Until the leaves turned and fell, I’d been using my Seek app every ride I took. I tried to identify a few of the trees that clung to their leaves in early November. But after that it's very unlikely this app is going to capture anything by bark alone. Cherry trees, birches, maybe, but in most cases, you need some kind of foliage to identify anything. I haven’t used the app much for the last two months though I’m sure I’ll be back at it once leaved things start to reappear.
And while I was searching around for plants during the pause of my bike ride, my routine became to snap one photo in each of the different built-in camera filters; ‘vivid’, ‘dramatic cool’, ‘noir,’ etc. I know, I know, you can apply all these filters later but who does that? I certainly never make time for it. Riding home along Old Huguenot Street today, I was wondering where to stop and snap the requisite pics and decided to pull off at the Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary.
The last time I was here I could identify plants, one of which I remembered as I walked down to the bridge: “pickerelweed.” I don’t usually remember the precise place where I identified one or another plant, but looking down at the water, imagining that remarkable elongated gar made me think of fishing when I was twelve or so. I never caught a pike or a muskie, but I'd caught pickerel before. When the app told me I was staring down at pickerelweed covering the water I began to search beneath for the fish itself.
No pickerelweed, and no fish today. The water is frozen over with a thin sheet of ice, which shown red, reflecting the sunset in the distance. And during my photo filter routine I do my best to capture the mood of the afternoon ice. You can’t bike here in the sanctuary. And I’m conscious of having left my bike against a tree near the road, without any lock on it. If it wasn’t for that I’d like to continue on over this wooden walkway and see where this marsh meets the Wallkill River.
Wednesday, 12/09/20
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