EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS
1960'S
My earliest recollections of exploring the outdoors begin with childhood memories in the green woods of Maine. My parents had a summer cottage there on a pond where my father and I would wander the uninhabited shores and deep forests. No trails, just meandering through tall fern and birch to see wherever we would end up. I remember how we often launched a small rowboat into the misty pre-dawn waters of swamps and rivers no one ever visited except us. And I remember the reason my father gave me, “just so we can listen for beavers.” Nature was a dream. Just sitting close to the mossy edge of a clear brook, riffling over golden ledge-rock, was as addictive as TV. My mother often took me on bird-finding trips to National Wildlife Refuges where I added to my “life-list” of bird species, and of course I always drew and painted whatever I saw.
WHITE MOUNTAINS, NEW HAMPSHIRE
1976
By the time I was seventeen, just out of High School, I set off on a long solo hike (76 days in the summer of 1976) climbing every peak over 4,000 feet in the White Mountains National Forest of New Hampshire (48 peaks in all). All my food and equipment was toted along on my back. At night the stars, the great-horned owls, the white-footed mice and the vast forests spread around me as I visited some of the most remote places that trails never reached. I learned what it was like to live outdoors during rainstorms, what the rugged earth does to tender feet, and what animals see.
I walked 600 miles.
JOHN MUIR TRAIL, CALIFORNIA
1978
Two summers went by before I prepared myself for another journey in 1978, this time further afield. At Cornell University I had studied the cartographic archives and set my sights on the Sierra Nevada mountain-range of California; the “Range of Light” as it’s called. I was alone. I was nineteen. I was flying across the country for the first time to begin walking 250 miles from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney along a mountain footpath named after John Muir, the famous naturalist, more than a month of high crests above timberline, awesome valleys, snowy passes, and river fords. I had never seen anyplace so beautiful as the High Sierra; each day was crystal clear blue, and each afternoon ever so briefly spiced with one of the Sierra’s famous fast-moving lightening/showers. I never needed a tent at night. I simply stretched out under the stars.
TEN TOUSAND MILES AROUND AMERICA
1981 - 1982
In 1980, having just graduated from Cornell University, I spent a year planning one of the longest treks on record: 16 months of wilderness travel, covering 10,000 miles of America’s natural environments.
TEN THOUSAND MILES
Beginning in the springtime atop Mount Katahdin in Maine, I walked 2,100 miles south along the Appalachian Trail, a crude footpath cut along the mossy spine of this ancient mountain chain to Georgia.
TEN THOUSAND MILES (continued)
By autumn I reached Alabama where I started rowing a Gloucester-gull dory down-river to the Gulf of Mexico. Winter was a series of gusty shorelines of sandbars and marshes, across the Mississippi Delta and along Padre Island to the southernmost tip of coastal Texas.
TEN THOUSAND MILES (continued)
From South Padre I set off on a heavily loaded bicycle to explore the desert-lands of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and California, crossing several thousand miles of deserted roadways, linking tiny towns, sometimes as far as a hundred miles apart.
TEN THOUSAND MILES (continued)
The desert was coming into full bloom as I neared the Mexican border near Campo, California, the start of my last leg, walking, climbing and following another mountainous footpath, “the Pacific Crest Trail,” northward for the entire length of California, Oregon, and Washington, up through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain-ranges to the Canadian border come autumn.
To travel self-propelled through the wilderness is to know self-sufficiency. Sixteen months, spanning ten thousand miles, living and breathing outdoors, how can I adequately convey the change in my perception and attitude? The world becomes “immediate” and very “real” during those long hours of immersion in Nature’s realm. My outlook on life will never be the same.
ON THE ROAD
1984 - 1988
During my first trip to Florida I photographed countless herons, egrets, anhingas, ibis, grebes, and other waterfowl of the coastal Everglades. This was the first of many "driving" tours I would make, photographing and exploring across different parts of the United States. My next trip was a 2,000 mile Southwestern jaunt through the late-April flowers of Arizona and New Mexico’s deserts, seeing just about every National Monument, every National Park, every zoo, and every botanical garden in those states. I would return again and again to the Southwest as this area became one of my favorite regions. A year later I was driving the northern-coastal region of California when I went off to hike among the giant Redwoods. Snow still lingered on the ground, and the tourists were nowhere to be seen. I slept out a couple nights, curled up inside a hollow redwood giant.
NEWFOUNDLAND
1988
Living in New England, I had always been fascinated by the idea of just heading due north by car up the coast as far as roads would take me. So in 1989 I loaded the Subaru with piles of canned foods and set off -- “just to see wherever I would end up.” Newfoundland was more spectacular than I had ever expected with towering marine cliffs white with gannets, and barren grounds brown with caribou. I paddled along the coastline in a kayak of my own design and was awed by the vast tranquility of countless miles of rough uninhabited shores.
ST. LAWRENCE RIVER , CANANDA
1989
In the autumn of 1989 I drove north into Quebec along the Saint Lawrence River to witness the annual snow geese migration. As the geese fly southward from the Arctic breeding grounds, they converge at a particular point on the St. Lawrence before dispersing southward to their winter ranges.
KAYAKING
1980's & 1990's
My love for kayaking bloomed in New England waters; the isolated lakes of northern Maine, the long ocean paddles out the length of Monomy Island on Cape Cod, the river journey’s, the swamp journeys, the rocky, wave-bound island chain journeys along Maine’s Atlantic coast. There wasn’t a truly wild place in northern New England that I didn’t paddle at one time or another. Having grown up in the town of Marblehead, a peninsula literally surrounded by ocean, and having known so many summer weekends of boating with my father in Maine, I’ve always felt a special connection with water. Kayaking allows an “up-close and personal” experience. When paddling, I’m “among the waves.” I’m feeling the water on my hands with each paddle stroke. I’m catching the wind and sun on my back. Water-birds and shoreline mammals such as moose, mink, and otter, all seem more accepting of my presence. With camera in hand I’ve photographed animals that could never have been approached using a larger boat. I’ve paddled late at night out on the ocean, rewarded by sparkling bioluminescence, the countless glow of tiny organisms brought to life with each paddle-stroke. I’ve sat eye-ball to eye-ball with muskrats and herons. Reached down to pluck sunning turtles from their logs. Had dragonflies and damselflies alight on my paddle. (Just down the street from my studio is a river I've enjoy paddling every month of the year in every type of weather, even in winter when the kayak creaks along through a skim of ice.)
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