Getting the Boot

 These are currently my favorite boots.They're about 3 years old, and, as usual, I fear that they will be at their most comfortable right before they're worn out.

I have other boots; boots are my favorite footwear. No heels, though - I hate heels. Not on other people, just on me. Heels are pretty, but they hurt.

They might hurt less now; I had surgery on my feet to correct congenital bone deformations a few years ago. The receptionist asked me, as I left after getting my cast removed, "Are you going to go out and buy some great high heels now?" My answer was a resounding NO. I am all about comfort.

For most of my life, "dress shoes" meant high heeled sandals. A solid shoe had a tendency to squeeze my bunions, which was beyond painful. I bought sandals so that the bunion could stick out between the straps. Sure, it looked kind of funky, but it didn't hurt as much. My daughter did the opposite with her bunioned feet, because she was embarrassed by the bunions. No sandals, no flip flops - she wore shoes that hid her feet.

When I was in high school, these were my favorite dress shoes. (Yes, that's me wearing them.)

They were a big name brand, Candies, but I got them at a steep discount, because it was spring, and they were in fall colors. Pfft! I didn't care. I loved those shoes. But man, they HURT. If I wore them to a 2 day debate tournament, Friday and Saturday, I'd have to spend most of Sunday on my couch, off my feet. I'd limp through church, and most of that required sitting. Still, at that point, I considered it worth it, because the shoes were adorable.

At that age, I'd also deal with tight waistbands and other indignities, if I thought it looked good.

At 20, pregnancy forced me into flat shoes and clothes with stretch, and I realized that I'd been living my life all wrong. Now, if it isn't comfortable, I don't wear it, unless it's a lifesaving device.

The first time I came downstairs wearing these black boots with a dress, on my way to church, my youngest daughter informed me that I was fashionable. "That look is really hot right now, Mom! Good choice!"

That was not the response I got from my oldest daughter when I unpacked the boots at her house a couple of years ago. I'd come to attend my grandniece's naming ceremony, and was staying at my daughter's house; my nieces live about 30 minutes away from there. I'd worn sneakers through the airport, and had the boots in my luggage.

My daughter looked concerned. "Did you bring dress shoes?"

"These are my dress shoes." She looked blank, so I re-phrased. "I wear these with my dresses."

"Did you pack any church shoes?"

"These are my church shoes." Again the blank look, again the attempt to explain; "I wear these to church. (My daughter blinked.) I teach Gospel Doctrine in these shoes, every week."

"Did you bring any other shoes?"

I pointed to my sneakers. "These."

She was aghast. This is not surprising; she's despaired over my clothes, and wanted to dress me, since her age was in single digits.

She felt a bit better after we arrived at the synagogue. Another niece, the new baby's auntie, is easily the most fashionable person on that side of the family. She had on a dress and cowboy boots. My sister, the baby's grandma, is also terribly fashionable (and lovely); she had on a dress and knee high black boots.

My daughter felt better; not that she likes my boots, mind you, but because, "At least you aren't the only one." To be the only one doing anything is horrifying to her. I hope that she didn't notice that I'm the only one here in a pattern instead of a solid. Well, OK, not the only one; my niece has on a striped cardigan.

I think we all look pretty good. I certainly don't think that I look scandalous.

I am so very aware, however, that not everyone agrees with me. One of the things that frequently makes my life more difficult than it ought to be is the expectations for women's footwear, in either a business context or in a special occasion context.

My husband and I like to cruise, and cruises have formal nights. Dressing up isn't required, they won't bar you from the restaurants if you're dressed casually, but dressing up is nice. Plus, you can get great portraits on those nights. But, formal clothes are hard for me, specifically because of the shoes. I have a dress that I bought specifically for cruises. It's black and silver, from a higher end store than I usually patronize, looks good, and packs well. Yet it has never left my closet, because I can't find shoes that I'll wear and would be considered appropriate. My daughters lean on me to get ballet flats, but those are usually either too narrow or have zero arch support (or both), and as someone with collapsed arches, arch support is often a deal breaker issue.

Narrowness is also a huge issue. Go to the store, and put women's casual and dress shoes next to each other. The dress shoes will always, always be narrower. I've seen shoes marked "wide width" whose soles are an inch and a half narrower than my actual foot. With uncorrected bunions, that was easily 2 1/2 to 3 inches too narrow. I have seen too many dress shoes whose soles are less than two inches wide. Whose foot is that made for?

Men can, and often do, pair suits with casual shoes, even sneakers, and it's considered fun and fashionable and appropriate. My husband has a pair of black tennis shoes that he frequently wears with his dress clothes, because they blend, and people don't even notice. I can't do that. I've seen too many people raise their eyebrows when I wear sneakers with casual clothes, even on vacation.

