The End

The time has come to retire "PostCards from the Other Side of the Hill." It is coincidence I ended with 100 posts...well, 101. It's actually not because I stopped posting, but more that I lost what it was about. I started this blog to chronicle my adventures on the other side of the hill...you know...the continental divide. But I am not having as many adventures lately, and I've come to the realization that this detour in life might be closer to a destination. I cannot say if I will ever return to Missouri, but Kat is now out of school and I've taken a job here, so I don't think I can call it a temporary thing anymore.

The other thing is, I never wanted to turn this into a baby blog, but that's really my life lately. If I blogged what I was thinking about, I'd bore you to sleep with stories about Carson's drool, or how he's just so cute when he stares intently at things. And as I said, with babies come fewer adventures. Few adventures means fewer pictures. It's hard to believe, but I have only taken pictures once...one single time...since we left Berkeley until a few weeks ago. And it was very rare for the previous 6 months as well. No adventures, no pictures. No pictures, no postcards.

Ironically, I'm actually starting to get out and have adventures again, but that's okay. I'm ready for this to end. But every end is the beginning of something new, and I will be bringing you a new blog. This last post is also the transition to the new blog, which will be my new photo project, intermixed with my famously meandering thoughts.

Last weekend, while Kat was teaching community college students how to train snails (or something like that) I took Carson on a hike to the top of the Pinnacles National Monument. It was a beautiful day for a strenuous hike. Carson wasn't much in the mood for my picture taking, but I managed a snapshot or two between protests.

The wildflowers were blooming up and down the trails. It was hard to bend over with Carson on my back, but I managed to get a couple of servicable shots. I'll continue to bring you these shots going forward, but I'm really excited about my new project. It's called "God in Man's World."

See, as long as I've been taking pictures, I've worked hard to take out all the distractions of a beautiful landscape, like any good photographer would. But as I see my own work, and the work of others, I can't help but think about how I'm almost telling a lie. The beautiful shot of Yosemite crops out the rooftops and power lines in front of the camera, and ignores the busload of Japanese tourists snapping the same picture behind me, hoping to get the same shot as "the guy with the nice camera." I also recognize that picture of the waterfall on the Internet. There's a railing just out of view. It looks so wild framed like that.

How many sunsets that made me pull over in the car just to watch did I refuse to take pictures of, because I could not remove the rooftops or the industrial park from view? But these things are the world we live in. We have made this world our own. You cannot go to even the remote reaches of the mountains without finding signs of man. Yet in these places that we have made our own, we see the beauty of the world God created, whether from a bridge over a high Sierra river, or a sunset over a highway in a city.

This is not a commentary on whether mans' footprint is good or bad. It is not an editorial highlighting the destruction of nature or the corruption of the beauty God has created. It is a documentary of beauty that we pass every day, and the relationship between man and nature.