Landscape and Language
A long sword of sunshine stabbed at the twisting trail ahead. Its blade of lengthening light reached through a new opening in the overcast and slid between the season’s deep green leaves. By the time I’d hiked a mile, the expanse in front of me had almost fully brightened. As if laundered, the skies had quickly cleared since mid-morning with the arrival of a strengthening butter-colored sun on this initial day of summer. Earlier, I had noted a stubborn residue of overnight clouds that had concealed the constellations like a blindfold. Remnants still shuffled across the atmosphere, marring the far sky before ushering in the sunrise. However, nearly all those scraps of cloud cover finally had dispersed and dissipated in the daytime heat. After those passing storms, the scenery had rearranged itself, and everything resettled.
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At first, I heard a seemingly chaotic squabbling of small birds perched in filled limbs scribbled overhead, the movement of wings still hidden within an oak tree’s dark green, large-lobed leaves. Eventually, though the whole chorus remained almost totally invisible, their birdsong began to harmonize in my mind as they busily occupied themselves among the fullness of that early summer foliage. Like the stilling of fluttering flakes in a snow globe at rest, this rain-washed setting has resumed its familiar appearance.
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The breeze that was here for so long has now nearly gone. Those once wavering trees, a touch blurry in slow-shuttered photos from even such slight motion, have finally begun to straighten, as if starched, during brief breaks in the southwestern air current, temporary lulls amid its inconsistent winds. Still, a few nearby thin trunks, permanently influenced by the seasons’ regularly repeated rush of gusts, continue to list a smidgen toward the river on its angled banks. One dead birch appears as if the slim mast of a little wooden ship at anchor but leaning with the subtle movement of tiny waves awakened in an almost imperceptible onshore current suddenly becoming brisk.
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Though an attribute of pure beauty viewed in my photos might be a lesser concern for me, when each scene depicted in my digital screen seems like an image bound to be found on the front of an old picture postcard, photography appears deceptively easy. With bright beams of sunshine moving through their fuzzy filter and grazing their outline at the tattered edges, a stray couple of little backlit clouds look like torn swatches of white linen cloth almost the color of December snow floating over a jagged skyline of treetops in a depth of distant cerulean. Or perhaps, I think, maybe they resemble small sails seemingly fringed, ripped a bit at their trimming by persistent winds in the past but now billowing in an increasing breeze blowing above aquamarine seas. Nevertheless, despite a few lingering illuminated tendrils of cirrus clouds lying along the horizon like wispy strands of light gray hair, by noon all would dissolve, and lucid blue skies would command complete contemplation. Stilled in windless air, these nearby trees will eventually be idle, each green leaf beginning to become bleached of intense color from the strong summer sunshine’s whitening wash.
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This section of the trail provides flat passage for comfortable walking with the shallow slopes of little hills rising up either side and—in my imagination—formed like fluffed oversized pillows, perhaps reminding me of Claes Oldenburg’s art installations offering large likenesses of everyday objects. These evident ripples in the landscape are among those distinct features throughout the northern portion of the state that had been shaped ages ago by a great glacial shift and protracted periods of thawing. Distinguishable narrow bands of ridges, marshes, bogs, woodland, prairie grassland, and sand dunes range across the northwestern region of Indiana near the Lake Michigan shoreline due to effects created incrementally in prolonged stages over an extensive span of time by a retreating glacier sometime between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
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At one point in history this entire area was covered by ice maybe a mile deep, and then segments were gradually submerged beneath water from the great glacial melt. Geologists have determined that at least three particular eras of major transition are indicated among the arrangement of details perceptible within swaths of the topography, including a few separate stretches of terrain paralleling today’s shoreline. Every one of these strips exhibits evidence of once representing a longstanding beachfront during cessation of continual transitional phases for the receding lake, each perhaps at one time displaying qualities similar to those in the current sandy coastal strands bordering Lake Michigan.
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More recently, members of Native American tribes—mostly Potawatomi and some Miami—also traveled many of the same places, moving through these woods on trips from their inland villages, passing parcels of hardwood along sandy paths, smoothly slipping down the river in lightweight crafts, or journeying across marshland on serpentine routes around lower Lake Michigan. With assistance from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and other institutions, as well as important input contributed by descendants selected from both of the tribes to whom this landscape seemed sacred, the national park has begun forming a new Indigenous Cultural Trail. Complemented by thematic informational signs about Native American heritage, this route recognizes revered traditions and honors those people who had fully inhabited the land only two centuries ago.
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Although I applaud this admirable, thought-provoking, and inspiring gesture deserving respect and intended to be instructional about historic developments, I question if an inadvertent and subconscious message exists in this solemn project. While this environmental exhibit is well-intentioned, it also seems unfortunately ironic, emphasizing a minimal contemporary presence of Native Americans. Moreover, this addition will draw attention to the gradual absence over time of an intrinsic historic and cultural influence by the original inhabitants. As well, the thematic trail will expose a current void of various past characteristics evident in the rest of the present landscape. On the other hand, just such a subtle secondary lesson might be beneficial, even if not deliberately designed in this venture.
