9/11 Remembrance
I choose to remember September 11, 2001 with the IPhone 7 video of September sunlight shining through clear water, set to the music “Blessing.”
The post header is sunlight shining through the clear water of Reavis
Creek, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona.
“Tree of Life”
In my last Pinelands post, “cedar water” was featured. This post is a exploration of the “cedar” in “cedar water.”
White Cedar, also known as Swamp Cedar, is a water loving tree seen here to the right of Quaker Brider, Wharton State Forest.
“Cedar water” is the dark, tea like, flow of Pinelands rivers colored by vegetable tannins.
White Cedar thrives along Pinelands waterways, lending color to the “cedar water.” 18th Century sea captains favored cedar water for long voyages, famours for staying fresh far longer than other waters. Also known as arborvite, “tree of life”, for the medicinal properties of the bark, well known throughout Native America.
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
A rare Pinelands maple tree over the cedar water of Mullica River looking upstream from Quaker Bridge on a warm August morning 2021.
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Ancestral Byways
……click for “Pinelands Connections I”.
These photographs were taken the last days of August 2021, the 26th and 27th, while exploring Burlington County, New Jersey, with my sister. I will be writing about our Thursday and Friday for awhile, starting with today’s installment.
Quaker Bridge Road traverses the wilderness of Wharton State Forest with a beginning off Route 206, Atsion Mansion. Our planning included Jeep Wrangler rental, only high-clearance 4-wheel vehicles are appropriate, the road surface is humpy sand, water filled holes abound. Still, sitting there at the start, with Atsion Mansion house in view, I waited awhile until a high clearance tour bus packed with adventurers, kayaks passed into the pines and out of sight. We proceeded an uneventful ~4 miles to Quaker Bridge at a stately 5 miles per hour, invoking four-wheel drive low gear a mile or so in.
Here is Quaker Bridge over Mullica River today, facing East.
Quaker Bridge road was a well traveled main route through the Pines for almost a hundred years with an inconvenient crossing of The Mullica at this point. During the year 1774, some sa 1772, West Jersey Quakers travelling to the Little Egg Harbor Yearly Meeting, started “a day early”, built a bridge. From a c.1940 photograph it is clear in that “day” they felled large trees for pilings, smaller trees, pines and cedars, for the other bridge elements. Since then, the crossing has been called “Quaker Bridge.”
Over time, the east side became a resting place, with at least one Inn/Tavern. Here is the east side today.
Even without hospitality and bustling humanity, after 4 miles of dreary road from Atsion this spot carries a sense of lightness, the well spaced straight pines over several acres conveying peace and rest. Over 35 miles from the ocean, the white sand presents as beach. There is a reason for this feeling, a 15 million year reason.
Between 15 and 10 million years ago the earth climate turned colder, so much water evaporated from the oceans to fall as snow and ice in the polar regions ocean levels fell 150 to 250 feet. As the ocean fell away, over eaons, mountains to the west were ground down, pulverized by the elements to flow, gather on the exposed plain. The white “beach” sand we see today, at Quaker Bridge and other Pinelands places, are surfaces of this “Cohansey” sands and clay ranging in thickness from 25 feet in the west to more than 300 feet at the Atlantic Ocean.
Over millions of years the land raised to become the drainage patterns we see today. The renewable resources of “bog iron” and water spring from this history.
Standing there I imagined Great Great Grandmother Ann (Milley) McCambridge resting on the journey from the McCambridge home near Speedwell. I placed the pebble, collected from Long Island Sound, on Grandmother Ann’s headstone the evening of August 26th. Click this link for more about Ann McCambridge.
“Background information on the Cohansey Formation aquifer.”
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
anthers and stamens
Evening breezes brought to a halt my series of hibiscus bloom photographs, that bloom faded and shriveled, to be replaced by another. I captured the images of this post on a very quiet summer evening. This bloom was facing up closer to vertical that the previous.
A key identification for all 300 species of hibiscus is the long stamen tube. I have yet to see a local insect interacting with the stamen, always they are in the flower throat. In the tropics, pollination is thought to proceed from large butterflies and birds.