When I competed in high school speech and debate, and thirty years later when I coached high school speech and debate, the students were supposed to dress up in "business" attire, to compete. The guys often just tossed on a blazer over their T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, and they were considered well dressed and prepared. Even if the T-shirt had a design on it, or the jeans were ripped, it could be passed off as edgy and trendy. A girl dressed the same way was seen as being inappropriately dressed, not caring about herself or the event, and unprepared. Even swapping pants for a skirt, but wearing the same top and shoes she'd worn to school, was often deemed inadequate. One of my students wore brand new, deep blue jeans with her blazer, and got "inappropriado wardrobe" written on her ballot. (We are still trying to figure out what "inappropriado" is actually supposed to mean, since it's not a real word.) Many, many girls packed slippers to wear between rounds, because their "appropriate" shoes hurt. 

Business women do the same thing. How many go out to lunch in their office suits and skirts and sneakers, because their dress shoes are just for show, like for when they clock in or meet clients?

This was a constant struggle for me over decades of taking wedding photos. I could "look appropriate," or I could wear shoes that were comfortable. Sure, men sometimes face this struggle, too. I remember cringing when I heard a woman say that she "should have known" that she'd get "terrible photos" of the wedding when her male photographer showed up in sneakers. "How much of a professional could he be, dressed like that?"

This is why my husband, also a wedding photographer, always said, "I'm dressing up even if I'm the most formally dressed person at the wedding." To me, though, that's just evidence of how men and women move through life differently. It would be difficult, and often prohibitively expensive, for me to try to be the most formally dressed person at a wedding. Other women are likely to be in gowns, silk, satin, taffeta, sequins. I'm not going to be working in those clothes. I often end up climbing on chairs or benches, or getting flat on my stomach, to get the shot I want. It irks me tremendously that wearing clothes, and especially shoes, that let me do my job well is seen as being inappropriate, not caring about myself, the clients, or the occasion. I can't do my best work if I'm in pain. I shouldn't have to.

Three of my childen are married. To two of those weddings, where I was not only the parent of the bride or groom but also taking the photos, I wore boots under my floor length skirt.

Even if I was the only one in boots.

Goddess Pele

I wanted to see Kilauea for most of my life. I'm lucky enough to live somewhere with access to volcanoes, so the concept of "volcano" wasn't new to me. Mountains with names like Lassen and Shasta are familiar places for me; plus, I've been to Yellowstone. I've walked through lava tubes, seen a hillside of obsidian, watched boiling mud pots. But the idea of an erupting volcano was so exciting, especially an eruption that you could get close enough to safely watch. When Kilauea started erupting, she became a "must do" sight.

My brother can see volcanoes - Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams - from his front porch. He narrowly missed being in the Mt. St. Helens blast zone in 1980, and he brought me a jar of flour-fine ash the next time he came to visit. As a scenic and wildlife photographer, though, he too wanted to see Kilauea.

We both finally got to see her in our middle age years, on separate trips. I was not really prepared for how Hawaiian volcanoes differed from the ones I knew. I was used cone shaped mountains, steeply rising and covered in snow. Sometimes, age and eruption would round the summit, but they still had a recognizable look. I'd been on Oahu before, and thought that the Big Island's volcanoes might look like Oahu's mountains.

Instead, by my frame of reference, they barely looked like mountains. Even Mauna Loa, the distance from her summit to the ocean floor making her the largest mountain on Earth, just looked like a long, gradual, unspectacular rise, ending in more of a plateau than a peak.

Kilauea doesn't even look like a separate mountain to me. I can't see any definition between her and the surrounding area. Plus, her caldera is lower than the surrounding area, not on a peak, like I'd expected.

"It's a steaming pit," said a man close to us, on his first visit there. Well, OK, technically, if you have no poetry in your soul.

It was fascinating, but not what I'd expected.

On our first visit, we were staying about three and a half hours away, so we only saw Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in the daylight. We saw the caldera, participated in a ranger led program, walked through Thurston Lava Tube, saw steam vents. I was happy to see someplace I'd wanted to go for so long.

My brother enjoyed his first trip to the park, but he was on a guided excursion from Oahu, so he had even less time there than we did.

None of us got to see live lava flows, the volcano at night, or (on our wish list) lava flows hitting the sea.

When we came back years later on a family trip, with my husband, most of my children and my brother together, we had wish lists of experiences that we missed the first time. Topping my brother's list were 1. a helicopter tour, and 2. seeing the caldera at night. Those things were on our list, as well.

There were seven of us, all arriving at different times. The first day we were all there, we planned to spend all day in the park. We did everything we'd done before and more, including a drive down the length of Chain of Craters Road.

Before sunset, we staked out spots near the Jagger Museum and waited for dark. For the seven of us, we had 5 regular cameras and 6 cell phone cameras. This spot is the closest observation area to the caldera, and the cameras clicked with regularity.

Then it happened - the first glow of orange in the steam.

Can't see it? Don't worry; it got more and more pronounced as darkness fell.

 

It was just gorgeous. Click, click, click!

Then it was dark, and the view went from stunning to magical.

I thought that it couldn't get much better than that.

But we still had our helicopter ride!

Do you see what we're all packing? Of course - cameras. We had wide lenses, telephoto lenses, a GoPro; this would be one well recorded flight.

