September 29, 2008

• Stump Hunting

   To the right you see St. Joe County’s famed Covered Bridge, sometimes called the Langley Covered Bridge:  being the astute observers that you are, you will note that it’s claim to fame as a ‘covered’ bridge is fairly skeletal. This is because ‘they’ (those Unidentified Others who run around everywhere, doing things) are doing extensive repairs on the bridge. What you cannot see in this shot are the huge construction cranes poised at both ends of the bridge, or the construction home-away-from-home, or the motor hanging 30 feet in the air from the crane’s tip. I actually like this concept of the bridge much better than the finished one, but ‘they’ have never asked for my advice.

  However because they are working on the bridge, they adjusted the dam to lower the river–according to Daryla, as much as 6 to 10 feet–and so Daryla, a devoted river fisher, and I (a devoted photographer) took what we came to call ‘the Stump Tour.”

   These gentlemen were fishing with their father. Of the three of them, I assume one of them was having fun. He’s not in the picture. The boys had spent entirely too much time on an asphalt bridge, too far from the water to get wet and too far from success to find any pleasure in fishing. They had eaten everything there was to eat, drunk everything there was to drink, and they occupied their time by throwing small stones into the water below them. This might have been more amusing, had they not had to look so hard to find throwable stones, and had their father not objected to their occupation (it scares away fish. Being the child of a devout fisherman, I know that nearly anything a child less than 10 can do to amuse herself will “scare away the fish”.Fish apparently live their entire lives in stark terror.) It’s one of those perpetual inequities in a relationship.

  There is no telling what the actual course of this river was, before mankind started messing with it. It would appear to have run through small forests. At some point we, in our infinite wisdom, began constructing dams, backing up the water, creating ponds where once only narrow streams existed, and as a result, killing trees, and the result is this:

  I took 127 photos yesterday, most of them of stumps sticking up out of the river. I learn (over and over and over again) that what makes a fascinating image to my eye does not always translate into an interesting photograph. However, in my mind’s eye I added 6-10 feet of water (I think this may be an exaggeration) to the tops of these stumps and determined you really need to know where most of these things are before you run downriver with a boat motor because I have been in a small boat when we sheared a pin, and it’s a l-o-n-g row home.(I’m not sure boat motors are still built quite the same way as when I was a kid, but they may be.) The propeller hit something, snapped the pin that held it on, the propeller went spinning into oblivion, the engine roared and the boat stopped dead in the water. So I took 127 photographs of stumps against the light and this is the shot I have to show for it. I amuse myself by believing the dings out of the tops of the stumps are propeller bites.

  I have only lived in this area for about…eight years or so. I moved here, I believe, in 2000. I had dated my Beloved for two years before that. So my sense of geography is remarkably bad. Places still pop up out of the woods at me miles from where I put them last, and some places just disappear and I have to call Nancy to find out where they went. This amazes her. She is one of those N/S/E/W people, I am a right/left person who navigates by the white horse in the field, or the old barn foundation with the black cows in it on the left… I would say (because this is my blog) that she’s always lived in this area and therefore should know it like the back of her hand, but the truth is if you picked us up, blindfolded us and set us down in Chesapeake Bay, I would flounder around, eventually getting where I’m going the hard way, and she would peel off her mask and drive directly to it.

  This matters because the scene above left is the view from Daryla’s friend Jackie’s back yard. I’ve been to Jackie’s house before. It never dawned on me she lived on the river. In fact…I had no idea she lived anywhere near the river. However, just in case that doesn’t amaze you as much as it does me…the river really should be washing up against the bulrushes there, not meandering around a tight curve. (Much less so many tight curves.)

  I leave you with this. I like it. And yes–it’s another weed shot.

  Edit: I encountered some difficulties getting Xanga to take this entry once I wrote it, and by the time it did I was done. Rereading it now, it occurs to me that the line about the “perpetual inequities in a relationship” actually goes at the end of the paragraph about my Beloved’s sense of direction versus mine. I have no idea how it got moved, but then…I thought this entry went into to trash anyway until I received a response.

   

  • 9:59 am
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