Reminiscence and Nostalgia
Advancing toward a marsh forest, I confront a mess of frenzied ephemeral insects seemingly threatening, thickening the air near me, so restless and relentless during their brief lives. Some flicker as they flit in and out of narrow rays of sunshine seeping between the deep green all about me. These leaves, quivering at times, throw their twitching web of silhouettes about the ground around my feet, shadows now showing almost a blue hue, perhaps like Renoir’s subtly colored cast of painted shade tucked under summer trees and on lawns alongside ladies’ delicate dresses. Today, although the gnats and mosquitoes appear very active, thus far my insect repellant spray seems to be working, and all types of flying nuisances have mostly left me alone. Only a couple of bees suddenly buzz by my head as I hike in a muddy mix of terrain transitioning to sand, soil, and pebbles along this diminishing trail, but up until now even these pests do not present much of a problem. Stepping between trees, at eye level I spy a long-legged spider slip by me on a slim limb, maybe stating its presence with a faint signature, stringing a fragile filament between two delicate twigs like a cluster of capillaries.
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Moving through the woods, I step over numerous skinny sticks, a loose scrawl of deadwood—almost skeletal snapped and cracked branches resembling broken bones of small animals—or a few toppled trunks with their darkly scarred bark fading and gritty. When I touch the tough texture, parts flake away. They remind me of chips from a dried and crinkled coat of paint peeling on an abandoned barn surrounded by an open meadow flooded by sunshine and baked during an extended hot spell. Indeed, local forecasters say today supposedly starts a week of extreme heat. All morning the weather has warmed, temperatures quickly lifting into the upper eighties before noon as thermometer readings approach the level of a predicted high near ninety-five degrees. My forehead sweaty above dampened eyebrows, a thin ring of perspiration has already formed around the crown of my black baseball cap emblazoned with a white “3”—the car number of NASCAR's late legend Dale Earnhardt—in a script font outlined by red trim at its front panel below the peak. Absentminded touches from my repeatedly adjusting its fit have stained the slightly arced bill with a ghostly residue left by wet fingerprints.
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In particular spots during this time of year, the narrow pathway nearly disappears, and I meet some resistance as I find myself dodging around or stooping under long slumping limbs still dripping with dew or remnants of yesterday’s rain, an accumulation of temporary barriers blocking my way. Momentarily, I recall lines from “Birches,” a favorite Robert Frost poem: “Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs / Broken across it, and one eye is weeping / From a twig’s having lashed across it open.” Crouching a bit, I duck under those obstacles, perhaps the bent elbows of gnarled branches appearing arthritic and rigid. A grid of heavily weighted limbs droops and scrapes my hunched shoulders as I step across fallen timber, and I remember when I was in this same spot on a harsh winter afternoon. Then, the bare trees offered little interference, though snow and ice presented slippery footing. Nevertheless, even as the going becomes more difficult, today these profuse leaves seem more inviting. As singular as the season may be each year, every summer the scenery meets my expectations: resplendent with splendor, it never disappoints. Nothing foils its impact. The spare landscape and strict gray face of winter have been gradually replaced throughout spring. Bathed by a sun-drenched sky, everything is re-shaped by summer’s lush decorations.
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The seasons present different degrees of difficulty for wanderers crossing the countryside. Autumn and spring often offer a pardon, a reprieve from summer’s heat and humidity or the grim existence in a bitter winter. But somehow today’s summer solstice with its extended hours of sunshine seems an isolated instance, a moment of transition and an opportunity for reflection. As I hike a familiar trail through thickening dune woods, those occasional insect clouds hover above encroaching overgrowth all along the way.
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In the next six months, daylight will be shortened by hours until I find myself again under the dull flat light of a Midwest December. Amid a lull due to the absence of sounds from birds gone south, when the forest is already firm with frost and all around me has ossified into rigidity, distractions are restricted and even diminished. Heavier snowfall sometimes slows my pace, and the cold can be uncomfortable when temperatures dip below zero or the only sound seems to be the creaking of empty limbs shifting in a brisk wind, drawing attention once more to a lack of birdsong. However, this walk is certainly easier in much of winter since the forest’s bare trees do not present such an obstacle to my passing and my view is unobstructed in any direction. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote in “A Winter Walk”: “The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow.”
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At times during my hike, as I briefly step into portions of a swamp forest that intersects this area along the way, I come upon patches of slick muddy soil spackled between slackened trees. This way proves thick with overlapping shadows that intensify by folding over one another and seem as portentous as a particular night sky further darkened to black by a lack of stars. In fact, when a strikingly white butterfly flutters by me unsteadily, intermittently lit by specks of sunlight filtering through tiny gaps between the trees, it appears like the lone lantern of a distant charter ship isolated in heavy seas and tossed on choppy waves under a dreary night sky. I am startled by how even in midday some excessively shaded spaces stay untouched, sheltered from direct sunshine all summer, covered by deep green leaves lying limp in this windless ravine. When I encounter such a location, I sense a state of secrecy in a haven awaiting discovery and disclosure. My eyes adapt to their surroundings much the way a photograph reveals initially hidden details in contrasting and less exposed sections of an image when camera settings are altered and adjusted accurately.
