Author: David Jenkins

“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!”

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, James Thurber Short Story published March 18 1939 The New Yorker

It’s a fair assumption that while most will have heard of Walter Mitty, in one of the movie guises, most will not have read the original James Thurber short story.  Here is a link to  a version.

As it turns out, with time on my hands at home, I’ve watched the 2013 video version starring Ben Stiller a couple of times the past few days.

The Stiller version has Walter working for Life Magazine, just as it is about to merge, (as it did in reality). One of their photographers, played by Sean Penn sends an image for the final front cover. The story in the movie revolves around that.

I’d watched the movie at a theater some years back and have to confess I’m not a Stiller fan, so it had little impact on me.
This time however I was taken, not with the story, but with the recurring theme of the best of Life Magazine. From the amazing sweeping scenery, to the interesting (strange) characters that have small but incremental parts.  Just like reading Life.
The Director of Photography (DOP), Stuart Dryburgh, has done an amazing job of setting many of the scenes to emulate that story lines of many a great Life Magazine story. Take the drunken helicopter pilot. The kids playing football high in the Himalayas (can you be low in the Himalayas?) A volcano eruption, and miles and miles of ranging Icelandic mountain country.

The second time I watched it with the sound turned down, and fast forwarded the ‘talking bits’,

It’s no secret, to those who’ve followed the my humble Saturday Evening Posts, that magazines like Time, Life, Nat Geo and The Bulletin played a big part of my early photographic training.  While still at school I was following the work of David Duncan Douglas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Eve Arnold and Dorothea Lange, to mention but a few. I was fortunate that my local small town library had a grand supply of magazines and photo journalism books, and to be honest, I immersed myself.

Places and people I never heard of, nor had any idea about how they fitted in to wider world, filled my head with the joy of the story and the wonder of the photographs.

So much so, that it is fair to say, that if certain events and people had not occurred in my youth (all good, no regrets), then I might well have filled that “Walter Mitty” in me, and as John Muir said, “With a pocketful of biscuits I set off to explore the inventions of God“.  Well, with a Nikon F, and a few rolls of Tri-X perhaps 🙂

Life Magazine had a motto, “To see Life; to See the World”, in the movie it becomes, “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life”

One of the most interesting photographic moments is when Walter finally catches up with photographer O’Connell as he is photographing a Snow Leopard. “A Ghost Cat“, say O’Connell, then decides not to take the picture, Walter asks why and O’Connell says, “Sometimes I don’t. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.”

All very symbolic and adventuresome. That I guess is why I enjoyed the visuals, with the sound turned down, less distractions to the brilliant camera work of the DOP.
Which left me with one unanswered question,  Who would go to photograph a ghost cat with a Nikon F3T (titanium) and a 300mm f/2.8 Nikon lens, without a lens hood?

And to paraphrase “The Alchemist“, by Paulo Choelo, “…the thing you really need is the thing you already have, you just need to learn to take a closer look. You don’t need to travel around the world, you had what you wanted all the time.”

Best wishes to all my Fellow-Stay-at-Home-rs.  Remain safe and well, and be brave to dream big dreams.

Enjoy.

. . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. “To hell with the handkerchief,” said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

“A Solitary Crow
In Winter snow
Needs no jewels”
Deng Ming-Dao

As a young lad, I watched, “Disaster Movies”, or read books that one way or another predicted, or pretended the “End of the World”, the lone hero/ine stranded, alone.  “War of the Worlds”, “The Day of the Triffids, “Panic”, “On the Beach”.
But never dreaming that perhaps one day, I would, with those around me, live in times of significant social, community and national change. On a scale that is impossible to grasp.

When I was a little lad, Neville Shute’s novel, “On the Beach” carried on its dust jacket a quote from
“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot.

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

It would be many years later, that I would be able to appreciate the depth of Eliot’s work.
As a country lad, our family would travel to Melbourne over the summer school holidays, and as best my young memory can recall is that somewhere or other in Frankston, or thereabouts part of the movie was filmed.  It was the talk of the dining table of our extended family at the time.  We used to swim at Frankston Beach, and explore along the cliffs toward Mount Martha.
And if I’m not stretching the memory too far, the making of the movie would have featured on the then fledgling tv news.
So much so that I recall our collection of kids, played at “Making Movies” that summer.
The female lead, Ava Gardener is  purported to have described Melbourne as “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world.” However it seems it was an enthusiastic Sydney copywriter who made up the quote.

It’s hard then as we face, “Self-Isolation”, “Social Distancing”, our personal hell of “4 metre square”, and the impossible task of finding Toilet Paper to grasp the huge changes thrust upon us. Perhaps not the end of the world, but I hope we all manage to come out the other side, safe, secure and with minimal loss.

Which brings me back to the Crow in the Snow.

Meng writes ,”A single crow standing unconcerned in the falling snow is the very image of independence. It needs, no clothing, no wealth, nor status.”

Readers will know I have quite the affinity for White-winged Choughs.  Not the independent bird of Meng’s meditation, but rather a community dependent bird. Their feeding as a group, their closeness with their young birds, the difficulties they face keeping their young together, and not losing to the family in the next territory, and their patient purposeful feeding always bring a smile to my face whenever I get to enjoy an encounter.

This bird, I’d guess to be a female, it and half a dozen or so of its  family were working along the downed logs foraging, but not eating.  Then when it seemed all had full beaks, they turned and all flew off.
“They have a nest somewhere and are feeding young”, EE observed.  And no doubt she was right.  We might on other occasions taken the time to follow them and see, but other duties called, and we left with their calls ringing through the Grey Box Forest.

Remain

Apologies to Jim Morrison-et al-, for changing “Riders on the Storm”.

EE and I were out and about along the local beach, with a storm offering just on the horizon.  The question of course, was how long?

We were enjoying the antics of a few beach birds, the usual suspects, Silver Gulls, a couple of loafing Pacific Gulls, and some noisy hungry young Greater Crested Terns.

Suddenly, as in literally out of nowhere, a flock of fast moving birds, swallow-like appeared, and I have to say that was my first reaction, and I looked back at the terns. Then the first of the flock approached, must too bulky for swallows, and those long narrow knife-like wings took me back to my youth, and I called, “Swifts”, because in those days, that is what we called them.

There was little light, but still, it was an opportunity.

These days they are called ‘White-throated Needletails”. And as they sped past, the white throat and inner tail marks were obvious. First it was only one or two, but they kept coming and in the end, boyscout count, there was around 40-50 fly by. Just that  little too high up for detail, and they didn’t make any variation in their travel line.

As kids on the open Mallee plains, we would often see them flitting about ahead of an impending weather event.  A fancy name for wind, rain, and thunder.  The air could be electric.
So it was no surprise they had been riding on the edge of the incoming squall.

On checking my Morecombe Fieldguide, they are described as:

Largest swift in Australia, … one of the fastest of all birds, …often gathers over headlands in humid unsettled weather preceding thunderstorms.

That sounds about right to me.  Simpson and Day add:

Wings swept back curved, anchor-like, tips pointed.

And by the time we had checked to see if there were any more, the first ones no doubt were approaching Footscray!

We took the hint and went back to the carpark, arriving just as the first few spots of rain came down, and the road was awash on the way out.

“Into this world we’re thrown…
An actor out on loan
 Riders on the storm.”

Enjoy