The Butterfly Road, Sal del Rey

All things migrate. The landscape is a network of roads. Anyway, the butterflies had better not fly over the salt lake. They fly along its edges.

Sal del Rey following the Brushline Road Approach

After a long search along the shore, I found the place of rest I encountered once before. At long last a pause hidden in the yellow green grass. In the center of the spring was a rusty pump. It was rusting away just as accretions of iron oxide and mold grew around it. It was the source of the salt lake and frogs leaped around it as I circumambulated. Most leapt into the pond, but a few leapt away into the grass. What mattered most was that they leapt out of my way. There are always contrarians, testing a different fate.

I had no chance to look closely at the frogs. They were so fast. And I couldn't catch a one of them, although I thought I was an expert frog catcher. They all went deep into the pond's green sedge, where they were still and all that moved were their thoughts of the above world from their below world. Their arched flight into the pond left an afterimage on my mind. One jumped into an old pipe and his leap echoed.

There were no ripples from the frogs jumping because there was so much algae. Their krrplnk sounded more like a thud each time. But there were light ripples from the wind on the surface. And the mesquite branches left shadows there too. Light itself is a shadow, Milton said, which flows or drifts from its source. We read, think, or speak of it through the arbitrariness of language or the flux of elements, one thing moving into another.

After a while I saw the frogs emerge from the spring pond, hungrily moving toward their prey. They looked outward from the pond, their heads just above the surface. They were wary panthers. A raccoon or snake would love this place. They are wary of me, looking right around the corner.

Ripples and Waves

What brought me back to Sal del Rey was the thought of photographing the ripples and currents in the sand. These ripples are caused by flooding from periodic rain storms. One thing distinctive about South Texas are the longer alternating periods of rain and drought. Sometimes the sands at Sal del Rey are all smoothed out. At such times the ripples may be at too large a scale to see and perhaps as much an effect of the wind as the rain. But after a rain there are ripples everywhere. The landscape has been combed by the weather as if Buddhist monks had raked the garden where they meditate.

One type of ripple tends to be reflection of another type of ripple. Ripples in the wind cause waves of ripples in the salt sea, which in turn cause ripples on sea floor. One ripple represents another ripple and each is a word for the other or a reverberation. It reminds me of the layers of an onion; peeling one reveals another. Or the outer form of matter revealing the an interior spiritual form. In the Hindu Vedanta the earth is said to be the body of God or Brahman. I'm not sure that the ripples do lead to an interior spirit, though; if this existence is a turtle standing on another turtle, it may be turtles all the way down.

Some of the ripples go underground where a rivulet disappears and emerges again in the distance. Some are caused by small fish. The slender fingerlings may be minnows or perhaps even a variety of salmon, like cisco, that take long migrations from sea and upriver. When I neared the concentric ripples the fish made, the ripples calmed or fled elsewhere. Why were they rippling so much? To eat plankton? To dance? Do these animals know why they ripple? Of course they do.

The ripples in the sand beneath the water reflect the waves in the water, but they are also deflections cause by obstacles, like stones and shells in the sand. And then there is also the backwash from the surf. The waves created caves and escarpments along the shore. And they would leave isolated pools. I'm not sure these pools wouldn't be tide pools. Tide pools have a greater density of life. They are an interzone between the land and the sea. They are not unlike the rain forest or coral reefs for sustaining life.

More photos of Ripples and Waves.

9.6.10 Memorial Day Photo Expedition, Sal del Rey

I was interested in what seemed like miniature ecosystems or small worlds when I arrived at the tributary stream that fed La Sal del Rey. These were often small hillocks topped with vegetation, often succulents. Years ago on Lake Superior, an acquaintance had told me that the small rocks just off the shore were the very beginnings of an ecosystem. They were desert isles, isolated tiny worlds in the process of creation. I was skeptical partly because of the grandeur of his claim but also because I was then smitten with his own sweetheart., a woman named Elizabeth Mendelsohn. So I was unlikely to concede much to him. He had a hardened, knotted personality with a hippie's preoccupation with seeing deeply. I still remember how his ideas would come to me as challenges, bullying and defensive. I loved Elizabeth's wiry, simple physique as well as her decency. She loved my samoyed mix, Olaf. They soon left for San Francisco. It is an E.O. Wilson or a John Muir idea that the earth is at first scraped clean from a glacier or a volcano, then it gradually resumes the natural succession or development. One of the things I looked for were these barren outcroppings. At a very small scale there were also grand canyons and desert mesas.

More photos of Miniature Landscapes