I walked the trails at Paris Mountain State Park for a number of years, starting back in 2001 after I left my career, trying to out-run the anxiety that plagued me, trying to find some peace of mind out in nature. Some of those walks lasted over four hours, up and down wooded hillsides and mountainsides, alongside creeks, around lakes. And I admit I did occasionally find some peace there. I also found some things that triggered old memories of war trauma.
Two places, in particular, caused me great anxiety, although at the time I did not understand why. After considerable thought, and after therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder many years later, I realized that one of those sites reminded me of an ambush position. The other place was really just a hole in the ground with a log laying across it. In my triggered mind that hole was a foxhole I had dug in Vietnam. My foxhole also had a log across it, where a buddy and I were sitting as we rested, before heading back to base camp. Something was tossed into that hole and it exploded, causing my buddy to lose one eye and ripping through parts of my body with shrapnel. But that’s a war story and I’m not telling a war story today.
After a bungled suicide attempt, after my sister and brother-in-law rescued me by taking me in and letting me live with them, after many months of therapy, I went back to Paris Mountain and began to hike again. I saw those two places. They were fairly close to one another. Somehow, I had pushed them out of my mind. I walked up on them unexpectedly, but recognized them immediately.
I then remembered that first day when my anxiety was triggered by seeing them. That day, I got so upset that I had to get off the trail. I headed through the woods in the general direction of the road that curves through the park and up the mountainside. I just hoped that someone might be on that road, someone I could talk to. What I don’t remember is what happened back then after I made it to the road. But this time, when I saw those two spots I was armed with the knowledge of what they had done to me. And so I stood there looking. I stood there until my mind accepted the fact that nothing was about to explode and no one was about to stick their head above those big rocks and open fire on me.
But this story is not about those days either.
After I began to hike at Paris Mountain again, I realized that there were lots of memorable scenes along those trails. My memory was not trustworthy at recalling those scenes. I was over 60 years old by then and had little confidence in the possibility of a long life, and almost no confidence in staying healthy for the years ahead. I decided I should do something to capture the more interesting scenes, so that I would have something to actually look at that could remind me of where I’d been. I envisioned a day soon coming when I would not be able to walk those trails.
I bought a point-and-shoot camera, my first digital camera, a Canon PowerShot S95. For many months I carried that camera with me every day, taking photographs of the trails I walked and some things I saw. I learned more and more about photography and began to see the limitations of a point-and-shoot camera. When I compared my photographs to some ones I saw online I could tell that I had a lot to learn about photography. I also learned that DSLRs were far more capable in capturing landscapes and wildlife. A larger sensor and different sized lenses were more important than I initially understood.
Today’s photograph is one of the last photos I took with my Canon point-and-shoot camera. By that time, I was doing all sorts of things with software, trying to make my photographs look more interesting. I had Photoshop and Lightroom and several plug-ins to manipulate my photos with. Today’s photograph started out as a photo of a heron at Cleveland Park, another place I walked quite frequently. The photo was taken in fall when the leaves were exploding with color. The original photograph was not all that interesting, and probably a little out of focus. So, in an attempt to save it, I ran it through a few different plug-ins, having no idea what the final result might be.
It almost looks like the heron is standing in front of a roaring fire. But it was just very colorful leaves that have been distorted beyond recognition with software.
I eventually got tired of all the photo manipulation I had been doing and concentrated more heavily on becoming a better photographer. I bought a crop sensor DSLR, a Nikon D7000, along with several kit lenses. I eventually upgraded to a full frame camera, the Nikon D610, which I still use.
I still remember the day I first saw a heron in Cleveland Park. I had never seen one before, not that I recall anyway. It was standing on a patch of sand alongside the Reedy River, which flowed only a few hundred yards from the Greenville Zoo. I actually thought that one of the caged birds from the zoo had escaped. I believe that for a couple of days as I stalked that heron up and down the Reedy River, trying to take photographs of it. Someone noticed me and started up a conversation which led me to understand that there were a lot of herons out in the wild and probably not any in zoo cages.
Once I started hiking at Lake Conestee Nature Preserve, I came to know a bit more about herons, especially after I found the spot where a dozen tall trees had a similar number of active heron nests. That seemed amazing to me.
Because of health issues and the hot weather and the Covid-19 shutdowns, I haven’t hiked much recently. But it’s been a couple of years or more since I’ve been to Paris Mountain, and about that much time since I’ve been to Cleveland Park. The trails at Paris Mountain are too long for me now, although I may someday go there and walk the shorter ones.
For years, I felt guilty whenever I walked Cleveland Park. I left my career when I was just a little over 50 years old. It took me 10 years and some terrible days with anxiety and months of deep depression before I could walk the trails of Cleveland Park without concern that someone would notice I was too young to be retired and wonder why I wasn’t at work.
Looking back on those days with a mind that is more capable of clear thought, it feels odd to remember some things I did and some things that I believed back then, many of them too embarrassing to mention. It doesn’t even seem possible that I was the person who had those thoughts, who acted that way, who lived that secretive life … at once, fearful to be found out and in total denial that anything was wrong.
Maybe that’s why this heavily manipulated photograph is interesting to me. There’s nothing real about it anymore. That old life was as real as the one I’m living now but trying to imagine what it was like, and why it was like that, is as easy as believing a big blue bird would be standing there, facing down a raging fire.