Preserving the Fall

Starts with a photograph, a frame of reference. Steve seems deeply meditative, sitting cross-legged, hands exploring some invisible blade of grass, plucking some wildflower blossom from its stem. Eyes downcast, content, absorbed in this task of dissecting nature, shredding it. Curved back, sunlight painted onto the sleeve of his sweater, the sweater I borrowed to go hiking in the Sierras, both of our knobby joints contributing to its decay around the elbows, gray, true to its color even in black and white. He was warm that day, I imagine.

The background: Middle Run–the largely unexplored natural area of Newark, DE–again. It is a field here, used in some months to grow straw, but is flanked by forest, contained by it. I would always come here on Sunday afternoons, looking for adventure, recruiting one or two friends to be the subject of my photography. I never tired of this game, of making the hike to that hidden field, of placing people in that context, nestled among bales of hay, stiff grass, those horizons, sudden leaps from sky to straw, straw to trees. Transitions. Changes. Weekend to weekday, human to nature, past to future.

The cornfields there remain unexplored territory. I understand that they are part of an experiment, that the University of Delaware agricultural science department studies these plants’ genes, breeds them, cross-pollinates. They hope to find the perfect stalk of corn, the highest yielding, the most nutritious kernels. I too must experiment, must search out something of greater quality.

Certain seasons find the corn healthy, tall and strong. Productive. They give this place a sense of life, hope. At other times, only wilted stalks remain, consumed by the threat of decay, crackling the sounds of death, of loss and cold beneath heavily traipsing feet. This many dead plants are arresting, an assault to the visual sense and sense of gravity, of time, one I would like to capture in a photograph.

I have come to this place in all seasons, have thrown snowballs, run barefoot in the grass here. But I always picture it in Fall, associate it with cyclical death. It is strange to love, to come back to this time the most, strange to find solace in the thoughts of leaves falling, disintegrating, of declining temperatures, shortening days, and the stark emptiness of the suddenly and awkwardly naked forest. There is an energy in melancholy, I think, something invigorating in longing, in absorbing the smell of decaying foliage and cold, in imminence. It is stretching a tired, defeated body, extending your arms toward the sky, arching the spine, never quite reaching high enough, folding enough, feeling as though disembowelment is the only release for the tension in the limbs; in this attempt, in the laziness, the lethargy, the desire to hibernate that it imbues, there is satisfaction, contentment. Sunny days in winter.

Death in the form of a haircut. In the past I have struggled in my relationships with the people who cut my hair. The Italian thirty-something brothers of Val’s who wear tight stone-washed jeans and whose eyes I would try desperately to avoid meeting in the mirror. The fresh-from-beauty-school girls from the Hair Cuttery who smoke Virginia Slims on frequent breaks and who probably know little more of hair care than bleach and perm, the effects of which can be seen on the head of each and every one of them. The older gentlemen who still own real barbershops and have the spinning poles to prove it: they wear white, oftentimes slightly translucent button-down shirts with cotton tee-shirts beneath them, still offer to shave their bearded clientele with a straight razor, charge eight dollars for everything, and know only one hairstyle for boys under the age of eighteen: the crew cut.

There is something I loathe about haircuts, about chopping off this red hair of mine. Perhaps it is the constant fear that the cut will never quite be the same as it was before, the previous cut that I had come to appreciate, with which I grew to feel comfortable. Perhaps the pain of the process itself, the graceless fingers, the stiff plastic combs getting caught on my earrings, the tiny hairs falling down the back of my shirt and itching incessantly, the repetitive comments and questions: women pay big money to have their hair dyed this color; which side do you part? do you use gel? Perhaps it is pure personification, that I fear the blow to the ego of my hair itself, that in response to my lack of appreciation for its redness, for its curliness, the lack of appreciation that bred the impetus to butcher it, to shear it, the hair itself would stop bestowing this redness, this curliness upon me, and in utter spite would grow out lusterless, brown, and straight.

My haircuts, because they are so infrequent, are unearned, unanticipated, sudden upheavals, radical changes. Acts of violence. Hair becomes longer in secret; things growing slowly do so invisibly, are impossible to detect without a photograph, a frame of reference.

