Cardinal Concerns

September 10, 2011

I am making a calculation that a sane person should never make. I am thinking of the cost of gas and the miles per gallon that a fifteen year old Ford delivers, and the length of drive, and coming up with a dollar per piece number for the fruit I am hunting today. Grateful that I am so capable of ignoring these kinds of calculations, I coax Carl into the truck and head east, the late afternoon sun behind us, pushing like a wind at our backs.

I stop in Fallsville for gas. Out of habit, I check the pot, but it is too late for coffee, so I just scrounge for the cash I have on hand, and Sky makes the calculation – $10 dollars =2.8 US gallons. Her old pump has a problem with high prices, so you simply ignore that part of the machine and dispense the correct volume. I am humming the tune to an old Vince Gill song:

…There was no road too winding, nowhere too far, with two bucks of gas and my old yellow car…

 I nearly abort the trip and spend the rest of the afternoon talking to Sky. She is willing to make another pot.

This time of year - early Fall - something very southern - both in cultural and botanical meanings of the word - begins to ripen. Huge purple black berries hang singly or in pairs from small-leaved vines that tend to rise above the ground to perfect picking height. Muscadine, vitis rotundifolia, also known as Scuppernong. The flavor is unlike anything else on earth and is concentrated in the thick tart skins. Tough and resilient, unlike their cultivated vitis brethren that demand babying and chemical codling, they do have one inconvenient habit - their hideout is a good eighty miles distant.

There are botanical lines drawn in the thin topsoil of the Boston mountains, and one of those lines is highway 7, running north south from Hot Springs to Harrison. If you drive its length, you will cross another line – the Arkansas river – running perpendicular, about half way along your trip. Highway 7 runs through both the Boston and the Ouachita mountains, but the river separates them into the distinct environments that they really are. To find muscadine, you must go south, below the river, or, and this is where luck comes in, go east to the other side of highway 7, where things are also to their liking.

Today I am in a foul mood. There is no particularly good reason, just a series of minor irritations – forgot my walking stick, forgot Carl’s collar, got a late start, forgot my thermos, made the mistake of listening to national news on NPR - but as usual the wind, the road, the thinking time, do their job, and when I pull off the highway three hours later at the secret spot, I have changed for the better. (It also helps that I have stopped at a cemetery along the way and photographed a humorous juxtaposition of outhouse and signage). I carry a full pack of camera gear and tripod just for the pleasant weight of it all, and head downhill.

Muscadine choose their homes carefully, and only fruit when they damn well please, so I pass stand after stand of vines with no grapes attached, before getting to the spot I know from years past, and there they are, waiting. The vines climb on understory trees and stay about six feet off the ground, and there are plenty, but I am also about ten days too early, the grapes green and hard as rocks. The cost per grape has escalated since I will have to return, but I am also thrilled to see them at all, considering the droughty, unbelievably hot summer they have had to endure.

When I reach the actual bluff line, and the view west into the setting sun, I begin looking for a spring that I remember, knowing Carl needs water. It is not where it should be, and I begin walking up a narrow drainage in pursuit. The sides are moist and there has been a hatching of eye gnats and mosquitoes that are driving me to use language I generally reserve for humans. Just as I am about to retreat, I hear the wonderful sound of moving water, and turn the corner to see a tiny clear pool, and next to it, a Cardinal flower in full red bloom, shyly acting as if it is no big deal, just an everyday display of magnificence.

Cardinal flowers surprise with the intensity of color, and with their late-year appearance when so much else has lapsed into end-of-summer depression, or pre-winter preparation. I have seen them in flower as late as thanksgiving in the Ozarks. They can reach several feet high, and the flower head is a cluster of individuals, each with unusual stamens that stick out above the petals, and demand closer attention. The scientific name Lobelia cardinalis, refers both to the early (1500s) botanist Von Lobe, and, of course, the color red. Like muscadine, they choose location carefully, and it is always near water.

As we hike out, I choose another route, one that will follow the bluff line for half a mile before climbing back to the truck. Carl walks ahead, and I can see the effects of arthritis and age in the odd movements of his hips. Two years ago, Carl’s kind and gentle veterinarian, Gerald Kelso (recently retired), had taken my hands and placed them on Carl’s hips and made me feel the grinding of bone on bone, the total absence of cartilage - the explanation of Carl’s increasing difficulty climbing into the truck, of his occasional yelps of pain. “This did not happen overnight,” Kelso told me, “he’s been dealing with it for a long time.”

