PS9 - Wilderness / Senic / House
One fine afternoon I decided to go for a long bike ride. However, the
fact that my bike weighs about three times more than anything currently
on the market, combined with the thirty-degree humid heat, made my trip
a lot shorter than I thought it would be. At one point I got off my bike
and I felt like I had exerted myself to the brink of death.
This was as far as I got. I said, "That's it, I have to go home now,
or I'll die out here. I'll take my picture and leave." And I was oh so
close to the gravel pits, too! I'll try again on a cooler day.
Here's our luxurious and swift mode of lake transporation. While most
of those other houses and cottages have boats with steel hulls and fancy
engines, we like to keep things old fashioned (cheap) around here. Actually,
Zachary and Alex outran me in a laser sailboat... I had challenged them
to a race, determined to prove the power of pedals over wind, but I turned
out to be wrong yet again. =) But don't knock the little blue shuttle,
for it really is quite fun to drive, and it's great fuel for the imagination.
Oh! Here come some ducks!
Cute, aren't they?
Guess I'll leave them alone now.
Here's one of those squirrels running for cover. Our property is overrun
with them. (Yet another example of a shot that would have tuned out at
400 speed.)
Two mourning doves enjoying our bird feeder.
If you know what kind of birds these are, feel free to e-mail
me. I'll give you a credit here for knowing the answer.
Here's our postal boxes. I pick up all the willmatheson.com viewer
mail here every day. Obviously, for such a large operation, I need a lot
of mailboxes.
One fine evening I decided to go for a long walk into the woods, through
an ATV trail that I accessed from the water line.
And, a good ten-minute walk from the beaten path, there is a tree house.
Now, you're probably wondering why I didn't take any pictures from up in
the tree house, as there might have been a nice view of the stream below.
Well, I tried to climb up the rope / hockey stick ladder on the side; I
put one foot on the bottom rung (itself about three feet off the ground),
and as I raised the other foot off the ground the thing snapped in two.
Since I was alone and without a safe way up, I declined to try further.
This is a stream that eventually feeds into the back portion of Sandy
Lake.
Now, you're probably wondering why my foot is in this image. Well,
I did that on purpose - I wanted to show you how positively soaking wet
my feet were, having lost my footing while crossing a boggy stretch of
woodland. I didn't even really know where I was - to tell you the truth,
I was on the run from the sound of a barking dog and human voices. I was
so frightened that I even picked up some heavy pieces of wood to defend
myself with. Anyway, I ran off downstream, thinking I'd get to Sandy Lake.
But I actually left the stream and ended up behind the Farmers Dairy, a
corner of which you can see here. Now, the funny part was how I left, I
walked out the front gates, and the security guard gave me quite the quizzical
look - I mean, here's a kid walking on foot with a camera, not coming from
the cottages, and he didn't see me go in. Must have been strange.
The driveway after the rains.
Amazingly, this picture was shot with the Max POS - and it is the ONLY
shot of the roll that really turned out. (For a full explanation, see this
part of PS9 - Bedford.) It leads me to believe that I was really shooting
with 100 film instead of 400.