Nope. No berries. Not yet.

For the past few years, about this time of the season, we've gone down to a nice, kinda secret, quiet spot on Oak Creek to harvest blackberries.  This year we went too early and harvested maybe 12 ripe berries in all.  The rest were all still small and green, weeks away from being ready.  

Fortunately, we did arrive right after a rain, so the air was misty and cool and the creek clear and cold. We waded around for a bit and then drove down to Sedona for lunch.

We'll go again in a few weeks, sometime mid-August, I think.  The berries in our secret spot should be ripe by then.

Little cat feet

The trails near Schultz Pass, puddle-wonderful, enshrouded in fog, covered in hail, were uncommonly spectacular this afternoon.

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

Archival Footage: The Settlement Of The Night Monster

[audio]

What follows is a true tale, or at least as true a tale as I am able to tell of it these days, so many years later, about a trip I took to the Galapagos Islands with my grandparents when I was 10 years old in 1977. It is a tale based, at least in terms of its sequence and style, on this poem of recollection which I wrote for Beckian Goldberg's ENG 200-something Introduction to Creative Writing poetry workshop as a sophomore at Arizona State University in 1987.

The photos below are also mine, taken by ten-year-old me with my prized Kodak Instamatic camera.

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"Yes, the night monster will settle there and will find herself a resting place."

Isaiah 34:14b

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Santa Fe Island, Galápagos
27 October 1977

It was a sharp knife, much sharper than most ten-year-old boys would tyically be allowed to possess.

And it was the right knife, too, its stainless three-inch-long blade and array of Swiss-army implements perfect for carrying confidently in one's front pocket all day long, especially on a grand, far-away excursion such as this.

The fish, lying on its side on the deck, a large trolling-hook pinned in its lower jaw, also gauged the sharpness of the boy's knife; its wide, unblinking eyes betrayed its awareness, as it gaped and gasped in desperate need of oxygen. It needed to die, wanted to now.

"Kill me," the fish told him.