Farewell to Cutler Park

. . . to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

-  T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”

 

On June 30, I made my last visit to Cutler Park.  We had sold our house in Boston, and were leaving later that morning to drive to Corrales, New Mexico.  (See “I’ll Fly Away” posted June 26 below.)  I wanted one last communion with a holy place.

For me, visiting – and photographing – Cutler Park was a kind of meditation . . . a way to step outside the bustle and stress of the day, and just FOCUS on one thing:  watching the light, looking for beauty, and working to capture it through my camera.  For an hour or so every time, the rest of the world just disappeared.  It was great therapy.

My relationship with Cutler Park began almost four years earlier, on August 30, 2008.  My wife, Linda, and some friends of hers would go there to run on the trails, and one day she came back and said, “You know, you should go over to Cutler Park.  There are some beautiful ferns in the forest.”  So we went over in the afternoon, and I took some unremarkable pictures of the ferns and a few other things.  Here’s an example:

And here are my first shots of the Charles River, which by now – if you’ve been reading this blog for very long – you’re familiar with.

Again, unremarkable.

Here's me taking a picture of something that afternoon:

But from that beginning, I was hooked.  It was (and still is) such a beautiful place.  Little did I know at the time that I would spend hundreds of hours and take thousands – actually, tens of thousands – of images there over the next four years.

Fortunately, my photographic skill improved with time.  That, coupled with the discipline of being there when the light was good, has yielded some marvelous images:

October 12, 2008

September 12, 2010

August 27, 2011

And everybody’s all-time favorite, the swans from November 7, 2009:

This will probably not be my last post to Cutler Park Chronicles, since I’ve got thousands of images and dozens of stories to go with them.  Stop back by from time to time.

And if you are interested in stories and photographs from New Mexico, visit my new blog, Corrales Chronicles, here and my new photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, here.

But for now, I’ll just share some of the images I made between January and June this year.  A few are arranged so you can see the change of the seasons – winter to spring to summer – in the same location.  Others are just images I like.  They are posted at my original photography website, Hastings Street Photography.  See them by clicking here.

Why We Moved to New Mexico - Reason #2

[Editor's Note:  As with the previous post, this is not really a Cutler Park story, nor are the images from Cutler Park.  I simply haven't started a new blog for my New Mexico images and stories yet, so this is my only channel/venue.]


At the end of the summer out here in New Mexico, the harvest of green chile peppers comes in, primarily from Hatch, New Mexico, along the Rio Grande in the southern part of the state (about 200 miles south of where we are).

Besides buying them individually . . .

you can buy them by the box . . .
 

or you can buy them by the bag (30 lbs.) . . .

 

And after you buy them, you get them roasted.  Whether it's a large amount or small, you take your peppers out to the parking lot of the grocery store 

and give them to the guy who will dump them in a big propane-fueled hopper.  

It takes about 3-4 minutes, 

and when they come out the skins are scorched.

Then you take them home, peel the skins, take out the seeds, 

slice the peppers, and put them in freezer bags for storage.

 

Last weekend we bought two 30-lb. bags -- one bag of "hot" and one bag of "medium hot."  (What were we thinking?!?)

It took us about 7 and a half hours to process all of them -- well, almost all; I gave up at 10:30pm!  But now we have about 20 lbs. of chiles in the freezer, ready to sustain us in stews and other tasty dishes we'll cook through the winter.

 And we'll enjoy it even more because we cleaned and cored and sliced every one of those  #!%$* peppers!

Why I Moved to New Mexico

[Editor's Note:  This really is not a "Cutler Park Chronicles" story, and these are not images from Cutler Park.  But at the moment, I don't have another blog ready to go (I'm workin' on it), and these images and the story behind them can't wait, so they have to go here.]




We had an amazing visual display at sunset this evening, but it wasn't in the western sky.  And there's a story to it . . .

The day started like this, at dawn (6:20a):

Not a bad start.  But the best was yet to come.

This afternoon we were out running errands, and could see a giant storm cloud/system forming in the north and moving south toward us.  Of course I didn't have my camera with me -- guess I'll have to take it everywhere now! -- so by the time we got home and I got outside, the leading edge of the clouds was almost directly overhead.  You can't really tell how LARGE it was, but here's how it looked as it moved from north to south (left to right), as I looked east at 5:04p:

To give you a sense of the size of this storm, the mountain you see at the bottom center of the image is 10 miles away and is 5,000 feet higher than the surrounding terrain.

Eventually, the system moved over us, but we were on the western edge, so it was sunny on our side, and we got no rain.  The mountain 10 miles to the east on the other side of the river, however, did get the rain (6:02p):

 The system kept moving south and east, leaving the mountain cloaked in a lot of gloomy, uninteresting clouds (6:31p): 

So after dinner, I repaired to my computer to process the afternoon's images.  Eventually, about 8:20p, just after sunset (which was at 8:15), I came up for air and looked out the back window.  OMG!

The storm system had moved south and east, past Albuquerque, and the setting sun, now below the horizon, was still shining on the storm clouds in the southeast.  Here's how the sky looked in the west (woo-hoo!):

I grabbed the camera, put on my shoes, and ran out the front door, across the road (8:23pm) . . .

 to the hill about 100 yards north of our house to get a better view (8:24):
 

The light was going fast, so I shot as fast as I could, juggling my settings and checking my histograms continuously.  It was like an explosion in the sky . . .

8:25pm:
 

8:26pm:

By 8:27pm, it was all over, except for the western edge of the cloud formation still catching light from the sun, being watched by the waxing moon:

From the time I looked out the back window to the time it was essentially over, seven minutes had passed.  But wasn't it glorious!


This is why I came here.

I'll Fly Away

After 39 years in public media -- the last 22 of them at WGBH in Boston -- plus raising two boys, putting them through college, etc., we've saved enough to start a new chapter in our lives.

Two years ago we bought a house in Corrales, New Mexico (just outside of Albuquerque), as our eventual retirement getaway.

The last piece of the puzzle was whether we could net enough from the sale of our Boston house to make the long-term financial plan work.

So we spent days getting the house ready -- repainting, re-wallpapering, re-plastering ceilings . . . 

throwing out papers, boxes, cabinets . . .

 and then staging the living space for show and sale.

We put the house on the market in mid-April, and by the end of May we had an offer that met our financial plan goal.

Since then, we've been finishing the job:  cleaning out the attic, garage, and basement.  More stuff to the curb.  The pickers have been coming by religiously on Sunday evenings before trash pick-up on Monday mornings.  Don't know what the garbage men think, but I expect they'll be glad to see us go.

So now we're down to our final days in Boston.  The moving company comes to pack us up on Thursday; they load the truck on Friday; and we put a few things in the car and leave Saturday for a 2,200 mile drive from Boston to Corrales.

Once we get out there and unpack a bit, I'll post some final images from Cutler Park, selected from the very few outings I've made since January.

And then I expect to open a whole new vista for you from New Mexico.  I'll keep you posted about that.

The Best of 2011

2011 brought a range of photographic opportunities for me, from the very large . . .

to the very small . . .

strange . . .

and simple . . .

abstract . . .

and literal . . .

machines . . .

monuments . . .

and moments of joy . . .

pain . . .

peace . . .

and awe . . .

each beautiful in its own way.

You can see them all (and more) in four “Best of 2011” galleries at my Hastings Street Photography website by clicking here.