One hour begins now.

For this task I went to the Strybing Arboretum, a place that before today I would have said I could find my way around with my eyes closed, and one of my favorite places to go with a camera. Since I knew that without vision I would have very little concept of time and space, I set a timer on my phone for one hour, and then blinded myself. Not trusting myself to keep my eyes closed or avoid peeking around a blindfold, I went with electrical tape.

Playing in traffic

One reason I had picked the Arboretum for this task was the lack of any cars. Well, except for the occasional maintenance vehicle. I ended up walking right into this parked truck, having to feel my way around it, and then get out of the way when it wanted to drive past. I tried to get a picture of the truck that had caused me so much trouble, but did a poor job of centering it in the frame since it wasn't making any noise and I had to rely on my memory of where it might be. This was barely forty feet from where I had started, but I was already entirely lost. I tried to find my way by following the paved surfaces, but kept getting caught up in little cul-de-sacs (the area around that water fountain might have been one, although I don't remember bumping into the water fountain itself) and getting turned around. It was around this time that a couple of kind passersby noticed me having some trouble, and asked if I was trying to locate the bathroom, or anything else. I asked them to point me toward the California natives section (my favorite place to walk and the general goal I had set for myself at the outset), and as they were going that way, they invited me to follow their voices.

Joining the tour

I knew I was getting close to my goal, but became aware of a large number of people around me, and stopped, not wanting to walk into any of them. It turned out to be a tour group. I listened to the guide talk about the magnolia that he was gesturing at, and tried to figure out where it might be. I noticed that you can hear trees. If there's even a little bit of wind, you can hear from the rustling not only where a tree is, but how tall it is, and I imagine that with some practice you could get an idea of what kind it is by the sound its leaves make. As the wind picked up, I could perceive trees all around me, and I felt like a bat using echolocation to navigate.

Mysterious found objects

I figured out at one point that I had left the main path, and got myself pointed in the right direction by listening to the city -- Lincoln Ave is directly south of the park, and I knew that I was trying to head west, so by keeping my left ear pointed at the traffic noise, I reasoned that I'd be headed the right way. The rack of signage I encountered then was entirely unexpected. Going through this and a few other photos after the fact, I've determined that I somehow managed to walk around behind a maintenance shed without realizing that it was there. Although this is not something I would ever have thought to photograph normally, it's my favorite of this set for some reason.