Ruby Tuesday – The Bishop, CA Edition!

Half way up California’s fabled East Side sits the quintessential Western town of Bishop.  I’d driven through there once before, ’round about 1980, but all I recall about that particular trip was that the brownies were absurdly green.

Ahem.

Fast forwarding to March of 2009, I had occasion to stop there with my buddy Lizz on our whirlwind tour of Southern California, ostensibly in search of wildflowers but taking in anything which was visually Not Massachusetts.  I’d expressed my desire to see Mount Whitney before descending into Death Valley, expecting the geographic contrast to possess a certain power (which it did,) and Lizz did me one better by first humoring me, then spiriting me a little ways farther north to Bishop, where Galen Rowel’s Mountain Light Gallery exhibits some of that photographer’s astounding work.

People.  If you’re ever in the area, make this stop an imperative.  You’ll be transported by one of the visionaries of modern photography to places which we mortals can barely imagine, exquisitely rendered by an artist of rare stature.  I bawled like a baby before half a dozen of his works.

By the time we left I was trembling, partly with desire to see what Galen saw, and partly out of the fear which comes from knowing how rare that gift really is.

We drove Up West ’till a late season snow storm made continuing imprudent, then parked and wandered around beneath the thick grey skies, benefiting from the dry air of the high desert as it ate the falling snows, leaving us to swim in the turbulent air below great granite massifs piercing a blanket ofy winter sky.

And amidst all of this, hints of Ruby enlivened the austere majesty of the High Country:

I bet you thought I forgot to dance with The Meme What Brung Me, courtesy of Mary.

No way, Mary.  I;m clumsy, but I’m not a cad.