Still from last week's inaugural road trip north on Route 611, this is what the old 60-mile Delaware Canal and towpath looks like after last summer's flooding destroyed almost everything south of Easton. This recently restored lock, a remnant of the great canal building era of the early and mid-19th century, was right along the bike and hiking trail.
I show this photo to illustrate both the antithesis of serendipity and to ask you to send me YOUR photos to share.
I stopped along the canal at the suggestion of an outdoorsy photo editor here at the Inquirer. He said it was a shame, because it was such a great trail, and promised to show me some photos he shot. He's still looking for them. So that's where you come in. If anyone has any photos of hikers or bikers on the towpath from BEFORE the flood, I'd like to see and share them here. You can't upload photos directly to blogs on philly.com, but I just got an email address just for Scene on the Road, so you can send your photos to me and I'll post them. It's Roadtrip@phillynews.com. And see the state parks website for updates on trail repairs.
Now the antithesis part. The scale of the towpath/trail's destruction really was amazing to me. Just like walking through a dense forest crowded with underbrush and stumbling upon the trunk of a giant Sequoia, it's hard to show the scale of some things in a single photograph. No matter how impressive. The tow path was like that. But it wasn't just something I stumbled into. This was starting to feel to me a lot like WORK. Like a difficult newspaper assignment, the kind you can't just blow off saying "there's no photo there, so I didn't take one," because someone - editors, reporters, readers - are counting on you to deliver. Anything BUT the serendipity of wandering on a road trip. But hard as I tried, without other people to include in the photo for scale, I couldn't see a way to make a picture that effectively communicated what I was seeing. Especially when viewed as a four inch photo on the web.
But, after hiking for twenty minutes past the "closed trail" sign to reach the washed out area, I felt compelled to take a photo. That's 611 at left, the Delaware at right, and the washed out canal and towpath/trail in the middle.
If I were an artist, I could just call it expressing myself and not worry so much about whether or not anybody else understood. Whenever anyone every asks, I tell them that's one of the biggest differences between art and what we do as photojournalists.
Nobody asked me that last night when I spoke at the Churchville Photography Club in Bucks county, but I did get many other -- much smarter -- questions. They're taking the summer off (from meetings, NOT from taking pictures) but if you live in Bucks County, check out their website, and plan to attend the next meeting in the fall. It's an excellent club, with active and involved photographers.
I'm off now on my second road trip, this one on Route 206 in New Jersey, from Hammonton to Trenton and Princeton north to the NY border.
