Earth Image Photography, Nature Photography, My Summer Office

Corn on the cob season ended yesterday. The good stuff, anyway.

Every summer for the past twenty, a local third grade teacher has driven a hundred miles south six days a week from mid-July through late August, leaving home at four in the morning to pick up a truck load of corn picked from the field that morning. Then driven back north and set himself up in a Realtor's parking lot beside K-mart, selling out by early afternoon. Everyone around town knows of his ambrosial crop and line up patiently to pick out their half-dozen or two and homegrown beefsteak tomatoes and big sweet onions and cucumbers. And new potatoes too. They are impulse items set out with pride, but of secondary status to the corn on the cob.

Because of work yesterday I missed the final truckload, but I've consumed so much corn the past few weeks I'm beginning to turn into a corn. In fact, I noticed this morning a big yellowish kernel growing along the side of my toe.

I've always been satisfied tossing my ears into a large pot of boiling water and roiling them for five minutes. No sugar needed. A week or two ago time got away from me and cooked for seven minutes. Oh my, the tenderness brought tears to my eyes and drained butter to my chin.

5:00-

Grand Sandbanks now has an eight-foot wide stony beach. The water level has dropped by fourteen inches since Thursday. Broadleaf lily pads stick up high and dry. Such a quick lowering worries me a bit, since natural nature is accustomed to slower changes and moves slower than man's hasty compulsion. I noticed a clam six inches up on the beach, still full of clam flesh but, I suspect dead, because it needs more water to move and breathe. How many fish have been stranded and lie gasping in swampy low places?

Along shore is an eddy where the shore makes a slight indentation and the current circulates back upriver in a counter-clockwise rotation. There is a submerged stony ridge that acts as a rudder and at the confluence of faster water and confused water a soft pleasant sandbar to sit on out of the fray. The dynamics have changed with the low water. A trail of regularly spaced whirlpools forms off the leading edge of the point and rolls into the current, vortexes twisting, spinning blue sky into brief cones, then flattening, dissolving as the parade disbands.

The vertical cliff sides are in sharp relief and look exactly as large-scale Arizona cliffs do when sun shines across at cross-angles. Geological physics in miniature where generations of insects and birds have tunneled inside and dug out their homes.

Crickets. Hundreds of squeaks lulling my ears into late summer accustom. I don't hear them because they're always there. Then later I hear them from a December chair and outside the window low snow is threatened by Weather Channel's darkness of night sleet. (Some students may be gleeful to put off tomorrow's American Government Final Exam but I just want to get the damn dread done with.)

6:21-

Pulled up on Glitter Beach. I heard an odd noise around the bend; pondered it for a moment. Must have been swamp gas.

A turquoise kayak bow hastened into view, then its all, paddled by a vigorous sweet-smiling man. Followed in matching craft by his date who might have been vigorous three hours earlier but was, at this time, drooping markedly.

"How much further to the bridge?" he asked.

"Half-an-hour, or much less, at that rate. Where did you put in?"

"The dam, three hours ago."

I will not be working in the college library tomorrow as planned. Despite the financial aid's assurance two weeks ago he'd put through my work-study funds last week, he did not, and won't answer his phone or return messages. And I'm pissed. So is the library director who now has not a single work-study employee and has threatened to close the library because of it. It's a small two-year college and everybody knows everybody else. I've known the financial aid director for fifteen years, and am bewildered at his lack of courtesy. If funds are not available, tell me. If he's overworked, get help for a few weeks during the beginning of fall semester. But don't make promises you're unable to keep.