I am drawn to piles of stone.

Much of the appeal is that a pile of stones, no matter how disorganized or haphazard it appears to be, is clearly a product of human intervention. Outside an avalanche, a pile of stones doesn’t happen by accident. Somebody put them there. The exact placement of the stones may have been a matter of chance or convenience, but nonetheless they were put there—and put there deliberately.

People have been piling stone on stone for millenia. Literally. There are cairns and megalithic structures dating back to 9000 BC. Piling stones has always been a means of communication. At first, a pile of stones was a simple way to mark a trail—a device for telling others which way to go. Humans being human, the simple eventually became elaborate. Trail markers became boundary markers—a device for telling others where not to go. As the messages communicated by the piles of stones became more elaborate and sophisticated, so did the piles themselves. People began to pile stone for artistic and spiritual reasons.

And we got Newgrange in County Meath, And we got the pyramids at Giza. And we got the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. What is a tomb or a temple, after all, but a sophisticated pile of stones?

Obviously, the piles of stone I photograph haven’t any intentional meaning. They weren’t put there for any religious, artistic or social reason. They were just dumped there. Raw material at a construction site.

But the actual reason the stones are piled in any particulat place is, for me, entirely irrelevant. In my mind, I always choose to attach some sort of social significance to the stones.

Not seriously, of course, but inventing some meaning for the pile changes the way I see the stones. By giving the pile some arbitrary purpose, the stones cease to be mute construction material waiting to be used. Like those earliest piles of stone, they become articulate; they convey a message.

And they become beautiful.

Maybe this is one of the reasons I became so engaged by that chunk of curbing.

One of the things I love most about Utata—the peculiar collective of photographers I’m involved with—is a project we call Iron Photographer. We’ve been doing IP projects since April of 2006. Every two weeks Jamelah Earle and I come up with three elements—two compositional elements and an artistic element—which our members try to put together in an artful way.

The IP process begins when Jamelah and I chat about the elements over Instant Messaging. We purposely refuse to come up with a list of possible elements in advance; we want the elements to grow organically out of the conversation. Sometimes one (or both) of us isn’t in the mood to be creative, and the process is messy and awkward and a jangle of nerves, annoying as a paper cut. Other times the process is like the very best jazz, improvisational and intelligent and funny and entirely unpredictable. Sometimes it starts off one way and ends another, or goes through two or three iterations of each. But somehow, we always manage to come up with something.

The elements can be…let’s call them idiosyncratic. Something with stripes, a food item, shot slightly out of focus (IP 47). Something white, a chair, shot in a gothic style (IP 102). A plastic bag, something red, shot in square format (IP 118).

What’s amazing to me is how often the members of Utata can take the most impossible and bizarre elements and find incredibly creative and artful ways to put them together. They do it so beautifully and with such consistency that they’ve forced me to become a better photographer in an attempt to keep up with them.

There’s nothing quite like a community of smart, funny, creative people to keep the creative juices percolating (if juices percolate—which under most circumstances, they don’t but in Utata percolating juices wouldn’t raise an eyebrow).

By chance, I heard the weather forecast last night. ‘Fog advisories for the morning; commuters should be alert.’ So I set my alarm for six o’clock ante meridiem—telling myself I’d go to bed early, which of course I failed to do. So there’s me at 6am, looking out the window and not seeing a bit of fog through the dark. Nothing. So I booted up my computer, went to work, and didn’t look out the window again until around eight o’clock.

And we had fog.

I’d completely failed to consider the mechanics of fog production. By 8:15 I was on my bicycle, by 8:30 I was on the bike path that ran along the creek.

It was a chilly ride, and wet. The fog wasn’t particularly thick, but it made the world all clammy and dark and weird and sometimes a wee bit dangerous. Occasionally it was more like a mist than fog. I stopped under one of the bridges to tie my hair back.

When I stopped, I surprised a feral cat with three kittens. The cat and two of the kittens scampered off up the creek bank; one of the kittens panicked and ran the other way—toward the creek. The creek was running low so the kitten wasn’t in any real danger, but it mewed and cried and was obviously frightened at being separated from the others. So I played border collie for about ten minutes, and eventually succeeded in herding the little bugger back across the bike path and up the bank where the others were.

Did I take a photo of the cat and kittens? Sadly, no. I didn’t take the camera out of the bike bag until after I’d dealt with the kitten. By the time I got the camera out, the thoughtless little bastards had scurried away. Still, it was pleasant under the bridge.

I had much better luck farther down the trail, when I came across Wrigley. I’ve met this dog and his human companion three or four times in the last couple of months. He owns property in the area; Wrigley owns him. He’s a classic golden retriever—smart, friendly, a wee bit loopy, eager to please. And I was reminded why you never want to wear black around a golden; after a few minutes of petting and hugging Wrigley had left about thirty-six pounds of dog hair on my clothes.

