A Circular Path

These images come from an urban nature centre that has, basically, one path. The path goes from the nature centre to the “bog,” which is mostly wetland, with some trees, now being overwhelmed by domestic blueberries. Every year the walls of this pathway, which in many places crowd in around you and stand several feet tall, are generally impenetrable. Here and there, are a few animal trails, very low and very dark. The walls are trimmed back each fall and in the spring new green growth peeks through here and there. Sometimes like a few misplaced hairs, sometimes tendrils that have a menacing look to them. The images are too full of detail, making them as impossible to understand as the walls are to penetrate. These images are part of a set collected at several similar sites over the past five years.

Winter in Burn's Bog

The bog, when frozen, opens up. Its interior becomes visible, its skeletal system, clear. Water that normally runs for one day and disappears the next freezes, yet the movement of the water is traced in its odd shapes and layers of frozen surfaces. Some plants are frozen inside the ice, like bugs in amber. Their colour remains bright and life like. Most of it will thaw and just go on with what it was doing before the sudden freeze. Birds fill the lower branches of the bushes and brambles, searching for seeds. They call back and forth. I don’t know if they are sharing what they found or warning others to stay away. The low winter sun casts shadows which in the spring are never disappear. It reminds you that we are moving, not the sun. We’ve got it all wrong.

Flooding in the Delta

The rain stopped early today and we went down to a woodlands along the Pacific coast. There the high tide and strong winds blowing inland Brough a flood inland. Pathways throughout the woodlands were flooded, some were like little streams. What all the salt water will do to the cottonwoods I’m not sure.

Near The Wire Fence in the Forest.

There is a wire fence in the forest, I suppose it is to keep you away from the edge of the river, and away from the protected areas of the forest. Here the light barely comes through. Still, things grow, sometimes smaller and slower than you would expect. But they grow.

In the Forest at Sunrise.

Early this morning, right at day break, I returned to the small woodland at the delta of the Fraser River on the Pacific Coast. Some trees had recently fallen from the parameter of the woodland and light was streaming in where I have never seen it. Where five years ago there had been a Sturt of growth of vines and seedlings, all of those were gone. They had dried out, and crumbled to the ground. I wonder what happened then that brought about a change inside the dark forest, and why it has stopped.

A Towel by a Tree in the Bog

The Forest Next to the Highway

A pathway runs along the highway, just behind a break of trees, allowing light to flow in from reflections on the road, stones and water.