A Walk in the Woods as Ansel's Wife

Once in late summer I went on a daytrip with three friends to a pine forest in another part of the state.  We were all photographers, but I had just rediscovered writing and drawing and had made a conscious decision to not bring my camera with me.  In fact, I had teased my friends about being such hard-core photographers and not being able to go anywhere without their cameras.  As we tromped through the woods, I spotted a most unusual mushroom that was oblong and almost twig-like except that it was bright pink!  I really wanted a photograph of it but my companions, aggravated by my earlier taunting, all refused to take a picture.  So I stopped to make a little sketch and realized how impotent I was without my own camera.  Then I began to wonder about Ansel Adam's wife, Virginia Best, and how she must have felt, at least on a few occasions, when accompanying Adams on his treks into the wilderness.  Of course, I was projecting my own situation, but didn’t she see her own images and feel frustrated not being able to photograph them?  When I returned home, I made several large prints from negatives of terrain that were recently shot while producing Topo of the Trip, and used these as the background for further drawings from the experiences of that day.  The unusual pink mushroom did not make its way into this series and to this day is still unidentified, existing only as a memory amplified with conjecture that has also faded as time has passed.