Tag Archives: seasons

When Yellow Trees Shine Brightly

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Arches National Park is not really known for its forests or its trees. In fact you can walk a good long way and not see a single one. But when you do it is a marvelous surprise. To see the strong dark trunks rising up out of the arid plain, limbs with their lime green leaves in the spring, bright riotous yellow in the fall, is more than a special sight in this water-less, some say desolate place. It is nearly miraculous.

Although the deep earth tones of the sand and rocks are beautiful in their own way, the addition of these brightly colored wonders make them even more so by the contrast between one lifestyle and another. The hot enduring reds of the cliff faces, the firmly grounded tans with its shimmering heat waves rising up towards the heavens, the occasional dusty burst of color from a flower are the mainstay of this country, but  there is always the special place hidden in a shadowed arroyo where water flows slowly and fitfully under the ground and in rare miraculous occurrences on top of it, that allow the trees, especially the cottonwoods to grow and survive, when by the look of the place they shouldn’t be here at all.

Such is the case with this image taken in late October in Arches National Park. For the high desert it is cool now, the water coursing along beneath the earth as it has been too hot earlier for it to flow on the surface. The sun has been kinder the last few weeks and the trees noticing, have changed their colors to prepare for winter when all things except the wind and snow and occasional jackrabbit and the coyote following it, stop, and it is quiet and still throughout the dark days and nights of that long season until the warmth of Spring returns and the cycle begins again. But that is still a time in the future, right now when yellow trees shine brightly it is a good time to be alive.

Thoughts Of Spring

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With every major change of the seasons, Winter to Spring, Summer to Fall, the Canada geese would make their pilgrimages either North or South. To get there on time they would normally head in the intended direction when the weather was also starting to change. In the Spring the snow would still be lingering on the north slopes and the back roads, unpaved, were still muddy tracks through the fields and trees. In the Fall the leaves would be well along, having changed color, drying out and wavering in the chilly wind, some having fallen already and crunching beneath your heavy boots.

My mind, sodden from the memory of the winter and the constancy of the cold, never quite believing that it would ever end, was hungry for the next signs promising the change of the weather and the deliverance of the next season. When I thought I was at the end of my patience that’s when the Canada geese would appear. Black dots above the horizon, they would turn into vague shapes of forward movement, wings held at just the right attitude to glide forward.

I would begin listening for them, impatient for their arrival, scanning the horizon for those first waves of V-shaped wings powering their way towards me. I would listen harder and eventually I would be rewarded with the staccato cries of the geese calling from high up in the clouds. My ears catching every note as it sifted down through the gray haze and broke like sharp, crystal-edged flakes of sound around my soul. Each call a request, an invitation to join them, if only I weren’t locked tightly to the earth.

Take me with you, I would say quietly, take me with you. Often I would call it loudly up into the sky in a vain attempt to reach them, to make them see I was trapped here and could not leave and I wanted desperately to join them, but they never paused in the steady rhythmic beating of their wings. It never failed to happen, when the first wings appeared out of the distance, impossibly high, looking like dotted lines drawn against the sky their bodies just a dark silhouette, always, always when the first call reached out of the mist, the thought would jump unbidden into my mind. Look, I’m here, take me with you.

Heading North in the Spring and South in the Fall, stark shapes against a deep blue sky, every feather outlined in perfect detail, or passing through clouds, their shapes becoming faint and opaque like shadows barely seen in the darkness. Their calls muffled, the size of their bodies getting ever smaller as I watched them recede into the distance, their calls fainter and fainter until they were gone and only an echo of them remained in my mind. Take me with you, I would say, and though I was forever rooted to the ground, I never ceased to ask.

Cycles

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When you stop and look at things like this cottonwood tree for instance, if you’re paying attention to how things work you’ll notice that this tree is just going to sleep. Its early fall, the summer has been long and hot and filled with blistering days and sudden thunderstorms with wind that threatened to tear off it’s very branches. There was lightning that struck close by but spared it and nearby fires that were the most dangerous thing of all. But through it all it has stood fast.  Now it gets to sleep for its long night. This tree marches to a different drummer, with its night lasting for months before it begins to wake for it’s equally long day. It’s waking and slumbering schedule is incredibly slow as we see things with its days and nights lasting six months each. Do trees live to be as old as they get because they measure time differently than we do?

When this shot was taken it is about 6:00pm in early November on our schedule, the sun is setting and soon our day will be over. The difference is in ten or twelve hours we ‘ll be back at it again while the tree slowly slumbers on. The wheels of time spin at different rates for everything in our existence. To the tree our days and nights must seem like the gentle blinking of the sun, if trees notice it at all, while to us the trees slow cycle can appear to be a form of death or least a sleep so deep it seems that way.

One of the irreplaceable benefits and joys of being a photographer is the ability to document life as we travel though it. To be able to visibly chronicle the passages that affect everything about us and then have the ability to travel back and forth between the changes is a form of magic. To re-experience these events by viewing these frozen moments in time, gives us and all who view the images, the ability to make some sense of our lives. To some degree anyway. It doesn’t answer all the questions but some answers are better than none. In about six months the tree wakes up again and we can ask it more then. If we’re polite and pay attention it should share.