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Category: landscape

Blue Marble

Blue Marble

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It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 17 astronauts’ famous photo of earth from space, the  Writer’s Almanac tells me. It was the first time our planet was photographed whole and entire, its mountains and deserts and oceans in clear relief. Clouds like tufts of baby’s hair after a bath, when you comb it, still wet, into ridges and whorls.

It is a snapshot in time — a cyclone forms over the Indian Ocean — but so much more. It is our own precious, fragile earth. And it was the last time humans would be in a position to photograph it. (Robots were in charge of subsequent lunar missions.)

Just coincidentally, the Writer’s Almanac informs me that today is also the birthday of writer Willa Cather, who said, “We come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”

When we see our planet from space, how can we not love it more?  Not just our own corner of it, but all of it. How can we not want to do everything we can to protect it?

Photo: NASA

Worn Smooth

Worn Smooth

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“I loved the place I was losing, the place that years of our lives had worn smooth.” 

Wallace Stegner

On a walk yesterday, I imagined how I would feel if we were leaving the suburbs I’ve railed against for years. Would I slip off the yoke of commuting and slide easily into city life?  Or would I long for what I no longer had, for morning walks through the meadow, afternoon ambles in the woods; for a pond that reflects the heavens back to us.

We have not worn our lives smooth. Suburban living exhausts because it demands daily compromise; it is not easily knowable. It changes enough to thwart routine.

What wears smooth is the woodland path, the trickling stream, the natural world that the suburbs  cannot quite eradicate.

Moonset

Moonset

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On my drive west Saturday I followed the moon as it slid slowly toward the horizon. It was a beacon for the early hours of my trip, the ones I struggle with most because it’s dark and I’m tired and the steaming mug of tea has cooled and there are hours to go before I enter the Bluegrass state.

But the moon was dramatic in its slantwise trip, thanks to its full state and to the banks of clouds that colored in its wake. It seemed even larger as it reached the horizon. Big and glorious and sun-like in its setting. A full moon can mimic the sun much better than a half or a crescent.

I realized, though, as I admired the moonset, how sun-centric I am, how I compare the satellite unfairly with the star.  The moon has its own motions and missions and poetry.

I missed the moonset’s final moments, because by then I was driving south through the Shenandoah Valley and the western sky was hidden from view.  But it was there when I needed it most.

(A partial-moon moonset viewed from our house.)

150 Years Ago

150 Years Ago

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I went there once, a hurried pilgrim on my way home. Time to stop but not reflect. I vow to go there again, to walk the fields in silence, to meditate upon this number — 23,000 — the tally of soldiers killed or missing during the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862.

It was the single greatest one-day loss of American life. It happened less than two hours from here.

The landscape now is serene. It’s up to us to imagine the horror.


Burnside Bridge on September 1862 (photo by Alexander Gardner, courtesy Library of Congress) and in 2008.

Shells

Shells

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“Do we have a shell I could take to school for my photography class?” Celia asked this morning.

Shells? Do we have shells?

We have them from Topsail in 1996, Oregon in 1999, Clearwater in 2004, Chincoteague in 1997, 2003, 2008, 2011 and, from this year, shells still in the plastic bag I hurriedly stuffed them in two weeks ago. I stuck the bag in the garage and forgot about it until this morning.

I opened the bag, and there they were again: shark eyes, whelks, jingles, clams, cockles and half an angel shell.

I remember the long walk on the beach the afternoon I found most of them, the ridges and hills where the sand wasn’t graded, trudging and trudging until I couldn’t see another soul and finally, finally coming to the end.

The vacation has been over for two weeks. The shells — and the memory of that walk — remain.

Photo: InsideFlorida.com

The Kindness of Strangers

The Kindness of Strangers

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My new assignment (which I gave myself): Walk the Cross-County Trail in earnest. Cover the sections I haven’t covered (which are most of them). Chart the great green heart of this populous county.

