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.
“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.
“Time Irresolute, Tummond’s Bog ”
“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 ”
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.
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.
“December Storm, Lake Erie”
Gulls picking the waves off Whiskey Island.
“Winter Amour”
“Reaching”
A trip to Mantua, Ohio today (Saturday, Jan. 29th) almost went unrewarded in search of the “Tummonds Bog”, a natural wetland and nature preserve, managed by the Ohio DNR and virtually impossible to find. After an hour wrestling with Siri and the directions of Mapquest, then another making concentric circles looking for the trailhead, I resolved to try another day.