Picture My Walk

I went for a walk in the woods yesterday. As usual, I brought my camera, but it was unusually hard to find a visually attractive subject. The landscape looked much the same as it had in the fall. The ground was still brown with fallen leaves. The trees were still naked and spindly. The rocks were still rough, unforgiving lumps of gray. Gray, gray, gray. Even the sky was gray. Only lichens, mosses, and pine trees provided some relief from the neutral colors.

But why am I going on and on when I have pictures to show you?

First, imagine Verizon’s “Can you hear me now?” guy walking through this scraggly landscape.

It may look desolate and far from civilization, but if you take just a few steps forward, this will be your view:

Ironically, when I am out and about in the woods, communing with Nature, I have excellent cell-phone reception, presumably thanks to those towers on the horizon. At home, behind the big, rocky hill on which I stood to take this picture, I’m lucky if I get a single bar.

Those birds in the sky are turkey vultures—ugly up-close but beautiful in the sky. Did you know that the turkey vulture can find food by its scent?

Back on the ground, there are so many types of mosses and lichens. There are pillowy green mosses, like this.

And there are many weird, silvery gray to pale green varieties of lichen, some of which spread in creepy patches on trees, or like a rash on the rocks, and some in rounded masses on the soil.

While there is green to be found, brown is the dominant color on the ground. The hungry eye searches for anything interesting among the papery leaves and brittle grass. Any distinct shape is like a feast after famine.There are trees that hold on to their shriveled leaves through the winter. Some of the leaves curl up like seashells. When the wind whirls by, the leaves shake and whisper in a way that can send shivers up your spine if you’re all alone in the woods.

As I make my way back down the hill, icy snow flurries fall hard enough to pitter-patter on the ground. I try to capture a snowflake on my glove, but it melts away even as I aim the camera.