Lingering Winter

I took a couple of walks this past week at two different locations that are only a mile or so apart, but the conditions were very different.Spring is trying to arrive here in upstate NY, but the miserable winter we have been stuck with all year is still hanging on. That means some ice and snow are still lingering, but it is slowly melting into mud and slush in some places. Just when most of the snow cover is gone, we get three inches overnight, but then the next day it just melts into goo. Oh well.

My first walk took me to an old stomping ground where quite a lot of the snow cover has melted; even up at the top of the hill. The walking was easy over mostly open ground. The streams only had ice along the edges and were running high with bubbling rushing water.

Even the sun was out – a rare event in the last few months. I could have spent all day taking photos and just hanging around watching the water run, but I was only able to sneak out for a few hours and had to get home.

A couple of days later I went to a forest just across the valley. As I drove up the dirt road to the trial-head, the conditions looked about the same, but as I neared the top of the ridge things changed drastically. The muddy dirt road got all icy and a solid blanket of snow covered everything in all directions. Getting out of the car I was met with snow crunching under foot, dark heavy clouds sprinkling sleet, and a biting wind.

There are several points to access this area, but some are on unmaintained roads that aren’t open yet. A trail of three or four miles leaves this spot and winds through the trees to the other side and then it circles back around another three or four miles. I planned to follow the trail out and then drop down a gully or two and work my way along the side of the hill back to the start.

This turned out to be a tough job. The six inches of snow on the ground was the kind that has a hard crust that will almost but not quite support a person’s weight. So each step went well at first, but as my weight shifted, the crust would break and my foot would drop a couple more inches with a jolt and then I would drag my foot out of the hole it had made while the other foot crunched down into a hole of its own. If you have ever walked far in this kind of snow, you know what a tedious business it can be.

After slogging along like this for an hour or so, those heavy threatening nasty looking clouds that covered the sky from end to end suddenly vanished! The sun came out, the wind died down, and in what seemed like a matter of minutes, the temperature rose ten degrees.

Now I was over dressed. In no time I was wiping the sweat from my brow and stuffing my hat and gloves in my pockets. It got so bad that I had to take off my coat and carry it over one shoulder with my backpack on the other shoulder and my tripod in one hand as I crunched, crunched, crunched through the woods.

Eventually I came to a gully that I know with some pretty nice waterfalls. I wanted to see if I could get some spring thaw type shots of the rushing water here like I did the other day across the valley. Unfortunately the stream was still mostly covered in ice. I could hear the water running, but it was hidden from sight.

I worked my way downhill for a while and found a spot of open water here and there. I thought I would find open water further down, but before I got that far I came to an impassable spot – no way down without a longish jump down the ice covered rocks – the hillside still frozen and too slick to climb. I had to back track.

Eventually I came to a place where I could cut across the hill again. I stuggled on around the curve of the hill crossing several other gullies that were just as frozen solid. Hours later I came back to the car hot, tired, and thirsty.All in all it wasn’t the best day I’ve ever had in the woods. I was really amazed that the conditions could be so different from one day to the next. The hills here generally aren’t tall enough to influence the weather that much – a couple of thousand feet tops.

Oh well, like they say about fishing “A bad day hiking is better than a good day at work”

MDW

Is Everything Beautiful?

One day a thought came to me – why do people think nature is beautiful?

Certainly there are lots of opinions on what is beautiful and what isn’t, but in general I have found that people find nature and natural scenes beautiful even if they are not the “outdoorsy” type. Maybe not everyone finds snakes beautiful, but show a room full of people a coffee table book of landscapes featuring snow capped mountains, pristine lakes, bright sandy beaches, etc. and it would be tough to find someone that would dislike looking at it.

So I started looking into why this is the case. I’m no where near done with my little investigation, but I ran across something while hiking a couple of weeks ago that I thought I would write about now while it is fresh and come back to it later in a more general way.

My study of beauty lead of course to aesthetics which is the branch of philosophy dealing with the ideas of beauty, ugliness, and the like and it’s application to judgements about works of art and other things that we experience. Through the years many of the big thinkers have put forth various formulae for what is beauty and what art should and shouldn’t look like. Today I’m going to look at one idea put forth in the nineteenth century termed positive aesthetics. The idea that everything is beautiful in some way.