Growth becomes problematic. I am possessed with a halfhearted desire for static, to freeze things, to attain the perfect cut and stop all subsequent growth. I don’t need it; contentment with what is. Halfhearted because perhaps some day I will desire change, to have a ponytail again.

Strong memories come from autumn. Hiking again in middle run, it is the optimal temperature of fall, quantifiable by the warm sun on my face, perfect comfort in a wool sweater, perspiration in the wind. Here with two friends, one of them notices my visible affinity, my congruence to the season. I am wearing brown cargo pants, ordered from a catalogue, and today, the green sweater that is starting to develop holes in the elbows that I can claim wholly as my own. Hair, like always, is red: a tree beginning to relinquish its leaves to the wind. They say it’s the hair, and the sunlight; red like leaves requires a photograph. Apparently, I look like a model: this moment is one of the scenes created by professional photographers in the catalog that sold me my pants.

They call it golden hour. That time a few minutes before the sun sets–a half hour at most–when the sunlight is transformed from the midday brightness that reveals everything the way it really is, in stark whiteness, changes the sunlight that can burn into a soft gold, creating long, mysterious shadows and deceptively warm highlights, even in the premature and brisk dusk of the late autumn. It is the best natural light for photographs and I have known this since before I started shooting. Ironically, I have captured only one image at this time of day, a time that oscillates with the seasons. It was a moment when that fascinating light cut through the branches of the tall maple trees in my neighbor’s backyard, penetrated the screened-in porch on the back of my house, streamed through the sliding glass doors that lead from the porch to the family room, crept onto the fireplace, where it scattered its interesting pattern of highlights and shadows on the bricks. The fireplace tools, the brass ash shovel and the broom, are the subject of the still life, but are decidedly out of focus. Focus instead is on the shadows.

It is a rush to capture such light. I remember running around the house, trying desperately to find my camera, to find film, to coax it into the resistive sprockets of my old and decrepit–but impossibly loveable–Pentax K1000. I remember the relief I felt when it was over, when I had snapped a few shots and was left to sit on the bricks of the fireplace, left to relax, to contemplate, to watch the sky and the light recede through deepening shades of gold, orange, red, become engulfed from above by the cold blue of the night.

Color is often indicative of heat. The strongest, hottest, most virile flame shines white. As it burns, consumes its fuel, its impetus, it grows colder, becomes softer, yellow, gold, orange, then burns out. The last remnant, the smoking ember glows eerily, is red.

Some things are inescapable. In the unspoken competition we have not to wash our hair, Steve will always win. I sometimes justify this lapse in my personal hygiene by pointing to the chemicals in most shampoos, the chemicals with unpronounceable names–cocamidopropyl hydroxysultaine, distearyldimonium chloride, quarternium-80–the chemicals that wash down the drain to contaminate our precious supply of groundwater. So when the time comes that the oils of my scalp start to weigh down my curls, start to straighten them, I generally rinse with lemon juice to get them back.

But Steve’s curls can’t be straightened. I’ve noticed that no amount of neglect, no accumulation of dirt or grease or sea salt, no night after night of flattening against a pillow, can disrupt them, can disturb those big, dark, brown curls that I might only describe as swooping.

Certain features may define a person, may become completely intertwined with, inseparable from them, may be illuminated in the cave of memory every time they are recalled. You can’t forget them, and they can’t escape them, even if such features have changed, even if such mental pictures, such ideals, such associations have been rendered obsolete. In my mind, for Steve, it is his curls. This despite the fact that the military college he now attends has rigid guidelines regarding hairstyle, requires that cadets be regularly subjected to a barber’s razor set to cut no longer than half an inch.

But I know some day they will grow back, that some day mental picture and reality will once again be one and the same, that soon those curls whose length is only betrayed in summer, wetted flat by crashing ocean waves, those curls from which I have mockingly picked the lint, those curls that shake when he laughs, that soon those curls will return. Potential for growth remains.

Infinity. I discovered it at a young age. On opposite walls of my parent’s rectangular bedroom, there are two mirrors. Reflections bounce back and forth, back and forth, reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections. Standing between them as a child, at an age when I was finally tall enough to see into them without standing precariously on tip-toes or on a chair, I loved seeing the millions of me’s standing in the millions of bedrooms, stretching out in two lines, one forward and one back, to some tremendous distance, the light trapped, bouncing back and forth, back and forth, contained, yet boundless. This is my perception of infinity, the analogy that comes to mind, the memory that often surfaces in response to other things theoretically infinite: forever captured in a confined space, made possible only through reflections, through the annexation of light.

