If you follow my columns at all you know these three facts… my wife and partner is Twila… she often scolds me for slipping and saying something about getting old… and we hang out with a group of photographers from time to time. Why does any of this matter? I’m getting to it… I promise.
During all this COVID mess, I have been feeling old. I can’t help it, but having to sit around the house and basically just work and do nothing else is enough to make a person feel old. I missed getting out and shooting pictures and visiting with my crazy photography friends. Then we got a message about meeting the gang for a shoot. Often we will work in a rented house someplace cool or in one of the photographer’s studios. But, in honor of COVID and just for something different, my friends had decided a location shoot was just the ticket.
Location shoot? That sounds fun if it is an interesting one and the weather cooperates. Not so fast. My friend explained it was a waterfall in middle Tennessee. That sounded good until he told me to get to it and back out was a mildly difficult five-mile round-trip walk. Well, I put it to Twila, who is smarter but also more optimistic than me, and she agreed it sounded like more fun than spending the day in front of our computers.
We began to organize our equipment and other items we thought we might need while keeping the distance in mind. But the day before the shoot another message pops up. Our friends had found another waterfall, a bit longer drive but only a quarter-mile hike. WOW! That sounded great and it was on private property… less people to hassle us while we shot pictures… maybe.
So the big day arrived and off we went. Two hours later we pulled off the side of the road… no parking lot for private property waterfalls, I guess… and found some of our friends waiting. Twila grabbed her backpack and I got my camera bag… each of which probably weighed 25 pounds… and off we went. The first part of the hike was a perfectly level gravel path and I was starting to feel pretty good. Then it happened.
We were all walking along together and chatting and came around a bend and were stopped dead in our tracks. There in front of us was a beautiful waterfall. However, to get to it we were going to have to descend about a 25-foot bank that was about a 75-degree slope with nothing but roots and rocks to use as steps. Doing it without a camera bag would have been a huge challenge. Doing it carrying my camera bag and, being the thoughtful husband I am, worrying about and trying to help Twila with her bag, was crazy!
But there was that gorgeous waterfall. So we all started down doing the best we could. I won’t bore you with the details, but we all made it to the first plateau in one piece only to see that to actually get to the water we would have to also climb over huge, wet, slimy rocks.
Again, I won’t bore you with all the details or the language, but not only did we make it to the water, we all spent over six hours there shooting pictures at three different falls. After that first climb, we made, maybe, six or seven other climbs. We all waded in one-to-two-foot deep, 60-degree water all day. To say we all came away with some amazing images would be an understatement. But the important things I learned that day… nothing stops my wife and partner. She climbed and waded right along with all the rest of us. Not one photographer fell all the way to the ground or in the water and no cameras were broken or lost. And, best of all, I figure if I can do all that at almost 66 years old… I’m truly not getting older… I’m just getting better and having more fun. And, COVID… you can kiss my sore, wet, photography bottom!
Publisher’s Note: In all honesty, I don’t feel… and obviously don’t act… my age. But it was four days before I could go up the steps to our house without moaning from the pain in my muscles.
by Tim Hurst, SOKY Publisher