I met this little long-toed salamander on the path to the observation blind at Ridgefield on an unusually cool spring morning. At first I thought it might just be cold and took my gloves off to warm it in my hands, but as I bent down I realized it was dead. Yet as I gently lifted it off the ground there was a slight twitch in its tail. Its arms and legs were desiccated, its eyes closed, and it looked to me like its body was shutting down. I’ve only ever seen salamanders at Ridgefield in the last moments of their lives, usually getting plucked from a hiding spot by hungry herons and bitterns, but this is the first time I’ve seen one up close.

I held it for a little while, hoping against hope, but when I finally set it down beside the path one last shiver trembled through its body and it never moved again. I’ve loved salamanders since I was a little boy so I was a little teary-eyed walking back to the car, consoling myself that I gave it all we can really hope for at the end, a warm hand to hold as we die.

As I hiked the Kiwa Trail at Ridgefield, I saw many treefrogs but none that I could photograph until I found this well-hidden frog. It was more cooperative than the others and I like the way the out-of-focus blades of grass frame the image.

This red-legged frog had been sitting in the duckweed before hopping up onto a small rock. I wanted to convey a sense of the frog emerging from one world to another, so I placed it at the bottom of the frame with the top third green water, the middle third transitioning from water to earth, the bottom third solid ground.

After having luck finding red-legged frogs at Ridgefield in the summer of 2002, I returned a couple of weeks later and was pleased to find them (and the occasional bullfrog) out and active again, and while none got quite as close as the previous visit, they did present some nice photo opportunities in the duckweed.

Unfortunately, although I look for them every time I hike the Kiwa Trail, I’ve never seen them since.

A day before my birthday in 2002, I came across some red-legged frogs at the edge of a quiet channel alongside the Kiwa Trail at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. It was a nice early birthday present, my only previous encounter with a redleg was the one I found a few months earlier when I heard its awful cry and found it breathing its last as it was swallowed by a red-spotted garter snake. This was a much more pleasant experience — especially for the frog — and I was thankful for the chance to spend so much time watching them as they moved around the pond.

Most of the frogs were either at the edge of the pond or in the pond itself and grew still when I walked up and sat down, but soon enough resumed their hopping to and fro. But I was stunned this one actually hopped up into the grass right beside me. It was too close to use my telephoto zoom, fortunately for me it stayed where it was while I switched to my macro lens, then all I had to do was lean over and take the picture.

This is not only the same treefrog I’ve posted before, but it is literally the next picture I took. Kind of funny that my two favorite pictures of it were taken back to back. It changed positions a bit and then climbed down onto a leaf to lay down.

Ordinarily the tall green grasses that grow each year at Ridgefield are my enemy. As the spring progresses, the grasses get so tall that they block the view of many of the ponds around the auto tour. On this day, however, they became my friend.

As I walked the short trail to the observation blind, a nice couple saw my camera and pointed out a treefrog next to the path. It was clinging to a tall blade of grass amidst the other foliage. The frog was much more tolerant than other treefrogs I’ve seen at the refuge and I eased my tripod into place until I found a nice pleasing green background.

As other visitors came up the path, I passed on news of the frog as it had been passed to me, backing out my tripod so everyone could get a good look and take their own pictures. I ended up taking fewer pictures than I normally would have but even so ended up with one of my favorite pictures.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s little known trilogy The Lord of the Rings, there’s a passage where the wizard Gandalf is forced to take the fellowship through the Mines of Moria. It is a passage they take only as a last resort, as the dwarves who once mined Moria have abandoned it. The dwarves dug and dug into the earth, creating spectacular rooms in the rock. But one day they dug too deep and unleashed a great evil into the world.

It’s a passage I’ve been thinking about lately as somehow, sometime during the past couple of years, I dug too deep. The world can rest easy, I’ve unleashed no flaming demons from the depths of hell. But something has awakened. I don’t know why, but it has, and the question now is what to do about it.

What has awakened is the desire to create. I’ve had an outlet for this in some sense for the past decade through my photography. But to be honest, I’m not much of a photographer. It’s the wildlife that I love and photography for me is a means to an end. The desire to create obviously isn’t evil or even bad, in fact it’s a good thing. But there is a very real danger, especially if you can’t find the proper outlet. The desires may fade with time, but if not, you either need to find a way to express them or find a way to kill them (and risk that a part of you dies as well).

When we moved to Portland a few years ago, I traded a long commute in the car to a long commute on the light rail. The beauty of the light rail was that I could read or work on my laptop. For the first time in years, my web site finally started getting regular updates. I started reading through my backlog of magazines.

Then one night in late 2003 I was flipping through the channels and came across Ophah on Larry King Live. She was explaining that she had stopped her book club because she had set it up so that she was only covering books of living authors, but she wanted to cover both current literature as well as the classics. She brought up John Steinbeck and spoke about him for a while, and it dawned on me that I’d never read anything by Steinbeck.

My wife picked up Travels with Charlie and I was hooked. Next up was The Grapes of Wrath, then Lonesome Dove, then Harper Lee’s gorgeous little book To Kill A Mockingbird. The rest of the year brought a flood of novels (for me it was a flood anyway), from classics like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury to modern authors like Gregory Maguire.

At some point during the year, a story started forming in my head. I hadn’t done any creative writing since high school. That was twenty years ago, and I only wrote then because I had to for my classes. I’ve always enjoyed writing, I’ve just never done any creative writing. But this story started to form, slowly coalescing and shifting direction in my head. Then another story started to form.

I kept reading and when I got to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, I started thinking about writing my stories down. During Ursula Hegi’s Stones From the River, I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped in the middle of Ursula’s book and read Stephen King’s On Writing, an excellent book about writing a novel. I then finished Stones From the River and continued reading other novels.

In November of 2005 I participated in NaNoWriMo, a contest to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Our friend Heather had done it in previous years and I decided to give it a shot. I decided to start writing the second story that had been swirling around in my head and I reached the 50,000 word target before the end of the month.

I haven’t written any more the past couple of months, I’ve been pretty tired and not mentally up to it. Pat Robertson says its because I once voted in support of medical marijuana, but it’s actually just because work has been pretty busy. A lot of fun, but busy.

But things should be slowing down soon and the desire to work on my novel is getting stronger. I’d like to start organizing my thoughts in an outliner (The Omni Group’s excellent OmniOutliner) and a graphics package (OmniGraffle, also from the Omni Group), since I have some plot points I haven’t figured out and some themes I want to make sure get carried through the story.

And I hope to get out and do some more hiking, nothing gets my conscious and subconscious mind going like a good romp in the woods. And that’s all well and good. It’s all well and good as long as I can find the time (and more importantly, the mental energy) to do it. I’ve been writing a lot more on my web site and obviously a little bit here in the blog, so that’s helped as well.

Digging too deep. The real danger I suppose is not that I won’t be able to work a bit on the book, or take some pictures, or update my web site. The real danger is that I don’t know where all this will lead. It might not lead anywhere, just that I’ll add a few more creative outlets to my hobbies. I don’t think there’s much danger to be honest, because while I have a desire to create, I don’t have a desire to publish. Which seems to be a little unusual, but there it is. And that alone should be enough to keep my creative outlets a joy and not a job.

It’s kind of exciting, in some ways it feels like a rebirth. Maybe it just took me forty years to find myself, something most people do when they’re twenty. So I’m a little slow.

And what does the newt picture at the top have to do with any of this? It doesn’t really, although one does play a small role in the book. I just love newts and I love that picture.