The artist John Constable is quoted as saying, “There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature (1849) wrote: “And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty.”

I’m on board with this idea when we are talking about natural objects and scenes. On the other hand, I feel that I can’t wholeheartedly subscribe because I believe that I have seen ugly things (especially where man is involved). I can’t come up with a specific example at the moment, but when I think of ugly, depictions of violence, destruction, and hatred come to mind along with milder forms of ugliness like strip malls and tract housing.

While thinking about these things I’m taking photographs and hiking and what not. One batch of photos that I recently took were of the inside of an old garage here on the farm. Something that maybe not everyone would think of in terms of beauty. I found the old junk to be quite beautiful especially if lighted in the correct way. Some folks must agree with me as they made comments to that affect.

Another thing that I ran across goes more to the heart of Emerson’s idea. While walking along a frozen stream, I found a dead raccoon. I see this kind of thing all the time. Inexperienced people may have a romantic ideal of nature with happy little bunnies hopping about all the time, but when you are out in the woods a lot you know that some things are prey and some are predators and that age and disease take their toll even here. Normally I would just walk on by, but this day I decided to take some photos.

Could I get “beautiful” images from something like a dead raccoon? Is there beauty even here? Well maybe there is and maybe there isn’t and maybe if there isn’t then maybe there just wasn’t the right lighting (it was dull and overcast) or maybe my skills are lacking or maybe I just need to go on a binge of photographing dead animals in order to become proficient.

I just put links to the photos in this post since they might be uncomfortable for some people. If blood and guts are not your thing, you might not want to look at them.

The first image is relatively tame. It’s just a close up of the racoon’s hind foot. I kind of like it. The photo could certainly be improved, but on the whole I wouldn’t say the image itself is ugly. If I hadn’t told you that the raccoon was dead, would it make a difference?

Raccoon foot

The second image is a bit more gruesome. Nothing goes to waste in nature so the raccoon was gradually being consumed by other creatures. This is a shot of the raccoon’s side with some exposed flesh and bones (but no real “guts”). If you can get past the immediate shock of “I’m looking at a dead animals innards”, you can see some pretty cool textures in the wispy fur, the red flesh, the white ribs protruding, and the dark hidden interior regions.

Raccoon ribs

Anyway, take a look (if you dare) and see what you think.

I’ll have more to say in the future on the subject of why is nature beautiful. I’m not sure if I’ll post any more dead animal photos – rather not get a rep as “that dead animal photographer”. On the other hand I’ll probably have second thoughts when I see stuff in the woods that might not normally be thought of as typical fodder for photos.

MDW

Metal and Ice

It was pretty quiet this week. The weather continued its up and down thing; one day cold and snowy, the next warm and rainy. Yuk. I got out for a short walk one afternoon when the sun made a rare appearance. It was cold and windy, but I didn’t mind.

The sun makes a big difference no matter what the temperature. It can be ten degrees, but a little sunshine makes it feel almost warm. Dull grey clouds have covered the sky most of the winter so when the sun showed itself one afternoon I couldn’t resist getting outside.

The snow under my feet sparkled with tiny reflections of the sun above. The bare tree limbs even sparkled since they still were covered with a film of ice from a recent bout of freezing rain. Sometimes it got so bright that even with sunglasses on I had to squint my eyes. I liked it.  The wind may have been biting, but the strong warm rays provided an effective balm.

The bright light washed out the LCD screen on my camera so I was shooting blind, without benefit of viewing the pics or their histograms as I took them. It was like using a film camera again. I especially missed the histogram what with all the snow.

I spent a couple of fleeting hours wandering through pastures, fields, and woods behind my house. In the woody spots the trees clacked their hard bony fingers together in the wind and showered me with ice fragments that they shook off. In the open fields small tornadoes of snow swept by the wind leaped up, swirled around me, and then disappeared as their unseen impetus passed by.

A forgotten hay rake sitting in one of the hedgerows year after year provided the rusty metal photos – one of those things that gets parked somewhere on a farm with the intent to come back and collect it, but things steal our attention away.

New equipment is bought or borrowed, different crops replace hay, farmers get old and leave the fields to fend for themselves. Trees grow up twisting around and through the metal weaving it to the ground. It can’t be moved now.

MDW