Deep Woods 4: Spirit

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: My daily log tells me that I’ve been hiking in the preserves of Steep Rock almost steadily, several times a week, since the first of July, though for the first weeks I didn’t carry a camera. That's not long considering the river has been here since before the glaciers.

The first day I brought my camera was August 9 when the sun was high in the sky, Other pictures posted so far were taken more recently. My aim is to open perspective where none seems to exist.

Deep Woods 3

“Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” –Robert Rauschenberg

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Few things seem more mundane than a walk in the woods until one has walked deep enough to feel like a stranger with an uneasy welcome there. One needn’t even lose the trail between endless hills to feel the chill of forest presences and the authority of crows.

Deep Woods Self

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: It’s called “Hidden Valley,” an apt name. The valley winds, deep and invisible, from the Romford section of Washington, CT, where the Bantam and Shepaug Rivers join, until the enlarged Shepaug River emerges five miles downstream at Bee Brook and the new highway bridge. Between these points the river winds behind Baldwin Knoll, Robin Hill and the Pinnacle, looping back and forth and back and forth, at various times flowing north, south, east and west, until the water passes under the highway. Some rivers wind where the ground is level and the river gets lost. The Shepaug cuts steeply following rock’s discipline. 

The Baldwin Knoll entry to Hidden Valley is on the back side of Baldwin Knoll. From there I can descend by any of four trails that surround a shadowy cleft that cuts deep to reach the most remote region of the Shepaug River. The cleft falls to the west and catches sun through much of the day in summer, but at this time of year on a clear day the sun is always winking through forest and is gone early in the depths, and my climb back up in late afternoon is a climb to the light.

Deep Woods No.1

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  Robert Frost famously described the woods as “lovely, dark and deep,” but did not linger there, had “promises to keep.” When I first began carrying a camera on hikes through the woods I wanted to capture the austere beauty I found there, but when I got my pictures home, they were anything but deep; in photographs the depth of the forest became a flat wall. I realized the perception of those timeless depths came, in part, from the busy gossip of leaves, birds and streams, and from the phenomenon of binocular vision and from my forward motion along the trail.

This is the first posting of a new photographic project I’m calling “Deep Woods.”  To make these photographs I am closing one eye and trying to be still.