Another American Adventure: Movies

Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Freedom Road

This is my first attempt to use the video feature on my camera. It is also a test to see just how loud the sound of the road traffic comes through the camera microphone.

Just before I did this video I talked to a couple who live a few doors down on the road side. They didn't know what I was talking about! They said that you don't notice the traffic at all with the doors closed, and even with them open, you get so used to it that you don't hear it.

Maybe I'm just over-reacting, and need to move on? Note that those leaves, whatever noise buffer that they offer now, are going to fall.

"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.