-balance, dizzy. And my ears ring like a squeaky fan. It's all triggered my recluse gene. So what to do?

So far I've begun macro studies of plants and critters in my garden and other nearby places. And I've started this blog. Problem solved?

Taking Pictures

I'm officially stumped, hitting a wall. Vacation is over and I'm back to work and time just seems to evaporate. So this will probably be short, what with the dogs barking and the freezer repairman clanking in the kitchen not ten feet from my desk. Going back to work always puts me in a different mind-frame, as if my thoughts have to relate to my job. Writing should be work-related writing, about scholarly things that other people, scholarly people, would deem worthy. It's a real kill joy.

On my own, I can stop thinking about what other people would think about my thoughts. They're just there and I can enjoy them, or move on to other thoughts. So, I'm trying to figure out how to have an independent thought during the semester and how to make time to write them down.

As an ease into this awkward transition, I chose to write about photography, so I can mostly use pictures and let the words take a siesta.

Lately, I take pictures of plants up close. Its a way to see the familiar in a new way, like the poppies in my garden. Everything I know about plants changes when I move in close. When I first met the camera, it was just a tool for capturing memories or documenting work. No art, everything at a human scale, like the eye sees.

I admired the work of Ansel Adams, because he could get so much of the landscape into one image. He captured the immensity of the American West and I loved that.

Then I found Dorothea Lange. She seemed to do for human tragedy what Adams had done for the beauty of the Western landscape, but not by grabbing a big image, rather by moving in to reveal the immensity of the human soul. She also seemed less encumbered by the photographic equipment, compared to Adams who always lugged a large format camera into the mountains.

She used a medium format camera or a 35 mm. Sometimes using a camera with a lens that could capture images 90 degrees from straight, so she could appear to be photographing something other than her true subject. Her photographs convey her unobtrusive nature as a photographer. I also tend to move quietly and can often go unnoticed in the world. Sometimes it feels that there are the people who live life and those who watch the film. I'm a watcher. It's not that I'm a lazy couch potato. It's that I feel as though there is a script to life that no one bothered to give me, so try as I might I always feel outside the action. So I watch. . . and take pictures.