Rat Mazes

I finally got out to the far arroyo yesterday. I usually walk out on Sundays, but last weekend I thought, I can do that anytime now, I have something else I want to do today.

As I followed ATV paths through the prairie that sits above a ranch road, I realized I didn’t need to just walk where I usually did, I could go farther north and see if I could get to the point where the arroyo crosses the county road.

As I ventured farther, I thought, how much we turn our supposed encounters with wild nature into comfortable routines. Every weekend I go out at the same time, walk the same path. Am I just condemned to protect myself from novel stimuli?

But then I remembered there were things that created my patterns, and only some of them change with retirement. While I tell others the reason I walk is my doctor made some strong noises, the real reason is I want to watch how the plants change from week to week and use photographs as my notes.

I learned plants have many adaptions to the sun in this bright, high altitude environment. One is that as the air warms, the rate of photosynthesis increases. Before the rate goes beyond the limits of a plant’s ability to process the energy, it finds ways to protect itself. One obvious technique is deliberately wilting during the day.

A less obvious method is the alteration of its biochemistry so that flower parts that absorb energy from the sun in the morning begin to reflect it before noon. It’s called the violaxanthin cycle.

You can’t see the difference in reflectivity, but the camera can. It’s thus much easier to photograph a flower before it’s gone into its protective mode. This means, in the summer, I leave early and get home by 9:30.

However, there’s also a lower limit for when I can walk. My camera isn’t able to take decent pictures early in the morning. Pictures are either muddy or look like they came from the bottom of an aquarium. As sun angles change in fall, I can photograph flowers much later in the morning, but I also can’t begin as early.

A second natural factor that has influenced when I walk is the wind, which comes up when the air warms. My camera isn’t quick enough to catch flowers on moving stems. You don’t realize until you try to photograph them, how many plants are in motion when you can’t yet feel a breeze. Such flexibility is, no doubt, another adaption to our hostile environment.

There is a band of time available then, which may be longer now than in July, but is still absolutely determined by nature.

It’s convenient that the natural limits for photographing flowers coincide with some personal ones. My body can’t tolerate high heat and bright sun. There’s a point in the morning when the air changes, when the sun becomes warmer, that forces me indoors.

I suspect my limits are related to some lung problems I developed as a child. I grew up staying out of the sun and walking more slowly than others. There was probably some early feedback cycle that led me to look at the ground to shelter my head, which in turn meant I began to notice plants and stones, which in turn made me go slower to notice more. It can take me 90 minutes to walk a little over a mile here on a Sunday.

It so happens the arroyo has areas where there are many plants, and other areas where there are few. I’ve explored some of those areas, but haven’t gone back to see what’s beyond or to try to figure out why the plants appear where they do. My usual walk, my personal rat maze, limited as it is by natural factors and my physical level of energy, stays within the limits of predictably interesting plants.

Retirement can’t undo the consequences of my parents’ smoking and housekeeping habits.

I don’t think I have the same limits when it comes to exploring the land at a more general level. My car protects me from the heat. I haven’t yet discovered if the sun has any effects on my ability to photograph rocks.

For now, I drive out later in the morning, after the sun has reached that point that sends me indoors. I could leave earlier, but my mind is more creative when I first wake and I don’t want to get into the car until I’ve come to the end of that particular cycle. It’s when I write.

The only other limit I know so far is that I have a limited capacity to be stimulated. If I see something that overwhelms my senses in some way, I might as well return home. I won’t notice any thing more, no matter how spectacular until I’ve fully absorbed what I’ve already seen. It can take hours.

So, I’m venturing out slowly, sometimes looking at those things like La Bajada Hill that I deliberately ignored so I could get on with my life, get to Albuquerque to buy something. In a way, I’m building immunities. Once I’ve fully absorbed my near environment, then I can pass through it quickly to get to something new.

There’s one routine that won’t go away, and may even expand: downloading cameras, recharging batteries, renaming pictures and taking notes on them while I still remember what they are. These tedious, but necessary tasks have become part of my decompression routine, part of the way I process the stimulus from the day, and reset my sensory receptors for the next outing.

If, as I anticipate, I’m going to be spending time in motel rooms in places where the natural landscape is more interesting than the human one, this may become a welcome time hog.

The major difference retirement has made so far is that my adventures no longer need to be limited to the time on weekends that isn’t already committed to such chores as the weekly visit to the post office, but I can't suddenly ignore natural rhythms.

Pictures taken yesterday, from top to bottom are: 1- cottonwoods, 2 - strap-leaf spine aster, 3 - chamisa, 4 - Russian thistle, 5 - juniper berries, 6 - purple aster, 7 - mushrooms, and 8 - tamarix surrounded by chamisa with juniper in the back.