Light is falling fast. I have dallied along the bluff longer than I intended. Dusk and sandstone can be siren calls to a photographer, and it takes serious effort to break away and head up into the dark woods. I have taken no more than a dozen steps when I get tangled in a low-hanging vine – the tripod on my pack snagging it and pulling it down over my head. As I curse and work to free myself, I see dark round grapes hanging everywhere around me - muscadine in profusion - the southern bluff exposure bringing them to ripeness before their higher, shaded cousins. I fill one of the pockets of my vest to bulging – not enough to make jam or wine, but enough to secret away in the freezer for a mid-winter burst of flavor and a reminder of the heat of summer.

The climb has been rough on Carl, and he’s unable to put even his front feet into the cab of the truck. I lift them, one by one, making comments designed to help him maintain his dignity, then hoist his rear end onto the seat. He gives me a sideways glance of gratitude then stares out the windshield, waiting for the door to close. As I stow gear in the back, I am thinking of another dog and another man. Years ago, while working together on a book project(Buffalo Creek Chronicles), the writer Gary Lantz would drive over from Oklahoma and pick me up for a day of discussion and exploration. His old dog Jack would be in the back of the jeep, having been lovingly lifted and prodded and pushed into position. Three friends on the road, the two middle-aged men in the front knowing without speaking of it, that they are working under a time constraint of their own, that speed is of the essence.

It is fully dark when I pull back onto the highway – the kind of dark that is only possible away from cities and street lights, and yard lights. With just an occasional exception as I pass a house near the road, the only lights visible are moon, stars, headlights and instrument panel. I often feel as if I’m flying a small airplane at times like this. My preference for older trucks makes for a louder level of road noise, a constant rattle of metal parts, the roar of wind through open windows, and the roadbed can take on the appearance of earth at a great distance.

A blinking red light on the dash informs me that I have misjudged the gas. The dial is pointing deep into the red and I have sixty miles to go. I know that at 9PM, there will be no open station between here and home. An error has been made. I think of stories of WWII bomber pilots coming back to base, flying over the ocean, fuel gage on empty, no way to make it back. There must be a moment of calm acceptance. Nothing you can do will stop what is about to happen. There is no creative solution. The engine will sputter and stop, and then there will be only the sound of the wind, and all will change.

I could think of scenarios – a makeshift leash for Carl and a hike down highway 16 in the dark, all the way home, or perhaps to a homestead with a light in the window and a gas can in the barn, or leaving Carl and flagging down the next rare vehicle, or climbing the side of a mountain to find phone signal and a friend three hours away in Fayetteville. I refuse to think about it now. The choice will come soon enough, after the engine dies. Now, I just stare out of the windshield, watching the white and yellow lines moving, the moon challenging my headlights, the reflected eyes of deer mocking me. And I wait, almost euphoric, for the glorious silence, the feel of the wind.

See more!

Swimming Hole

In the middle of August, when temperatures begin to break records, and when no one in her right mind would even think about hiking, I throw Carl in the truck and once again head east on highway 16. There is a serious attraction waiting, and the oppressive heat only sweetens the allure. Only an hour after sunrise, and I am already sweating, windows down, wind blowing, Carl panting with the regularity and intensity of a diesel engine.

Today I decide to let Wanda at the Combs café break my fast with biscuits and gravy, two eggs over hard, hash browns, coffee and conversation with the cook - about grandchildren, men, hunting, working, and growing up in the Ozarks. While I eat, she sits at a sewing machine repairing a large camo jacket that a customer has dropped off the day before. The sound of that machine is a powerful time bender for me, and if Wanda had looked up, she might well have seen a twelve year old boy sitting there at the table, scarfing down his breakfast before running off to catch the bus, with a quick kiss on her cheek as he passed.

There is a magical little window in the natural history seasonal calendar of this hill country, what the writer Gary Lantz calls the tick rapture – the big ones are gone for good, and the seed ticks haven’t yet appeared in numbers – so it’s possible to walk all day along a dry riverbed and not be inundated. But even if I miss that window, nothing could keep me from this spot along the Buffalo River, not intense heat; not humidity measured in gallons per breath, because it is the time of the spring-fed hole.

