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Rounding out the heavy hiking, sizing up more mysteries. . . .
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Location: Blogs HEAVEHOmovie.com — Official Blog |
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| Posted by: jpw |
Friday, September 01, 2006 9:12:54 PM |
The month of August gave new meaning to “heavy metal,” with the photo and video acquisition shifting into overdrive to capture the dozens of weighty objects I kept finding off the trails and in areas where gravity took the lead. Man-made jewelry, as it were, seems to mock-lace certain sections of the Gorge. Sometimes the objects were crude, ordinary trash. Others held my fascination while I layered on the bug spray, sometimes taking hours to shoot all the setups I wanted to capture ideal illumination under the tree canopy. There’s something to be said about traveling lightly to find this stuff, though, which for me meant carrying a minimal amount of gear on my solo runs . . . pretty much what I could jam into a backpack and sling over a shoulder (I slipped and landed without any damage a total of maybe three times the entire summer). Yes, I vote for introducing mules to the Gorge, à la the Grand Canyon.
 Mid-August’s solitude in the chunk of the Gorge I had been visiting managed to get ruffled pretty heavily one afternoon when I started to sniff a new smell down there. It was tough to tell what it was and whether it was emanating from across the river in Canada or else from far up at the top of the Gorge itself. I was close to water level when it made sense that the scent was from a fire, still faint but getting more acrid as I went up the usual path back to the surface. Just above the most precarious few yards of trail that are literally carved out of one of the steep shale slides, it was clear that the fire was spreading from a small spot . . . and getting on the fierce side. It was well on its way to blocking the only way out of that stretch of trail. I didn't have nearly enough water with me to douse it but did what I could. By the time I was all the way up, packed, and driving away, I saw the authorities speeding down to address it. I found out later that the person accused of setting it got caught . . . and left the smoking gun—er, Bic—for me to shoot the next day. [Insert disconcerted shudder here. . . .]
Since this is a documentary about the arcane—especially on an express route down to the Gorge carpet, as I like to call it—it may be best to keep holding off the reveal of exactly which major objects are down there. It’s only fair that the audience wait until the maximum effect can be seen in the finished product video, right? Well, rest assured, you are in store for a metric Gorgeload of oddities, spanning the entire realm of sensibility, plausibility and heft. All share something, though: they endure, there in the Gorge, as Nature does her best to phase them out on a custom timetable. You will get to see this process show up over and over within reels of footage and hundreds of still images I accumulated down there over the past two months. As production segues from the height (or depth) of this outdoor acquisition to grabbing live action interviews and other imagery from stock photos and films, expect to view nothing short of an outdoor museum of the 20th Century, discarded, with no curator whatsoever.
We welcome you to return for updates, and anyone with unheard stories to tell can drop us a line. Thank you for visiting the HEAVE HO blog.
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