Fezziwig Press & Photography by Stu Jenks

"Bozette's Bluff"

"Bozette's Bluff, South of Cathy's Fault, Arizona" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks

[Bozette, herself, is visible in this photograph. She is in color. The mountains and cactus are obviously, in black and white.]

"Bozo at Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park"

"Bozo at Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks

"Six Extra Bones"

"Six Extra Bones" (c) 2009 Dr. Elaine Shapiro and Stu Jenks

[I hurt my right foot six weeks ago, jumping over a pool fence barefoot. It's been quite a bother for I couldn't put on my hiking boots, nor my cowboy boots. But I visited a great pediatrist the other day. It seems that some inflamed soft tissue is playing havok with a nerve bundle in one of my metatarsals. She gave me a miracle shot. She'll give me that same shot, twice a month, until the tissue is well. My foot feels better already.

But here's the cool thing.

I have extra bones in my feet. Three per foot. Seems that 10% of the population has extra bones in their feet. I have six all together. For a man who is more at home in hiking boots and on the high trail than anywhere else, this seems so appropriate. Thank You, God, for the extra bones.

I took a picture of the x-ray of my right foot. You can see two of the extra bones in it.

And thank you, Dr. Elaine Shapiro, for helping heal my foot.]

The Transpersonal Papers: Chapter Twenty: "Aspens Reborn"

The Transpersonal Papers: Chapter Twenty
"Aspens Reborn, Red Ridge, Arizona"  © 2009

    My feet are freezing, but I don't care. It's hard to level my tripod in the snow, but I don't care. The air is biting cold, but I don't care: for the Aspen trees are reborn.
    It's been five and a half years since The Fire. The Ponderosas are still gone of course. They won't be back for a hundred years, but Aspen trees are not pine trees.
    Ponderosas are solitary creatures, alone together, making a forest. But Aspen groves are one single botanical organism, a huge root-pack in which countless trees have sprouted from a single seedling germinated many years ago. (Many Aspen groves live to be thousands of years old, the oldest colony growing in Utah, estimated to be over 80, 000 years old.) And the Big Fire probably did the colony some good, allowing more baby shoots to sprout. In not too many years, a thicker forest will grow on the Red Ridge then even flourished here before The Fire in 2003.
    But I still miss the Three Surrender Trees, still grieve the hole in the sky where they once grew, but this fledgling grove of Aspens just may fill a bit of that hole in my chest.
    I see the shot. I draw a spiral in the snow. I take the shot.
    Spiral up, spiral down. Spiral in, Spiral out. A helix inside and outside of me.
    I touch the soft infant bark of one of the Aspens and pray for its safety. (I miss the Baby Blue Spruce too.) Then again, this grove will outlive me by thousand of years. They'll do just fine with my prayers, but the praying feels good. It make me happy to push some love out of the wounded hole in my heart.

 

"Mandolin near Apache Springs"

"Gold Tone Mandolin near Apache Springs, Arizona" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks

"Big Horns near Dripping Springs, Arizona"

 

“Big Horns at Cindy’s Fault, near Dripping Springs, Arizona” © 2009 Stu Jenks

It’s a joke in her family. “It’s Cindy’s Fault. She did it,” they would laugh as they drove up the hill to their cabin in the White Mountains (even though I winced a little, when I first heard her tell the story, knowing the subtle shaming that nuclear families can do.) It did look pretty in her photo though, so on New Year’s Day, I went looking for Cindy’s Fault.

To my wondrous surprise, as I neared the top after a brief but strenuous bushwhack, I saw a family of Big Horn Sheep, one ram and two ewes. I quietly pulled out the 70 by 200 and shot them through the tall Ocotillos. I walked quietly closer to them. I took at least twenty images and then made my way to the top of the western fault. I shot the eastern fault (the true Cindy’s Fault) and then popped a few images toward the south. Lastly, I shot a few trees deep in the canyon. Then I realized the Big Horns had gotten used to me. (They were only couple hundred feet below me, continuing to feed on the grasses and scrubs of the plateau.) I walked back toward them and this time, I crept to within thirty feet or so. The ewes raised their heads from grazing once or twice and the ram stood guard over his brood, but mostly they relaxed around me. Not only did they get back to their routine of grazing, but I saw something in their eyes. Their eyes had softened.

And then I relearned a lesson: They know me now. They know I’m not going to hurt them. They trust me a little. Their eyes relaxed and their faces opened up to me. Just like when I’ve shot those portraits of the Tucson Roller Derby Girls last year at Old Trail Town. They know me. They know I’m not going to exploit them. They trust me a little.

Sheep. Humans. We are all mammals. And most mammals need to feel safe in order to open up and be vulnerable to the camera, or to each other.

And I swear, at one point, that ram knew what I was doing and struck a majestic pose.