I park along the national forest road, check my pack for camera, tripod, water, dried apples and cashews, then drop steeply to the river and begin walking downstream in the middle of what will, in a month or so, be a torrent of impassable water. Today it is astonishingly hot and bone dry, the rounded sandstone river rock acting like a solar reflector oven. It is difficult to imagine that there ever has been water here. Carl hugs the bank where there is a few-inch band of shaded stone that eases his abused footpads. After a quarter mile, we reach a long shallow pool that has more psychological value than its bath-water temperature warrants. I don’t bother taking off leather boots, (they will dry later) and just wade in, continuing downstream.

Anyone who spends time in an Ozark riverbed in mid-summer knows that there will be an oasis within a bend or two, and true to form, in half a mile, a deep aqua-blue pool materializes on the near horizon like a desert mirage. Carl is the first in, drinking and wading and wagging with a rhythm of pure relief. One of the benefits of summer hiking on the upper reaches is that nary a soul will be seen all day, so I don’t even hesitate – there is a line of pack, canteens, clothing and boots that lead to the sandy spot I use as a launch pad.

The hole is so deep and cold I can only stay in a few minutes, just long enough to drop my core temperature back within the green range on the dial. Without bothering to get dressed, I unpack camera and tripod and try once again, and fail once again, to transfer the essence of this place onto film.

A person has to be careful here. There is magic. Bring someone with you, and you will fall in love. Bring children, and they will go feral right before your eyes. Come alone, and you may just wake up twenty years later, hair down to your waist, your friends all gone, your film fogged and useless.

Passion Fruit

July 1, 2011

I would not be the first man to be thinking of a woman while sitting on a gravel bar on the upper reaches of the Buffalo National River, or for that matter, while standing, as I am this droughty-hot afternoon, in the middle of the dry pasture of an old homestead, trying to keep sweat from dripping onto the lens of my camera. I am staring at a flower, and traveling through time.

Anyone who has seen passiflora incarnata, otherwise known as passion flower, or maypop, knows that this flower does not belong on earth. The color and structure and surprise of it are otherworldly – living, blooming proof that meteorites carry ancient seeds from planet to planet. And I cannot look at them without thinking of Nancy Maier – musician, poet, artist, songwriter, and rather otherworldly herself.

In 2003, Nancy called me to schedule a day of copy work – the mundane production photography that every artist must arrange to document their finished pieces, or in this case, to make her paintings useful for the insert of a CD of her latest songs. Nancy had just made it through a bout with cancer, and as we drank tea and made small talk, I knew I was in the presence of someone who had shaken hands with death and walked away to tell about it. Her paintings and her songs were a witness, a warning, an encouragement – a distillation of the horrors of treatment and the joys of discovery that seemed to walk hand in hand for her.

While I saw to the technical end of things – setting up flashes, taking exposure readings – Nancy began walking up the long driveway to the house and the nearest bathroom. I was watching her from the studio door, enjoying the scene – a woman in a long dress, one hand holding her hat against the breeze, moving through deep grass and morning sun, Carl padding silently behind her. Just as I was registering the oddity of that old dog leaving me alone to follow a stranger, I heard her give a loud sigh and saw her collapse.

By the time I reached her, my silly little first aid kit in hand, she had already begun a small watercolor painting; her sudden exclamation and drop to the ground a reaction to the unexpected sighting of a cluster of passion flowers climbing over the fescue along the path. I hid the kit behind my back and answered her questions as best I could – the name’s reference to Christian themes that some saw in the structure of the flower, the crown of thorns, the cross, and the implications of death and resurrection. I personally could attest only to the resilience of the plant and the odd fruit that when green and plump and attractive is dry and inedible inside, and only when brown and papery and unappealing, holds a treasure of plump, juicy, thirst-quenching tart seeds. I finally left her to her work, with Carl nervously circling at a distance, as if trying to protect her from something neither of us could see.

A few months later when I received a copy of the new CD, I was most interested in hearing again a song that she had played for me that summer day, sitting in a rocking chair, while on the other side of the studio, I methodically photographed one painting after another – The Buffalo River. She had spoken eloquently of the spiritual cleansing and regeneration she often found there during the stress of what seemed like endless chemotherapy.

The river takes me down to places I have known

The river takes me down into my home

The river takes me down with people I have known

The river takes me down into my home

Love is like a river flowing

Steals your breath and keeps on going

Will I win or will I lose

The question doesn’t matter to a fool

Nancy died last year. I have four things to remember her by – that song of the river, a thriving patch of passion flower that I pass daily on the way to the studio, a small watercolor of my home that Nancy painted from her position in the driveway, and perhaps most powerful of all, the memory of the way she handed it to me, laughing, like a child clutching dandelions.

