Thursday evening while paddling on the river, I looked up at the moon and thought of Ansel Adams. Adams, you may know, was a photographer of the American West — arguably the photographer of the American West — known for his black-and-white prints that rivaled the grandeur of the landscapes they depicted.
Though many of Adams’ best-known images were made along the California Coast and in the National Parks, his most iconic was a twilight photograph of an obscure village in New Mexico. The light of a fading sun is reflected by the gravestones of a graveyard as a round moon rises in a black sky. The image, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” has its own Wikipedia page, and the making of the photograph its own mythology. In 2006, the art auction house Sotheby’s sold a print of “Moonrise” for $609,600.
When she saw Adams on the cover of the Sept. 3 1979, issue of Time magazine, Beth picked up the phone and called him.
By then Adams was in his late 70s and was receiving acclaim outside of photographic circles; the following year Jimmy Carter presented him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Here’s Beth’s recollection of that phone call:
“I dialed ‘0’ and got a long-distance operator. I asked for the listing of Ansel Adams in Carmel, California. Fully expecting an apprentice to answer the phone, I was startled when Ansel himself said, ‘Hello.’ He was touched I had called, not to ask him for anything, but to just tell him that his being in the spotlight was much deserved, and I was so thrilled to see it happen. He seemed charmed that someone was calling him from Mississippi.”
Below the trestle, the glow of an almost full moon was coming into view over Friendship Cemetery.
Friday we saw the Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox, so named because it provided light for farmers harvesting their crops.
Being on the river alone at night in a small boat has its own pleasures, large and small. Water bugs zigzagged around the bow of my kayak like tugboats escorting the QEII into New York harbor. A blue heron squawked its displeasure at being dislodged from its roost for the night. Outcroppings of elephant’s ear swayed in the evening breeze and clumps of water lilies with lavender blooms bobbed along the shoreline.
Between the port and what used to be Laws Shoals, a towboat named Alice Parker pushed past.
A Google search for Alice Parker brings up the Boston-born, 91-year-old choral arranger and composer responsible for more than 500 compositions. She, too, has been on the cover of Time magazine and featured in a wonderful NPR profile, also online.
And here was her namesake, plying up this muddy river in the backwoods of Mississippi. A photograph of the towboat can be found on a website called Dick’s Towboat Gallery.”
As Aunt Sarah used to say, “Do tell.”
Back in the 60s, when the river was little more than an oversized creek, we water skied behind loud, powerful boats dodging stumps, overhangs and propeller-destroying blue rock. Like the aging deer hunter, now content to sit in his tree stand and watch, I’m happy to be paddling quietly in this simple little boat.
There were more snakes and fewer gators in those days. Occasionally there is an ominous slap, and I question the wisdom of this nocturnal outing.
William “Ham” Roberts was one of those stump-jumping daredevils for whom the river has and continues to be a favorite haunt. Before he pulled two tours of duty in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot, William was dangling from a kite pulled by a ski boat and being dragged across a sandy beach into the water whereupon he would stand up and ski barefoot.
William and the late John Laws Jr. flew attached to kites pulled by the same ski boat, crisscrossing and managing not to get tangled up with one another or the sycamores lining the river.
“As far as I’m concerned John Laws was the best in the world on a flat kite,” William said Friday. “He wasn’t afraid of the devil.”
At the Shoals, I turned around and headed back upstream. At the port, the pilot of the Alice Parker was trying to shoehorn his barge into the array tethered there. The tug’s powerful searchlights imparted an otherworldly glow to the scene.
Staying far to the right I paddled past the tugboat unnoticed and grateful for its searchlight as it swept across the river ahead.
By now the moon had come into view, an old friend who would see me safely home.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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