I was having a tough time focusing on the pea blossoms.
I could see them through the viewfinder but, thanks to the sweat in my eyes, I couldn’t tell which blossom the camera was focusing on. To make matters worse, the sweat coming off my forehead was running through my eyebrow and into the camera’s eyepiece and those salty dribbles were making it hard to see if anything was in focus at all.
For the past two hours I had been driving slowly along with the air conditioner cranked against the 32C heat outside, cruising among the lush farm fields between High River and Milo. The crops all look amazing, the fields full of bright green wheat and barley, just-blooming carpets of canola and, here, tangles of field peas.
I hadn’t been stopping often to photograph them, though. The mid-afternoon sunlight was particularly harsh under that cloudless blue sky which, incongruously, made the fields look incredibly dull. Even the canola, bright, yellow and fresh as it was, was boringly bland.
The closest I had come to anything vibrant was a huge mat of algae on a pond near Brant. This particular pond had been nearly dry a few months ago but the wet spring had rejuvenated it — and the dormant algae as well — and now it was almost completely covered with mats of bright, acid green and fluorescent yellow.
True, it wasn’t much to look at from ground level but looking down on it through my little drone’s camera, it looked pretty cool. But then again, I am a sucker for random patterns.
Like the ones on wind-blown fields.
I love how barley and wheat look at this time of year when gusts of wind sweep across them. The stems are still pliable now with none of the stiffness that comes along as the grain ripens and the long whiskers of the bearded seed heads are more hair-like than the needles they become. The wind makes them dance.
The peas, sadly, just lie there. In among them there are some pretty nifty little curlicues formed by the vines and the new pods glow a translucent green when backlit by the sun. But overall, the fields are flat and uninteresting, too tangled for most animals to wander through and hard for even birds to hunt in.
So why was I parked and perspiring next to this pea field? It was because of the flowers.
Peas, like every other crop, have been bred to be uniform and predictable so they can be grown and harvested with confidence in the final product. As a result, pretty much every pea plant looks the same. Same leaves, same little vines, same pods and same pretty but bland white flowers.
But once in a while, a little ripple appears in the gene pool. And that’s what I had my lens aimed at.
There were two ripples, in fact, one a bit deeper in the tangle and one head and shoulders above. Both had, instead of those uniform white blossoms, petals of pink and rose red. The tallest one was especially pretty, even in the harsh afternoon sun, with long, leafy tendrils reaching out over its homogeneous cousins and a tall stalk studded with blossoms yet to bloom.
But I was having trouble getting any pictures of it, both because of the sweat stinging my eyes and dribbling into the viewfinder as well as the wind that was whipping the flowers around. It was tough even with the lens braced on the truck’s window frame but after 10 minutes of frustration and perspiration, I finally had a couple of usable pictures. I backed the truck out of the approach I was parked on and carried on.
I’d left town late in the day with a plan to head to the area around Milo and McGregor Lake to spend the afternoon and evening in the fields and along the shoreline. I knew the crops would look good, what with all that rain and all, and, of course, the lake would be warm and wadeable.
On top of that, the forecast called for clear skies so once the sun set, I had the idea to see what I could do with the Milky Way that I knew would be overhead in the night sky. The day would be hot but the night would be pleasant and I do love driving at night!
So I rolled on east through the fields with the windows rolled down — I was drenched with sweat and rushing wind felt better than the air conditioning — stopping here and there to take pictures of hawks and rainbow-spewing irrigation sprinklers as I went. It was around 7 p.m. when I got to the lake and the temperature was still hovering around 32C but the westering light had softened and the world began to take on that summer evening glow.
Dozens of swallows thronged the fences, preening and panting, while gophers, mostly young ones, ran through the grass of the little campground. One paused to nibble on a flower while another sat low and rubbed its eyes. Sweaty, like me? No, gophers don’t sweat.
At a pond below the dam at the lake’s north end I heard a marsh wren loudly declaring its ownership of this little stretch of shoreline but it was frustratingly hard to get a picture. Not, like the peas, because of the wind or anything else but because wrens are so darn small.
