The eclipsed moon peeks out between two crags in the Alabama Hills. Photographed May 2022.
Stare into the heart of our galaxy on a moonless night, and you find dark clouds of interstellar gas and dust spread across the brushstroke of stars my ancestors called the trail of the straw thief... Focus your gaze, and you begin to identify patterns that you see repeat- ed in the landscape below, in the sinewy limbs of bristlecone pines stretching skyward, in the light and dark streaks twisting about their trunks, and in the textures etched upon them by the incessant wind of time... Photographed July 2020, Schulman Grove.
(Caption is for this and next photo) We can imagine a coincidence thousands of years ago, the blink of an eye on cosmic time scales... In the Oort Cloud, an insignificant ball of dust and ice, its path disturbed once again, its orbit honed by the gravity of those far above its station, hurled toward the Sun, uncertain of its future... On Earth, in an in- hospitable corner of the White Mountains of California, a seedling bursting forth, a mere twig of the species pinus longaeva, equally uncertain of its destiny... While one traverses the timeless emptiness of space and withstands the incessant pull of the Jovian planets, the other grows, is carved by the bitter winds into fantastical shapes, spreads its arms toward the heavens, and dies a glorious death, its own body the sarcophagus that will carry it unchanged millennia into the future... Perihelion, for a comet, is as dangerous an affair as the flight of the mindless moth toward the open flame, or the close encounter on a dance floor with a woman so beautiful and so out of reach that every trace of sensation, of admiration, and of love is scorched away in an instant... But, once in a while, a sungrazing comet survives its close encounter and fills the skies of planet Earth with its brilliant light, flaunting its twin gowns of effervescence blown asunder by sunlight and by the solar wind. In the White Mountains, the long-dead bristlecone pine, as timeless as the comet itself, awaits to greet another messenger from the far reaches of our Solar System. This may be the first naked eye comet in two or three decades, but to the bristlecone, patient as ever, it is one of many to have displayed their ephemeral beauty, a mere twinkle against the backdrop of unchanging stars rising to greet the long-lived witnesses to our history night after night, year after year, century after century...