(That fanny pack kind of thing we're all wearing? That's a parachute. Or, maybe a flotation device. I'm not kidding. They're mandatory.)

We took off from the far side of the island and headed inland, over the "shoulder road" between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, headed for Kilauea. "Are there any active lava flows right now?" my son asked. We're aware that nature doesn't take orders or requests, but we were hoping.

"I'm sure we'll see something exciting. For one thing, the floor of the caldera fell last night," the pilot said. That means that the hard crust on an area had crumbled, and left the flowing lava underneath visible. For the pilot, this was an everyday occurrence, but for mainlanders, it was very exciting.

As we approached the caldera, my husband, shooting with the wide angle lens, was shooting images like this:

When we got closer, my zoom lens allowed me allowed me to shoot straight down into the caldera. The pilot circled over the volcano, one direction and then another.

OH MY GOODNESS! It was amazing.

As we flew on, the pilot said, "I'll just watch for smoke." That was likely, he said, to indicate something that we'd want to see.

A rising wisp of smoke led to this:

The next led to this:

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh! It looked just like something on the National Geographic Channel. "That's new," the pilot said. "It'll be gone in about 15 minutes."

It's hard to estimate from the air, but I think the drip was about ten feet long. I zoomed out to get a bit of perspective, and in again to watch it ooze.

The next sight of rising smoke was larger. An isolated stand of trees was smoking, then catching fire, from the lava at their feet.

"They avoided the last few flows. Poor things, they're goners now," the pilot said.

I felt for the trees, but it was fascinating. Shooting through the moving, curved helicopter windows was difficult, but all of us managed to get numerous shots of this truly once in a lifetime experience.

Mahalo, Goddess Pele, for a look into your home.

All photos, copyright 2015, The Reflection Works Photography

Have Fun Stormin' the Castle

Everyone has something in particular that they like to do when they travel. Some people get excited about the food; some get excited about the shopping. I get excited about the photographs that I can take.

When we planned a trip that would take us to Europe for a week, people asked, "What do you want to see?" At first, I just said, "Whatever is there." Then I started thinking, and we started buying things like train tickets, and I amended my answer; "I want to see a castle."

I've grown up in the American West; we get all excited if something is 100 or 150 years old. Our entire nation is just over 200. When my niece spent a year abroad in France, she lived in an ordinary neighborhood in an ordinary town, and her home was over 400 years old, with stone walls. The thought made me swoon.

At our first stop, Madeira, there was no castle. The island was gorgeous, and I didn't miss the opportunity to see a castle.

Our second stop was Gibralter. I was excited about the rock, the monkeys, the view across the channel to Africa. But there, sitting on the hill, was a castle.

See it? Don't worry, we got closer.

Technically, it's a medieval fortress. Still, on only my second day in Europe, I got to cross a "must do" off my list.

It became apparent that castles were not scarce the morning we arrived in Barcelona. This was the view from the deck of our ship:

Well, then!

This is Montjuic Castle, first built in 1640. We didn't go inside, but we did get a closer view.

 We saw plenty of palace-like buildings in Paris. Even if we hadn't, who cares? It's Paris!

We hit the castle jackpot in Germany.

After looking, exhaustively, at flights to take us home, we'd discovered that the least expensive flight left on a Thursday from Frankfurt, so we arranged to arrive in Frankfurt on Tuesday night. That left all of Wednesday for an adventure. We were without a car (we'd arrived by train), so we looked into tour companies, and settled on a tour that would pick us up from, and deliver us back to, our hotel. We were scheduled to go down the Rhine in a tour boat, on a stretch of river that was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has the highest concentration of castles in Europe. We all charged our camera batteries in anticipation.

Unfortunately, the Rhine was flooding. It was the highest water level in over 300 years. Virtually all river traffic was halted.

This is a staircase that goes down to the waterfront sidewalk. The water levels were, if I recall, 15 to 20 feet above normal here.

Many of the docks were themselves underwater. Some peeked out, but you wouldn't want to dock there.

The tour company had a contingency plan. We would still get many of the usual elements of the tour - lunch at a cafe, a visit to a local monument, a ride down the mountainside in a chair lift reminiscent of a ski lift - but instead of sailing past numerous castles, we'd get to tour the grounds and interior of one.

It was an absolutely picture perfect example of a castle - suits of armor, a ballroom, towers... just gorgeous.

There's me and my husband.

Here's the view from across the river.

Isn't that storybook perfect?

What was more astonishing to me, though, were the number of other castles in the area, castles not included as part of the tour. They were just sitting there, a part of the normal scenery.

I mean, they're just everyday buildings. Here's another view from across the river, showing the next castle just a bend in the river away.

Do you see that? Here's a closer look.

They're within sight of each other, some of these castles. Holy cow! I mean, even if it was centuries ago, I could easily walk or ride between them!

So, we have a new plan on the back burner. Some day, we'll go back to Germany. We'll drive the Romantic Road, we'll float down the Rhine, and we'll photograph more castles.

It's a great plan.