Focus
(This 1124th Buffalo
Sunday News column was first published on October 7, 2012.)
Wildflowers
at Major's Park in East Aurora
This
column is about focus.
Anyone
with a camera will be familiar with what I am talking about. Mine, for example,
has a little lever that allows me to increase the magnifying power of the
camera's lens and viewfinder -- at the same time to bring things up close and
reduce the viewing field. I don't often use another of its features but this
lever also allows me to go in the opposite direction, to widen the view and
make things appear at a greater distance.
A
series of experiences a few days ago made me consider how this concept of focus
provides a metaphor for many of our observations of the world around us.
On
that day I joined Rick Ohler's writing group for a bus
tour of the Town of East Aurora. The tour was part of Nancy Smith's Campaign
for the Mill Road Scenic Outlook, which seeks funds to protect this attractive
vista.
I
have done my share of traveling. I've visited most of the United States and
Canadian provinces, taught in England and back during World War II spend a
month in the Mediterranean, even riding a bus over the Anti-Lebanon Mountains
from Beirut to visit Damascus, the farthest I have ever been from home in
western New York.
And
I have friends who have traveled still farther. Borneo, New Zealand, South
Korea, Tanganyika: you name it, they have been there,
mostly but not always on birding expeditions.
To
bring those trips into focus you would need not only a wide-angle lens but a distant viewing position, perhaps on the moon.
It
would be much easier to focus on our expedition around the Village of East
Aurora and its outskirts. You could get that entire trip into a single photo
from a small airplane a few hundred feet high. In fact, still in that airplane
you would need to widen your lens only slightly to include the lovely view
looking north from our trip high point that took in the City of Buffalo and
nearby Lake Erie.
I
thought about the contrast between those excursions to distant lands and this
local bus ride. And I asked myself, which would I choose? Perhaps it is a
function of age but I found myself happy to choose right here. My internal
camera is satisfied to limit its width of focus lens to our neighborhood.
For there is plenty to see right here. I am reminded of this when I think of
how rarely we locals visit Niagara Falls, one of the world's wonders. We go
there only to escort out-of-town visitors.
On
the morning of our tour we stopped at several parks, again tightening our
focus. At Sinking Ponds, for example, we looked out across the placid waters at
the lovely woodlands rising beyond them. And Rick pointed out the adjacent
marsh were he told us Corps of Engineers-constructed bridges sank in quicksand,
giving the parkland its name.
We
learned when we stopped there how Major's Park was recently added to the Town
Parks system. And when we paused at the Cazenovia Creek Nature Sanctuary, Rick
told us how the disastrous slide of a home down the embankment led to the
removal of the condemned building and the creation of this lovely park.
Our
trip culminated at the Mill Road Vista itself, an open field bordered by maples
just beginning to turn into their handsome fall colors.
But
along our travels I had found myself tightening my view still further. First I
focused on the individual homes we passed. Many of them had no lawn, their
yards merging perfectly into the woodlands in which the houses were built. Yes,
there were vast expanses of lawn in some places, but they were the exception.
How different this was from our other suburbs.
Finally,
I reduced my focus to the world of individual plants, thinking of an exercise
my predecessor David Bigelow once suggested: throw a hula-hoop on the ground
and explore the world it circumscribes.
There
I found the lovely fall colors of asters and goldenrods, of daisy fleabane and
red-osier dogwood. And the milkweed pods that will soon open to set in flight
seedling parachutes.
When
we tighten our focus there is much to enjoy. We too often miss it.