Therapy

May 16, 2011

I seem to be thinking of death to the exclusion of all else lately.  Today, it is my father’s death that sends me east down highway 16 toward the comforting arms of wilderness.

When the undertaker came for my father’s body, I asked to have my well-used walking stick placed with him in the crematorium. It was a rather desperate attempt to establish a pathway, associating something of mine with him that would, even after death, allow an instant connection between us each time I lifted a stick and headed for the woods. This one was made from a branch of Arkansas alder, thin reddish bark left intact, with three feet of black gaffer’s tape tightly wrapped around the shaft – ready for use against the hordes of mid-summer seed ticks. It had served me well for ten years.  I have found these pathways to be useful in the past. A buckeye, a coffee mug, a wedding ring, have all worked their magic over the years. It was worth a try.

The word conflicted comes to mind when describing our relationship, probably not an uncommon sentiment between fathers and sons, and as with any death, guilt, loss, love, and regret appear daily in ever-changing proportions, and will for the rest of my life.

Our own Lucinda Williams put it so nicely in her song Blue:

We don't talk about heaven and we don't talk about hell

We come to depend on one another so damn well

So go to confession whatever gets you through

You can count your blessings I'll just count on blue

This morning I pause at the creek near my home and grab a length of sycamore branch that has washed down in the last flood, cut it to perfect size using the formula my father taught me forty-eight years ago, then stop in Fallsville for breakfast. Sky fixes me her version of what’s good for what ails me, something that involves whole grain bread, baked eggs, tomato, avocado, onion, lettuce and mayo, along with a large mug of strong organic coffee. I would like to sit and talk - Sky has a calming influence on her customers – but I have a date with a beautiful woman.

When speaking of flowering plants, botanists might caution me to avoid referring to them as male or female – most are both, or neither – but I would argue that in one instance at least, there can be no doubt. In every way that matters, orchids are female, and one in particular, Yellow Lady’s Slipper is queen. In five years of returning to this magical spot, I have noted that it is impossible not to drop to my knees in her presence.

My mental calendar of Spring seasonal responsibilities goes something like this:

           

            February 15^th – tap maple trees

            March 15 – find watercress and chives

            April 15 – pay taxes, then look for morel mushrooms

            May 15 – plant tomatoes

            Mother’s Day – visit the lady's slippers

This year, I am a week late, and what a difference that makes in the Ozarks. It is all about green now. Where two weeks ago, flowers dominated the forest floor, screaming for attention, today all are gone, or really still there but looking as if they’re coming off of a month long binge of intense sexual excess, and I suppose they are.  They have shed the tuxes and evening gowns of celebration and are hunkering down for the real work of growth and reproduction. As I push through ankle-deep poison ivy, I call out loud the names of those I recognize, and nod to the ones I don’t: may apple, orange pucoon, magnolia, trillium, wood betony, wild hyacinth, jack-in-the-pulpit, four leaved milkweed, false Solomon’s seal, woodbine, maiden hair fern, true Solomon’s seal, lyre leaf sage, spiderwort, false dandelion, sweet cicely, and woodland sunflower. Strangers outnumber acquaintances ten to one.

I know now that I am too late for the orchid, and I slow my walk, stop and talk to Carl, drink from my canteen, photograph a rock wall. I am reluctant to find them past their prime. I am moving toward them, but slowly, taking the round-a-bout way. It feels like I am heading to the morgue, knowing what awaits me, but determined to do my duty of identification. Death and the passage of time. I make mental calculations of how many more spring viewings I could possible have. When I find them - the large monocot parallel-veined leaves easy to spot - the capsule in which seed is forming has already taken the stage, and the once complex and beautiful flower is brown and wilted and decomposing.

As a punishment, I suppose, I decide to take the rough way out, up a steep muddy drainage jammed with boulders slick with runoff. Carl questions my choice and refuses to follow until I am almost out of sight, then catches up just in time to see an upper middle-aged man lose his footing on a creek boulder, and the dance of hands trying to cushion an expensive camera, body twisting at odd angles and walking stick flying upstream. I sit in the cold shallow water unhurt, laughing at myself in that great, loud, long-lasting way I can when there is no other human within miles.  When I see that my walking stick, which has landed in the water a dozen feet away, is floating back toward me, I turn and say “Carl, what are the chances?” then reach for it.  The act of reaching puts my head at a different level, and when I look up, I am facing a hillside of perfect, just-bloomed Yellow Lady’s Slippers.