The baby killdeers were easy, though. They just poked along the shore like mini versions of the parents. Nearby a yellow-legs waded through the shallow water hunting for supper. Further out, a female shoveler duck floated along, snoozing. A gull flew by with a crayfish in its beak but I missed that picture completely.
A little north of the lake I found a great horned owl sitting on the roof of an old farmhouse. Behind it, the sun hung like a big yellow ball as blackbirds swarmed around and dive-bombed at it. Eventually it flew off to a nearby fence. The blackbirds followed.
Back at the lake, fishermen were packing up for the day as the light turned golden and the sun leaned in to kiss the horizon. I went over to the east side to watch it happen and take pictures back across the water and I set up my littlest camera to shoot a timelapse of darkness coming on.
Which took forever.
The sun officially set at around 9:45 p.m. but dusk lingered for a full hour afterward. Not a complaint, really. Better this than the resounding thud of night falling in the winter. And it was pleasant sitting by the lake with all the little midges — no mosquitoes, strangely — buzzing around and the gulls flying by.
But by 10:30 I’d given up on the timelapse — it was still fairly bright — and went looking for things to shoot in the dusk.
There was enough colour and brightness still in the sky to silhouette a yellow-legs hunting at a roadside slough and even enough to shoot a bit of video as I rolled along. Back over by the lake I surprised some people by the shore as my headlights swung across them — sorry about that, folks — and parked by a camp table to sit outside in the cooling air to wait until dark.
Flying bugs thronged my camp light as soon as I turned it on so I set up my camera to take a few long-exposure pictures of their fluttering forms in the light and then shut it off to let the night fall.
It was well past 11 when the first bright stars appeared and the Milky Way came into view down the lake at just before midnight. The temperature had dropped to a much more tolerable 24C and the breeze coming across the water was lovely and sweet.
The moon — just a fingernail — had already set but I wondered if the owl I’d seen earlier might still be by that old house so I went to have a look. Nope, no luck there. So I rolled on into the night.
A few clouds had tumbled in but the sky was mostly clear and driving with just the running lights on to preserve my night vision — slowly and watching the road — I looked for anything that might make a picture. Stopping at a bridge over an irrigation canal, I aimed the camera down the channel and looked around as the 30-second exposure ran.
Above me, the Big Dipper was nearly upside down while the little puff of the Andromeda galaxy sat a couple of fist-widths above the horizon off to the northeast. To the south, the Milky Way ran like a cloud of white dust, so many stars in its embrace that they all ran together in a smear.
Over the rush of the water I could hear coyotes singing and nightjars calling. Something flew by fairly close just as I started the truck again. A bat?
At Queenstown I stopped to take pictures of a bronc rider cutout on the wall — hey, it is Stampede time! — and got a little creative with the light. Flashing the brakes and quickly turning on and off the headlights created different shadows and glows on the white wall. Even the light from my phone’s screen was enough to brighten things up.
I crossed more canals and bodies of water that I could barely see and listened to the crackly country music coming through the speakers from the broadcast towers of good old KMON in Great Falls, Mont. Driving where I was between Milo and Arrowwood, I was right on the edge of the station’s 50,000-watt reach but crackly Alan Jackson or Tammy Wynette is better than no Alan or Tammy at all.
It was just past 1 a.m. when I stopped to photograph the water tower in Arrowwood and I spent a bit of time there trying to find an angle where the street lights didn’t flare into everything. Sorry, folks, if I spooked you going back and forth around the tower in the middle of the night. It was all for art’s sake, I promise.
It was getting close to 2 a.m. when I stopped to shoot the old wind pump close to Mossleigh and I was confident enough that no vehicles would come along that I parked right in the middle of the road to aim my camera. And when I looked at the pictures on the camera’s back, I got a surprise.
The camera saw what I couldn’t see, even with my dark-accustomed eyes. Off to the north in the sky beyond the tower, a faint yellow-green glow filled the horizon. And coming up from that, streaks of magenta and pink. It was aurora, faint but lovely and the long exposure had made it visible.
I stopped twice more along the way before the sky and stars were overwhelmed by the lights of the city. By 3 a.m. I was back home. By 4 a.m. I was in bed.
And instead of all the wonderful things I could have dreamed about, all the interesting things I’d seen that day, what danced around in my unconscious mind?
You guessed it.
Peas.
