Forests and Fields

Bruce Trail, Caledon, Sept.1990

AROUND THE TIME THE LAST BITS OF THE BERLIN WALL FELL AND THE FIRST GULF WAR BEGAN, I headed off into the woods with my camera for what would be the last time in many years. This time I brought along my Rolleiflex on one of my visits to my sister's place in Caledon, which was conveniently located right next to the Bruce Trail.

A network of hiking trails that bisects Southern Ontario from Niagara to Tobermory, the Caledon leg passes through forests and by farmer's fields, with occasional landmarks like the Cheltenham Badlands. The woods are mostly recent growth, logged for almost three centuries and dotted with tumbledown cabins and the remains of mills. Occasionally, though, nature tosses up a red herring, like this rock outcropping that a glance would mistake for masonry.

Bruce Trail, Caledon, Sept.1990

I enjoy taking photos on nature walks because I can't really relax. City streets are far more readable for me than a couple of miles of dirt path wandering through trees. On my own, I spend most of my time trying to read the landscape and look for hazards underfoot, but with a camera in my hand I have something to do, and a way to record the brutal textures of nature.

Perhaps it's a Canadian thing. In Europe nature has been logged, mowed, farmed, mined and landscaped for centuries, even millennia. Nature here is much more raw, and thanks to sparse population and brutal winters, it's not a place you want or need to pass through. Not surprisingly it looks wilder, with thicker undergrowth and denser trees and the scars of glaciation will visible under the dirt.

Bruce Trail, Caledon, Sept.1990

Or maybe it's just me. I have a photographer friend, Sean McCormick, who lives in Alberta and takes landscapes that are regal and majestic and full of awe. I joked with him a few years ago that my nature shots tend to look more like crime scene photography; it was photos like these that I had in mind.

Caledon cornfield, Sept. 1990

A couple of days after I walked the Trail I asked my sister and her husband to let me out of the car so I could take some photos by one of the farms along the highway. It was just before harvest so the fields were tall and thick as far as you could see. This was old farmland by Ontario standards, cleared a century or more ago, and even while it spread over rolling hills you could still see the sky, big and dramatic though not, perhaps, as endless as it is out on the Prairies.

Caledon cornfield, Sept. 1990

Nature, ominous and threatening; a storm threatening, twisters forming in every cloud. I am not the guy you want in your backpacking group, but send me out into the woods or a feedlot and I'll probably come back with at least one decent photo, mostly because I'm always certain that something out there is trying to kill me.