I returned this morning to the same spot along the side of Piney Woods Church Road where I saw the oak leaf floating yesterday, and discovered needles of ice had formed overnight. Every moment, the world around us is changing. In the spirit of Heraclitus, we can never step onto the same road twice.
After the overnight rainstorm, the ditches along Piney Woods Church Road had filled with water once again. In one of them, I saw this oak leaf floating, the edges of the leaf slowly taking on water. The stillness of the scene offers no hint of the raw winter’s day on which I took this photograph.
I set out late this afternoon, on the 5th of February, with a specific goal: to locate a certain water oak tree branch with a solitary leaf at the tip which I had photographed yesterday. It had rained heavily overnight, and the air had turned colder, with a raw edge to it. The wind was blowing considerably, at speeds up to fifteen miles per hour. Needless to say, the leaf was long gone — probably pulled off the branch by a passing gust and carried off. What was it Bobby Burns said? “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” So I am posting yesterday’s shot here instead, as an extra blog post by way of a prologue to today’s photo (which I will post later this evening).
On a drizzly gray afternoon, I saw two bluebirds perched amid the branches of an old pecan tree. It was a poem without words.
After a brief rain overnight, I arrived on a lazy mid-morning Monday for my ramble down Piney Woods Church Road. I took quite a few photographs, as usual, including those of a vibrant green patch of resurrection ferns covering a branch of an old pecan tree (no doubt this photo will appear in the blog before too long). But I settled today on this dreamy, more abstract image of greenbriers. Cloudy Day Dreaming is intended in part as a nod to Australian Aboriginal spirituality; the Dreamings, or creatures of the Dreamtime, are ancestral beings that created the Australian landscape at a time that is simultaneously long ago and ongoing now. Aboriginal ritual dancing is a means of accessing the parallel world of the Dreamtime to enable Aborigines to participate in the ongoing Dreamtime story. In a similar way, I think of my photographs as possible doorways for encountering a world of wonder hidden just beneath the surfaces of our everyday natural places.
Last weekend, this author took a visit to Newman Wetlands Center, following a familiar half-mile trail of gravel and boardwalk along and through areas of ponds and woods. Fences or railings along most of its length keep visitors to the straight and narrow, preventing them from stepping off trail — and potentially, into the muck. Gravel and boardwalk surfaces are level, and capable of sustaining heavy foot traffic. The wetlands themselves are not. A single deep boot-print in the mud could remain for months.
It was quite a surprise to discover, along the trail, that a section of wooden fence had been removed. According to a laminated paper sign attached to one of the remaining fence posts in that section, the purpose of this break in the fence was to enable visitors to use “new trail areas”. Perhaps the plan is to add gravel and perhaps a wetland overlook, with more fence and railings. Or maybe the gap is there to enable visitors to feel mud underfoot and thorny briars rubbing against their bare legs.
Beyond the gap in the fence, a zone of flattened leaves marked an impromptu path a few dozen feet to the edge of a stream within the wetland. A bit of bushwacking led to a great spot for photographing some aquatic turtles (painteds and sliders) sunning themselves on a log. In his enthusiasm, the writer startled many of them while trying to approach, and they plopped into the water and swam away.
The “adventure” was one of the high points of the author’s trip, and marked the only point on the trail where there were “hazards” such as thorny underbrush and patches of deep mud. There is something unsettling, though, about that gap in the fence. It is not the gap itself that is troubling, but the fear of what its impact might be. The same space that provides children (accompanied by adults) and adults alike with a way to get closer to nature can also become heavily compacted and eroded with so many passing feet. And what of the turtles on the nearby log? Will they eventually move on, after too many times of being scared off their chosen logs? No doubt the wetlands would be much better protected if we all kept to clearly marked paths of gravel and wood.
And yet, this line of thought is even more troubling to the author, as an environmental educator. As Richard Louv has documented so powerfully in his Last Child in the Woods, children today have fewer opportunities to get out into nature than their parents did. They spend much less time splashing in the water, jumping in the mud, catching frogs and salamanders, and using leaves and branches to construct imaginary realms. Increasingly, children are growing up in suburban developments whose doctrines and convenants expressly forbid tree forts and wild spaces in residents’ yards. Where can children go to bond with nature? “Where do the children play?” as a famous songwriter once asked.
There are so few places left in Georgia, and throughout much of the eastern U.S., for children to connect with the natural world. So naturally, those few places open to them are in danger of abuse from overuse, because they are all there is. We need more gaps in the fence, not fewer. We need a lot more places without fences, or “keep out” signs, or wood-chip paths where nature is to be observed at a respectful distance, like paintings behind ropes in a museum.
This article was originally published on March 31, 2010.
I have always been fond of lichens. I recall, far back in my childhood, encountering British soldiers lichens (Cladonia cristatella) growing atop a neighbor’s fencepost, in an enticing micro-forest of gray-green stalks and brilliant red caps. Lichens are odd among living organisms, for being two in one: an alga and a fungus joined together. Scientists still don’t know who gets the upper hand in the partnership: are lichens simply fungi that have taken up farming, or are they algae in fungal space-suits (allowing them to live in brutally hot, dry, and cold conditions where algae alone could not survive). Lichens are odd, and lichenologists can be a rather odd bunch, too — I count a few among my friends. On a gray and foggy winter morning, as I walked down Piney Woods Church Road from Rico Road, it was wonderful to be greeted by a splash of red on a fallen fencepost. Closer inspection revealed a community of lichens. This photograph includes two members of the genus Cladonia: Cladonia didyma, (Southern soldiers, the one with the red caps) and Cladonia subtenuis (Dixie reindeer lichen, the one that looks like a shrub with bare branches).
I set out mid-morning today under cloudy skies, the temperature already over the freezing line and headed into the 50s. I was in search of what vestiges of snow I might find, knowing that this could be the last day in 2014 when a snowy photograph would be possible. I made a few discoveries, including a previously unknown patch of lichens (Cladonia leporina) which will almost certainly appear in this blog within the next few days. Meanwhile, I offer one parting photograph with snow, a roadside still life with a still-green water oak leaf and dried grasses. Tomorrow this same spot will turn into a fairly nondescript patch of winter weeds, but while the snow lingers, I find the image beautiful.
