| Field Trip: |
Municipal Rose Garden/Rosicrutian Museum |
| Trip Date: |
April 26, 2008 |
| Report Author: |
Scott Hinrichs |
| Report Date: |
April 28, 2008 |
Bugs and mummies on a tostada swimming in gravy.
Yes, dear fellow club members, another Milpitas Camera Club Dining/Shooting
excursion has passed you by!
This Saturday, April 26 started out with two MCC members wedged into a narrow
booth at the Bite-o-Wyoming hash house for breakfast. (Bite-o is the official
sponsor of this year’s Milpitas Camera Club Olympic Eating Iron-Gut
Competition.) Mike, of course, was working out for his big gravy-eating events
at the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics and I was sticking with my favored
category, the Meat Mastication Marathon. Incidentally, I took a bronze in the
’76 games, but I’m finding the young guys are too good for an old meat-mucker
like me. I’ll keep going as long as I can because the competition gets in your
blood.
After our mandibular workout, we drove to the
San Jose Municipal Rose Garden and
cinched our gear around our bulging bellies. Mike naively asked about how I
would go about shooting the roses (most of which were off the peak of their
pulchritude). His question made me laugh out loud.
"Roses? Roses! Who shoots roses?" I said sardonically. "What? Do I look like
one of them pansy flower photographers?!! I’m here for the bugs, boy! ...the
gol-darned vermin!"
A look of understanding washed over the face of my brother with the lens. "Oh!
Insects! Let’s get going!" He said joyfully, as he eagerly snapped his macro
lens loudly into its bayonet seating.
I had forgotten that Mike was a notorious proponent of the phylum Arthropoda: of
the subphylums of Hexopoda - the true bugs; Myriapoda - the millipedes and
centipedes; and Chelicerata - the arachnids, spiders and scorpions. His
chambered heart has a more than commodious capacity for the love of beings
armored with chitinous exoskeletons, possessing articulated appendages in
numbers of six, eight or a hundred, and scurrying about at the behest of their
surging ventral nervous systems and dorsal hearts. Regardless of whether you are
a thing that sees with compound eyes, or lays your eggs in the living bodies of
your neighbors, or has a conspicuous ovipositor, or lives an openly symbiotic or
parasitic lifestyle, you have a true friend in Mike - a man who loves all
Proterozoic throwbacks just as he loves his fellow primates.
We saw the Rose Garden from the dirt-side up - the way it should be explored.
Occasionally I would see Mike with his head above the rose canopy, but he also
took to rooting in the grass and dirt inserting his macro lens behind the
curtain of foliage to the place where the small creatures do their daily
business. After a time, Karen dropped by and asked about the roses and I had to
snap a few obligatory shots of the roses just to prove to people that I had been
at the Rose Garden. (I’ve never taken a good picture of a damn rose - and I
never will!)
An hour of more rooting passed as though it were seconds and it was nigh time to
meet the other Karen at the
Rosicrutian Museum in front of the pregnant hippopotamus.
We all decided to tour the museum this time and were pleasantly surprised at the
museum’s liberal camera policy - only flashes and tripods prohibited, but no
limit on available light photos. We visited all the pharaohs and mummies and saw
the fake tomb and, generally, had a very nice time at the museum. We capped off
the experience with a 35-minute show in the Rosicrutian planetarium - it wasn’t
quite a seat-gripping experience, but some of us had a nice nap while the voice
told us all about the Mithraic mythology and ancient astrology.
Three of us ended our pleasant afternoon at a nearby Mexican restaurant,
crunching on tortilla chips slathered in delicious salsa and sharing the shade
of a large tree on the open air patio.
Our excursion was a small but very enjoyable experience - too bad you missed the
bugs, the mummies, the tortillas and the fun!
© 2008 S.R. Hinrichs |