Preserving the Fall :: Personal Narrative Nature Seasons Papers

Preserving the Fall Starts with a photograph, a frame of reference. Steve seems deeply meditative, sitting cross-legged, hands exploring some invisible blade of grass, plucking some wildflower blossom from its stem. Eyes downcast, content, absorbed in this task of dissecting nature, shredding it. Curved back, sunlight painted onto the sleeve of his sweater, the sweater I borrowed to go hiking in the Sierras, both of our knobby joints contributing to its decay around the elbows, gray, true to its color even in black and white. He was warm that day, I imagine. The background: Middle Run–the largely unexplored natural area of Newark, DE–again. It is a field here, used in some months to grow straw, but is flanked by forest, contained by it. I would always come here on Sunday afternoons, looking for adventure, recruiting one or two friends to be the subject of my photography. I never tired of this game, of making the hike to that hidden field, of placing people in that context, nestled among bales of hay, stiff grass, those horizons, sudden leaps from sky to straw, straw to trees. Transitions. Changes. Weekend to weekday, human to nature, past to future. The cornfields there remain unexplored territory. I understand that they are part of an experiment, that the University of Delaware agricultural science department studies these plants’ genes, breeds them, cross-pollinates. They hope to find the perfect stalk of corn, the highest yielding, the most nutritious kernels. I too must experiment, must search out something of greater quality. Certain seasons find the corn healthy, tall and strong. Productive. They give this place a sense of life, hope. At other times, only wilted stalks remain, consumed by the threat of decay, crackling the sounds of death, of loss and cold beneath heavily traipsing feet. This many dead plants are arresting, an assault to the visual sense and sense of gravity, of time, one I would like to capture in a photograph. I have come to this place in all seasons, have thrown snowballs, run barefoot in the grass here. But I always picture it in Fall, associate it with cyclical death. It is strange to love, to come back to this time the most, strange to find solace in the thoughts of leaves falling, disintegrating, of declining temperatures, shortening days, and the stark emptiness of the suddenly and awkwardly naked forest.