environmentalGeography

a short note.  I find it interesting how much 15o miles and 200 vertical feet can affect the local climate.  I got up this morning and out the window it looked really crappy (by Columbus standards), meaning that it was perfect Cleveland/NE Ohio weather.  I got out on my bike and had one of the best rides since finishing school, all because it was cooler, the wind was down, and the sun wasn’t out.  It’s amazing how much I took for granted the limited sunlight we get up in the north.

The Home Range Talk, as landscape

Note: As before, images will follow as I get them resampled and scaled to fit this format.  Thank you for your patience

In climbing, range takes on a series of separate connotations. There is obviously the standard ‘Mountain Range’ connotation, and that is the highest level designation. However range gets used differently at different scales, much like landscape gets used differently in different circles. For this essay let’s consider range with climbing as the overreaching definition, but also splash in a little wildlife biology connotation – that being that there is a particular spatial extent or ‘range’ to which mammals will confine themselves to for a variety of reasons.

Landscape of Home

I began taking pictures about seven years ago. At the time I was working with another instructor at an Outdoor Education Facility on the beginnings of a Outward Bound type manual on teaching the fundamentals of survival to younger audiences. With that we thought that it was important that we had some kind of documentation of what we were practicing with the curriculum that we were developing for the facility. Now, as I review some of those early photos I notice two things: the first that I was REALLY BAD, and that I probably shouldn’t have been blowing that much money on film as I experimented and taught myself the fundamentals of photography; and the second was that I was really not comfortable in that environment.

Fast forward a bit, in 2006 I finally relented and acquiesced to the digital world, not because I had come to my senses, not because I wasn’t understanding aperture and exposure and wanted a computer to take care of that for me, but because I was tired of waiting and hoping to find out whether or not what I was shooting made it into the frame like I had intended it. What happened as a result of the transition to digital was that I now have a running catalog of imagery to draw on for just about any purpose.

The purpose here is to expand on a definition of landscape that we have been discussing for the better part of the fall now. When we started, I was still convinced the definition of landscape was what I painted for my keystone piece of my portfolio that I was submitting to Art Schools, which is very reminiscent of renaissance paintings of Europe. The consensus that the remainder of the group seemed to be at the time that landscape actually had to be a physical place in the world that we could point to on a map, which also means that we would have had to have been there (I use the global We, meaning mankind still). I disagreed with it then, and I still disagree, I’ve never seen a waterfall like I painted in 1996 but I still consider it a landscape, even though my definition of landscape has changed, or at least evolved. So here is my definition of landscape, a continually evolving mixture of Place (Px) plus or minus the Time (Ti), plus or minus the Reason (R), and plus or minus the Company (C ).

Landscape =Sx,y,z∫{Ti ± Px ± R ± C}

In developing my definition of landscape, much like in defining soil series I held place constant and varied all of the other parameters, then added scale after the fact, because after further discussion with the group, I arrived at the conclusion that it plays some roll even if I haven’t flushed out exactly what relationship it has. My rational for that comes from these two images of running streams. One is the world famous New River taken from the one road back out of the gorge, and the second is from Chippewa Creek, a small tributary of the Cuyahoga River, near Brecksville, Ohio. Both images include a “rapid”, but what you don’t witness in either is how strong, or how deep either is (the one upstream from the Fayette Station Bridge is a Class 1, the one on Chippewa Creek is ankle deep). So boiled down to a simple equation there is the definition of landscape that I will work with from here on out.

A little more about home, geographically I am from Groveport, Ohio, a suburb that is about twenty miles southeast of Columbus situated outside of Interstate 270, which during my youth meant that I was at no time more than a half mile from a large, primarily family run cornfield. The house I grew up in was right next to the school I attended, and even in junior high school I only had a mile bike ride to get to school, a year of high school was again right next door before graduating from a building two miles from home. So there defines the scale at which my story begins. Today I reside here in Akron, Ohio, but travel back to Columbus as much as I can, as well as to Fayetteville, West Virginia; Slade and Somerset, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; and LaFayette, Georgia. All told a diameter, if Columbus is the center, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 miles in full extent. All of that space however would not be what I consider home.

Having defined the full extent of the parameters for the place portion of this equation, let me back up a bit and explain that this won’t be a long string of pictures of friends and family in scenic locations; there won’t be a long line of vacation pictures here. I am member of the family to catch the photo bug. Dad has had it for as far back as I can remember. The difference between his bug and mine is that I don’t want to fight with family and friends to pose for portraits, or listen to the complaints about how good or bad someone looks in a particular image. So I expanded on the fact that I am an avid backpacker and climber as well as an Environmental Scientist, and I shoot nature photography. More specifically, the classic artistic definition landscape photography – wildlife photography requires far too much equipment in order to get it right. So although people are an integral part of this definition of landscape, there will only be a couple of shots. Continuing on with the definition of the global parameters for this definition, all of the images have been acquired since August 2002 (Labor Day Weekend). Reasons I won’t elaborate on other than to say again that I’m a climber, and that I explore the world with that frame of mind. The company is the same as the reason parameter, unless otherwise stipulated they’re climbers and we’re sharing that experience.

