Veterans Oasis Park

Author's Comments

I almost did not write about this one. Veterans Oasis is the kind of place that rewards you precisely because nobody else has bothered to come, and there is always a small part of me that wants to keep that arrangement intact. But the park is generous enough to absorb a few more careful visitors, so here we are. It is a constructed wetland in the middle of Chandler, which sounds like a contradiction until you stand at the edge of the southeast ponds at sunrise in January and watch a great blue heron hold absolutely still in water that has gone pink. The light here is desert light, which is to say it arrives clean and low and uncomplicated. Winter is when the park earns its name. Migratory birds come down through the flyway and settle into these engineered marshes as if the engineering does not matter to them, and perhaps it does not. I do not bring a wide lens here. The photographs I have made that mean something to me are tight - a coot's foot lifting from still water, the corrugated detail of an egret's neck folded against itself, the surface of a pond breaking into concentric rings around something I never quite saw. This is a place for patience and for a longer lens than you probably want to carry. The solar system walk is a curiosity rather than a subject. I mention it because you will notice it and wonder. Walk it if you have time. But the real reason to come is the water and the birds and the surprising softness of early light filtered through cattails in a city that mostly forgets it has wetlands at all.

Gallery