Glenn's Photo Gallery - Photo Journeys
Hart Park
Photo Journal, An Eclectic Trip to Hart Park
For those who already know me, you can skip down to the photos. For the rest, let me introduce myself. I bought a digital camera (Canon EOS Rebel XT) about three years ago and have since been trying to, first, learn how to use it and, second, trying to figure out what to do with it. I've dabbled in artistic manipulations, portraiture, landscapes, etcetera, and now this. I could call it travel. I could call it story telling. I could even call it photo-journey-ism. But I think I'll just call it a photo journal. I may keep this up or, like many other avenues, move on to something else that piques my interest. Pardon me if I wax a little Kafkaesque as I was listening to an audiotape of Kafka while on this trip. Kafka's mental meanderings seemed to have complimented, and perhaps influenced, my wanderings on this particular trip.
A few months ago my family and I took a hurried trip to Hart Park in Bakersfield, CA. As a starting point we left our house, which is a remodeled ranch-style home built in 1960, sitting amongst the sagebrush, lizards, and hawks on the outskirts of the booming metropolis of Rosamond, CA, population more than I can count on our collective fingers and toes, but not much more. I promised myself that I would soon take a more liesurely trip when the time allowed. The time allowed came on Tuesday, June 23, 2009. So off I went at sunrise in my old Ford with my camera and a large cup of coffee to make up for the large glass of wine the night before. I stopped in the slightly smaller town of Mojave on the way to get some fast breakfast. It was no culinary award-winner but it did manage to reduce the grumbling in my stomach so that I could concentrate on the road and the Kafka audiotape narrator's explanation of narrative prose as it pertains to languages and translations and transliterations. Maybe I should have stuck with the wine.
My first stop was along Hwy 58, about halfway between sky-high Tehachapi and down-to-earth Bakersfield. At the time I was only planning on going to Hart Park but I should have known that fate had something else in mind when it enticed me to take this photo of a meandering road for, indeed, my travels that day were no more direct than this one.
About an hour after my journey began I turned off of Hwy 58 onto Comanche Drive and found myself in groves of trees and other greenery, common to farmland but completely foreign to the open desert. I stopped and stared. After a while I remembered that I had a camera so I took a few pictures. One scene in particular reminded me of some of the movies I had seen of Italy and France with rows of trees so I stepped into an orchard and took a few shots. Looking at this photo I can imagine myself having been to some exotic foreign land, like Bakersfield.
With tears in my eyes I shuffled on, past oil pumps that reminded me of those toy birds that rock back-and-forth while dipping their beaks into a glass of water, past Ming Lake, which was remarkable in its unremarkableness, and arrived, light of heart, at Hart Park. There I found a potpourri of birds, scurrying critters, and housecats lazing in the shady places in and around the old log waterwheelhouse. Peering through the chainlink fence at the furry felines I noticed that a couple of the water valves were, while not entirely erect, still standing and sporting an array of cobwebs which glistened in the light streaming through the broken roof.
From there I walked among the brightly-colored Peacocks and their less glamorous partners, the Peahens. But what I really wanted to photograph were the Wood Ducks. I checked down by the river and found none. I went to the lake and found none. They must have heard that I was coming and hidden because I found neither Wood Duck nor woodchuck. But I did find an Egret among the fallen tree branches who eyed me with suspicion and tried to stare me down whenever I looked through my camera at it. But I fooled it, I plugged in my remote shutter release and, while facing a group of groggy ducks, I took many pictures. Hah, hah, I fooled you!
There were also the obligatory mallards, geese, and other common birds floating in the water and conversing in a loud way on the land. Up in the tree tops, though, were the stately Great Blue Herons. I could see that they were keeping an eye on me between bouts of shuteye. They looked quite regal looking down on us mere land dwellers. Mostly they just sat there but occasionally they would ruffle their feathers or go about preening themselves. Over the hour that I watched them, and them me, a few took short flights, much as we would take a walk around the block to stretch our legs.
Of course, no trip is complete without a photo of a bird on a stick. This one took a short break from tweeting with it's buddy a few trees over to give me the old "hawk eye."
Having decided that the area had gone to the birds I wandered West and found myself on a plateau overlooking oil fields, the Kern River, bicycle and horse paths, and an expanse of plumbing reminiscent of the old Windows screensaver, "Pipes." Having accomplished my goal of getting to Hart Park I thought that it was now time to go home. So much for thinking. I started back and, since I was in no real hurry, I traveled along roads I'd never been on before, just to see what I could see. At some point I found myself heading East on Edison Hwy following the railroad tracks. Like most children of my era and background, I used to play along the railroad tracks, waving to the engineers, feeling the rumbling of freight trains as they went by, and gaping at the hobos watching us from within the boxcars or sitting around their campfires. Now, when I see a train, I feel a need to reach for my camera.
Unlike in my youth, this train was also a rolling art gallery. This particular work looked interesting, but I had no idea how to interpret it. Could it be a young Spock going through puberty? Could it be Captain Kirk trying to look like Spock? Or could it be that listening to Kafka had moved me to hallucinations?
Turning away from the art display and Kafka, I spotted a group of bell pepper pickers in a pepper patch. Try saying that three times fast. This scene reminded me of Pissaro's "The Harvest," Millet's "Gleaners," and other impressionist and classical works of art depicting farm labor. Maybe in a couple hundred years my photos will be worth millions and I'll be rich.
Making my way back to Hwy 58 I found I was still not finished with the day. I saw the sign to Caliente and, even though the day was warming up, I just had to go see for myself. I thought Rosamond was small but what I saw of Caliente was about a dozen homes, a third of which looked abandoned. Of those, this one looked like, with a new roof and some paint, it could be made into a fine home. This could be a real hot bargain in today's economy.
Remember my opening photo of the meandering road? Well, that was pretty straight compared to my journey. According to the clock I had only been gone a mere four hours but, in my mind, it was a trip through time and space. I took harvest photos reminiscent of scenes from the mid 1800's, heard about Kafka and the late 1800's, saw houses from the early 1900's, relived some of my childhood from the 1950s, watched birds of today, and pondered about art depicting scenes from the future when humans and aliens may trek the stars together. Days like this don't come every day.
Glenn