"Autumn Here Will Kill Me with Its Dark and Dreadful Loveliness"
27 October 2010
PHOTO NOTES (click on each image to see it full frame without need to scroll or zoom): One late October morning in 1985, the last full year I was in the City, I walked from my home at West 89th and Amsterdam downtown through Central Park to my office at East 39th Street and Madison, where I worked as editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine. The jungle-oppressive northeastern summer heat and humidity was finally in retreat and the morning was chilly enough for a black wool beret and a black turtleneck sweater beneath an earthen-hued tweed sport coat, and as always I had a battered tan canvas shoulder bag slung crossways from my left side.
Carefully chosen for the fact that whatever the bag might say to onlookers, it never so much as whispered cameras, it usually contained an M4 Leica with its 35mm Summicron mounted and a 90mm Elmarit “just in case” and probably a half dozen extra rolls of Tri-X, but today I had substituted one of my spare M2 bodies and loaded it with Kodachrome II and turned the in-park portion of the five-mile hike into a quest for images of the deciduous autumnal color that flares as a brief reminder yes even Manhattan is part of Mother Nature's domain.
The footpath I followed was predictably carpeted with fallen leaves that made a satisfying scrunch beneath my desert boots and reminded me of boyhood Octobers in Michigan and East Tennessee and the wonderfully tangy smoke of now-forbidden autumnal burning, but the park's colors were disappointingly diminished by drought and pollution and dust, and the only pictures I made that morning were with the 90mm lens of a solitary cardinal perched amidst bare branches, the bird's breathtakingly crimson male feathers a stunning contrast to the drab surroundings.
Nevertheless I remained on the path through the woods adjacent Central Park West and as I approached the park's southern boundary I found that much to my surprise and with the full intensity I normally reserve for the three women who have been my true lovers I missed the damp autumnal chill of Western Washington, its intervals of rain and wind and fog and its wan yet seemingly golden sunlight and most of all the stark almost ominous interplay of colors, the dominant hard yellows of aspens and cottonwoods and big-leaf maples with occasional red flaming bursts of vine maple as if in counterpoint and all of it intensified by backdrops of evergreens of a hue so seasonably funereal it sometimes approaches the color of night even at high noon.
Then I remembered how the edges of the blackberry leaves seem to rust beneath the first frost, how the huge igneous boulders along the South Fork of the Nooksack River collect pools of rain in their irregularities, how the water turns black from the minerals in the rocks and how it looks with yellow leaves afloat on the blackness: a small but very special Gaian gift when you're casting Mepps spinners into the river's troutly depths for big Dolly Vardens or native rainbows, the yellow-on-black a visual haiku in a realm where – for just a few weeks – the whole environment becomes an indescribably poignant, unbearably sombre eulogy to the passing of another year.
When I reached the office that morning I gave my colleagues and employees their pro forma greetings and went straight to my typewriter, my mind still fixed on visual memories of Western Washington and overwhelmed by an intensity of realization. “Autumn there,” I wrote, “will kill me with its dark and dreadful loveliness, if not this year than surely some other.” Prophetic? That remains to be seen. Meanwhile the above two images – the uppermost with its momentary Gaian blessing of dappled sunlight maybe the best nature picture I ever made – capture some of that poignancy. Both are in the Cascade foothills of rural Thurston County, a bit south and inland from Tacoma. Each was photographed with a Pentax K-1000, a Tokina f/4 70mm-210mm zoom and Kodak 400 negative film, the top image probably in 1996, the bottom most likely in 2001. Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.
LB/27 October 2010
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