A rainy autumn day, a string of them, today darker with no chance of sun. Slipped on a better pair of boots, weather proof, and headed into the woods just at the limits of the city. A long loopy trail took me into an embrace of greens and bits of yellow. The rain was coming harder, but the colours begin to take on a lustre that one finds in all this wet. I unzipped my coat, and tucked the camera inside and kept walking. What struck me in such a landscape is how the rain is transformative, not only by enriching the colours and tones, but also by signalling something of the direction or perspective or symmetry of the scene. That’s what drew me to this large oak with its spirally arranged leaves with lobed edges, and a nut called an acorn, borne in a cup. The tree looked like it leapt out of a children’s storybook, and it was quietly heralding the start of a trail. All around its base were fallen leaves, touches of red and orange and yellow, and beyond the straight up and down vertical lines, softened greens and yellows. All glow and hue courtesy of the rain. Yesterday when the sun peaked out from behind a dark sky, I might not never have noticed. I was feeling a little anxious, too, because I had just been released from the hospital after six nights of a serious flare up with Crohn’s Disease. Or maybe it was compounded with walking in the rain, and wanting to find pictures to capture a Fall day. In any cases, I was there, keeping up the pace. Landscape or nature has its own signature style when it comes to photography. In most cases, photographers run out for a street scene, and easily capture umbrellas, rain jackets, puddles, reflections on the road, wind-swept trees with cars parked below, and at night, streaks of colourful light. The forest by contrast sits back, and watches you, It wants nothing of your attention, or at least, seems so, as it appears wrapped in mystery and silence. Unlike parts of the world, like the Amazon, where the earth ‘summons the rain” as the New York Times’ writer Ferris Jabr says, our area sees it as a gift, and after a summer of heat and dry, people in coffee shops will hunker over their cups and glance outside, and stay, ‘We need this rain!’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would agree. Indeed he took this position: ‘How beautiful is the rain! After the dust and heat, in the broad and fiery street and in the narrow lane; how beautiful is the rain!’ And so, we venture forth into the woods, seeking something of its lushness, and learning how the wind will sweep pollen, leaf fragments and insect shells into the atmosphere. As Jabr writes, “The wet breath of the forest peppered with microbrews and organic residues … creates ideal conditions...” And I would add, to the physiognomy that poses before us when we step into its home. Before us is this transformation, and deep in its source is this part of the planet perhaps renewing itself. We ought to tap into that. We have to approach with a lightness, a shyness, and need to keep our eyes open. Patterns of leaves, and at this point in the Fall, here in the southwest, set against the sky, it could still be summer but the edges of the leaves, if you look closely are turning colour, like finding an annoying smudge or lipstick stain on a coffee mug that you take from the cupboard, and wonder if someone didn’t wash it properly.
But again, there is something fundamental and deep rooted in the way nature presents itself, or what we first perceive. It reminds me how in the Qur-an we are told that whenever we look at the natural world we find a revelation of the divine. “Muslims,” writes Karen Armstrong, “are far more impressed by the regular rhythms of nature than by the supernatural miracles celebrated in the Jewish and Christian scriptures … because … the natural order is the revelation of divine power and wisdom … All creatures praise God simply by existing …” She goes on to stay the ‘invisible forces of nature are sacred.”
David Abram, an American anthropologist believes at an earlier stage in human history we would have experienced nature as ‘animate too, but over time we have come to regard it as mechanical, prosaic and predictable.” He says a closer look gives us insight “leaving one open to a world alive, awake and aware.” He gives the example of watching a sunbeam illuminate a column of dust and realized in that instant maybe something of the divine but certainly of the mechanical of how this sudden lighting up of the dust particles,“imbued the air currents with warmth but altered the mood of the room.”
There’s something to that when I step into the woods. A familiar respect. Especially in the rain, or the early morning and late day light. There is a giving-to, a surrender maybe to its will, to step into its patterns and rhythms. To let the dark and the light and the shimmering colours have their effect.
Where the urban street can come alive in the rain as people rush home, driving or walking or running for a bus, the woods retreat, though deer will often continue to graze, heedless of the storm. Wild turkey, often seen in these parts, behave differently, If you go out at dawn and it is silent and calm, maybe a slight rain, you might find one of these gobblers roosting somewhere, waiting out the storm. As one writer noted: ‘I’ve succumbed to the chills or boredom of wet, silent woods and stood up to go prospecting, only to bust a lazy longbeard off a limb nearby. Even turkeys are prone to slapping that snooze button when conditions are dreary. Let him make the first move.” Turkeys flock to open areas, and around these parts, you will find them in the Tall Grass, or soaked fields, “brush-busting” as it has been described as they make their wat through water-landed vegetation. But today, here, in these woods, the day was silent, the trail itself like a sentence in a line of poetry, taking you on a journey, beckoning you to be patient. Still, I found myself hurried, and at times messed up on a couple of photographs, where I ought to have reset the depth-of-field. Later when I climbed back into my car, a leaf fell to the wet window, like a face in the crowd, and behind it the vast array of greens and blacks and hints of other colours. Like the final line of the poem suddenly showing itself.
Much later, I went back out at night, drove down to the river, the Ambassador Bridge glowing in the misty evening. The rain had just started again. Light drizzle but persistent. My attention was this tiny brick building, actually a public washroom, its architecture with that dip and slant of its rooftop reminiscent of a circus tent. The photograph shows it huddled in the shadow of the towering massive suspension bridge, the trail of lights leading back into the city from the river. A misty night, the glow around the quizzical building with its flipped up lines of the roof, like a French bob cut. I parked my car across the park and walked back across the lawn and then captured the sculpture of the nuns leaning into the wind, all intent and fierce evangelism at play in the rainy night. Here is where you feel the colours coalesce into an evenness, a muted tone highlighted by the sharpness of the bridge’s path.
A good day and night.
