Forestwood Park, 9/27/24
THE PLACE
The power of water so often is veiled. We can stand at the edge of a calm ocean or a lake and be lulled into unawareness of the potential energy before us, especially if a body of water has been in one place for centuries, or millennia, pliantly staying within arbitrary boundaries. However, given the chance, water will go where it can, as quickly as it can. And when that happens, water’s awesome moving presence can flatten virtually anything. Thereafter, water’s absence can be as staggering as its departure. The sudden drainage in August, 2024 of Smithtown’s New Mill Pond after extreme rains burst the dam that was keeping the lake in place is a case in point. The water had formed a lake for more than two centuries. Generations had fished, boated, and hiked there. Then in the space of 24 hours, the lake’s waters rushed away, taking roads, structures, and an ecosystem with it. In that departure’s aftermath, an empty lake basin, studded with formerly submerged tree stumps, formed the lake’s relief, a perfect mold of what had been, and then, starkly, was gone.
A bridge crosses over a stream the flows toward the now empty basin of the former Mew Mill Pond.
New Mill Pond’s surroundings still comprise Smithtown, New York’s Forestwood Park and Blydenburgh County Park. The extensive and well-maintained trail system stretches on to accommodate miles of relatively flat hiking.
Spurs from the trails that circumnavigate the lake lead down to the edge of the lakebed where Canada geese, egrets, herons, and ospreys still forage and hunt for food.
Stumps and logs formerly submerged below the lake’s surface now pepper the bare lakebed, making it look more like a forest recently logged than a lake recently drained.
A great egret flew the length of the northeast arm of the New Mill Pond lakebed and landed next to a rivulet of water flowing along the contours of the lakebed’s low points. It strode among the low-growing greenery that had sprung up from the watery soil newly exposed to the sun.
THE LENS
After entering and park through a gapped fence, I set up a tripod and started filming the empty lakebed. As so often happens, some epic shots passed before me as I was setting up. An osprey landed with a splash in a pool of water left behind when the lake suddenly drained, trying to catch a meal. I couldn’t see whether its talons were full as it flew north away from me, with its species’s characteristics piercing cry. A couple minutes later, a phalanx of Canada geese flew east not 50 feet in front of me, only about five feet off the ground. Any photographer or videographer has these stories to tell: the quintessential fishers’ laments about the ones that got away. Nature doesn’t perform for us. In order to capture its images, we have to be in its places at its times, set up and ready to shoot. Patience and persistence pay, but we’ll still miss vastly more than we record. Countless shots only will be captured as memories.
THE MUSIC
I’ve continued practicing the guitar, and it’s continuing to prove rewarding. Having been a fiddle player for so long, mostly of Scottish and Irish traditional tunes, I’m familiar with the chord progressions behind Celtic melodies. For this soundtrack I strummed the chord progressions that form the underpinnings of two Irish reels: Doctor Gilbert, which centers around Em, and Paddy Ryan’s Dream, which centers around Am. I was looking for a mood that matched the melancholy feel of the video shoot’s subject matter. Irish reels most often are played at warp speeds, but I slowed the tempo way down to record this video’s soundtrack. I took the chord chart straight out of Mel Bay’s Complete Irish Fiddle Player, by Peter Cooper. It was one of my first fiddle books well over a decade ago, and it’s serving me well again now as a guitar player. Understanding the way chord progressions support the flying melodies fiddle players and other melody-instrument players knock about often without thinking about music theory in any meaningful way provides the basis for understanding the music on a deeper and more fundamental level. As I was playing the chords, I was hearing the drawn-out melodies of the reels on the fiddle, maybe in the styles of Martin Hayes or Ryan Young, two masterful Celtic fiddle players who specialize in letting tunes breathe easily at slower tempos.
Being still in my first couple of weeks of playing the guitar, the slow tempo helped me find the chord fingerings. I’m still just using simple open chords. The barre chords will continue to push the limits of my developing abilities for the foreseeable future. Moving between Em and Bm had me missing some notes. Fortunately, the strummed guitar is forgiving of certain inaccuracies. With six strings in play, you can miss a couple and often still get the idea across. Slow and thoughtful practice remains the right path for me. These recordings are providing me a record of my progress, and challenging myself to play into a microphone regularly motivates me to keep making that progress.
THE GLASS
I brew all-grain beer on a Sabco Brew Magic V350 three-vessel system. It’s almost a decade old, and it’s worked well over the years. A pump failure has rendered the system out of order for the time being. I don’t begrudge the system its breakdowns here and there. It’s a machine, and machines break. C’est la vie. I have a wet-end pump assembly on order from More Beer (morebeer.com), which has been my go-to vendor for brewing supplies ever since I started as an extract brewer well over a decade ago. As soon as the parts arrive, I’ll install them, and I hope that gets me back up and running. I still have the plastic cooler system I used for all-grain brewing before I upgraded to the Brew Magic, so worst-cast scenario is, I dump some grain and hot water into a cooler and brew a couple batches that way while I work the kinks out of the Sabco system. As they say in the breweries on Arrakis, “The Spice must flow.”