Dealing With Death

 April 20, 2011

There is a cemetery. 

So many of my journal notes seem to start with that line. Cemeteries hold a special power over me – I rarely pass one without stopping, or making a note to return later, perhaps when no one else is around.

I often attribute that power to the simple fact that so many people I’ve known and loved inhabit them, and by extension, all cemeteries are filled with the loved ones of others.  Each stone tells the story – some more decipherable than others – of the tragedy. And, in spite of any belief in the circular nature of the life/death cycle on this planet, to me, any death is a tragedy, and grief, guilt, anger, despair, fear and disbelief are part and parcel. Or, perhaps, as it has been pointed out from time to time, I tend to walk on the dark side of things.

There is a cemetery in northwest Arkansas that seems dedicated to children. Something in the very layout, the placement on a little rise, speaks of it. And the stones finish the story, many without saying a word. There is one in particular that draws me back, over and over. It is a small rectangle of sandstone with the hand of a child chiseled at the base, as if reaching out of the ground.

Hands appear frequently on gravestones – pointing to heaven, clasping the hand of a spouse – but this one is different. As I kneel in the grass under ancient cedars and fumble with camera and tripod, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the hand was carved by a grieving parent in a desperate attempt to maintain contact, to have something to touch, when they knelt in the same grass, but with purposes different than mine.

Within the same afternoon, it is possible to encounter two other icons of death. One, on a lonely stretch of mountain top dirt road, is powerful because of the surprise of encountering it in deep grass, out of the context of a cemetery, and the stark whiteness of the catholic imagery.  Hiking through the Ozarks, that color is usually reserved for bones.

I’ve never seen anyone else stop there, but I have to. A nod to the family and the young man whose life ended there in an accident a few years ago.

Death is not reserved for humans. On the same beautiful Spring day, when violets, bellwort, trillium, blue star, wild hyacinth, mandrake, phlox, and orange puccoon are begging for attention, walk a bit farther, and find this perplexing display. Did the coyote, along with five of his friends and relatives, fail to read the sign and paid the price? Was this a personal feud with the landowner? Is the killer showing off his skill to passersby, or warning off other animals: cross this line and die! I decided not to stop and ask.

Combat Dance

April 2, 2011

I suppose it’s clear by now that I use the word magical way too much when speaking of the Buffalo River Wilderness Area, but so be it. There is an energy about the place, and it speaks to whoever wants to listen. Sometimes I’ll be bushwhacking along a bench on the side of a mountain, or in the bottomlands along the river, when something changes, some disturbance in that energy field, perhaps.  I’ll stop in place and start looking around, and invariably there will be signs of human habitation – a rock wall, a cluster of cedars, an old foundation, rusted metal, a spray of jonquils.

Ask me when I’m in town, sipping coffee at Baba Boudan’s, trying to ignore the traffic on College avenue, and I can be intellectual about it. I am willing to suppose that my eyes and brain simply put the signs together and inform me to pay attention; there is no spiritual or supernatural aspect to it. But, ask me when I’m standing in the forest, looking at the opening to an ancient root cellar, and I will swear on a stack of bibles that it was the laughter of children, the movement of mules, an axe splitting wood, that stopped me in my tracks. So real, that I am confused by the absence of faces.

Sometimes, there is only a pond, or the dried up remnants of one.  A natural progression  takes place with abandoned ponds over time – they fill in with layers of leaves and mud, or dry up as trees nearby grow and siphon off the reservoir, so often all that remains is a small deep pool and a surrounding area of occasional flooding, or simply a depression in the forest floor that begs an explanation. Nearby trees usually tell the story – a copse of water-lovers out of place. At one of my favorites, on the upper stretches of the river, sweet gums grow in profusion, the soil is compacted in an odd way, and grasses, rare even a hundred yards distant, appear to have been planted by machinery.

