Reverse Cloudland

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Reverse Cloudland, a set of five photos by Gregory Scheckler, 2009

These images came from the Northern Berkshires, from the forests around Mt. Greylock. The mountain and its sisters create a ring around the Berkshires, offering shelter and vista, diverse ecologies and world-class arts. My artistic interests tend to focus less on the arts scene and more on nature’s roles in our lives. Sometimes art and nature intersect, for example in MASS MoCA’s exhibit Badlands, or the Clark’s exhibit Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner: The Manton Collection, which included many landscapes. These art shows, however, tend to be about distant environments whereas ‘Reverse Cloudland’ focuses on our location.

According to Henry David Thoreau’s writings excerpted in Most Excellent Majesty: A History of Mount Greylock (Berkshire Natural Resources Council, 2009), in July of 1844, Thoreau climbed up the Bellows Pipe Trail to the top of Mt. Greylock. He camped at the summit, sleeping beneath some planks in an observatory tower, after having had a humble dinner of rice, the crumbs from which he shared with mice. When he rose in the morning:

“As the light increased I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of a wreck of a world, on my carved plank in cloudland; a situation which required no aid from the imagination to render it impressive. As the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra firma perchance of my future life. There was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name Massachusetts, or Vermont or New York could be seen, while I still inhaled the clear atmosphere of a July morning, if it were July there. All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled.”

His transcendent moment culminated in a blanketing over of the doldrums of the world beneath, veiling the terrestrial to reveal an image that he felt symbolized the expansive heavens. Thoreau’s experience built on the God-in-Nature ideals that inspired the Romanticists and the Hudson River School. My set of photos starts with that kind of image, of clouds obscuring the valley, hiding North Adams from view. But then the photos move down into the forest, shuttering beneath the clouds with a long look at the changeable forest floor: the trees, grasses and mesocosmic critters such as deer, or a yellow-spotted salamander being released after having been measured for a scientific study. In other words, whereas Thoreau’s experience led to an idea of an expansive divinity, my photos move in reverse, to the small and delicate, the real and local, towards what Leonardo da Vinci called the ‘near and not so far above us.’ Although I’ve traded Thoreau’s transcendentalism for a 21^st Century documentary realism, the poetry-inspiring effect is nonetheless similar in that we well-fed modern-day people still feel the unique beauty of the Berkshires.