Here’s the five-year-old, Ike. Next will be to catch the elusive critter, Zoë Ingrid.

I went about my business today, and a really curious thing happened. Tons of people in town and up at the reservoir and all over started talking to me about fishing and cars and guy stuff. It’s like this new look is professor camo. I might keep it.

We’re funded through a National Parks Service grant, and we get some pretty amazing access. This summer I’ll be leading or advising projects in Zion National Park, Grand Canyon-Parashant (in the remote NW section of the Grand Canyon, and Denali National Park in Alaska. We’ll also be exploring new possibilities for projects in Olympic National Park in Washington, Great Basin, King’s Canyon, and Sequoia. We also have projects that I am not directly overseeing in Cape Hatteras and Manhattan (many are unaware of the many, many urban NPS sites).

For the last two days I’ve been hiking through an upper section of Zion National Park, called Kolob Canyons. This morning we awoke to snow. We knew it was coming, but we sort of hoped we’d be wrong about that. It made for a miserable slog: lots of mud and being cold, but it was spellbindingly beautiful.

I kept expecting to see Chinese warriors flying overhead with spears and flowing silk robes, engaging in silent battle between the sandstone ramparts and the mist.

Today was hard going, but it was very beautiful. It was a good day, all in all, because I had good gear, I was in pretty good shape, and I was at work.

Sleep well.

So, today I was in the Wal-Mart, getting chewable Tylenol and two things of photocopy paper, and I walk past a candy display, seemingly innoccuous. Upon closer inspection, I noticed a product that was at once so, absolutely hip to popular culture, and so utterly without shame that I felt what I can only call the Postmodern Sublime.

I realize that I’ve not been keeping people up with the progress of the young sportsman. Well, as you can see he’s terrorizing the house.

Click on image for Barbie detail.

I recount the following conversation I had with my daughter as I was getting out of the Jeep to take the above photograph:

Zoë was yelling at me, “What are you doing, Dad?”

I told her I was taking a picture of this truck.

She asked why, and I said, “Because there is a Barbie head in the front seat.” She said, “What’s a Barbie?”

And I said, “You’re a good girl.”

This kind of moment (in which I revere my daughter for not recognizing an American icon) is pretty closely related to the fact that I am almost obscenely proud of the fact that I have never been to Disneyland (or world). Neither has my wife.

As far as I am concerned, this bundle of truths makes my family perfect.

The baby doesn’t value anything that won’t fit into his mouth. The three-year-old doesn’t know who Barbie is, calls broccoli her favorite food, and won’t sculpt with the colored clay because it’s for “babies.”

This sounds like something someone must have said once, but we are best defined by those things we reject, or maybe also by the things we secretly love. I love Velveeta and picante sauce, the TV show Scrubs, and comic books.

What do you reject? What do you secretly love and hope no one will ever discover?

Getting this shot, by the way, was really dang tough. I had to pretend like I was just showing my mother some shots of the family, when I was really trying to get a steady shot with a 1/16 of a second shutter speed, maximum zoom.

Click here for the movie

“Goodnight Everybody”
une film de papa
You’ll need Quicktime to view the movie.

Click here for the movie

“Row, Row, Row Your Laundry Organizer”
une film de papa
You’ll need Quicktime to view the movie.

I did have one or two moments during my recent trip to Chicago (more on that in a day or two) to snap this photo of the El and some Blade Runner-esque building.

No retouching here, just real space opera.

I don’t know whether to be pleased or frightened. Zoë sees the camera as “thing that creates Zoës,” which is a fairly apt observation, since my aesthetics (at least as far as the camera is concerned) are almost 100% attuned to something Zoë has whipped up to amuse herself.

It was a fun adventure, a free room, a little paid gig, a new audience. So, we packed up the Jeep and headed out of town. Just as we did, the sky opened up and we were almost immediately driving in blizzard conditions.

The drive went well (everything turned to rain), and the reading went well. I slept really well—woke up two hours later than normal. But when we pulled open the drapes in the motel window, we saw that it had snowed overnight, and that it was still falling.

Official climate data for Zion National Park goes back to 1928, and the average snowfall for that part of the world in February is 1.8 inches with no real accumulation to speak of (remember summer temperatures average about 100 degrees). Well, it accumulated today.

Take a look.

It was simply spellbinding. Once again Alisa and I found ourselves asking ourselves how we got so lucky.

I know lots of intense young artists think that a work of surreal art has to have melting clocks and elephants on stilts and fur and stuff. Not so, this is perhaps one of the strangest things I have ever seen.

But for Alison, it was completely normal. So who am I to blow against the wind.

It shouldn’t come as any real surprise, though. Turner announced the close of the frontier in 1893 at the World Exposition in Chicago. We’ve had 110 years to get used to it.

I have photographs coming of the more “elaborate” displays within walking distance.

The other day I passed this little nativity scene and wondered if Max Von Sydow wasn’t right in the Woody Allen film, Hanna and Her Sisters when he said “If Jesus came back today, he’d never stop throwing up.”

I guess that’s sort of a cruel way of asking the question: Does Jesus like kitsch of himself and his parents and his birthday? Does he feel any nostalgia for those grand days of the Renaissance when images of him were actually good?

Or does he think that displays like this one are more democratic and less classist than a Titian or Giotto? Better that everyone have an illuminated, plastic Wal-Mart display of his birth than none at all.

Or does he think, “I told them about graven images. I’ve told them and told them and told them and told them”?

I feel bad for the old guy, but that’s what you get when you belong to a 16-month-old baby girl.