The timing of the assignment: regrettable. I left later than I’d intended and was little more than halfway on my route when the low clouds and heavy air gave way to the severe storms that had been predicted (and which I had ignored). Forced from the trail at a detour, I picked my way through the wind and rain to a nearby street. I huddled for a while under trees that were short enough not to kill me if they fell but full enough to shelter me from the brunt of the storm.

Ten minutes into the deluge the wind picked up, the rain fell slantwise and I decided to make a run for it, to find an intersection where I could call for help. It was then, as I tried to make a phone call, that there emerged from the storm a kind soul with a large umbrella.

He motioned me over, I ran toward him, and together we dashed to the shelter of his garage. He disappeared for a minute and returned with two towels. For the next 20 minutes we talked about the storm, the fearsome way it blew up and (typical suburbanites) the siding we had on our houses. I never learned his name.  This morning I read in the paper that a tornado touched down less than two miles from where I hiked.

I went to the woods for wilderness and solitude; what I found instead was the kindness of strangers.

I wasn’t far from here when the storm struck.

Picture Postcard

Picture Postcard

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I am a sucker for the post card shot. The off-center, the too-close, the out-of-kilter — these do nothing for me.

When it comes to landscapes, I have a middle-brow sense of composition. Give me blue skies, puffy clouds (see yesterday’s post), a road winding in the distance, fir trees in the foreground, and I’m happy. Even if there’s a bit of blurring (because, say, the picture was taken out of a car window at 50 miles an hour).

This is a photograph of Glacier National Park, snapped on a vacation there  a few years ago. It made me catch my breath then. It still does.

Caught in the Web

Caught in the Web

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The woods are full of webs these days, spun silk across the path, invisible until breached (which of course is the point) and therefore impossible to avoid. Built by aerialists for aerialists, they don’t bother our fern-high hound.

But for me, the biped, they are an annoyance, tangling themselves in my hair and sticking to my arms, legs and face. I tried swinging a stick in front of me as I walked, but felt ridiculous.

So I decided (without formally deciding) to accept the webs, to brush them off as I stroll, to apologize silently to the forest as I unravel its delicate stitchery, knowing this is just one way among many that I alter — just by moving through it — the woods I love.

Among webs’ many annoyances is the difficulty of photographing them. At least I snapped the perpetrator in this shot.

Sunday Drive

Sunday Drive

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A late summer afternoon, work and chores are done, the sky still light, the air still delicious, a car in the garage — and not just any car but the red convertible. We pop off the top, drag out the maps, find a route and head west.

For the first few miles we zoom along in familiar traffic, but then the road narrows and the scenery swells into hillocks and pastures. Fields are green and the hay is baled. The landscape soothes, as it always does when left to its own devices.

Half an hour later we cruise down a road we’ve never driven before. Trees arch overhead, stone walls line the lane. I lean my head back against the seat, trail my hand out the window. We could drive like this for hours; it would be fine with me.

Genius of Place

Genius of Place

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I’m part way through a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted called Genius of Place, by Justin Martin, and already it has gone from being a book I was going to skim and return to the library to one I’m willing to pay to finish. (It’s overdue and can’t be renewed.)

Olmsted was not only a renowned landscape architect; he was also a farmer, writer, publisher, abolitionist and world traveler. Thanks to a loving and well-heeled father who supported his ventures both emotionally and financially, Olmsted evolved from a lost young man to an apostle of place. His medium was the landscape. His message was beauty.

I’m not even halfway through the book yet — Central Park is barely a gleam in Olmsted’s eye — but I’m already looking for clues to what shaped him. One is that he knew places from the inside out.

“He’d walked all over Connecticut as a child; he’d walked all over England a few years back,” Martin writes. “Now he was intent on completing his tour of the South; he didn’t want to miss anything.”

I’m with Olmsted on this one: When you don’t want to miss anything, it’s best to walk.



Above: A view that Olmsted made possible.