Exposed

I grew up back East where it was green and rained a lot. Sometimes I could see the horizon, mostly I saw trees. I was a Girl Scout and camped every summer. Tent camping, not cabin camping.

After my first go through college, I moved to North Carolina, which is wetter and greener than Michigan. I cut my photographic teeth on the Blue Ridge Parkway and tent camped in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Now I live in Utah, on the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. It was quite a shock moving from where rain didn't count unless it was an inch or more to a place where a tenth of an inch of precipitation is an event. But still, not five minutes from my house, I can drive up a tree covered canyon with a stream bubbling near the road. Several of the finest ski resorts in the world are within an hour's drive. Albion Basin is an easy morning trip for flower photography. Last week I went on a photo expedition to southern Utah, to red rock country. To get to the red rocks, one has to drive through a whole lot of nothing. There are many abandoned farmsteads standing desolate in the middle of the desert and the remains of soddies crumbling into hillsides.

I looked at the parched, windswept abodes and wondered how anyone could choose to live in such places, exposed, solitary, naked to the sky.I need the comfort and security of trees. I need green.