... john and i had arranged to spend a morning wandering ... "where should we go" ... "hmmmmm, how about we just head up towards daggett rock in philips and then figure it out" ... as we neared the turnoff we decided to take a side trip up to smalls falls to make some pictures while the sun was still low in the east ...
... i couldn't really get my landscape eyes working properly ... happens this time of year, perhaps a symptom of what i call my "visual autism" ... so much color and detail, i become compelled to focus my vision upon a single leaf or rock or some other isolated element ...
... i worked my way down beneath the walking bridge and found an interesting perspective of the old dam below the lower pool ... so odd, to think that many years ago this isolated place was the home of some sort of agricultural or industrial mill ...
... a simple composition within which i became lost ...
... john set up on the rock where my little girls first learned to dive into a mountain stream ... of my most delightful memories is the music of them laughing as they tried to swim in the bubbling froth at the base of the lower falls ...
... i snapped another shot of john as we made the short uphill hike up to daggett rock ...
... i took several shots of the 8,000 ton glacial erratic ... none of them were anything i felt like sharing [which is a polite way of saying i took a lot of lousy pictures], so i thought i'd offer you this interesting late-1800's postcard of "cleft rock" ...
... as i've said before, many years ago daggett rock was in one piece ... some rude new hampsherites came over and split it into three pieces so they could claim as being larger their boring "madison boulder" ... just another reason, as far as i'm concerned, for maine and vermont to divide that silly state up between us and be done with it ... john posted a picture of me zeroing in on a single leaf ...
... 15,000 years ago, after being ripped from the side of sugarloaf mountain 12 miles to the north, in the muddy deluge that was the melting of the mile-thick ice sheet which had covered this landscape, here this mighty bolder came to rest ... minus perhaps 20-100 years for the first seeds to germinate and sprout, 15,000 times the autumn leaves have framed this huge chunk of crystal speckled granite with vibrant splashes of glowing yellow and red ... barring the sun exploding or a giant planetoid crashing into the earth [or, i suppose, wal-mart inc. deciding to take over even more of the planet], 15,000 years from now this cycle will still be taking place ...
The leaves, Hermanito, believe the leaves!
They come in spring,
Bask through the summer,
Show their glory in autumn
Die in winter
Yet the tree remains.
We are the leaves, Hermanito, believe it!
Renewed in spring,
Enjoying the summer,
Parading in fall,
Gone in winter.
But what of the tree?
Only the rocks, Hermanito,
Live forever.
And there are always rocks.
JAMES HALL
... on the hike out i became mesmerized by these leaves ... an interesting fact of physics/metaphisics, that within them exists the exact same amount of color as is displayed by the entire forest ... to take infinity and divide it, yet each and any subset you create will in itself be infinite ... whether or not g*d exists, if we look we will see ...
... deep in the woods, stone walls ... "what effort, by hand and horse, to move all these rocks," remarked john ... "someday," i asked, "do you think all of what we find so big and important and permanent, will it, too, be but lines overgrown in the forest" ...
... where at a right-angle walls intersected, john talked of two farmers meeting in a rocky field, before beginning the process of clearing the land finalizing with a handshake a line that would delineate their lives long after they themselves had returned to the soil ...
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives of others.
PERICLES
... worlds within worlds within worlds ...
I found I could say things with color and shapes
that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
... the forest, it speaks, ours is to listen—and hear ...
... wandering up the carrabassett valley john guided the car to ira mountain, where "a temple rises above kingfield" ... here, sitting within the "echo chamber," i think he is contemplating the purpose of this modern megalithic construction ... "hmmmm, pagan sacrifices ... worship of the northern star ... rituals to insure a successful harvest" ... me, of course, i was thinking of nubile native girls, clad only in body oil and very small leaves, offering themselves up to the mysterious strangers from afar who out of giant wooden houses floating upon the sea had suddenly stepped ashore in their land ... [sigh ... yea, i never was much for the standard textbook history] ...
... product of the overly imaginative musings of a nutcase with access to heavy moving equipment, or the result of some real estate developer's farsighted machevellian scheme, either way this is a most interesting place ...
... at the top of the mountain we looked out and appreciated ...
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU