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About SAW

Born in D.C. and grown in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maine, and New Mexico, Sarah Anne Wharton's photographic experience began as a ten-year-old with a 110-film format camera: a sleek, black tube, half the size of a sandwich. She brought it with her everywhere, congratulating herself on a solid choice of future career when she caught two chipmunks eating nuts in one frame. From then on, traveling from state to state, country to country, and person to person, SAW has kept at least one camera strapped around her neck.

She is curious and exuberant, and loves to bake, whistle, and photograph your face.

Sarah currently works, lives, and plays between rural central Pennsylvania and urban Brooklyn, New York, but travels often and everywhere. Come visit and you can meet her coyote mutt puppy, Boon, and listen to the constant rain spatter of the PA mountains from her deck.

July

7/15/2012

A string of July days – precisely 15 of them – have blown by with the help of hot, summer sun sliding across deep blue, clouds that bring rain and clouds that don’t, hours at work, hours at home, hours with seltzer water, chatter, and wine.

Why so fast, Summer?

If your lengthy days weren’t taking me across the country this week – to my golden heart’s friends, new decks, big cities, humidity’s curly hair, and shared kisses, cats, and coffees – I would be displeased at your speed.

However, I have other things to muse on in this moment, for instance: the potential cavity that my recent vanilla ice cream and rainbow-flavored Nerds habit might be forming; the cool night air on the other side of the door that waits for me to take the dogs out; the endless trail of moth carcasses in the graveyard under the table where Annie sits; the question of sleeping on my back or my stomach tonight; and love.

Also, all the faces I will see and hold and squeeze and kiss in July’s next 15 days, and a few of August’s after that.

Be well. Slow down. Sleep sweet.

– SAWK

Posted in New Mexico, SAWK Living Tags: cottonwoods, dogs, New Mexico, puppies, pups, San Fidel, school, st. joseph mission school, sunrise, sunset, trailer

Observations

7/1/2012

– While volunteering at your local recycling drop-off center (next to the Mining Museum), and sorting through all the plastic bottles left by those who couldn’t come during manned hours, it is quite a bummer to realize that 1) the small, clear, and greenish #4 phial in your hand is not recyclable at this location, and 2) it is a Summer’s Eve personal douche container. Fail.

– There are bright, unexpected moments that catch you in a flash, like sitting in a hot car – an oven with wheels, surrounded by sun and slow-moving air – and then opening a water bottle to briefly note the swift scent of rain under its cap. It mimics exactly the fresh smell of a cool morning after grey clouds shower the ground during sunset the night before.

– Colors of things in this landscape that are black or brown or green turn blue or gold or orange at the slightest, lightest provocation.

– There is little more simultaneously satisfying and unsatisfying than to finish a good book, a loved one . . . It is like waiting, waiting, waiting for vacation only to know it will soon end, or scratching an aching itch and by doing so, knowing it will hurt once you stop scratching. Fulfillment and disappointment skipping hand in hand.

– Is there anything more perfect than something perfect, but not contrived?

– Water is life! – You learn this from the desert. And like everyone else does here – when they ask in church or when they dance in swirling colors and feathers on top of the mesa – you pray for rain.

– Upright puppy tails circling your bed at 6:30a on a Sunday are enemy periscopes, ever-vigilant, ready to mark the exact moment that your feet touch the floor, thus notifying their vessels to let the morning onslaught begin. If you haven’t been licked to death by the black one or pawed to death by the brindle as you stumble through rough, morning waters on your way to coffee, you may just win the battle today, soldier.

– Today is a day of purple flowers, clouds stretched intermittently across the dawn sky like a thin, white, crocheted blanket, and dark, dusky drapes of oncoming rain – or at least the hope of it.

And – considering that it is the 1st of July – let’s have a tribute to the dog days of summer.

Be well. Send rain!

– SAWK

Posted in A Dog's Life, New Mexico, SAWK Living Tags: cottonwoods, dogs, New Mexico, observations, puppies, pups, storm

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From the Morning

6/30/2012

In the desert, it isn’t sounds that you awake to like it is back east.

In the forest, the birds are your alarm, chirping and twittering increasingly until the rest of us creatures stretch, bleary-eyed, but upright. In the city, it is others that wake you, shuffling and moving, the slow close of early morning car doors, the first rumble of an engine come to life, the beeps and honks of vehicular communication.

No, in the desert, the sounds and movings come after . . . It is light that first animates.

Not until the warm, golden glow crests the tops of hills and horizons do ants move under their pebbled domes or birds sing morning songs of just a few notes.

Not until yellow arms grow, expand, and reach out to you through cracks in curtains and windows do puppies rise and whimper to go outside and greet them.

