Yesterday I was leaning against the railing of the Kaw River Bridge,
just looking at the changing patterns on the surface of the water and watching
the ever circling swallows swooping in under the bridge beneath my feet - and then
steaking back out again. From the buff colored patch above their tails, I
identified them as cliff swallows. I have often seen them dipping and darting around
long rows of mud nests one next to the other against the steel girders on the underside
of the bridge.
From my sky view, I stood there mesmerized. The winds were light
and the muddy current slowing after heavy spring rains. The gray skies and
dark trees reflected off of the endlessly undulating ripples, the colors changing
with the breeze. The surface of the water dimpled and danced, foreground
becoming background, background becoming foreground. Wavy lines dividing dark
and light.
Everywhere I looked, the same and not the same.
And right there, from just below my feet, uncountable swallows were
looping out, looping back, darting in and up and down and around again. A
flicker of wings then long glides, banking and diving, skimming the surface of
the water. Swallows flying with abandon, hurtling through thin air at breakneck
speed, missing each other without a thought. I would try following a single
swallow as it flew closer to the bridge, and then in a blink, it would dodge
out of my eyesight.
I quickly realized that I couldn't catch any of this with a
camera. I didn't have the equipment either to freeze the motion or to contain the
randomness of the scene below me. And even if I could stop the action or video
the movement, I knew that I couldn’t capture my sensations. I couldn’t even come
close. And I knew just as well, from long experience, that I wouldn't even remember
much more than a blur of my afternoon on the bridge after I walked away. So I
just watched for awhile. Swallows flying over the river.
But then, after fifteen minutes or so of just being there, I
pulled my device camera out of my pocket anyway. With nothing but electrons to
lose, I held my camera with careful fingers over the railing and simply clicked
the button. Click, click, click, click....
I was aware of the absurdity of my actions, but I wasn't even sure
which absurdity was which. I was trying to somehow hold onto something that was
simply there for the seeing and trying to catch something more than a camera
could ever catch. And the river and the swallows would be there again tomorrow.
And next year. And the next. Water
reflects sky. Wind ripples rivers. Swallows fly. The living world is always
there, but it never holds itself still for a picture. I knew that I was at best
taking a small souvenir of a moment in time.
Later, back at my computer, I deleted one image of muddy water
after the next. I had been mostly shooting air. Then I began discarding photos
of small dark blotches nearly indistinguishable from small chunks of wood
drifting downstream. I deleted and deleted. I framed and cropped. And finally, the
photos you see are what remains. Not very much, but something. At least the edge
of the bridge was in sharp focus. And the horizon always seems to sort of blur
into the distance – in pictures or in reality.
I see things
in photographic images that I don’t see in the living world. And so I step back
from that world now and then to take some pictures for myself. It’s another way
to look. And I am often astonished by what nature photographers can capture
with an experienced eye and good equipment. Images I could never see with my
naked eyes. Hummingbirds frozen in mid-hover. Every gray frayed feather of a
Great Blue Heron, revealed as sharp as glass on my computer screen in an
instant as yesterday’s bird flies low over stilled rippling water. A complement
to what I know from life.
But
these here are my photos. I couldn’t capture the living world. I didn’t expect
to. I did manage to retain a kind of afterimage of ripples and swallows. And out of the corner of my eye, I might have
caught a wing and a prayer. But nothing I could prove with a photograph.
**