I finished with the camera, laid it on my lap and then simply watched their grazing for a good long while. I then blew them a kiss and made my way back to my truck, at the bottom of the hill.

 

 

 

 
 

"The Day After Christmas"

"The Day After Christmas, Coalmine Canyon, Hopi/Navajo Joint Use Land, Arizona (c) 2008 Stu Jenks

[The Christmas Gift I gave myself this year. Seven hours up from Tucson, seven hours back, and a hour of snowy bliss walking around the edge of a place I've been coming to, for over 20 years. First time seeing it in the snow. Coldest I've been in the year 2008 (around 20 degrees F with a windchill well below zero, I reckon.) Recommitted to hiking in 2009, to The Heaven Boulder and The Ghost that lay deep in Coalmine. Yes, true, too many people now know about Coalmine Canyon, thanks to a front page article a few years ago in Phoenix's Arizona Republic, but the good news is that few hike down into it. There is only one way down and it is a bear. So why fall down a steep talis slope of dirty coal, most think, when you can see this wondrous sight from the rim. So come on, tourists, if you must, but pick up your trash, please, and pause for a moment and feel its power. (Both Hopi and Navajo believe the canyon is haunted. I've seen the ghosts myself.) And Merry Christmas, Coalmine, and may you, and I, and all of us, have a happy, peaceful and joyous New Year.]

[P.S.: The next-to-last image is of my trusty truck Chesepeake. And those hills you see in the distance in the bottom photo ain't hills, but rather The Grand Canyon as seen from over fifty miles away at Coalmine Canyon.]

The Transpersonal Papers: Chapter Seventeen: "Along The Methuselah Trail"

The Transpersonal Papers: Chapter Seventeen:
 
“Along The Methuselah Trail, Ancient Bristlecone Forest, White Mountains, California”

© 2008 Stu Jenks

 

Namaste.

The God in me sees the God in you.

This Sanskrit greeting has been in my head a lot on this trip. I’ve been trying to remember this phrase, when I first meet people. With kind folk, I then tend to see them as gods and goddesses. With jerks, I then tend to see them as good souls but with a big pile of crap on top of their heads.

It snowed here a week ago. Someone has walked this four-mile loop before me. I don’t know this trail, but I don’t need to, with a single set of footprints guiding me forward.

The rambunctious bikers are behind me. Very good chance they won't walk far. It’s cold, but not bitter. The sun’s going down. It will be dark soon.

I round a corner after a mile and see a Bristlecone highlighted on a ridge line. The tree so brightly lit, it’s as if the Sun was a follow-spot in a dark theatre. I raise my 70-200 and shoot. Pow, pow, pow. Again. Pow, pow, pow. I look at the screen on the back of the camera. I smile. That’s a shot. Insurance, too.

Ever since I first touched a Bristlecone in Eastern Nevada two years ago, they are like gods and goddesses to me too. They are the oldest living things on Earth, some living to be older than 4.000 years old. The oldest known Bristlecone lives somewhere on this trail. He is 4,723 years old. They don’t tell you which tree he actually is, but they do say, you walk right by him and you could touch him if you knew to.

Limber Pines and Bristlecones surround me now. (Limbers look somewhat similar to Bristlecones but are taller, with different needles, and don’t live as long, but they are old trees nonetheless. If it wasn’t for the Bristlecones, they would be the stars of this forest.) Beside these two species of trees, not much grows on these dolomite hills. Actually it’s because of this poor soil, that the Bristlecones (and Limbers) thrive here.

When I was near Wheeler Peak two years ago, there were quite a few Bristles growing near a receding glacier, but not a large grove. But the troop of trees here covers three ridge lines and hundreds of acres and they say there are even more Pines to the north, along a road that is now impassable by snow.

There is a low hum here, a deep hurrup of old creatures.

This is Fangorn Forest of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

And Treebeard does live here. But they call him Methuselah.

 

Sun’s been down about an hour now. Only a little blue left in the black of the sky. Stars are shining ever brighter now. I’m two miles deep into the forest.

I’ve just taken the Rollei off of my tripod and replaced it with the Canon. The Rollei’s insurance. Shoot, for all I know, the black and white will be better than the digital.

I’ve hoop-danced a lot beside a old man (or is she an Ent-Wife.) Maybe I’ve danced too much. Maybe I need to stick with just two or three hoops rather than five or six. Just like I can overwork a painting and make its colors muddy, I can over-spin a hoop dance and make it too busy. The simplest artistic answer is usually the right one.

The Full Moon’s shine hits the side of this old man’s hide. Hard snow freezes at his base. I’ll just hoop-dance to his left. Three hoops only. An odd number seems to be the key.

I climb up the hill and do my spinning. I then return to the camera. It’s very cold but I’m loving it. I’ll expose the digital neg for about five minutes. With film, I exposed for close to ten. Overexpose black and white film, underexpose the digital color.