A day once dawned, and it was beautiful.
A day once dawned from the ground.
Then the night she fell –
And the air was beautiful.
The night she fell all around.

So look see the days,
The endless coloured ways,
And go play the game that you learned
From the morning.

And now we rise –
And we are everywhere –
And now we rise from the ground.
And see, she flies –
And she is everywhere –
See she flies all around

So look see the sights –
The endless summer nights –
And go play the game that you learned
From the morning.

– Nick Drake, From the Morning

Be well today.

– SAWK

Posted in New Mexico, SAWK Living Tags: cottonwoods, New Mexico, San Fidel, sunrise

Eight Months

6/28/2012

As I sit in the darkening kitchen, I watch the wind that leads the storm shake the weeds outside the window.

It is hot, hot, hot – each day, every day – and we need this rain, but it only teases.

And the expansiveness I feel as I wait reminds me of driving across Arizona almost eight months ago. Like then, I am alone. Like then, I listen to quiet music. Like then, I am mostly still, only moving in small increments. Like then, the wind whips in rushes and gusts, very visible and barely audible on the other side of glass.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

I left Tucson, taking my time towards home, shortcutting into the mountains through Clifton and the Morenci Copper Mine as quickly as possible, heading north on AZ-191.

It wasn’t fast at all.

What with construction through the tiny mining town and being routed through a section of the working mine, it took over an hour to go just a few miles. Just when I could see open road through the tight underpass of some giant metal equipment, a gust of wind blasted the sweet smell of fall away through my driver’s side window at the same moment that an acrid wall of peach-colored dust blew in through the other one. Coughing, sputtering, and wiping grit off my right cheek, I maneuvered through the lattice past the tailings and machinery, tasting freedom mixed with coppery dirt.

It was in hour six after leaving the mine – when my accrued driving time should have meant that I was two hours from home – that I realized my scenic shortcut through the Apache National Forest had gone awry.

The map in my head matched my trusty friend riding shotgun – Rand McNally – so why wasn’t I in Eagar, AZ yet, only a few hours from my cozy trailer? . . . Had the mine tailings I’d breathed rotted my brain? Had they destroyed the many years worth of geographical knowledge I’d built up every time I lovingly pored over maps and atlases, tracing my finger along roads! rivers! canyons! mountains! – learning and imprinting them into my mind? . . .

Either way, I was only halfway along the winding, curving stretch of 191 that needed traveling, the sun dropping with the temperatures to ice another November in the mountains.

I stopped to pee on the side of the road, ducking behind a juniper out of habit. It didn’t matter that in just shy of six hours, I saw only four cars – making the ratio of humans to turkeys 1:5 and the ratio of humans to javelinas 1:2 – I had a modest reputation to retain among all those myriad homo sapiens strangers who might unwisely decide to drive great distances in the growing dusk and wilderness like I had!

Eventually, I topped out in a meadow before heading down hairpin turns as the sun finally set. The golden light breaking through boughs of pines and aspens turned the pines gold and the aspens whiter than the snow trapped in patches on the ground under them.

Driving the final two hours through the thick pitch black up NM-60, 36, 117, I made it home after a deep, grueling, beautiful 12 hours.

Now as I sit in the complete dark of storm and evening, all that I saw – the cotton fields outside Safford, the rocks and crags towards Clifton, the pinks and oranges of the mine, the heights and trees of the mountains – seem removed and gone, too far from this time and this place.

Eight months ago, in two hours from now, I was walking up the steps, legs and mind both sore and stiff from the length of the drive and time in my own company. Like then, I am tired. Like then, I am thirsty. Like then, I will let the dogs out one last time before I fumble and trip through the dark to my bed.

Be well, and sweet sleep.

– SAWK

Posted in SAWK Living, Travel Tags: Arizona, roadtrip, Tucson

I Can Say that I’ve Lived Here

6/27/2012

When you live alone in a lonely place, you start to notice things.

Each of these things is quiet, and – like with you and everything else that breathes and doesn’t – the wind rushes through and around them.

All goes slow or still. Dusklight – the only shadowy movement in the bedroom – crossing the dresser on the drawer that never closes all the way. A sudden raven – smart, and social, and dark against the endless gold and brown and grey – leaves with a whooshing of wings.

People are scarce, and water is more so, but when – every few days – heavy clouds pass and drop quick, cold splatters that shock you with their scent and take your breath away, they cover the footprints you’ve left since the last rain. When days go by without sight of storms or souls, I can track my solitary trails up and down the road, those feet from Sunday with the dogs and the noon, these from the sunset when I wanted the wind, those from the morning before the light . . . each set the visualization of a tangible memory and experience – the “Sarah was here” . . .

Evening darkens another walk, another set of footprints, grasses and clouds the last things – noticed or not – that are left lit.