“Ghosts of River Road”

Posted on Dec, Wed, 2023 in Landscapes, Musings from Still Point, Uncategorized

“Ghosts of River Road”

Inevitably, one morning late each year sycamores appear along the banks of the Chagrin River. Rising up the steep slopes bounding the river, deciduous trees of all manner crowd the hills for six months draping the landscape in a mantle of green, then briefly in October fire. All the while, sycamores wait silently unnoticed until winter’s first storm arrives in the night, its gusts and freezing rain borne on the edge of a cold front. Broad leaves of maple, white and red oak, mature beech and cherry, even sycamores are stripped in torrents of wind and rain, papering the forest floor in bronze and rust only to fade in brief days ahead.

As a child I recall the magic but also the melancholy of seasons past as we would drive along the river, observing the ghostly sycamores, their white trunks, sclerotic branches and fingers imploring us closer – only the marescent leaves of young beech and black willow, tenacious and withering through winter remained.

Humbly, just out of river’s reach, a trinity of sycamore have stood year after year silent and still, obeisant, tethered to shale bedrock. Today, diverse woodlands carpet the Chagrin Valley and native hemlock and white pine stipple and texture the eastern slope of the river.

This image captures the same copse of sycamore, just south of Gates Mills village on the banks of the Chagrin river, the same I’ve photographed and written about before; one of life’s touchstones as gracious time has spared us both into a seventh decade.

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Where Shadows Come to Die

Posted on Oct, Thu, 2023 in Landscapes, Musings from Still Point

“Where Shadows Come to Die”

Perhaps it would be better titled, “When” than “Where” shadows come to die. The image below was made at Squire Valleevue Farm’s eastern meadow shortly before noon, May 26th. By late morning in the month of May in northeast Ohio the sun casts only weak shadows that cause the landscape to lose much of its texture and perceptive color.

Several years earlier I had photographed this same meadow at the same unpropitious hour yet had the good fortune to capture what became a popular series I named “Constellations.” The images were ground-level views of dandelion heads, white spheres clustered like so many stars, their desiccated yellow petals dried in the sun, replaced with white threads; orbs of geometric, flickering fluff fixed in a transient state awaiting a propagating wind. Mirroring these constellations of dried dandelions, small, tightly bound cumulous clouds arranged themselves against a blue sky. The successful images that day were unexpected as the effulgent light almost directly overhead produced almost no shadow, absorbing red, orange and yellow wave lengths, rendering the landscape texturally flat. And though the more recent photograph pictured below was afflicted by the same midday light, it too retains dimension and texture. But why?

As I found myself comparing other photographs I had taken at midday, I developed a theory as to why some appeared washed out and some still succeeded in the harsh light. My own experience suggests that there may be another explanation to this counterintuitive phenomenon. It may be illusory, simply a function of the sheer number and variety of elements in the image, especially the number of complementary colors that add texture and dimension, creating the illusion of shadows as the visual effect defies conventional lighting orthodoxy.

The photograph below provides some insight that I should have discerned years ago. Early blooming magenta heads of clover in the foreground, violet hued, little bluestem prairie grasses and contrasting variegated green Timothy grass, dotted randomly with bright buttercups, in toto creating a counterpane tapestry of light and color, appearing to undulate in waves, spreading, almost floating across the meadow. And in the distance, anchoring the scene, the farm’s small hoary-white barn, flanked by a brilliant black locust, its first leaves of spring opening, soft neon yellow and green.

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“Drawing Nigh, Summer’s End”

Posted on Aug, Tue, 2023 in Landscapes, Musings from Still Point

“Drawing Nigh, Summer’s End”

August breaks with torpid grace across the dunes of northern Michigan as Big Sable lighthouse lends distant perspective. Here, striated above Lake Michigan, morning light recedes into wisps of melancholic blue.

August, when asters bloom in random clusters and alders clump and shimmer almost unnoticed amid the undulating sweep of reed and marram, here live the grasses that color and cowl these dunes and texture the landscape. The change in hues, all but imperceptible by late August, subtly signal the end to summer is nigh.

Light breezes and shadows, discernibly longer by late afternoon, bring with them nostalgia, one’s yearning for fixity and a reluctance to accept the abiding change in seasons. An early provocation perhaps and reminder of summer’s mortality, the landscape resisting the slow, inexorable drift of dunes through time, reluctantly, implacably into the next season.

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“Time Irresolute, Tummond’s Bog ”

Posted on Feb, Mon, 2023 in Landscapes, Musings from Still Point

“Others will see the islands large and small; … A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them …” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Walt Whitman

“Time Irresolute, Tummond’s Bog ”

167 years after Walt Whitman published these prophetic lines, technology, capitalism and exigent political and religious ideologies now conspire to change at least one dimension of time’s long held notion; that some things are immutable, that some things transcend the temporal, that some things will endure. How can the simple beauty of a wetland that has survived for 11,000 years fall to the whim of man in the course of a few years? Entropy comes to the natural world with surrealistic speed disguised in many colors but almost always motivated by profit and power.

This scene of mallards flushing over a beaver lodge is at once iconic and timeless but imminently precarious. Imagine a world devoid of these creatures and the everyday quotidian beauty of the landscape.

Sunday (Feb. 19), Kate and I were visiting Tummond’s bog, a little known wetland in Mantua, Ohio, when mallards exploded over a beaver lodge at the west end of the marsh. It was the same location and scene we might have experienced 11,000 years ago with the end of the Pleistocene era as Ohio’s last glacier receded leaving eskers and kames behind to delineate the wetland, effectively arresting it in time. Pin oaks, white oaks, beech and shagbark hickory trace the slopes to the water where rush and sedge frame nesting areas for waterfowl and supply material and food for beaver lodges – a remarkable ecosystem, symbiotic, self-sustaining yet fragile.

One can walk, as we did, along the top of the serpentine eskers that still shelter the bog. As this scene existed in the past, it remains today. Tomorrow is less sanguine.

Oscar Bruggman Sand & Gravel, a privately owned, local company, is strip mining the wetland’s contiguous boundaries first removing surface vegetation (trees and brush), then topsoil and eventually the gravel to be sold. The mining impact to the hydrology, water chemistry, soil acidity, the underground aquifer, wildlife and myriad other critical components of this natural system presents an imminent existential crisis.

Perhaps it’s not of any real consequence. There are millions of bogs of course and when they disappear few will be aware of the loss and few will care. My personal hope is we come to see this obscure little bog as a microcosm, a metaphor that somehow helps, ever so minutely, to affect public opinion and, perhaps as a long shot, to galvanize action to preserve beauty and silent wonder.

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