On a recent frosty morning I headed out into the backyard to see what I could find. I carried the 24-70mm and the 100mm macro with the intent of photographing some tiny scenes. I’ve been poking at macro photography for a while now — it’s hard work and I’m nowhere near good at this.
When I walked down to the river’s bank I found a familiar set of ice forms that I have yet to photograph successfully. As you can see below, they still elude me. I’m thinking that video may be a better medium for these as it may be that the interaction of the ice and water is what makes the scene and short of bringing lots of artificial light into the image, I don’t think this can be captured (not that I won’t keep on trying.) Still, it was great fun lying in the snow almost standing on my head trying not have the camera slide into the river.
I wasn’t involved with OAR in the early days. Stories of those early cleanups included the use of cranes to remove cars from the river and mountains of tires. Just a few years ago a large number of tires were removed from the river just behind the Elks Club here in Maynard. Last year a team reported that they couldn’t remove all of the tires they found in a site in Concord.
Bob Guba, who, as well as being the cleanup site coordinator in Acton, celebrated his 80th birthday today, mentioned that he continues to be amazed that each year they clean up a section of the river and they feel they’ve pretty much removed all the stuff — only to come back the following year and find more. And it’s not so much that new things are being thrown into the river (that still occurs, but not as much) — we’re still uncovering the decades upon decades of abuse that were piled upon this river.
We’ve had a pretty long spell of no rain in New England this year and the river was running quite low (except for a bit of rain earlier in the week we probably would have had a mud puddle cleanup). So the shoreline was pretty flat and muddy, with a bit of vegetation — but a lot of what is normally below the surface was right there to see.
And so we continue our efforts to save this river. Like many forms of pollution and environmental stress that we have today in the United States, much of it is invisible. Occasionally nature lets us see the damage we have inflicted upon this planet, but more oft than not it covers it over — and we think we’re doing a great job. The truth is not quite as rosy.