It was a bit of a research excursion in the Metroparks. These are from around and about the Brookpark Road bridge, 3 January 2010. A few details, a bit of an adventure, and a structure.

Another image has more context than this: cutting away the context forces one to negotiate directly with particular content. To an extent it abstracts the information. Still, I could do with less snow, to draw this further toward scalelessness.

The outlet was forty or sixty feet above the creek bottom, and probably a couple hundred feet away. What happened was: wandering along, well above a creek, I saw a waterfall “over there” that I wanted to investigate, looked at the terrain, picked an approach, and away I went, traversing and climbing.

I am fascinated by seeing through the water – maybe, too, by seeing through the water while seeing what’s reflected in it. I’ve made photos about that before.

Slate or shale – slate breaks down into shale and then into clay – and algae. Again, removing context abstracts is, removes scale.

A moment in the life of a creek.

Slide.

More after the break.

Here I’d arrived below the fall.

Looking back gives a sense of how steep it is – fine enough for scrambling.

Someplace up the exposure is this shale slipping apart. I really like the movement in it.

Deluge.The experience itself had a kind of scalelessness: with little to use for reference, I may as well have been on the Moon. I easily climbed ten body lengths, but it may have been fifteen. The outlet is probably a foot in diameter.

This is the Brookpark Road bridge. The Cleveland area has some wonderful old bridges. I enjoy how the structure of this one springs from the ground.

And the space underneath. I think of long halls, of solemn and mysterious places in fantastic worlds. The bright overcast sky made everything luminous, as well.

This is the view from the far end of the bridge. I’ve come to love imperfections. Signs of age, wear, care. Maybe spalling concrete, maybe graffiti, maybe water stains. Little marks that bring a structure out of its platonic ideal and into the present.

This one is oddly dizzying. Same space, very different sense than the above.

Late afternoon sun.