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Nevertheless, I frequently consider the possible narratives of those whose lives once would have included traversing this location and whose voices at one time might have floated through this forest in a different language. Among mixed signals apparent in his writing life about the Native American figure, Henry David Thoreau wrote in A Week in the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: “The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.” Alone in nature, I occasionally think about how wilderness links us to history, how it can serve as a useful tool for memory, even though the slow erosion of human interference has altered all we see. At a time like this, I wonder again, as I often do, about those who once walked these routes out of necessity rather than for leisure, and I am heartened that the Indigenous Cultural Trail could instill similar contemplation in others.
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Indeed, as if reliving the past were possible, I momentarily imagine this region as it once was. While preserving something necessary, a sense of reverence and respect for distinct presences in former eras, I envision an arrangement of the landscape drawn into an informal order. My imagination conjures the creative chaos of nature, an elegant embroidery that gradually changes with the seasons, yet deftly and in important ways always remains the same. Through careful composition and conscientious omission when selecting countryside content in the settings of my camera viewfinder, my photographs usually attempt to depict a sample of pure elements in the environment seemingly uncorrupted by contemporary contamination, what I have intentionally and self-consciously labelled elsewhere as imitation wilderness. Then I hear a plane passing overhead. Looking up, I sight this jet probably headed for O’Hare, and I track its deliberate movement through the sky. The slender silver body glints in sunlight as it chalks a long white swath of contrail toward the northwest, perhaps the way a motorboat’s sleek wake may extend its pale scar across calm blue lake water. Again, the present crowds out the past.
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By the time I return to my car in the now half-filled trailhead parking lot, the haze of a lazy late-day sun lingers overhead, its vague light feathering edges of the sky along the horizon. Stats on the display screen at the back of my camera indicate I have taken almost thirty photographs, some with differing compositions or alternate angles of the same scene, as I’ve hiked through woods and marshland, across a meadow, and along two small dune hills beside a narrow river. Additionally, I anticipate chronicling these locations later in separate journal entries or posting brief reports as personal commentaries on social media, maybe the way Thoreau might have recorded his notes about nature had he lived in the digital age.
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Still, sometimes I think I’d like to try writing an extended fixed narrative that connects events and chronologically supplies concrete solutions rather than showcasing a series of simple creative nonfiction fragments, indirect impressions with whispered hints and a variety of observational opinions, often only posing ambiguous questions and speculative notions. However, nature requires me to respond on its terms. Like the scrutiny of expressive instrumental music or examination of stilled scenery in a landscape painting, no authoritative analysis can be definitively incontestable. Even attempting to judge so would be limiting, and also potentially erroneous.
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Therefore, I share revelations resembling a familiar genre for me—captioned photographs—those scenic images accompanied by compact commentary or perhaps poetic passages of complementary prose, maybe literary vignettes. Isn’t one’s perception of the past simply a collection of witnessed incidents that have been retained and preserved by individual memories? I wonder, is this impressionist description an additional perspective or an alternative depiction? Is this method merely an anecdotal history that fulfills my wish to relive a day of personal experience or consider consequences of human encroachment upon nature? While I ponder, I consider how legitimate, convincing, and pertinent these forms of expression might be.
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As poet Charles Wright refreshingly suggests in “The Secret of Poetry,” a piece maybe characterized more as blunt than subtle, nature’s song “fills our ears with no meaning.” Through comprehension and contemplation, observers might supply a refined context or suggest a potential consequence, both of which can vary from one individual to another. Therefore, my creative composition method determined by description, definition, and desire leads me to a pattern of variations on the narrative. Viewed or read absent a refined story line, landscape imagery provides an instrument facilitating meditation. Wright often famously focused on three themes in his poems, “landscape, language, and the idea of God.” A great admirer of Cezanne landscape paintings that stimulate and inspire him, Wright has specifically described landscape depiction driven by lyrical imagery as his primary form of writing, a style he believes unfashionable in current literature.
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Similarly, I seek to reach a place in which my prose and photographs of nature initiate landscape imagery with indicative language illustrating more abstract notions. In my pursuit, I consider the old-fashioned Romantic idea of elements in our environment as silent signifiers of the spiritual world, perhaps what Walt Whitman notably referenced—even expansively including inanimate manufactured objects beyond the natural—as “dumb beautiful ministers” in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
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Leaving this landscape for home, I hope there is no way this day will ever diminish from my memory. Slowly, I drive over an old stone bridge battered by decades of destructive wintry weather—those strong northern storms bringing damaging winds, snow, and ice—as well as the repetition of spring inundations that always alter the terrain in the surrounding floodplain. Root boles come loose from muddy banks and gusts topple into the water current those trunks already tilted and tenuous. Today, the Little Calumet River crossing is framed by a set of overhanging trees with their greenery of leaf-filled branches interlocking and curved above the road like a chapel arch. This opening creates a natural tunnel suggesting an entryway or exit from some spiritual place, a spot perhaps not necessarily extraordinary but just isolated enough from everyday life to invite contemplation of the past in its limited imitation of wilderness.
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A couple of cumulus clouds now scuttle through that powder blue sky peeking between the few last gaps in overhead foliage, as the day begins to retract its light. Local forecasters predict another storm front to emerge quickly for passage through the region by the pre-dawn hours, replacing an overnight sky that will be seeded with stars. Though this weather system is shifting directly from the west and weaker than those we’ve recently experienced, I expect the countryside will be changed once more, reshaped maybe only in minor modifications to the seasonal scenery, yet introducing enough motivation for a return visit.