OUT FROM THE CENTER

Since 2002 I have had one constant travelling companion, and she’s been wonderful in that she has allowed me to revisit some of those ideological/ symbolic landscapes from my childhood that I had all but forgotten, like this one. This is George’s Creek, and runs about a half of a mile south of my house. As a kid we used to swim back here during and after soccer practice. I only ever stopped because I got my foot stuck in a tire and rolled my ankle pretty bad, but on a hot afternoon I hiked Loki back for a dip to cool off in the pool. The hike back to the pool leads past one of the few remaining fields in the area, so from that regard this little outing is a trip back in time for me, although it’s the first time I’ve taken the dog to this particular spot. There’s actually a much better one another mile or so down the road, but I felt like the walk, and Loki just likes to get wet.

Outside Columbus the park system is trying to maintain the “classic” Central Ohio through the creation of a number of parks, some of those are Historical Farms, some of them highlight the unique ecology of this part of the Scioto River Valley, and others still attempt to preserve the legacy of how the region has changed in appearance. An example is the park pictured at left, which is takes some care in signage to remember Dutch elm disease. All the same, a couple of people I trained for soccer with and I used to use the trails to run on in college

I’m still within the center of my home range I should add a little bit about Groveport Cemetery, which as a child was where we used to go sledding the image at left is where the sled hill used to be, as you can see when the concept came down of turning this section of the cemetery into a memorial for the large population of Veterans in the village no one complained. There are a few small towns within a three or four mile radius and like all high school bands, they all tend to march in the parades, except Groveport’s Memorial Day parade. GMHS is the only band that plays, mostly because of the ceremony pictured above, they play the Independence Day parades in all of the other towns, but they’re the only ones who play Memorial Day.

To this point, I’ve described the physical locations, some physical elements, some time stamping, if you include my dog my company, and a small piece of the reasons/ cultural pieces of the closest scale of home. Our hometown is easy to describe as our Landscape of Home, but if time weren’t a factor many of us would never leave our hometown if all of the pieces were static, our opinion of our home as a landscape would have been formed at a very young age.

GETTIN’ THERE

Being a climber from Ohio is difficult. It means that we have to spend a considerable amount of time travelling, and with the amount of gear that we require it makes getting there a considerable part of the landscape, or rather that we get to witness a number of landscapes as we get from wherever it is that we start, and where we climb. So there’s my climbing home, driven in, slept in, eaten in, lived in. The Jeep is at both times an element of, and when you consider the remaining portions of the definition a landscape all to itself. However I wouldn’t call it a landscape, it is though the primary means with which we have experienced the landscape, and that ground level within the space context is important to this discussion.

I’ve been travelling to Kentucky for vacations and athletics for the majority of my life, and this series of Road signs has been in place as far back as I can remember. There are a number of them, and they go through the Ten Commandments with us at 70 to 80 miles an hour and they make this section of interstate unique. But ultimately, they’re just fly –by country between pieces of home, ribbons of asphalt that link far disconnected locations to a single common jumping off point.

All of the ‘landscapey’ images for these farther off places have the same common elements, mid latitude deciduous forests with a good deal of topographic relief, so I’ll fly by them in this discussion. These are the places where the reason and the people earned their place in the definition of landscape. Compare the image of the two bridges above with the two images of the same location below. These were taken on two separate trips to Fayetteville, and one is one of those quasi –vacation pictures that I promised to limit. What makes the third different from the first two, beyond the wonderful butt shot of Kevin Rich, is that it puts all of the elements of the equation in one image(shot on my camera by one of my climbing partners – that’s how I to be in the picture). We (old friend and climbing partner, company) were there to show the bridge off to Kevin (reason) in the fall for Bridge Day (Time). This also happens to be a bit of an icon, considering it is the largest single span in the Western Hemisphere, but that’s really just an afterthought. Incidentally, as an afterthought, this picture represents the moment that I wanted to fully get back into climbing after about a two year hiatus, and has burned Lookout Rock into my head as one of those particular places that more or less bring the definition of a landscape into focus.

So briefly I’ve mentioned how the people we’re with (company) can affect our perception of a place in the narrow context, and the landscape in the larger context with the purpose (reason) for the visit both framing the perception of the landscape (had we been there to go rafting, we would’ve been discussing the way the river bends and opens up which is why the more difficult rapids are further upstream, not the bridge) and the company.

RESIDENCE VERSUS HOME

First a time statement, it’s cold and snowy here in Akron at writing, which always affects my opinion of anyplace in a negative way.

If home is the larger form landscape in this discussion then there are still places where we can live that don’t receive that declaration, but still contribute our ‘home range’.

Akron, in a time compared to knowledge continuum, falls at a point where I have become fairly comfortable with my camera equipment. I can generally speaking capture the image such that it will convey the message that I want to convey at the time. Take for instance this picture from mid-semester last spring as I was prepping for a Remote Sensing exam. I’m thinking I was worried about staying awake for it, all the same this image is a good jumping off point for my purpose for being in this landscape.

It’s pretty fair to say that if it weren’t for school, my range would never come this far north except for vacations to visit friends and see their new homes and babies.

So with that here is where I tie all of the pieces to Akron, Ohio. This shot, aside from the inside joke that I have running with the individual, is from a spot near Cleveland, and represents how the even this definition of landscape can be subject to change, that there are factors that can affect the magnitude to which any of the components are included in the equation.

At this point in time it’s shows the hope and optimism I have for this new extension of my range. Since that point I haven’t taken many pictures in Northeast Ohio that haven’t been with relation to a class in one shape or another, but at the end of my time here I want to part with two images that more or less have defined the landscape for me here in Akron: it  has seemed that I’ve always missed the good weather opportunities to do anything outside here, and as such maybe haven’t fully experienced the culture and all of the good that Akron and Northeast have beyond the large tourist attractions.

However we did get to tip a few back from time to time.