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12 | (continued) But even with what is in store for me, I can console myself with the knowledge that I have a higher purpose in mind: photographing the little feathered darlings with some very sharp telephoto lenses and a focusable, filtered flash unit. The filter cuts the invisible (and harmful) margins away from the visible spectrum, so the subject receives only refined white light—no infra-red (radiant heat) and no ultra-violet radiation. In being focusable, the unit produces only the light the subject requires—no longer is it necessary to illuminate the landscape just to capture the image of a bird the size of a pine cone. Although I’ve never actually seen such a device, the technology has been around for years, and the need, in nature photography, is obvious. I’m confident that they exist, or soon will be available. There were a few occasions in the summer when I tried to overcome my lethargy, but they seemed impossible to sustain. One day I did several views of the second camp site, every one of which looked shamefully squalid in that setting. Which probably explains why I never thought of standing in the shot myself. I took a couple of interesting flash-lit images of a strange fungus that curiously resembled a matted white beard. And under a plastic sheet, I managed one sequence, in a light rain, of an unusually “open” section of forest, having only a canopy and a carpet of ground plants, with no understory, no bushes, no mid-sized plants at all. This last group, all vertical wide-angles with a 20mm lens, showing the rain-washed leaves of the low plants glistening in the foreground, are among the loveliest forest images I’ve ever done—taken perhaps twenty yards from the tent, looking north. A more solemn, gracious tranquillity I’ve seldom seen and never captured. But I’m afraid that was all. It seems an unforgivable waste of a glorious opportunity, but I had by then become thoroughly disillusioned by the blank unprofitability of nature photography, and had begun to associate it with the apparent futility of my life in general. For me, trying to create any form of art in a near-perfect social vacuum not only takes all of the joy out of the act—it eradicates its entire meaning.
Many readers, mothers especially, will insist that it would have done my morale a lot of good to fix myself a nice, well-rounded, hot meal on the fireplace now and then. Such people do not know the meaning of the word depression. The mock companionship of reading and recorded music are bad enough at times, but they carry no burden of tedious preparation to worsen their shallowness. It would be an agony to spend hours assembling the makings of an elaborate meal, knowing perfectly well that I would have to eat it alone. Nothing brings home the truth of one’s condition like such a futile exercise in self-deception—it would feel like a dress rehearsal for a suicide, or the last meal of a condemned prisoner. Life on the margins of well-being is hard enough without such hollow charades of cozy normality. But like any camper, I did make many small discoveries about which foods and chemicals to prefer for maximum convenience, considering the severe limitations of my storage and preparation facilities. |
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On the subject of food, you may have thought it strange, when I described my bathing arrangements, that I never mentioned using the fire for cooking. The reason is that I never did use it for that purpose. In all the camping I’ve done, I’ve seldom if ever gone beyond merely heating a can of soup, beans or stew, or boiling a cup of water for some freeze-dried treat (rarely) or perhaps a mug of hot chocolate —precisely the sort of cuisine a lifelong bachelor eats every day. The less effort a meal requires, the more I tend to enjoy it: the ideal is |
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