Gums, Upper Buffalo Wilderness Area


11x16 inch pigment print    $125
*4x6 inch pigment print      $25




* available to followers of this blog


To order or discuss, click here

Years ago, when I stumbled on this pond, I sat for a while listening for the voices as I tend to do, when movement nearby caught my attention. About three yards distant, two large copperheads were facing each other. As I watched, they reared up a foot or so into the air and glided forward, entwining their bodies in a vertical spiral. They would then slowly unwrap, pull back, then reengage. It lasted for an hour as I watched – the most graceful, gentle choreography imaginable. I could have reached for my camera, but didn’t, feeling too much like an intruder, and finally tiptoed away, not wanting to disturb what I assumed was a mating ritual. When I called a biologist at the University of Arkansas the next day, I was told to consider myself lucky indeed – I had witnessed what is known as a combat dance between two male snakes, vying for the female who was probably coiled on the other side of the log on which I sat.

Is it any wonder?

A note about the photographs:  The images in this series of journal entries are part of a collection that will be on display during the month of April, 2011, at the Fayetteville Underground Vault gallery. The exhibition, titled 30 Days In The Life, will include 17 photographs, all new work. I offer them for sale to my journal followers, and also a special version – a smaller 4x6 photograph  that will only be available for a short time after each entry.

The Flow of Water

March 21, 2011

It’s all about water, isn’t it? The search for it, the fleeing from it. Or, for an Ozarks photographer perhaps, the luxury of simply immersing in the beauty of it.

It is flowing water that most often attracts the photographer’s eye. Water moving over rock is composed of an infinite number of individual droplets, each carrying its own packet of light, and with practice, an artist can chose the right combination of shutter speed and aperture to either freeze those droplets for inspection, or let them flow into a ghostly fog.

                                 Upper Reaches, Middle Fork, White River, Arkansas

11x16 inch pigment print   $125

* 4x6 pigment print $25

*available only to blog followers

So why, when confronted with moving rivers, do I so often choose to seek out the backwaters, the eddies, the pools?  The water has stopped, or is barely moving, life is slower here, there is time to contemplate, to collect things of interest, to nurture. And, often, it seems that the visiting photographer is just another of the collected items, floating and swirling to unseen currents, temporary, resting, destined to leave and continue the journey downstream.

Leaves are drawn to backwaters, and concentrate in numbers that represent their distribution and proximity. Water-loving beeches and gums and magnolias predominate this time of year along the upper stretches of the Buffalo National River in Arkansas – the leaves from witch hazel, alder, and a host of others blown and floated away earlier in the season. Many have sunk to the bottom, newer arrivals are still floating, so there is a depth to the image that extends from rock bottom through layers of soggy leaves to the surface of dry floaters, and above that to reflections of passing clouds and overhead tree forms, skeletons showing in the mirrors that come and go between leaves.

Today, I am using film and an old style Voigtlander rangefinder camera that is light to carry. Every camera has its own rhythm and ritual, and for this one it plays like this: envision, attach camera to tripod, compose, rethink, recompose, take meter readings, look at cloud cover for possible changes, make calculations, set camera shutter speed and aperture, attach cable release, wait for clouds to diffuse the light, re-meter and recalculate, trip shutter, leave camera in place, sit and open a thermos of coffee, munch on some trail mix, make a note in photo journal, pet Carl, take another look through camera, pack up and move upstream.  Life is good.

Beech and Magnolia, Upper Buffalo Wilderness Area, Arkansas

11x16 inch pigment print   $125

* 4x6 pigment print $25

*available only to blog followers

The images in this series of essays are from an upcoming exhibition
30 Days In The Life
that will be on display at the Fayetteville Underground April 6th-30th, 2011

Elephants in the Ozarks

March 9, 2011

There is a phenomenon, or perhaps visual experience is a better term, that I like to think is unique to the Ozarks. It occurs in deep winter and earliest Spring, and you must be on foot and hiking along a high ridge somewhere along the Buffalo River. You will be moving through a mixed hardwood forest – maples, oaks, hickories, occasional red cedars, hackberries, ashes and walnuts. They will all be bare; last years leaves underfoot as you move toward the edge, toward the steep downward trek to the river. You will be astonished to find yourself looking down on a sea of leaves, a cloudbank of tan, toothed beauty, still clinging to mature trees and young saplings – all beeches (and sons of beeches) – that form a layer through which you must pass to reach the next level. Some difference, some magical combination of moisture, soil richness, and light have come together in just the way beeches love, and suddenly a tree that was absent only a few hundred feet earlier, now dominates the landscape.

