Sculpting in Grass and Sand

I have been thinking about doing more videos for this blog.  There are only so many things that are actually fun to watch: a raptor dive-bombing a prairie dog, a herd of horses blasting across a grassy field, a dog running in slow-motion as in a dog food commercial, or a sexy lady walking down a sidewalk in high heels. 

And yet there are certainly a lot of videos out there.  Many of them use a standard trick of the movie industry: they make the camera move to hide the fact that nothing interesting is actually happening.  Or they just give up and stick a talking head in front of the camera.

That is why I appreciated a windy day recently near the Oregon Trail: the grass was only a foot or so high, but it was fine in texture, so the wave motion was lovely.  My little dog and I were revisiting her favorite sand dune.  When I saw this I had to smile:

I smiled because of something Thoreau had once written, in "Walden."  Normally his mind worked like a still-photographer instead of a cinematographer.  But he made an exception here:

"Frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the still waters, where a muskrat is crossing the stream, with only its nose above the surface.

[On a running fox:] Notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful. His pace is a sort of leopard canter. When the ground is uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves, conforming to the shape of the surface. He runs as though there were not a bone in his back.

In some places the ice crystals were lying upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the frost work of a longer night, crystals of a longer period, but to some eye unprejudiced by the short term of human life, melting as fast as the former."

That last sentence has always made my eyelashes flutter.  And indeed, a canoeist or kayaker, paddling through a marsh, will be quite amazed at how graceful a muskrat can seem in the water.  What Thoreau said of a fox could also be applied to any pet cat.

And the waves of sand on that dune, where my little darlin' disported so merrily, made much the same point with the waves in the spindly grass as Thoreau's "frost work of a longer night."