"You don't take a photograph, you make it." ≈ Ansel Adams
And he meant that, in a few more ways than one. Here, precariously stands a tree I photographed in 2018. "It" is "They" actually, for its two trees joined at the base, truly sharing osmosis between them. One was cypress, that I knew. The other was a very different kind of tree & also ... at the crowns of both, mistletoe had taken hold by some fluke loong, long ago. I was there again in 2024. I walked down to the shoreline, knowing it was likely gone. It was. I've learned now the old dock's being removed.
Everything in this scene then, subject-wise, is gone. The sky is gray, end of day, with a hint of hazed blue at top. The water's golden, long grass golden & fallen over at the trees bases. There's a large trunk which is bent underneath the remaining earthen bank, curving slightly upward then plunging back into the water, all earth which once surrounded it eroded away long ago. This scene is a study in entropy & for that reason is in my top five favorite works in "The America: Lost & Found" series.
From my notes: "One night, a few months back in the early fall when the waters were down on Lake Marion, I was walking by its north shore and saw a ghost. On viewing it, I began to hear whispers of old arguments told by one of the voices closest to me for so many years. A very old waterlogged and siltified tree trunk, smooth and very gelatinous, almost like a giant dead salamander having lain on the bank for too many days, was beating between the piers of an old dock stretched out into the waters of the lake. On either end of that log were deep grooves worn into its circumference, old and slick as well, from the chains or cables which evidently had held it in place for far too long."
That describes what are called "ghost trees"—those which, at the end of the land clearing project my grandfather was one of the supervisors for between 1936-1940, had to be staked down.They had crashed the timber market.
Here's a #tree offering 🍃 "Twin sisters of different mothers"
#EastCoastKin #TreeTuesday #trees #naturephotography
#photography #treemendous #treetrunktuesday #Lakeside
#SouthernGothic #ParkwaysProjects #NPS #travel #art #BlueSkyPhotography #StateParks #LakeMarion #SC
#Boating ALTtex has a story 🦉
