12 Birch Creek Panos

Summer has passed in a blur of grasshoppers, cheatgrass, nighthawks, toadsong, sandstone, basalt, silence, alfalfa, Benadryl, ramen, fruit snacks, laundry, dancing, sunburn, stitches, love, and x-rays. But here are a few pictures I got along the way:

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The Fly Who Dreamed He Was an Eagle

Once upon a time there was a Fly who nightly dreamed that he was an Eagle and that he found himself flying over the Alps and the Andes. The first moments of the experience always made him deliriously happy; but after a time he would begin to feel uneasy, as he found the wings too long, the body too heavy, the beak too hard, and the claws too strong. Indeed, all this great apparatus made it difficult to settle comfortably on rich cakes or people’s turds, or to do a conscientious job of bumping against the windows of his room. The fact was he really didn’t like great heights or open spaces at all.

But whenever he awoke he would deeply regret that he wasn’t an Eagle who could soar over mountains, and was enormously sad about being a Fly—and this accounted for all the nervous flitting about and spinning and buzzing, before he could slowly settle his head onto his pillow.

Augusto Monterroso 1969

La oveja negra y demás fábulas/The Black Sheep and Other Fables, translated by Walter Bradbury

Faith and the Mountains

At first, faith moved mountains only as a last resort, when it was absolutely necessary, and so the landscape remained the same over the millennia. But once faith started propagating itself among people, some found it amusing to think about moving mountains, and soon the mountains did nothing else but change places, each time making it a little more difficult to find one in the same place you had left it last night; obviously this created more problems than it solved. The good people decided then to abandon faith; so nowadays the mountains remain (by and large) in the same spot. When the roadway falls in and drivers die in the collapse, it means someone, far away or quite close by, felt a light glimmer of faith.

Augusto Monterroso 1969

La oveja negra y demás fábulas/The Black Sheep and Other Fables, translated by Walter Bradbury