An essay about trees in the July newsletter of the ABQ Photography Gallery got me thinking about how much of my own photography in the last twenty-five years has focused on trees and how that interest developed over a lifetime.
The first trees I remember well were a couple Dougls Firs in the front yard of my grandparents house in West Seattle where I spent much of my childhood. I climbed in them and played underneath their branches with my toy soldiers. The house and the two trees were still there the last time the Google street mapping vehicle passed by, perhaps a dozen years ago. I was surprised in looking at that picture that they looked much as I remembered them; they seemed healthy, but not bigger than they were in my memory, though they may have already been fifty years of age back then.
As I grew toward adulthood in the Northwest I was surrounded by trees, but no individual one lodged itself firmly in my memory. It was not until many years later that I developed another brief but close relationship with some eucalyptus trees on San Bruno Mountain south of San Francisco. A desire to get a close-up look at a nest of young Red-tailed Hawks prompted me to don a pair of climbing irons to get me the fifty or sixty feet up to the nest.
Though I liked San Francisco. city life there grew uncomfortable in the mid-1970s, so we headed northeast in a Ford Econoline van with two kids, a dog, a hawk and a friend, ending up in Southern Idaho. We lived for a time in the small town of Glenns Ferry, and then found an old dairy farm house in the countryside with a row of big mulberry trees in front that were well watered by an irrigation ditch. I recall Margaret making some good pies with a combination of the mulberries and gooseberries which grew in our back yard. The landlord decided, for a reason I don't recall, to cut down the mulberry trees. A good portion of them were burned in the wood stove in our kitchen.
In rural Idaho our kids had the advantage of a mostly rewarding small town experience. I appreciated the opportunity to reclaim some of my family's Idaho history and learned a lot about hunting and fishing. However, a series of low paid jobs and little prospect of anything better made a continued life in Idaho seem untenable.
Margaret found an escape hatch in the form of a scholarship to get her Master's in Social Work at Eastern Washington University. So we spent the next two years living in a trailer in the scabland woods outside of Cheney. I worked for the welfare department in Spokane for the duration. The last winter in Cheney featured a hundred days of snow on the ground. I was ready for some sun.
We piled the kids, the dog and a cat into the back of a little Chevy Love pickup and headed southwest, ending up finally in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We both got reasonably good jobs and were able eventually to buy an adobe house in a remote desert location twenty miles north of Las Cruces. On our five acres the most common trees were mesquites. They provided a little shade and the horses really liked the mesquite beans.
Partly due to health issues we decided after about ten years that living in that beautiful but remote location was no longer a good idea. A move north to Albuquerque offered more accessible medical care along with the possibility of living close to our daughter. We managed to sell our desert home just before the big housing crash, and ultimately bought another near Albuquerque's Old Town where we live now.
We have four trees on our little corner property. The fastest growing is a volunteer locust that popped up in the yard in just the right place. The other three we planted -- a sturdy red oak by the sidewalk in front of the house, a redbud by the south sidewalk, and a desert willow beside our bedroom window that is beloved by us, as well as bumblebees and hummingbirds attracted by the copious flowers. I like the desert willow particularly because it reminds me of ones I used to find often in desert arroyos down south. Those trees were often accompanied by clumps of Desert Four O'clock flowers, so I planted some as a companion for our willow, and they bloom every day all summer.
My favorite photographs of trees made since we moved to Albuquerque are in a Flickr Album.
