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12 | (continued) Given the above, it won’t surprise you that I did very little photography while I was there, apart from a few assignments and two or three attempts at stock images. My shortage of cash was only part of the reason; depression can be almost paralyzing at times, especially when coupled with the realization, which took me years to absorb, that as the Richard Avedon character in “Funny Face,” (played by Fred Astaire) put it: “You can’t imagine how small a market there is for pictures of trees.” Also, for as long as I remained, I could never rid myself of the feeling that I had no business being there, that I was an interloper among those wild and unpretentious creatures, that I simply did not belong in such intimate contact with them. This had nothing at all to do with “trespassing.” The farmers who worked the land like a captive whore for decades on end were in a far worse moral position than I. My sense of intrusion was merely an extension of my broad-spectrum ignorance of natural things. If I had been more of a naturalist, I could have done much to relieve the sense of exile that stealthily haunts any urban man living alone in the woods. The fact that I chose that address is not as significant as it seems—choices of that sort are never wholly free, never unaffected by external forces; this was especially so in my case. Certainly it was not for lack of subject matter that my mind dwelled more on my own life than on the life around me—that little forest was full of wondrous things, many of which I noticed, but none of which I studied, or was even prepared to study. One example: at the south end of the lot, where the woods began to break up into scattered groups of trees beside the railroad right-of-way, there was a delicate screen of maple seedlings, scores of them, all of the same age, filling the space below the boughs of the southernmost maples. The seedlings filtered the sunlight in a maze of broad, spring-green, translucent leaves and frail stalks. This alone was lovely to see, but what gave that small niche of light a very poignant meaning for me was the sacrificial relic at its center: the massive stump of the ancestor tree, cut down years before, a darkly eloquent presence among its tender young.
It can also be seen as an inevitable reaction to the lack of any market for Nature images too subtle for the urban mind. Thoroughly burned, eternally shy. The director of a successful stock photo agency, as he viewed my portfolio, put the matter very clearly: “Spare me your dewdrops!”
Of course I had no field-guides with me, and never considered buying one. I’ve always considered the field-guide-toting male as something of a joke—a stock character of folk-comedy, an embarrassing twit who can name all the species in a woodlot, but would not dream of bedding down among them for a single evening, and has trouble tying his shoes. I have known such a man for over twenty years, and his intolerance for the discomforts and exertions of outdoor life continue to appall me. But now I feel I’ve earned the right to carry a field-guide. I want to start with trees. There are so few species at this latitude that my lifelong inability to identify all of them has ceased to be amusing. With effort, I should be able to memorize even their Latin names in a day. Complete familiarity should let me name a species with a mere stroke of its bark, eyes closed—no two are alike, right? Next on the list would be birds. I’ve long since been resigned to the certainty of never learning as much about them as Terry has, who’s spent most of his (daylight) spare time birding for over thirty-five years. He’s taught me a little so far, much against what I took to be my better judgement. The haughtily-imparted expertise of an (insecure) “expert” is seldom accepted with ease. I’ve tried to teach him how to use a camera, and found to my amazement that he is both technically and artistically ineducable—but he’s a book salesman with a B.A. in English. |
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I saw this the day I moved into my first campsite, and of course my immediate thought was “what a great shot that would make!” Every time I saw it glowing in the sun, the idea returned. But such was my state of mind at the time that I never shot it. The phrase that occurs to me now, in explanation of this, is 
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