Photo-a-Day: Gorge

I’m back, after a brief hiatus. We took a quick trip to Red River Gorge, in the Kentucky wilderness. To make up for not being able to post the past couple of days, I offer you two photos.

The first one is of one of the funnest things on the planet: playing fetch with the dogs in the water. We’ve got Prufrock, the whiter one in the back, and Scout, the darker one in the front. And, yes, that’s a very dirty me, fixing to throw their stick. Pruf was quite a swimmer in his youth, but now that he’s about 11 and a half, his skills have declined. Instead of a full-throttle paddle in pursuit of a stick, he’s more likely now to bound through the water for a few steps, stop, sigh, and look at me with a pathetic expression that conveys something like, “I can’t find the stick, please throw another.” And we repeat the cycle.

Scout is scared of everything, including swimming, and, just between you and me, she has a fraction of Pruf’s intellect. Sometimes, she’ll bring a stick back to me if the water is shallow enough. Otherwise, she can’t quite figure out the whole swimming thing. I coaxed her a long a bit on this trip and actually got her to dog paddle. In true Scout fashion, of course, her dog paddle didn’t look like any other dog paddle I’d ever seen. She moved like an otter, twisting through the water.

A quick look through my photo library reveals that I have numerous versions of this same photo–in this exact same watering hole–from various years. You can never have enough photos of being in the water with the dogs.

The second photo isn’t a sunset; it’s something almost better. The light at sunset. The way the pinks and yellows stretch across the sky and illuminate something as mundane as a pine cone gives dusk such an energy. Things in the Eastern part of the sky seem to light up as the sun casts its parting rays across the horizon. It’s just beautiful.

So, here are some pine cones.