Today, I control it with my Pentax K1000. It is a previously owned camera, a Christmas gift given to me one year by my parents. They couldn’t have paid much more than a hundred dollars for it, if that. A small price to pay for infinity. With it, I have stolen time, absorbed fleeting moments and made them forever.

Looking at photographs, I see the friends, the relatives, the strangers, who will remain as they are indefinitely, as close to infinity as they can come without actually escaping the limitations of the flesh, the threat of decay.

They will always be shirtless at the beach, always sprawled out on the couch, always sitting in the grass, always having a picnic. They will always been at the pool, always in the woods, always at amusement parks, always dancing drunk at parties. Always laughing, amused by the implications of mortality.

The optimal temperature, the effects of time. Sixty-eight degrees is ideal for the reactions of black and white photography, for mixing chemicals, for subjecting film and paper to the baths of developer, stop, fix.

Heat tends to speed up the reactions, to decrease the time needed in the baths. Cold slows things down, increases the time needed to produce a clear image. Negatives given too little time in the chemicals are underdeveloped, come out flat, dull, lacking in contrast. One must wait longer to see something clearly, to add drama to an image. Too much time leads to overdeveloping, graininess, exaggerated contrast. Areas of an image become only black or only white–loss of the in between shades. In this way, time is the enemy, effacer of detail, of nuance. It is erosive.

Somewhere, there is a balance. A photographer may rely on time-temperature charts provided by a film’s manufacturer to find it. One may note that a film must be developed for six minutes at sixty-eight degrees. But the same film, at sixty-five degrees requires seven minutes, at seventy-two, five and three quarters. Variables need to be considered. One must be willing and capable of adapting to changing conditions.

Ends with a departure, a denial of gravity. I’d never heard him breathe like that before, never before detected his breathing. But at that moment, I could hear him inhaling shallowly, and I could hear the air trembling as he slowly exhaled it. It seemed as though more was coming out of him than going in. A net loss, I think.

Somehow, I expected it. I don’t know how I could have, from Steve, this best friend of mine of eleven years, this friend who had never before really spoken of his feelings to me, but I did. I suppose it must have seemed like such a natural progression from that first time we hugged, that night a few months earlier…

We were both scared. He was leaving for military school, for Valley Forge Military College the next morning and I was dropping him off at his house, an occasion that warranted more than the usual routine: ‘peace,’ and a friendly honk as he stepped onto his front porch and I drove away. Instead, I put the car in park and got out, stood in street. The hour was late enough, and we stood, hands in pockets, eyes avoiding direct gaze, in denial of the gravity, that this was a different goodbye, stood hovering in that in-between time long enough for the dew to begin collecting on our sweatered shoulders. Then we hugged: we wrapped our lanky arms around each other and with one of his huge hands he tussled my greasy red hair…

So when were driving that Saturday night of the long weekend in October when I had decided to come home to Newark, the weekend when he was first allowed to leave Valley Forge, when I heard that strange breathing for the first time, I wasn’t surprised to hear him tell me–in that trembling voice–that it is so comforting to hold Stephanie, his girlfriend, in his arms.

The tension returns on Sunday. We are in the coffee shop of our summer again, Steve, myself, a few other friends. The red building up around his eyes, the swollen lump in his throat, the return of that shallow-deep breathing say that it is time for him to go, time for the end of his first weekend away from the hell that he has only described in vague detail, the hell that I nonetheless believe in, time for him to go back to Valley Forge. He hovers, standing next to our table, hands in pockets. Every time someone offers him a seat again he says that he should really go. One foot toward the door, but all the rest of his body given over to us, he looks into my face and widens his eyes, subtly shaking his head left and right, up and down. It’s his silent way of screaming, of desperately asking that I do something. It kills me to see him this way, kills me that all I can do is jokingly suggest that he flee to Canada as I break contact with his pleading eyes and force my attention back to the coffee stirrer I am once again shredding into splinters.