Two more experiments from November 28th: river of news, news of river. Bottom image I refer to as "Call of the Wild". Also two from California, parts of the Manzana River that got burned out in one of the largest wildfires (second largest in recorded Calif. history I think) a few years ago.  Ranch hands welding fences or something in dry grass and wind. Sloppy, reckless, stupid. Sparks took off and thousands of acres gone over weeks, not days, of burning. Unimaginable. I took these images last year as part of my project to explore rivers of flood and burn, Virginia and California. I still have more to do. I backpacked along this river when I was a teenager. At one point you leave the Manzana and hike steeply over a high, exposed ridge called Hurricane Deck into another beautiful watershed called the Sisquoc where we camped (also burned out in the fire).  Hurricane Deck is brutal in the summer. No water for miles of hard hiking: dehydration and cramps. Still, all of it fantastic in its sparse, western way. The four-panel one is called bear-tracks because the bottom left panel, along the muddy bank below, shows a pair of fresh bear tracks (probably too small to see). Black Bears here. Grizzlies, as featured on the state flag and once upon a time everywhere, have been extinct in the state for decades. Pointing out the irony of our flag is a truism. It's always been too sad, and obvious, for such clever observations. As a kid growing up under a flag that was pure idea, a kind of fiction or lie, you figured the flag could just as easily been an image of a unicorn. I realized later that as a kid I felt the flag really represented, unintentionally, betrayal. And with it I assumed that such an extermination should never happen again, like the flag was a kind of oath. That idealism and naivete live on.