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Friday Slide Show: The Urban Jungle
23 September 2016
You just never know what you're going to find around here. On a recent excursion in the city, we thought we knew exactly what would present itself to us. But when we got out of the car and looked around, we thought we'd taken a wrong turn. Where were we?
We were in the urban jungle, that's where. On safari without a guide. Armed only with a dSLR and a zoom lens, itself protected with nothing more than a circular polarizer.
Were we afraid?
Are you kidding? What's to be afraid of? We've lived long enough. But if you happen to be investing in a retirement plan, you might want to stay home because there's no guarantee this safari won't be your last.
Well, there never is. So many oddball things happen to people that you never really know. That's life in the urban jungle. You're invincible until you aren't.
We hadn't planned on taking a picture yet when we closed the car door and turned around to find this peculiar building with exotic street landscaping posing for us. The duct work of the building just on the other side of the matching fence added a feral aspect to the scene, as if the place were crawling with air ducts.
That's life in the urban jungle. You're invincible until you aren't.
We had no sooner turned the camera off when we spied a Morris Minor across the way but within reach of our telephoto range. A convertible at that, which makes it an even rarer sighting. And it had posed itself in front of some distinctive growth it would be rude to refer to as weeds. It really looked like the set for a TV series. For a very small TV.
A block away from where we'd planned to shoot, we turned the corner and were confronted by an oasis. The dirt path leading us in was irresistible.
What a lovely refuge. No one would ever find us here, we thought.
But it wasn't wild. It was landscaped. There were sitting areas and a pergola for shade. We suspect whoever owned the adjacent building had made a public park out of it for the employees working there.
A few minutes later we were back on the asphalt. We framed the wide street, an insanely tall street light, a crane, a building going up. Industrial indeed but only a few steps from the pergola.
An apartment building surprised us with a particularly soft-leaved plant by its entrance. We didn't do it justice. We wanted to touch it but there are some things you just don't hazard in the urban jungle. You have to observe the boundaries.
Our last shot amused us. In contrast to the modern building that began our safari, this one had a very old home next to a multi-story building, both of which had been barely spared by the freeway construction behind them. We arrived just after the Post Office truck, the only two signs of civilization in the neighborhood.
But shortly after, we both left, leaving the place the wild refuge it had been before we discovered it.