* * *
Sometimes I calculate seasons by calendar months; other times I measure them by unfolding weather patterns, maybe by the evolving shapes of elements in the changing landscape, and perhaps by the escalating or diminishing level of volume by birds heard all along my way. Nevertheless, I always have self-assurance in my travels here due to memories arising from familiarity during prior inspections of this terrain. In the past I carried a park trail map handout with an additional sheet of interpretive nature information in my back pocket for assistance, and I do still keep them somewhere in my photography backpack, but they are no longer necessary. In fact, I now know the landscape here so well that I am not sure in which partition of my gear storage I have placed those pages of direction and guidance.
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If I were to create a pencil sketch of my movements through this portion of the woods, I'd simply produce a line drawing resembling the curving course swerving between two hills before rising to higher ground and narrowing into a straight yet slim path. This configuration is similar to the image initially depicted on that tattered poster map pasted to a plywood board beside the trailhead parking lot and located just above a weathered bench. As I peer forward toward another furrow in the topography far ahead resembling a ravine but not very deep, a feature remembered from previous treks, I anticipate aspects of the countryside I want to revisit and capture again with my camera, though knowing all will be modified since my last visit, transformed a bit by the current conditions. As Claude Monet believed when repeatedly painting the same haystacks or cathedral spires in dozens of instances at differing seasons or during various stages of daylight, “a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life—the light and the air which vary continually.”
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Indeed, despite any difficulty in maintaining my way due to seasonal overgrowth or even a massive snowstorm in winter overtaking unique landmarks and specific indicators of direction, every step during my wandering supplies a hint of recognition. Amid this scenery, my brain identifies specific images creating the recollection of a sole location. Over time, I have concluded the process of photography enhances my ability to remember and record settings. Articles with research examining the influence of nearly universal access to cameras through smartphones have determined a correlation to recollecting experiences correctly.
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As I have instructed students in my creative writing courses, whatever we remember arrives as an accumulation of various factors, resulting in some details that might be slightly varied from actual events or derived from attempts to fill in gaps and supply context. In addition, our depictions of the past can be aided by others’ narratives or by moments preserved in photographs. In numerous experiences, whether patiently preparing to photograph a serene landscape setting or peering through my viewfinder at action in a sporting event surrounded by thousands of screaming fans, my attention to specifics in the atmosphere around me magnifies. In this manner I can isolate an incident for greater concentration and help strengthen my memory. In fact, as I photograph the moment, I am more aware of the environment because I intend to save images that effectively reflect the circumstance and significance at the instant in which they were taken.
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During an insightful essay about returning to Indiana after a spell away (“Landscape and Imagination,” published by Scott Russell Sanders in his 1991 book titled Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home), the author comments: “It is increasingly rare for any of us to know with passion and subtlety a particular place….” Because of the current restless mobility of Americans and the tendency of individuals, especially younger ones, to be more engaged with sources of technological entertainment in contemporary culture, Sanders suggests fewer folks remain for extended amounts of time in a set location, and only a limited number repeatedly immerse themselves in nature. Interestingly enough, one must note Sanders could not have conceived the exponentially greater addiction to technology existing in today’s society, now more than three decades later. However, he further observes that even when engaged by compelling scenery, “It is never a simple matter actually to see what is before your eyes. You notice what memory and knowledge and imagination have prepared you to see.” Perhaps an appreciation for this medley of characteristics—memory, knowledge, and imagination—applied to understanding and interpretation of experience summarizes well what I hope to find and what I admire most in my favorite writers who explore reactions of the human spirit in relationship with the natural world. Similarly, I attempt to bring these elements into my own observations and reflections.
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My compilation of photos with images captured from prior hikes provides further evidence feeding my inadequate memory, as the hand of time momentarily loosens its grip, and my mind drifts back, though my imagination sometimes mixes fact with fiction. Often observed and preserved without an accompanying narrative, every one of the pictures evokes emotion of a moment frozen forever in that minimal fraction of a second the shutter snaps open to collect the setting, a record of scenery ready for retrieval and review anytime or anywhere. Although stilled moments—the progress from past to present to future stalled and preserved as memory in a photo—I like to imagine all of my stationary images of landscape suggest a narrative continuing in the ongoing measurement of time and reflect an element in the ever-unwinding thread of life. Each of my pictures merely produces an opportunity for quiet contemplation amid a frequently chaotic world. For me, a photo serves a similar function as a poem, which Robert Frost adeptly defined in his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” to be “a momentary stay against confusion.”
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Additionally, involuntary memories are reactions frequently evoked and retrieved upon an unexpected stimulus to the senses, such as a sudden exposure to sighting of a stilled moment that forgetfulness might have veiled for years. As I have instructed students authoring memoirs, personal histories, autobiographical poetry, or creative nonfiction projects in my writing courses, whatever we remember arrives as an accumulation of various factors temporarily influencing perceptions. Never static, recollections are always altered upon each recounting by the interplay of reality and imagination, the influence of time’s passage and the narrator’s contemporary emotional state. All chronicles are revised and extended with every retelling. Proust knew this—and so can we: “The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.”
