I can thank an almost obscenely juicy batch of pears for today’s Dispatch. The first time it stimulated inspiration (in addition to the usual taste buds) was when I noticed that most of the smallest flying creatures you’re likely to find in the desert insect guidebook were madly circling and occasionally landing upon my two-year-old-son during a break on a recent five mile Autumnal Clarity hike. Our destination was a place we Funky Butters call Owl Canyon, for the high cliff nests carved into the sandstone buttes which tower above us and the resulting owl pellets that line the canyon floor alongside us.
The reason for the entomological interest in my son was that he smelled delicious — a combination of fresh pear juice and smudges of cocoa remnants decorating his face like war paint. If the image conjures Paddington, it’s apt: my son, much of the morning, wore a curious cub’s expression of puzzled acceptance as he swatted away the season’s lingering hornets and butterflies, who badly wanted to lick him.
Having finishing snapping a few hundred photos of that phenomenon, I turned my face slightly downstream along Owl Canyon’s parched Technicolor creek bed. There, I noticed a local kid’s first solids in the act of proving to be a family-picked local pear from the same batch as his brother’s insect lure. That is to say, my youngest son, still firmly in the Along For the Ride phase during our hikes (though already a full-fledged participant in family humor), was also wearing chunks of pear, dripping with borderline over-ripeness. His age: five-and-a-half months. His expression: toothless bliss. In other words, he was already getting a taste of the Funky Butte Ranch ethic.
And a tasty one it is. Consequently, a few hundred more photos. Because you never know what you’re gonna get these days. If the Digital Age has freed us from the physical limitations of film, I refuse to submit to instant gratification: I don’t check the photos until I upload them to the Mac, often weeks later.
We had just picked the pears, incidentally — by the cooler-full — at a neighbor’s the previous week. Actually, they pretty much fell off the tree into our picking bags — that’s how ready they were. The orchardist Vlad had insisted: the cornucopia was about to overripen on his trees, he told me (I can now confirm this was an understatement), with frost a’coming. With the Funky Butte Ranch orchard on the brink of maturity, I didn’t put up much of an argument.
Back in Owl Canyon, I was delighted to see my youngest squirt having such a juicy experience: on the hikes since we’d snagged the pear bounty, the rest of the family’s rapacious mid-hike Vitamin C slurps were engendering what appeared to be a little envy in our still mostly-on-milk infant. He’d look at the rest of us scarfing, and emit a growl that evoked Peter Boyle’s Frankenstein monster. Read more…