Into the desert

Early rising has been part of my pattern during this time away. The faintest brrr of the cell phone set to vibrate wakes me completely. The temptation to stay in bed has been for the warmth.

This morning I left the hotel at 6:10, expecting sunrise at 6:41. A trail toward the lake began directly across the street (CA395) from the hotel. It had a name, this trail: the Lee Vining Creek Trail, the creek being one of the five that feeds the lake from the winter snow melt in the high mountains, producing a swath of green through the desert-brown slope toward the lake. The sound of the creek and the deep lushness along its path was a surprise to me, given the aridity of the area. A welcome surprise, giving me back a taste of the Yosemite Valley's comfort.

As I wrote yesterday about the sunset at Mono Lake -- not very dramatic without clouds, my photographic efforts at the sunrise didn't amount to much. But, following the trail, I ended up at the visitor's center again and walked back toward the hotel and breakfast along a quiet street where some of the town's services are located, among others the school bus maintenance facility and a school house turned museum. This is the window to the right of that museum's main door with a vine making its way up and across. Get it? Lee Vining? Sorry ... I tend to forget that these places, like Lee Vining, are places where regular people live and work and marry and die. They are home. Without the walk this morning, I might have stayed exclusively in my visitor mode, a schedule to keep, scenes and details to photograph, failing to remember to grant that level of reality to Lee Vining -- and everywhere else for that matter.

We spent the day at Bodie, a genuine ghost town, the ride there initially taking us west out of the Mono Basin and then northeast deep into the desert on increasingly diminished roads -- 4 lane to 2 lane, across cattle guards and through gates, and finally to a dirt washboard. About an hour's drive from Lee Vining.

That hour, though, may as well have taken me to Mars. Harsh, desolate, forbidding, Bodie -- not to mention, permeated by, awash with grief, a powerful combination of hope and hopelessness pervading the windblown silence of the dusty streets.

But, as far as photography goes, Bodie is a paradise. Shadeless at an elevation of 8300+ feet, it's a place arrested in time and a place of sharp physical, as well as, historical contrasts.