Nature – Page 33 – The Inner Frame

Steingrund unter den Händen

This continues the series of revisits of my year 1993/94 in California. Very rarely a landscape hits you with such a force that you are left with a lifelong desire to return.

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The climb from Lake Tahoe to Mount Tamrac is through lush forests, and nothing but the weathered trees prepares you for the view from the top.

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In the front is Gilmore lake where we had memorable swim, and further behind follow Susie Lake, and, already in the granite, almost invisibly, Lake Aloha.

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The landscape gradually transitions from impossibly green vegetation to gray and white granite rocks. The latter
are, however, not steep and ragged but smooth and almost plane. No invitation to hell could be sweeter.

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The heroes of this place are the trees. They struggle on without almost no soil, withstand harsh weather, and even when long dead, remain.

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The Other Side of the Spring Mills Park

On the other hand, there are some really spooky places in Spring Mills State Park, provided you come at the right time.

Next to Bronson cave, some fallen trees have assembled themselves in something that looks at an ancient rune.

In the fall and just before sun rise, the Spring Mills lake offers the best lake shore views in Indiana.

For whatever reason, there is always a healthy tree among the many dead.

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Even without the fog, the scenery is awe inspiring.

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For whatever reason, there is always a photogenic dead tree among the healthy. I wonder what ghost stories the settlers told here.

Wild Columbine

The Wild Columbine is one of the later spring wild flowers in Indiana, but one of my favorites, maybe because it is so photogenic.

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One usually finds her in clusters, near rocky slopes. My major difficulty with wild flowers is the depth of field. When you try to get a good shot of a trillium, for instance, you usually do this vertically down, and even with a modestly shallow depth of field, you inevitably have the muddy Indiana soil as a background, mixed with dirty brown leaves from years back. On the other hand, of the depth of field is too shallow, significant parts of the plant will be unpleasantly blurry.

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The Wild Columbine lends herself to side views, and her taste for location almost automatically provides beautiful backgrounds.

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This is all nice and pleasant, but to really appreciate the beauty of this flower, you need to get down to your knees and look at her intimately close.

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Maybe, in my next life, I want to be an insect. Just for one spring.

Past and Future

Once in a while it helps to go back in time a little. Indiana is a reasonable place for that, because during the Devonian period, some 390 Million years back, it was covered by a shallow see, a paradise for all kinds of critters small and big. They left us with plenty of fossils, and many of them are easy to find in stream beds.

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A famous place with a giant fossil bed is in the Falls of the Ohio State Park. The park itself is quite small and might come as a disappointment, as collecting fossils is obviously not allowed here. But one can take pictures.

This is somewhat serendipitous. I am not an expert, so I am completely clueless what the curious little sculptures on the rock bed are.

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Some might be rare, others just pieces of eroded trash. I don’t know.

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They are beautiful by themselves, and they set us into perspective: What fossils will we leave for casual visitors in 400 Million years? What will they think they see? Will there be a hint of civilization? What would we like them to see?

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Maybe the traces of a hand or a forgotten glove would be enough to tell: There was someone here who built.

The Old People

About half way between the water fall and the White River, following the creek trail in McCormic Creek State Park,
there is a sharp bend in the creek, which makes the whole area a bit darker than everything else. In the middle of the creek one can spot a strange creature standing there and obviously waiting for us.

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At a closer distance, the creature reveals itself as the trunk of a dead tree, losing not much of its previous ominosity.

Its strong roots hold on to the icy water like the grip of a dead man’s hand.

The stump hints at the missing presence of a once magnificent tree. It is always what is not there that makes a place sacred.

This is a landscape that would best be illuminated by Paul Celan’s Fadensonnen. Elsewhere in the park, off the marked trails, a relative is still alive, barely, waiting as well.

The Little People

Spooky Yellowwood State Forest is home to the Bald Cypress, which produces roots that curiously protrude form the ground. These are called cypress knees, and it is rumored that they provide stability and oxygen in the swampy ground.

The truth is an entirely different story. When it gets dark and nobody watches, they begin to stretch and move.

Some stay be themselves, others meet in small groups.

They attempt to recapture familiar themes. Is this above the Holy Family? And that below Mary with Child?

Or do they just mock us? We will never know, as with brightening light, they return to their places and and pretend to be nothing but roots.

Frames and Borders

There are certain places I like to revisit from time to time like old friends whom I only meet once in a while.

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The interesting thing about this particular place is that it provides its own frame.

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In a photograph (like in any picture), the frame is the border between us and what we see.

Here, the frame consists of dead wood, horizontal and vertical, and allows the view into a changing and living nature before and behind the frame.

Taking such pictures is like an attempt to cross that border.

As in The Suspended Step of the Stork, the attempt fails, over and over again.

Imperfections

The fire pink is notoriously difficult to photograph. In the 3-dimensional wild nature, its five bright red petals catch the eye instantly and let us overlook annoying background or minor blemish.

Only after we have tamed its appearance on a 2-dimensional photograph, the defects become immediately apparent. The uniform red shows the tiniest specks of dirt, and little tears in the petals that went unnoticed in nature become major issues. Even its own pollen becomes a nuisance in the photo.

Of course the right choice of light, depth of field, and post processing help. But I am still waiting for the perfect specimen for the perfect shot.

Wood and Stone

Even more than the near Shades State Park, Turkey Run State Park offers a maze of narrow canyons filled with remnants from the retreating glaciers of some 20,000 years ago.

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A common theme is the presence of wood and stone. Most of us are surrounded by their shaped presence more or less permanently, but here we can watch them grow and decay in their raw and untamed state.

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This place has something special at any season. In early spring, the abundant vegetation is still dormant, and the damage done by the melting ice and snow has not been cleaned up yet.

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This will just look like devastation to most, reminding us that building with wood or rock is, in the long run, nothing but building on sand.

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Occasionally, there is a view that seems to contradict the chaos. While such views are nothing but rare byproducts of the greater erosive randomness, they still remind us that there is purpose, as long as we pursue it.

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Emergence

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In my previous post about snow trilliums, I had lamented this year’s demise of them due to bitter frost after a period of warm days, and documented my claim with a a picture of a plant that looked to me like a very dead trillium. Not so, as a good friend has pointed out. The dead plant was in fact a hepatica, and is back, still with brown leaves, but also with nice little white flowers. Up close:

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And, even better, the snow trilliums I had taken for dead, are out, too.

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A little curiosity today was a small patch of three snow trilliums that had pink veins. Pretty.

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