I mentioned earlier that the fog made the world a wee bit dangerous—and so it did, for two reasons. First, all those wet leaves were surprisingly slick; if you took a corner at speed, they’d slide out from under the tires. But the bigger danger came from the fact that the bike path wends its way through groves of walnut trees. Walnut trees drop walnuts. And they drop walnut leaves to hide the walnuts.

So concealed beneath all those lovely leaves are these handball-sized organic land mines waiting for some unsuspecting cyclist to plow into them. And it’s almost impossible not to smack into a few on a long ride. When you use toe cages on your pedals (like I do) finding a walnut with your front tire can get pretty exciting.

Even though wet leaves and walnuts are a massive pain in the cyclist’s ass, I have to admit I like them. First, they’re pretty—and pretty goes a long way. Second, they discourage those folks who ride for exercise from using that particular path. I’ve got nothing against riding for exercise, but so many of the people who do that seem to think those of us who ride for the enjoyment of it are just in the way. We’re taking up valuable bike space that could be more effectively utilized for cardiovascular improvement. Or something like that.

In a couple of weeks the wind will blow most of those leaves away. In a couple of weeks the squirrels will have gathered most of the walnuts. And the exercise crew will be back. And that’s okay too. At least they’re out riding. They’ll just have to get used to me stopping at irregular intervals in the bike path to take photographs and herd kittens.

The fog has burned off now. It’s sunny outside—beautiful blue sky, mid-70s, very light breeze. I’ve got an afternoon of editing in front of me. Editing and noodling around with book cover designs. Even though I wasn’t on the bicycle for exercise this morning, I can feel the ride in my legs. It’s a pretty good feeling.

If I was a golden retriever, I’d turn around three times, lay down, and take a nap.

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

I like slow modes of travel: walking and bicycling. But sometimes cycling is just too fast. On a bicycle you don’t have time to stop and visit with the young woman in a wheelchair who is being pulled along by an enthusiastic one-eyed Samoyed named Astra. Why was the woman in a wheelchair? I don’t know—I didn’t ask. How did Astra lose her eye? I don’t know—I didn’t ask. This is what I do know: Astra is a dog, and all dogs are wonderful no matter how many eyes they have. She’s not a one-eyed dog; she’s a dog—a dog who  happens to have half as many eyes as most dogs. But you don’t judge a dog by the number of its eyes. You judge it by its dogness.

The same is true of people, by the way. The number of operative legs a person has is a pretty inadequate metric for evaluation. If you’re on a bicycle—or worse, in a car—you may not stop long enough to remember that.

On foot you can stop and chat. I’m a big fan of chatting. Oh, I enjoy deep, meaningful conversations about politics and religion and Important Things as well. But there’s something delicious about a brief aimless chat—with friends or with strangers. “Hi, hello, how are you, isn’t it a lovely day, you have a beautiful dog, I like your hat, is there anything better than a sunny day by the river, take care, g’bye.” You can’t do that so easily on a bicycle.

If I’d been on my bike, I probably wouldn’t have stopped to chat with Mike and Jodi, who were just loitering along the river, taking a walk themselves, watching the water go by and the fisherman waste their bait. They seemed a tad embarrassed when I asked if I could take their photograph—but he straightened his cap and she removed her sunglasses, and both seemed pleased by what they saw in the LCD monitor.

Just ordinary people out on an ordinary Sunday afternoon taking an ordinary walk. The only thing out of the ordinary was when some long-haired character with a camera approached them, nattering away, and asking to take their photograph. I figure I gave them something to talk about—fair exchange for a photograph. With any luck, Mike and Jodi will have met Astra on their walk.

Farther up the river—much, much farther—I came across (actually my friend Stacey came across it first and pointed it out to me) a water-logged text written in what appears to be a form of Sanskrit. I never would have seen this on a bicycle (nor, I daresay, would she). There’s a Hindu temple nearby; I assume somebody was studying along the river and accidentally dropped the book in the water. Or perhaps somebody just wanted to share it with the frogs and fish and pelicans (the annual autumn white pelican migration is taking place now—is it a coincidence that the best English-language books are published by Pelican Press? Well, yes. Of course it’s a coincidence. C’mon).

It’s a beautiful written language, Sanskrit, and although I’ve no idea at all what this says, it’s a lovely addition to the river.

Steven Wright is correct—everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time. This is why you should take the time. Or make the time. Because the people you meet and the things you see will, if you let them, take you farther than your legs will carry you. It can give you an entirely new understanding of walking distance.

(Update: I am reliably told by Arvind Kumar that the text is in Hindi, not Sanskrit; both languages use the Devanagari script.)