I walked out from my wife's car, to the inn on the lake, and asked if I could cross their grounds in order to see the lake. The manager & chef was more than accomodating, helping me to find my bearings.
I had been driving for so many hours, that the simple act of walking was like two glasses of wine. With my camera on my back, I followed their trails until the trails grew tiresome - just more roads, like the last ten hours. As soon as I left these trails, I encountered an experience which is difficult to relate. I immediately realized that my whole life, I have underappreciated the grasses.
In the pink evening sun, these foxtail barleys and reedgrasses and velvetgrasses appear as exotic as bromeliads and anthuriums. As fall is arriving soon, the grasses have projected their stalks upwards.
I forget - grass made human civilization happen. That was about twelve-thousand and some five hundred years ago. Our middle-east was aware and experimenting with farming wheat and barley. But a coming drought - a thousand year cold-spell - forced these Middle Easterners to concentrate on this farming.
As I near the lake, the grasses fade: saline lakes are nearly dead zones. Only specialized species are adapted to live here; a few flies, a few shrimps and a few shorebirds.
I walk out another half mile: the dry of summer is shrinking the size of the lake, so I am walking in twelve inches of cookie-dough mud. My shoes are canyoneering shoes; so the lacing system is a wire that tightens the entire shoe like a mold against my foot. The oily suction of the mud fights to suction them off my feet. Sometimes, the mud is so dense, I have to release my shoes from my feet, then dig them out and balance to put them back on again.
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