I always expect to take pictures when I go for walks. It’s part of the hobby of enjoying the outdoors and learning how to take new and better photos. It's often a bonus to the experience, but some places I'll visit with the goal of taking some beautiful pictures. Western Head Preserve was one such place. While spending my week days getting my hands dirty digging up artifacts, I sought out new places along Maine’s coast that I had never been before. It was during a specific period in my life when I was working on taking self-portraits. It was early in my practice, and I wasn’t great at it (I’m still not), but I knew I wanted to capture some images next to the water. The preserve was a short drive and a shorter hike to the shoreline, where I once again found myself chasing the tail end of the golden hour as the sky became overshadowed with darkness. Though I did think to myself as I judgingly looked through the images, that this one might be more believable as a painting than a photograph.
Some trails are easy to get lost on. The trails that wound their way through Viles Arboretum were like that. Even with the help of my All Trails app, I found myself taking wrong turns. Fortunately, the arboretum is a nice place to get turned around in. When I visited, the trees were in full bloom. Rows and rows of them filled with delicate petals ranging from vibrant pinks to soft whites. Beyond them was a wide spanning lawn and beyond that was a proper forest filled with narrow dirt paths. There was so much wildlife present from birds and bees fluttering from flower to flower to the turtles that sunbathed on the logs that lay beside a pond.
Readers of my blog are no stranger to Capitol Park. Pictures of it show up from time to time in my blog posts, as it is a place I’ve been to a lot. My Simple Things blog post was written from one of the picnic tables and parts of my book were edited there as well. The park has a lot of sunlight and flowers dust the lawn between mowings. I see dogs walk the sidewalks with their owner and the occasional lone man practicing Tai Chi. Maine’s capitol building stands tall, framed between the trees that line the edges of the park. In the springtime, they blossom in beautiful pinks, and even after seeing them many times before, I can’t stop myself from gawking and taking another picture.
Another place I’ve been to more than once is the Whitefield Salmon Preserve. To be honest, I’m not sure why I like the trail so much. Maybe because it’s pretty quiet. Though I ran into other hikers both times I visited, I spent most of the hike by myself. Maybe I like it because the length is just right. At around 3 miles of wandering through the wilderness, I feel like I’ve had a solid period of exercise without feeling drained. But maybe it’s because the trail features a combination of all of my favorite parts of the Maine woods from old rock walls, tall trees with chittering chipmunks, and a river that connects to a still pond. I’ve never actually seen salmon in the river there, and the website doesn’t advertise the possibility of seeing them. Apparently, salmon used to be quite prevalent in the river, but now compose less than 1% of the fish population that can be found there. Regardless, I contented myself on observing the variety of other visible wildlife, including frogs, birds, and squirrels.
I remember two distinctive things about the day I visited Salt Bay Heritage Trail: the black flies were out for blood and there was a cross country team finishing their jaunt just as I arrived. While I pretended to take extra interest in the trailhead’s notice board, a group of high school aged boys filtered out from the narrow trail opening before continuing down the road beyond the easily missable parking space for the hike. But once they left, the trail was all mine for the afternoon. I hiked through the woods, delicately hopping over pools of mud that introduced my ankles to the flies. I squatted low, taking pictures of giant mushrooms, before standing again to capture the goldenrod as the sun set to the golden hour.
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