I close the shutter after five. Now, I have five minutes of noise reduction before I can reshoot. I think I’ll go and say hello to him again.

I make my way up the snowy hill, gingerly stepping as I have all night, not to dislocate too much of the rocky soil, for it’s only this poor ground that keeps these trees alive. The primary reason that the Bristlecone Pines eventually die is because after three or four centuries, all the soil that covers their roots erodes away and they simply die of drought and famine. The Earth leaves them, but they don’t leave the Earth, even after death. Much of the deadwood around me on the forest floor is over 7000 years old.

I find the big root I’ve been resting on all night and I gently seat myself on it again. I close my eyes. I take a deep breath. I place my right hand on the tree. I touch the smooth dead surface of this old man’s body. Even though this part of him is dead, I can still feel a low hum of life ringing through his trunk. He’s alive and happy. Maybe my being here makes him a little happier. I hope so. I don’t reckon he gets many guest humans, up this ravine.

“Funny,” I say to him, “I was wondering if you are the Methuselah Tree and now I think, to even try to figure it out is simply absurd. All of y’all are very old. Except for a few hundreds-years-old whipper-snapping skinny guys over there, most of you have seen many stars pass over your heads, many snows at your feet.”

He doesn’t say anything, but I can feel him listening.

“Thank you,” I say, “for being such a good model and for saying yes when I asked you if I could photograph you.”

“You…are…very…welcome…,” he says.

I stop talking, but I don’t lift my right hand for a good long while. I just keep giving him as much love as I can. Out of the palm of my right hand.

And like when I first met that nice couple in Groveland, California, the other day, I think these few words.

The God in me sees the God in you.

 



 

"Dawn at Half Dome"

"Dawn at Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California" (c) 2008 Stu Jenks

The Transpersonal Papers: Chapter Sixteen: "The Ghost and The Giants"

The Transpersonal Papers: Chapter Sixteen:
“The Ghost and The Giants: Coalmine Canyon, Arizona & Sequoia National Park, California”
© 2008 Stu Jenks


    A little over 24 hours ago, the plan was to go to Coalmine Canyon for the night and then head east toward the San Juans in Colorado and later, go north to the Abajos in Utah, hiking shooting and camping along the way.   
    But something happened at Coalmine.
    Change has come to Coalmine, and it’s not a change that we need.
    For the secret is out.
    Back in the 1980’s, when I first starting coming to that wondrous place on the Colorado Plateau, only a few Navajos from Tuba City, a small number of local Hopi, and a couple of ranchers who lived or worked on the Joint Use Land went into Coalmine Canyon. Oh, and Mike Johnson and I too, but that was it.
    But not now.
    After talking with some very white people from Phoenix yesterday, I found out why. (Two men, one woman, two big trucks, three big dogs, deep in the canyon. Couldn’t you just driven one car and left the dogs at home?) Seems the Arizona Republic, Phoenix’s largest newspaper, wrote a front-page article about the beauty of Coalmine Canyon a couple years ago. Thanks the fuck a lot. Tell 5,000,000 people about the place and of those, at least 5,000 will have to drive up and see it. When I drove down the back way into Coalmine on Saturday, I was angered and saddened. It wasn’t trashed but it had been badly overused. A spider web of tire tracks spread across the fragile and sacred land, when none had been there before. A new two-story mansion pierced the sky to the west. And even in this, the off-season, those fat white fucks with their dogs had added their own new line of tire tracks on the soft loamy soil. They looked a bit, let the dogs run, and then they left. The quiet solitude and deep spirit of the place, which Mike and I and so many Hopis and Navajos had loved, had now been replaced by lookeloos from the Valley of the Sun.
    At least The Ghost has been safe from stupid white people. They are too fat and lazy to hike those many miles, and they can’t drive their truck or ATV there.
    I camped last night a bit to the east of my usual spots, on land that was unfamiliar, but it made no difference. Fucked up is fucked up. And as I lay awake in my tent last night, I decided that this shooting/hiking vacation would have to be about visiting brand-new places. I couldn’t risk my heart breaking even more, going to places in Colorado and Utah, where I had been just a couple years before and find them fucked up by too many people, like I saw at Coalmine. I’ll instead go to places I’ve never been, but have always wanted to see for a long time, and if they have changed, I won’t know it for they’ll be new to me.
    So this morning I packed up before dawn and headed west.
    Got some coffee at the new McDonald’s at Tuba at 5 a.m. A McDonald’s in Tuba? God save us. Then again, they’ve had a BK there for years. Who am I to say that Hopis and Navajos shouldn’t be able to get a hot Big Mac too instead of just a Whopper.
    Saw a fatal accident this morning in a sandstorm, east of Barstow, on I-40. That gave me pause. I took a picture of the body on a stretcher. You won’t see it here.
    By early afternoon, I was in the Central Valley of California. Called an ex- girlfriend and set up to have coffee at a Border’s in Visalia. Not going to talk much about this meeting but I will say this: I hadn’t seen her in twenty years. Made my amends way back then, and gave her my greatest gift by leaving her the fuck alone. She remarried her ex-husband and I’m guessing she was happy until he died suddenly a couple years ago. Very sad. He was quite young. She looked the same, sounded the same, it was pleasant enough. But things do change, boys and girls. It was like having coffee with someone that I only once dreamed about, not someone I stated lifelong love and shared a home with. If you don’t give freshwater to love and friendship, that tree will not only die but also you’ll hardly know it grew there in the first place. It is what it is. Or what it isn’t.
    Headed into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas at dusk today. I always think I’m in a movie when I’m driving in California. Partly it’s because so much of this land and so many of its highways have been in film and on TV. But it’s more than that. Wild trees looked placed just so, on those hilltops. And people seem very focused on how they look, so everyone looks at best, like a movie star and at worst, like an extra. The colors of the grass, the land, the trees are muted yet bright: a combination of too much pollution in the air and that glorious California sunshine.
    Yet, at its worst, you can see the pervasive poverty that supports all this wealth, the mean over the meek, the defenseless overwhelmed by the invaders. But above it all, bright sunshine and under it all, more money than you could possibly imagine.
    Even this little foothill hotel that I’m sleeping in tonight looks like it could be the set for ‘CSI: Vasalia.’


