I returned this morning to the same spot along the side of Piney Woods Church Road where I saw the oak leaf floating yesterday, and discovered needles of ice had formed overnight. Every moment, the world around us is changing. In the spirit of Heraclitus, we can never step onto the same road twice.
After the overnight rainstorm, the ditches along Piney Woods Church Road had filled with water once again. In one of them, I saw this oak leaf floating, the edges of the leaf slowly taking on water. The stillness of the scene offers no hint of the raw winter’s day on which I took this photograph.
I set out late this afternoon, on the 5th of February, with a specific goal: to locate a certain water oak tree branch with a solitary leaf at the tip which I had photographed yesterday. It had rained heavily overnight, and the air had turned colder, with a raw edge to it. The wind was blowing considerably, at speeds up to fifteen miles per hour. Needless to say, the leaf was long gone — probably pulled off the branch by a passing gust and carried off. What was it Bobby Burns said? “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” So I am posting yesterday’s shot here instead, as an extra blog post by way of a prologue to today’s photo (which I will post later this evening).
On a drizzly gray afternoon, I saw two bluebirds perched amid the branches of an old pecan tree. It was a poem without words.
After a brief rain overnight, I arrived on a lazy mid-morning Monday for my ramble down Piney Woods Church Road. I took quite a few photographs, as usual, including those of a vibrant green patch of resurrection ferns covering a branch of an old pecan tree (no doubt this photo will appear in the blog before too long). But I settled today on this dreamy, more abstract image of greenbriers. Cloudy Day Dreaming is intended in part as a nod to Australian Aboriginal spirituality; the Dreamings, or creatures of the Dreamtime, are ancestral beings that created the Australian landscape at a time that is simultaneously long ago and ongoing now. Aboriginal ritual dancing is a means of accessing the parallel world of the Dreamtime to enable Aborigines to participate in the ongoing Dreamtime story. In a similar way, I think of my photographs as possible doorways for encountering a world of wonder hidden just beneath the surfaces of our everyday natural places.
I have always been fond of lichens. I recall, far back in my childhood, encountering British soldiers lichens (Cladonia cristatella) growing atop a neighbor’s fencepost, in an enticing micro-forest of gray-green stalks and brilliant red caps. Lichens are odd among living organisms, for being two in one: an alga and a fungus joined together. Scientists still don’t know who gets the upper hand in the partnership: are lichens simply fungi that have taken up farming, or are they algae in fungal space-suits (allowing them to live in brutally hot, dry, and cold conditions where algae alone could not survive). Lichens are odd, and lichenologists can be a rather odd bunch, too — I count a few among my friends. On a gray and foggy winter morning, as I walked down Piney Woods Church Road from Rico Road, it was wonderful to be greeted by a splash of red on a fallen fencepost. Closer inspection revealed a community of lichens. This photograph includes two members of the genus Cladonia: Cladonia didyma, (Southern soldiers, the one with the red caps) and Cladonia subtenuis (Dixie reindeer lichen, the one that looks like a shrub with bare branches).
I set out mid-morning today under cloudy skies, the temperature already over the freezing line and headed into the 50s. I was in search of what vestiges of snow I might find, knowing that this could be the last day in 2014 when a snowy photograph would be possible. I made a few discoveries, including a previously unknown patch of lichens (Cladonia leporina) which will almost certainly appear in this blog within the next few days. Meanwhile, I offer one parting photograph with snow, a roadside still life with a still-green water oak leaf and dried grasses. Tomorrow this same spot will turn into a fairly nondescript patch of winter weeds, but while the snow lingers, I find the image beautiful.
My Piney Woods Church Road Project ends its first month today, though eleven more still lie ahead! I offer these thumbnails (which can be viewed full-size by clicking on them) as a retrospective of the month’s journey. In my own thoughts, I have traveled so little distance, yet come so far….
At last, today brought clear skies and much warmer weather (into the 40s), which also brought the demise of the recent snow. I took this afternoon’s photograph when much of the snow had already melted along Piney Woods Church Road, with vestiges remaining in the most wooded areas. One such bit of snow still covered the edge of an old loblolly pine stump. The stump’s interior has rotted away, leaving behind bark layers around the edges. These layers have flaked apart, producing something that evokes a rock outcrop in miniature, with metamorphic layers of slate or schist that have been tilted upward by tectonic forces. Nunataks are isolated rocky areas, rising above the surrounding glaciers, found in polar regions such as Greenland and Antarctica. The term popped into my head as fitting this image well, perhaps because I was remembering back to how cold it was yesterday morning. As a geologist who loves the stark rocky landscapes of the West (especially the Colorado Plateau), I rarely encounter anything similar in the Georgia Piedmont. Except, maybe, for this.
Snow is quite unusual in this part of Georgia, so it seems worthwhile to devote a post to documenting this past Tuesday’s snowstorm, from the perspective of my daily journey down Piney Woods Church Road. When I walked the road late Tuesday afternoon, the snow was still falling, and there were no tracks — vehicular or otherwise — on the roadway. From Rico Road to Hutcheson Ferry Road, it was covered over with a pure white veil.
