The Two Walkers

"We're all just walking each other home." - Ram Dass.

It's spring break week at Penn State, as perhaps it is at many other universities in the U.S. Several of the main roads on campus are closed, and there are lots of physical plant workers out and about, doing the kind of major maintenance and clean-up work that is much easier to do when the students are away. Beyond that, campus is pretty much empty.

I usually work at home on Mondays, but on this day, I had an early morning commitment on campus. I was done a bit more quickly than I expected, which left me a small block of time to walk through campus to check out the emptiness. Spring break, like the breaks between semesters, is a great time for on-campus photography!

Aside from the physical plant folks, there weren't many gawkers like me, just lollygagging around looking at things. The weather has been warm these past few days, and the melt is on! The snowpack is turning to mud around us, and I even saw the first few green nubs of daffodils.

One of the joys of my life is just plain walking. Walking around with my camera, looking at everything, trying to see the beauty and magic that is there and capture it with my camera. I have been known to stop in my tracks, kneel down on the ground, and crawl through the mud to get a closer look. I am a lover of trees, of sunrises, of red-winged blackbirds, of the moon, of squirrels, of . . . Well, you name it. I love a lot of things!

As I was walking up the mall toward the library, I saw a pair of walkers ahead of me, and I just . . . liked the way they looked against the landscape. Especially in monochrome. So I took a few snapshots - they were well away from me - and then I put it into full zoom and came in for a closer look. This shot is the result.

The two walkers remind me of how lovely it is to walk across this campus on a fine spring day, with nowhere in particular to get to in any kind of hurry. I tend to be a solitary walker. I am almost always by myself when I am walking on campus. I am usually between things, snagging 10 minutes here or there, on my way to some other place I need to be next. I walk alone. But I saw these two walkers and I admired their togetherness. And so I photographed them: a pair of walkers against the landscape.

And then . . . I kept on walking. :-)

The song: The Proclaimers, I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles). Well, I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more . . .