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At some point in the future I might impulsively think of today in an unintentional memory, recalling precise details—sights, sounds, smells—of my walk along the wooded trail. Perhaps even as soon as tonight I’ll spontaneously remember the day’s experienced instances when late in the evening a muscle ache from overexertion while hiking keeps me from easily sleeping. In Richard Hugo’s well-known essay on writing poetry, “Triggering Town,” he suggests a process that parallels my use of landscape photos to inspire language and reminiscence: “triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words…. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life. The relation of you to your language gains power.” Perhaps this relationship between landscape, language, and imagination helps to explain my fondness for the Indiana Dunes as well as my desire for repeated visits.
* * *
Evidenced by my experiences and scientific studies, memories are improved in those folks focusing on freezing moments with their cameras. Even though I hadn’t viewed a specific image in years and had simply stored it away in my archives hard drive, I will immediately remember the day I captured the scenery viewed upon revisiting those details within the picture’s frame. Art critic, painter, and poet John Berger, in response to reading Susan Sontag’s classic yet controversial On Photography, once declared: “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” I remain conscious of this well-known quote whenever I press the button on my shutter release to preserve a scene during a particular instance. Indeed, the mechanism’s speed determines how much exposure a subject receives and to what degree or how distinctly a moment is stilled forever. However, as Berger correctly concludes, “unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning.” In fact, often images need to be seen within the context of circumstances or under the influence of the written word to be imprinted significantly in the mind.
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Since our depictions of the past can be aided by moments perpetuated in photographs or sustained by others’ accounts chronicling a situation, I sometimes wonder: will all beyond the frames of my photographs or the pages of my notes—those prose captions composed to offer context to a photo—eventually be lost to a fading memory? Do the words and images I preserve represent the discernible and more reliable record of my reminiscences? Are my commentaries essentially editorials influencing the way one sees the scenery, contributing the effects on other senses to the visual image I’ve captured with my camera to define or determine more fully the importance of an incident for complete analysis? As Ralph Waldo Emerson explained the process of integrating such information: “The senses collect the surface facts of matter. The intellect acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the essence or intellectual form of the experiences.”
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At the same time, fearful of detriment to the current health of the landscape that could occur from overexposure, leading to numerous visits by others, I occasionally wish I could keep the distinctive grace inherent in this place I capture with my camera a secret. Obviously, landscape photographers have a practical vested interest in maintaining the scenery they need as subject matter. However, as avid devotees to natural settings, they also appreciate the precarious position of nature, particularly in higher traffic locations like national or state parks frequently visited by tourists or even locals simply seeking weekend getaways. Landscape photographers focusing on more remote locales in national preserves or wildlife refuges have engaged in a related debate recently concerning identification of specific spots where favorite photos are composed. Some suggest a wise course would be to conceal such information to prevent increasing popularity and depletion of the location. Indeed, an interesting ethical dilemma arises as various well-known individuals recording the environment in images even admit to providing incorrect or misleading details concerning whereabouts of certain shots to followers of their photographic work, a philosophy that some criticize as an elitist attitude, but which the photographers justify as a way to safeguard the purity of a sacred place.
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We frequently recall all sorts of events the way we would will them to be, precisely like scenes we might repeatedly dream, snagged on that fictional landscape of the boundless imagination. Nevertheless, we often do not control our memories. They resist cancellation. Disregarding our conscious or subconscious attempts to banish them, their stored thoughts and visions return unexpectedly, maybe like those words of lyrics in an old song that cannot be unheard even decades later or maybe the way a favorite image is spontaneously envisioned from some classic film last viewed decades ago. When reminiscences resemble nostalgia, even perhaps a pensive wistfulness, the mind supplies a buffer, and sentiment embellishes its tale with a sense of forgetting certain unpleasantries. Importantly, one must distinguish between sentiment, which legitimately prioritizes a greater level of feeling rather than adhering to a merely objective or rational perspective, and sentimentality, which foolishly relies upon an exaggerated and excessive emotional interpretation of a moment, ludicrously attempting to distort the viewer’s response.
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Charles Wright once wrote in a poem titled “Inland Sea”: “Nostalgia arrives like a spring storm / looming and large with fine flash.” Rather than assemble a selection of recollections filled with regret, our enlivened imaginations often seek to eliminate or ease reality’s upsetting scenarios. Indeed, we yearn to return with fond and florid memories of scenes in previous seasons, at least in a hope to recover or discover images, actions, and events closer to an ideal remembrance. A nostalgic approach invites positive or inspirational reactions, and I acknowledge such an attitude is inherently part of my communication process. Consequently, I value this facet of evocative reminiscence—a quality frequently and unapologetically characterizing an aspect of my landscape photography and prose commentary.