Here are three macro photographs of this bloom, all from the Canon 100 “macro” lens. I learned by experience to tamp down the diaphragm to the smallest setting, f / 32 for this lens. The different aspects were achieved by moving the lens objective closer to the bloom. This is a “fixed” lens, it has one focal length.
Wikipedia – “hibiscus.”
anthers and stamens
Nyctinasty (flower response to light: opening with or closing without light) in hibiscus plants is a mechanism to protect against adverse conditions such as cool temperatures that can be damaging. Through a lack of light stimulus and circadian rhythms the plant is able to trigger the molecular movement of ions to allow for the closing of the flower.
Here are three macro photographs of this bloom, all from the Canon 100 “macro” lens. I start with the shutter diaphragm open at 4.0 (“F-stop”), a little narrower at 4.5 and a bit more at 9.0. For this lens the maximum opening is at 2.8, the narrowest is 32. As the opening narrows (F-stop increases) the exposure time needed to capture enough light lengthens and the range of the image in focus increases.
Wikipedia – “hibiscus.”
flower and buds
This is a perennial, commonly known simply as “hibiscus”, or less widely known as rose mallow. Other names include hardy hibiscus, rose of sharon, and tropical hibiscus.
The hibiscus flower is traditionally worn by Tahitian and Hawaiian girls. If the flower is worn behind the left ear, the woman is married or has a boyfriend. If the flower is worn on the right, she is single or openly available for a relationship.
Wikipedia – “hibiscus.”
flower, buds, bee
Yellow hibiscus, the state flower of Hawaii was recorded in ancient Greece. In the photograph is captured several unopened buds, behind the flower, and a bee in the flower throat, attracted by nectar there. It is a small bee, of the Halictidae family, that lives alone in a ground nest and also called a “sweat bee,” from being attracted to perspiration.
Wikipedia – “sweat bee” and “hibiscus.”
Experience a hike around Taughannock Gorge on a summer morning with thunderstorms threatening
Constant winds from thunderstorm updrafts, I brought along an umbrella just in case.
Click the “Watch on YouTube” for a larger format view and more information about each video.
Persistence of agriculture
Imagine walking across the ranch house ruin towards where I described the former pond. Looking to the east and north from the elevation you see this sight.
In the near distance a grass pasture slopes into Reavis Creek. The creek has flowing water in all but the longest dry seasons. By the way, the trail from Pine Creek is on the slopes of that conical feature in the distance, to the left.
From the ruin, walk down the Arizona Trail, south, for a few hundred feet and turn left into the fields to encounter the same apple tree, and a close up of pure white apple blossoms.
This tree is an outlier of a thick stand of several hundred trees to the north. The Searcher and I rode into the middle of the grove for a rest and chat. The horses were allowed to graze in the abundant new grass brought on by the winter rains.
The Searcher told me the story of the valley and that it was a man named Clemans who planted 600+ apple trees, trees in bloom all around us. The Reavis Valley was long a site of agriculture, starting in the 19th century with Elisha Reavis, who passed away in 1896 and is buried on the slopes of White Mountain, and continued with a series of ranchers and entrepreneurs in the 20th: John Fraser, William Clemans, who planted the trees, and John A. “Hoolie” Bacon, then Bacon’s son-in-law Floyd Stone who sold the land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1967.
We talked about some earthwork I noticed, in the southern part of the valley. It was part of a water system that diverted Reavis creek flow at the head of the valley to the ranch house. We decided that strange hexogonal structure on the elevation above the house ruin was the site of water storage. At that location the structure would provide a pressure feed for the house and much else.
A mix of winter rains and fertile soil were exploited in the Reavis Valley for a handful of decades, the enterprise now is set aside. This abandoned hay rake and chassis, used to harvest grass in seasons past, is evidence of the work. The apple trees produce to this day without irrigation.
The Searcher touched upon the subject of the “Circlestone” ruin he mentioned on our morning ride. He had never been there, but mentioned some books on the subject. It is a wide circle of rough stone wall enclosing mysterious structures. At this point, I was hooked, and decided to check Circlestone on a later trip. Here are some photographs from one of those trips, in November 2006.
In my next post The Searcher and I return to Pine Creek, Colorado gives me some trouble and we visit a stand of wild oats in the Reavis Gap.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 