Part 12

While I was back at the house, I had seen Mr. Mayhew out in the yard, heading for the barn. I stopped him and had him point out to me what general direction the creek was in. He reassured me that I couldn't get too lost in the woods, they weren't more than a mile or two across, so it would always be less than that distance to the creek, which would itself lead me to roads every half-mile or so. I'd ridden my bike out in this direction once or twice during the school year, so I had a vague notion of the outlines of the roads nearby.
        Feeling much better equipped now, I looked out into the woods around the fort, munching on a cookie. I spotted what looked like a fairly clear route in the direction I was heading, so I adjusted the bag on my shoulders and struck out into the trees. It was much warmer now than it had been when I first entered the woods that morning, but it was still nowhere near hot. There were plenty of birds darting among the upper branches of the trees, calling raucously to one another - no matter how many times I tried, I could never really bring myself to think of bird calls as "songs". Sure there were a few notes here and there, but it was really no more variation than the different pitches humans use within the space of a single sentence. And whenever there was a large group of birds, it sounded every bit as chaotic as a crowd of people.
        The ground was thickly covered in decades - maybe centuries? - of fallen leaves, which kept down a lot of the smaller underbrush. It wasn't often that I had to adjust my path to one side or another, to dodge a dense matting of small trees and thick vines, or a swampy patch full of some surprisingly tall plants, with millions of tiny orange flowers sprinkled through them.
        After a little while, I found my eyes getting bored with the scenery, and largely ignoring it, apart from picking out a path to walk along - and I stopped walking. After the first few days at the Mayhew's, I felt like I'd taken pictures of everything there was to take a decent picture of...but then, as I got to know the place better, I started finding more interesting things, in odd little corners that I'd completely overlooked before. There was a metal door on the side of the barn that had age and exposure to the weather had given a complete rainbow of colors to; there was a spot in the barn where, in late afternoon, the sun would peek in through a chink in the wall and be caught in the bits of straw-dust that always hung in the air. So now, I forced myself to re-adjust, to see if I could train my eyes to find more points of interest, under the trees. I walked a little more slowly than I had been, looking around more, and at my feet less.
        I caught a glimpse of a squirrel running up a tree, but it moved too fast for me and I couldn't bring my camera up in time before it disappeared. I wasn't much good at motion shots anyway, too little time to react and get a nice composition. I moved on through the woods, old leaves alternately crunching and smushing under my feet, dry branches snapping. I looked up toward the canopy far overhead, and wondered if there was a way to get an interesting shot of the sky peeking through leaves. I leaned my back against a tree, looking through the viewfinder upwards... then I turned around, my stomach against the tree, so the tree trunk entered the camera's view, angling up in sharp perspective. That was kind of cool. Then I started really looking at the bark, and took a few close-up shots, intrigued by the weird non-pattern of the deeply crevassed bark. Like a series of dry canyons, seen from satellite... That reminded me of the times I'd spent looking at moss as a kid. There was this huge rock in the strip of woods behind my house, and somehow it had managed to accumulate all different kinds of moss. There was one type - my favorite - that looked incredibly furry, very tall, and when you looked at it closely, you could see that there were hundreds of these tiny, delicate little fronds reaching up from the main mass of the moss, like the trees of a fairy's forest. I looked toward the base of the tree to see if any moss grew there, but no luck. I'd keep my eyes open for some, though, I'd love to investigate some like that with a zoom lens.
        I continued on, stopping more frequently now. I found a large, fallen over tree-trunk that was half-rotted, and sprouting small plants all along its length. There was some really bizarre fungi growing around a wide tree that seemed to be in bad shape - I tried to lend the images a melancholy air, trying to convey the sense of life being sucked dry from something already ill, but I wasn't sure how well it had worked. The dark room could help there, though, making the image darker overall, maybe over-burn some of the shadows, keep the contrast low... I found a grouping of stones, which I'd almost thought Caleb and his friends had set up, it was similar to the piles they made, but then I noticed the warm carpet of moss curling up around the bases (which I took many close-ups of), and realized it had been there probably longer than Caleb had been alive. The stones were so carefully balanced though... I was sure the wind didn't exactly blow through here very strongly, but still, for gravity to have been so gentle to them all these years... I got an eerie feeling from them, like I could almost see the ghostly hands that had set them in place decades (or more) before. I curled my own hands closer around my camera, I don't know if it was to protect the camera from strange grasping things, or as a grounding for myself.
        From time to time it seemed like I found little scraps of paths, but they always disappeared before long. After an hour or so of wandering, I heard water, and thought I could see a bit of space in the trees ahead. I moved a little quicker - and nearly tripped over a fallen branch as a result. I stopped still a moment to catch my breath, heart pounding, clutching my camera tightly. Couldn't do that. I approached the creek more cautiously, and was glad I had - there was a much sharper drop down to the waterbed than I had expected. It had to be fifteen feet or so down, and at a pretty steep slope. If I had paid more attention in Earth Science back in junior high, I might have pieced that together ahead of time, a body of water old enough that the town had been half-built around it would obviously have eroded pretty far down. I looked up and down the creek bed a little ways, trying to spot a reasonable path down. It was late enough in the season that the spring flooding was over, so though the summer heat hadn't yet arrived to dry up wider spaces, the creek was within its bounds at least, and there was a enough shoreline at the edges to walk along. Most of it was large sheets of warm grey rock, split into jagged sheets. I'd have to get some shots of those - they would be fantastic for doing overlays on other images, burning two frames of film onto the same sheet of paper.
        When I'd scrabbled down a slightly less steep portion of the embankment, I struck out for the nearest nice, flat, safely dry rock. I sat down and stretched out my legs, kicking off my shoes and letting my toes stretch out and relax. I lay back on my elbows and closed my eyes, letting my head fall back, and took a long, slow breath. There was the faintest breeze, and the sun was just warm enough to feel on my skin. I slipped off my backpack, setting it on the rock beside me, and took a long drink from a water bottle, pulling out an apple to munch on. I could feel the same warm jumble of feeling well up in me that used to seep into my system in the final days of June before school let out, when all the tests were over and I knew I'd have a summer of freedom and endless sun-filled days ahead.

        After a fairly long rest on the rocks, I stretched and got to my feet, knowing that if I stayed put much longer I would probably doze off, and in the process get a truly terrifying sunburn. I put my shoes back on - tempting as it was to wade my way along the creek bed, I absolutely hated having to put shoes on over wet feet, and I was going to have to walk back through the woods at some point. The dry rocks weren't going to have hidden patches of slippery algae for my feet to find and make me fall on.
        Taking pictures around the water wasn't quite as successful as I'd hoped. I realized I still didn't own the right filter for taking shots through water - I'd always have that weird layer of brightness over anything underwater, I couldn't get the clarity I wanted. I did get some really nice shots of the rocks, and little plants growing up through cracks in the rocks, and the reflection of plants leaning out over and dipping into the water. I actually took a lot of the latter, trying to work out how to balance the mirroring effect, and how to show that something was a reflection and not just a photo turned upside-down...