The bark of beeches is the tonality of human skin to a black and white photographer, and the texture of elephant skin to everyone else. Smooth, gray, scarred, imperfect, a record of the life. My face is a well written page, Maggie, but time alone was the pen ( George Washington Johnson).  I once came upon a half-dozen mature beeches that had been cut and stacked after they had blown down during a tornado along the Buffalo, and it was one of the most troubling and sad images I have ever seen. It was impossible not to imagine it as a killing field for elephants, the shameful nightmare of poaching and dismemberment that has been so well documented elsewhere. I walked among the trunks, touching them, apologizing to them, reading their histories in their skins.

Sam and Dusty, Beech Tree, Buffalo National River

11x16 inch monochrome pigment print  $125

4x6 monochrome pigment print $25

A note about the photographs:  The images in this series of journal entries are part of a collection that will be on display during the month of April, 2011, at the Fayetteville Underground Vault gallery. The exhibition, titled 30 Days In The Life, will include 17 photographs, all new work. I offer them for sale to my blog followers, and also a special version – a smaller 4x6 photograph  that will only be available for a short time after each entry.


to order or discuss click here

Beeches seem to beg for vandalism. I have three field guides to the trees of North America, and all of them, when describing beeches, allude to the almost uncontrollable desire, on the part of humans, to inscribe initials in the bark. The photograph attached with this essay is a prime example. I despise vandals. I have seen their selfish and irritating work on enough sandstone bluffs, trees, native American shelters, gravestones, and old homesteads along the Buffalo River, to last a lifetime, and my usual response to it, muttered aloud, would be “Dusty and Sam, there is a special corner of Hell waiting for you, and I hope you have a chance to check it out very soon.”  So, why am I not feeling that way on this day, standing in front of this tree?

Perhaps I’m just rationalizing, grateful that of all the things they could do, this one seems on the relatively benign end of things, that the beech will survive, and its not as if they cut it down. I can still wrap my arms as far around it as I can, and lay my head against its bark and wonder at what it has seen in its lifetime. So, today, Dusty and Sam, I give you a pass, grateful that you put up your guns and took out your pens and only left your initials in the elephants leg.

Waiting for the Essence

It starts just after dawn.  There is the usual cast of characters: an old pickup truck, a well-worn backpack, camera, tripod, walking stick, and Carl.  And the route is long-memorized: east on Hwy 16 past Crosses, Combs, Patrick, Delaney, St. Paul, Pettigrew, Boston, Red Star, to Fallsville, where the truck noses into the small parking lot at the junction of Highways 16 and 21.

Breakfast on days like this is taken at one of three places – Hoosh’s in Crosses, Wanda’s in Combs, or as today, Craig and Sky’s Fallsville One Stop. Craig is on duty, and he pours me a cup of strong organic coffee, opens the fridge and stares for a moment, washes his hands, and then prepares what he calls sunshine surprise – broiled eggs, onions, cheese, lettuce, tomato and secret home-made dressing wrapped in a spinach tortilla.

Two men are already sitting at the small table. They are both working on laptops. An artist, and a web designer, they scooch over so can I join them, and are kind enough to tolerate the odors and noises of my eating. Conversation is warm and interesting, cards are exchanged, stories told, and then Carl and I continue east to Edward’s Junction, turning north toward Boxley Valley and the Upper Buffalo National River Wilderness Area.

There is much to love about every inch of the 150 miles from source to mouth of this national jewel that happens to begin and end in Arkansas, but I find myself drawn, over and over, to the upper reaches, and to one spot in particular, where stone and moving water, old homesteads and beeches, seem to distill the essence of the thing, and the essence, is, of course, what I seek.

The hike is long and steep. I de-boot and wade through numbing snow-melt water, perch tripod and camera on a narrow rock island, and then wait. And wait. The light changes by the second as cloud cover opens and closes, thins and thickens. I watch for patterns, try to predict, envision the effect, then when it seems just right, press the shutter - a slight vibration of camera and tripod - and it’s done.

Sometimes, something happens in that 1/4^th of a second that the shutter is open. Whatever it is, it is faster than the human eye can follow. I consider it magic, or perhaps generosity, as if the sandstone, lichen, moss, witchhazel, leaves, and water all agree to show their inner selves, laughing at their joke, knowing it will be days before I realize what they’ve done.

                                                                                         11x16 pigment print  $125
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A note about the photographs:  The images in this series of journal entries are part of a collection that will be on display during the month of April, 2011, at the Fayetteville Underground Vault gallery. I offer them for sale to my blog followers, and also a special version – a smaller 4x6 photograph  that will only be available for a short time after each entry.