Toms River

As a child, I talked to trees. My first tree friend was named Thistle. She was a tall, slender olive tree my parents had planted in our windy bayfront backyard. Thistle stood graceful and silvery alone against the huge sky, but her delicate head grew sparse as she thrashed about in the relentless onshore winds. She eventually died. There is still a little hollow at the place where her roots were pulled out of the sandy soil. While I no longer talk to trees, I still feel that they are persons, of a sort. That is particularly true in my childhood landscape. Having played in these woods as a child, it’s hard for me to see them objectively. Other woods are just woods, but these woods are special. Here, my friends the trees are scrubby, not human-like at all. They aren’t pretty like Thistle and they have no “heads.” But I see the entire landscape through a half-remembered haze of childhood imagination, and that’s how I have photographed it. I descend into the swampy thickets, which have vines that curl and fork expressively at eye level. I physically move those plants with my own hands, seeking a way to make the scene come alive for me. Because the thickets are dense, and the swamps often flooded, areas I can access are relatively small. Most of the photos in this series are taken within a few hundred yards of my car. I look for back-lit leaves and dash from tree to tree, sometimes crossing sulfurous mud flats. But even when slogging through the mud, the air is always fresh and clean-smelling - in the spring and summer a green, fragrant blooming smell, and in autumn sort of a peppery decaying yellow smell. The relatively small areas I can access feel familiar to the point that each tree becomes like an old friend. My presence there feels quirky, self-affirming, and healthy. Of course, I still see detritus - bottles and cans, food wrappers, the tents and duffel bags of the newly homeless. The town’s eponymous river, which runs through one of the parks photographed in this series, was the site of a scandal involving a pollution-induced leukemia cluster. The factory at fault, now a Superfund site, is just upriver from where I’m shooting. Still, in those photos, the woods are joyful. While in a sense that portrayal is not entirely true, in a different sense it actually is. The woods have somehow retained their integrity, in spite of still-audible highway noise, the ever-encroaching suburban sprawl. Immediately upon entering, there is a sense of regeneration, of communion with the natural environment. I feel as if nature acknowledges my presence, gathers everything before me in its arms and flings it upward in a slow-motion juggle, letting me participate in a silent ceremony of its own language.