Local water
Do you ever think to yourself something along the lines of … “I am amazed by what I’m seeing, and I will be back tomorrow to see it again and to photograph it” only to learn that tomorrow it will be gone?
So about a block away from my house, there’s a wooded area that apparently used to be called Polinger Park, but is now apparently called Anderson Park. And through this park runs a little brook. I don’t know where it comes from, but I suspect it starts at the pond at Montgomery College, which I suspect may be spring-fed.
I walked down into the valley and explored a little today, and found no clearly defined paths past a couple feed into the woods. But it was walkable, with a pretty standard-issue forest floor lined with a spongy covering of accumulated fallen leaves and decayed wood. Lots of little undergrowth plants were just starting to grow, getting buds and shoots going. The trees were pretty typical too, with some old-growth canopy trees, some younger trees fighting with the old growth for light, and trees that had fallen and decayed.
I wandered down into the stream bed, where I noticed that parts of the stream had little minnows in it. There’s also a constant little waterfall spilling over an old concrete barrier connected to an erosion-exposed manhole sarcophagus with graffiti on the side. It’s … desolate and beautiful at the same time.
You know, staying on the paved paths, I had no idea where the storm drains on my street drained to. But now I know, they all run down into that little valley, into this little rock-bottomed creek with light random litter strewn about it, and eventually that stream links up with Upper Watts Branch stream, and trickles out into the Potomac, and ultimately into the Chesapeake. The water that I watched falling down a little concrete ledge ultimately ends up flowing where it does. That’s … sort of neat, you know? A couple of gallons a minute of the water rushing down the Potomac originated a couple hundred feet from my house.
Anyway, I was thinking how nice it would be to take pictures of what I was seeing. A lot of really pretty sights down in that little streambed. Erosion makes for interesting pictures, I tell ya. So I was thinking “I’ll go back tomorrow and do that”
But tomorrow it’s going to rain, which means that (1) the light’s not going to be the same, and (2) the whole area’s going to go from a fairly firm walking surface to a giant mudslick — at least down near the stream. That’s if the runoff from the rain doesn’t upgrade it from brook to creek, at any rate. And in a week, the plants will have sprouted, and the area’s going to be more impassable, and different looking. In the meantime, I’ll have work, and thus no chance to wander down there and re-explore. By the time I get down there again, it’ll have gone from what it is to what it will be.
Part of me feels like this was a missed opportunity — one of those “F/2.8 and be there” moments, if you will… where to get the pictures you want to get you need to have the camera with you, find the moment, and shoot the moment. Neither spend your time fiddling with the camera while the moment passes, nor spend your time cameraless while the moment’s there.
A bigger part of me feels like the “be there” part was more important than the “f/2.8″ part… and that I was probably more in the moment because I didn’t have a camera with me to try to frame pictures of it.
Anyway, it was a good day regardless. I think I’m going to try to do more exploration around here. The world is a really rich place, especially when you venture just a little out of the paved and mowed paths you usually walk.