BEACH YEARNINGS

The Beach by Diane M. Moore

The above picture is one of the very few pictures I’ve painted during my lifetime and, of course, is in the rank of "very amateur art.” Now that summer is approaching, it represents my envee (desire, yearning, etc., in Cajun French) for beach life. The picture was executed on a visit to Gulf Shores, Alabama, and my visit there actually occurred in late spring almost twenty years ago. 

I recorded this experience in a journal, then painted the picture. A week spent in sun and sand engendered a feeling of peace, which being near the ocean often does, and I was unencumbered enough not to care if my art “got out there,” as we often say about the dissemination of artistic effort. I wrote: “The umbrella lady comes at high tide, unlocks a painted white box, and many umbrellas, royal blue, spill out, accompanied by matching chairs. Set up, they represent linear thought, each bather’s pole placed in the sand in line with neighboring umbrella, plumb bob straight. A grove of blue palms under which lobster red legs jet toward the sea becomes visible. Waves vibrate monotonously… the sands are heavy with leisurely thought…On the beach everyone searches for something…gifts of the tides.”

This part of the calendar year I live on The Mountain, as it is called here at Sewanee, Tennessee (April 1to October 15) and develop a yearning for water and beach every year. However, we’re likely to schedule leisure time at other elevations; e.g., this weekend in a state park called Pickwick Landing on Pickwick Lake, not too far from the Shiloh National Military Park where my great-grandfather fought as a captain in a Tennessee regiment.

One of the recreational perks Tennessee offers is its state park system—56 of them located in all corners of this wide state. We’ve visited only four of them during our eleven-year sojourn. Many were built by members of the CCC and WPA who were part of programs instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt established both programs in an effort to provide employment for indigent young men who needed jobs following the Great Depression.

Anyway, I won’t get to the beach this early in the season…and probably not at all…but we’ll enjoy a few days near a lake in a 1516-acre state park a few miles away from historic Savannah, Tennessee and the Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge. I doubt if any art will result from the experience, but the thought of relaxing near a grand body of water is enough to satisfy my yen for sun and sandy beaches…for awhile.

BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS

Fog in Fairbanks Woods, Sewanee, TN

The heavy fog this morning reminded me why I frequently call Sewanee, TN, my second home, "Grayburg."  During this morning's services at St. Mary, I kept looking out the window overlooking the bluff and countryside beyond for sunlight, but it's now 10 a.m., and the fog still shrouds all signs of spring, including a few blooming dogwood and forsythia scattered about the woods.

The dense fog reminds me of a program I presented to the Fortnightly Club in February — one about the Great Smoky Mountains Park, another setting with a plethora of gray days. The program focused on the part that photography played in establishing the park as a national icon in the southern Appalachians. Western parks, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, were carved from the public domain, but each acre of the Smoky Mountains was held in private lands made up of thousands of small farms and summer homes. A decade-long effort resulted in funds being raised to buy those lands because, originally, the Federal government wasn't going to put up any of the money to acquire property for a park. So the states of North Carolina and Tennessee, composed of ordinary citizens and philanthropists — even school children — began to raise the money.

Their campaign was aided greatly by a group of photographers who supported the cause. During the early 1900's, when photography was in its infancy, professional photographers had to tote large, cumbersome view cameras, fragile glass plate negatives, and wooden tripods into the wilderness to photograph scenery that became the Smoky Mountain National Park. A photographer would set up a shot and wait, sometimes hours, for a moment of light before clicking the shutter to record images in black and white.

The photographers were also avid hikers. They logged thousands of miles carrying tents, bedrolls, food, and fifty pounds of cameras and various equipment on their backs on unfamiliar, rugged ground. They also build trails and measured, mapped, and named most of the land features that would become the Great Smoky Mountains Park. They made thousands of pictures of trees, waterfalls, and mountain peaks in all kinds of weather and created portraits of mountain people working in their homes, on their farms, and with various crafts, leaving a cultural record of the mountain dwellers.

Many of the facilities and restoration of historic buildings in the Great Smoky Mountains Park was done by the CCC's, (an organization to which my father belonged but not in the Smoky Mountain Park), and many of the trails, beautiful stone buildings, and bridges in the park are examples of their work.

However, the photographers were the real movers and shakers in the campaign to establish the park. They campaigned, "through their lenses" to pique the interest of government officials and private donors to acquire 6,000 small farms and large tracts that had to be surveyed, appraised, dickered over, and sometimes condemned in court. Lumber and timber companies with standing inventory required compensation, and some people were given lifetime leases if they were too old or too sick to move. Finally, in the late 1920's the Legislatures of Tennessee and North Carolina donated two million dollars each for land purchases, and by 1928, five million dollars had been raised. Then the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund donated five million dollars. The Great Smoky Mountains Park was formally dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt in September, 1940 as he spoke from the Rockefeller Monument at Newfound Gap astride the Tennessee-North Carolina state line.

Ansel Adams, who was famous for photographing Western national parks, once set out for the Great Smokies following WWII and spent only a week in early October, making 47 images, four of which were published and three printed. In the book, Pictures For A Park, How Photographers Saved the Great Smoky Mountains, by Rose Houk, Houk tells the story of Adams complaining about the hazy light in the Appalachians ("Grayburg!"), comparing it to the strong light in California's Sierra Nevada. Adams wrote to a friend that the Smokies were "Okay, but are going to be devilish hard to photograph." A copy of Adams' photo entitled "The Dawn, Autumn Forest" appears in Pictures For A Park, a black and white close-up of a stand of trees, "their luminosity displaying Adams' prowess with light and lens and darkroom technique..."

My favorites among the photographs I viewed in the book by Houk were those of the faces of the mountaineers in the Great Smokies. Many of them are melancholy and weathered, and I wasn't surprised at the expressions on the faces of the mountain folk — the photos were probably taken on a day like today in "Grayburg!"

Photograph of fog by Victoria I. Sullivan