Recently, someone asked me, "What's your favorite thing to do?" The answer required about three or four seconds of thought; "To be alone in the Woods." In all honesty, being alone in nature (with my camera) is probably a more encompassing answer, for that is where I feel most at home and most intune with who I am as a person and a photographer.
Nature has always fascinated me. Growing up in southeastern Oklahoma as a young boy, I often found myself sitting outside in the shade of my grandparents big yard and dreaming about wild adventures. I read adventure stories, there were no DVD's or VHS videos back then, so reading was just about the only way a boy could build his imagination. One of my favorite publications was Boy's Life, the Boy Scouts magazine. It was always filled with true life adventures that came to life through the wonderful illustration that filled the pages. Oddly enough, I was never a real boy scout, I just sort of became one on my own, and I loved the BB Gun advertisements on the back of comic books. Oh my, how I wanted one of those Daisy pump BB guns. My parents never did get one for me, but I did eventually manage to own a trusty lever action Red Ryder...still have one. (Some of my fondest memories raising my two boys was when I taught them how to shoot it.)
I'd build miniature log forts and cabins using the numerous broken limbs and sticks that littered that dusty old yard. While doing so, my young mind would flow across time to imagine what it must have been like back in Daniel Boone's day. (Come Fourth of July, I'd blow them up with firecrackers.) But, the most adventurous moments of my youth came when I'd take off on my own, cross the railroad tracks behind the neighbors house, and head off through the woods and fields to eventually find the shallow running shoals where the Poteau River split. In the imagination of a young boy, I was exploring the deepest of backcountry woods just like ole Daniel Boone did. In reality is wasn't very far. Even so, I'd sit alone for what seemed like hours, until I'd get hungry and make my way back to civilization.
Those imaginings from way back then became ingrained into my heart and I still treasure those moments for without them, I'd not be even close to who I am today. Things have changed in a lot of ways since then, but in other ways they remain the same. That young boys adventurous spirit still lingers inside of my now older self, only now I am able to play them out for real, more or less, with my canoe, my backpack, my Jeep, and my camera. There are few outing I explore without my camera for with it, I can visually capture the essence of what it means to be alone in the quiet of the woods or canoeing across a lake with the sun setting across the way. Oddly enough, the mental images I made all those years ago are just as sharp, just as real, and just as rewarding as any photograph I've ever made...maybe even more so.
I need those simple quiet times in the woods to clear my head of all the nonsensical rhetoric that floods our world today. I often long to revisit those simpler days when I was a boy, but I understand...you can never go home again. Yet making time for a short hike and finding a quiet place to just sit awhile and listen to the wind talk to the trees or listen to moving waters as they dance across a set of shoals, or maybe watch as a swollen creek tumbles over a waterfall well, it's a good way to clear away the clutter from inside. Along the way, I'll take a photo or two just because I can. Maybe someday, someone will see one of those images and understand why the moment was important.