    Dawn. The drive up. Through conifers whose names I can only imagine. Higher and higher I go.
    Then suddenly, I see my first one.
    “Holy Mother of God.”
    I then laugh out loud. I bet thousands, hundreds of thousands of motorists have said something like that, when they saw their very first Giant Sequoia tree.
    This is going to be a very good day.


    All alone. No one here. Huge parking lot. It’s cold. November. In July, a madhouse I bet, but today. It’s just me and the boys.   
    And they are huge.


    Hours later. I’ve taken some images but it’s so foolish. No away to capture the largest living things on the planet. Take their reflected light, put it in the box, make a flat thing from it? Pure folly. This is a four-dimensional experience, three dimensions plus time. Maybe that triptych or that four piece will work, but it doesn’t really matter. The best pics are taken with the eyeballs alone. Got a photo of your lover’s eyes when she see you at her door? Didn’t think so.


    Still alone, except for that buck and doe over there. On and off the snowy trail. My head being hit by the occasional large chunk of icy snow that melts from the upper branches. Deer tracks here. Snowdrift there. And then I stop short.
    That be a bear track. A very large bear track.
    I pull out the Canon and take its image. I then begin to follow the tracks through the snow. One than another. They look fresh. He is big. I walk for hundred feet or so, and then see a large bush up ahead and stop short again.
    I smile a dopey grin.
    He could be up there behind that scrub. Do I really want to disturb a black bear up here?
    There is a hard-held truth in my life and that is I don’t want to die stupidly. In my sleep, in my house, in a hospital, as an old man hiking in the desert? Fine.
    But I don’t want to hear this from the Other Side.
    “Hey, did you hear what happened to Stu?
    “No, what.”
    “He was hiking in Sequoia National Park and got killed by a bear.”
    “Really? How’d it happen?

    “They’re not quite sure. But it seems he was following this bear deep into the woods. His tracks matched the bear’s.”
    “Why in God’s name would Stu do that?”
    “You know Stu.”
    “Yea, I do.”
    I stop walking, turn around and get back on the trail


    On my way back to the truck now. Still haven’t seen a soul. (Many souls are now at the parking lot but I wouldn’t find that out until later). Loving these trees. Feeling blessed to have eyes to see them and legs that take me to them.
    I stop at one big guy and place both hands on his foot-thick bark. I give him some of my energy, through my palms, through my heart.
    “Hey Tree,” I say, “May you grow strong and live a very happy and long life. Just be Tree.”
    And then the Tree speaks to me.
    “Be Stu,” he says.
    “Thanks, “ I say, “I’ll do that. You be Tree too.”
    “Be Stu,” he says a second time, speaking very slowly, and then I understand.
    Being Stu is a tall order. Being who you are isn’t that easy. For me, I tend to be a bit of a people-pleaser, a phony at times. I keep important thoughts to myself when I should stand up and be counted instead. I let financial fears keep in place, when really I need to go. I sometime leave my light under a bushel basket, as they say back home.
    And this Tree is asking me not to do that: To Be Stu, warts and all, thoughts and all, loves and all.
    Yikes.
    But I’ll work on it. I promise, Tree.
    And thanks again, I say to him.
    And I then place my hands back on his bark and neither of us talk for a good long while.