Back in 2014, on an early morning in late Spring, I, with my camera at my side, walked the trails at Lake Conestee. The sun was behind me as I parked my car. And it was bright. I had driven past the old dam and turned onto the narrow road through the large brick structures that used to be a working mill alongside the river. The parking area was empty. It looked out over the remnants of what once was a great and massive lake, or so I’ve heard. I never saw Lake Conestee in its heyday.
I usually begin my hike at another location in the park, off Mauldin Road, where all the ballparks and playgrounds are. But this day, like some others, I wanted to do it a little differently. The nice thing about the park at Lake Conestee, now officially referred to as Lake Conestee Nature Preserve, is the number of trails from which you can choose to take your hike. The only drawback to this particular trail is that it is not a loop, which means the return trip is back up the exact same trail on which you began.
As always, I walked along the trails looking for something interesting to photograph. Wildlife tends to be more exciting, but my true love is landscape photography. A line of trees blocks or partially blocks my view as I leave my car and head down the trail toward a long boardwalk, built to keep hikers from having to walk through water after a rainstorm. Often, those trees are filled with small birds chirping away, as they were on this peaceful and bright sunny morning. As far as I knew, I had the whole park to myself.
At each break in the trees I would scan the lake for anything photogenic. The water was muddy from a recent rainstorm. I could see a heron perched on a wooden post sticking a few feet out of the water. The bird was too far away for my lens, so I did not attempt to photograph it. I kept walking.
A few minutes later, I had gotten distracted from my photographic interests and had begun to walk quite slowly along the trail in a reminiscing fog of vague thoughts. That often happens. In fact, looking back to my original reasons for taking hikes, after I left my career because of problems with PTSD, the moments when my mind drifted away toward some better and calmer time … those moments had become precious to me, lifting me out of my troubled mental state and delivering me to a better place, if for only a little while.
Then, I came out of it. Some little noise, some natural sound, broke the hold my wondering imagination had on my conscious mind. I noticed as I looked around that I had not gone far. Then off to my right I saw what became today’s photo. That dance of sun and shadow my eyes naturally seek out was right there across the muddy water.
With a backdrop of deep shadowed woods, three trees stood out, beaming with sunlit leaves in their yellow-green glory. They captured my attention and re-awoke my imagination; partially, I suppose, because of the inaccessibility of their location; no way to get there, no way to fulfil my urge to get a closer look.
The sunlit façade seemed like a wall, protecting the mysteries hiding in the shadow. Never would I know, never would I see, what natural or fanciful things might happen within that darkened forest, inside those deep shadows, where nature keeps her secrets and those of us out here are limited to what we can know, but limited to what we can believe … only by our imaginations.