July 3rd pictures

Yesterday I thought it would be swell to go see what it’s like down in the woods. I haven’t been down there since, well, probably the last time I put up pictures from there, so probably about a month ago. There are approximately 500 mosquitoes per square inch and wood nettle almost up to my shoulders in some places, so I coated myself in a healthy (i.e. unhealthy) layer of Deet and wore long pants and boots and a head net tucked into my collar. Ultimately I wanted to go down to the river bed which I figured would be quite exposed, as dry as things have been here. But before I got there I heard some young kids whooping it up at the opposite riverbank and did not feel like wandering around doing my picture-taking thing in the same stretch of river. It would have cramped my style. The heat index by that point was around 100.

So then I wandered around and looked at other things for as long as I could tolerate it, which was for about 10 minutes.

1. Jack-in-the-pulpit fruit, unripe

: 2. Grasping tentacle-y limbs of tree by the bend of the stream

: 2a. Yup, it’s verdant out there.

: 3. Of course the stream isn’t much of a stream these days. It never is; it’s usually only filled when there’s snow melt. It fills with some heavier rains as it did earlier this spring, but it’s been bone dry for some time.

: 4. Detail on the bottom of the stream bed.

: 5. Barbed wire fence that randomly marks the boundary between ours and our neighbors’ property, which is cheerfully ignored. Our neighbor sanctions this wandering, though.

: 6. Wood nettle in flower. Wood nettle isn’t nearly as bad as stinging nettle, from what I understand — I’ve never encountered stinging nettle. But this stuff is irritating too. It managed to scratch me through my jeans.