This scene is from a swamp near the Suwannee River in Levy County, Florida. It’s a place my father finds solace. In order to find this location, I had to drive to a piece of property that is just shy of 12,000 acres, owned by a paper company that removes the trees and hauls the logs to make products for you and I, unlock a gate to gain access to the property, drive to our family camp, load my gear from the truck to an all terrain vehicle, drive the utility vehicle to a trail head marked with a PVC post, switch the UTV to 4x4, drive another 100 yards or so, park it, gather my gear and then walk another 100 yards through a Florida swamp to a tree stand my father calls Nancy. I’s named after the road it is adjacent to a few hundred yards away. He feeds the deer on a regular basis but hasn’t harvested a deer in 12 seasons.
I joined the same hunting club as my father in 2020 to spend more time with him. He loves to sit in these woods and decompress from the world. No cell phone, no distractions, just silence and mother nature at work. If you sit long enough in his tree stand you can understand why he loves it so much.
The woods are silent first thing in the morning, but as the morning light starts to peak through the trees, the wildlife begin to awaken. The birds start to sing, the squirrels chase each other through the tree tops and make enough noise to make you think a pre-school is nearby. The deer, bears, raccoons, and most anything else you can think of move through the forest ever so quietly all foraging for food.
Within a few hours everything settles down and silence blankets the swamp once again. Every so often you can hear the wind blow through the trees, or you might even hear limbs and trees fall from years of decay. A few hours later and the wildlife starts moving again, foraging for food. It’s interesting to observe and listen to nature’s schedule during the course of a day. It repeats these patterns until dark.
I understand why my father finds himself in these woods some 20 years later. It’s escapism. It’s an escape from noise, people, politics, everyone’s opinions of each other. He manages to just sit and relax. This scene unfolded in front of me during the fall of 2020 as my father and I filled feeders and repaired tree stands for the coming hunting season. He mentioned that he had not harvested a deer in 12 seasons to which I started problem solving on how to fix that for him. He then relayed to me that he just enjoys sitting in the woods.
As the scene revealed itself to me I saw a landscape photograph. The foreground was full of calf high ferns with the sunlight catching the top of its green leaves. The middle ground was ankle deep green grass, which then transformed into a dark swamp full of life. I was in awe at its beauty and made this frame to share with you.
Mother nature has so much to share with us if we just sit quietly and be an observing partner. One day this scene will disappear when the timber company decides to log the location of its trees, and then my father will be sitting in a field of planted Pines. I’m glad I could photograph the scene. I think I’ll print it for posterity’s sake.