Opinion: Meadow Life

So we got to the trailhead to a place I know and I looked at the boy and the boy looked at me and I said, “Where’s your backpack?”

He forgot it.

Forgetting a backpack would normally not be a big deal, as I had mine, but what was a big a deal was inside his backpack he normally has the black bag.

The black bag has the “short” camera lenses in it, which is to say the wide angle, the macro lens and the good ol’ 50 mm.

They were home, in his backpack, sitting in his room where his mother put it.

All I had with me was a 400 mm lens. Our system works like this: I carry the 400 mm and the camera with me, usually in a chest pack and he carries all the other stuff, which is in the black bag. I like to keep the 400 ready accessible, since you never know when an exotic bird is going to pop out of the brush or some other rare creature will stop to take a look at you. (The last time that happened it was a lynx and believe me, if I had the 400 mm in my backpack I would have never gotten the shot, because the lynx hopped in the brush and spent all of 15 seconds looking at me before it high-tailed it. There was no time to rummage around in a backpack looking for a camera and lens.)

These sort of encounters that last less than 30 seconds have happened more times than I can count, but I also have to admit, it often doesn’t happen. It’s one of those things that happens maybe 1 percent of the time, but then again, most of my career has been defined by the 1 percent. Almost all of our hikes have been defined by a few magical minutes, sometimes a few magical seconds. The rest is either just a pleasant walk or drudgery with mosquitos.

So any rate we didn’t have the black bag, but we went on the hike anyway, me grumbling as we trudged through the woods and worked our way along the meadow. The flowers were the best I’d seen in years but pretty tough to shoot with a 400 mm so we went into the thickest part of the woods, a part I hadn’t been in 18 years or so.

There was a hidden meadow in there, too, with bumblebees in the Prairie Smoke flowers, some of the tallest Prairie Smoke I’d ever seen.

There was one lone big aspen back there too and we watched a red-naped sapsucker feed its young, squeezing like toothpaste in and out of its nest hole.

The bugs were thick in there and so we left and on the edge of the bigger meadow two deer, a doe and young buck stood up and gave us the bad eye from 75 yards out.

They were surrounded by flowers and made for pretty pictures. 

So it turned out we did have a pretty good walk, black bag or not.