“All rivers seem personal by comparison with plains,
or even mountains…The most personal are those which fall and twist and slide
from noisy rapid to quiet pool, and follow, like a living creature, the
contours of the land. They change from year to year…When you get to know such a
river, you will note new cuts into grassy banks, new channels through
meadowlands, a maple bending further down until its branches ripple the
current, a sycamore dropped into a pool, its roots parched, its arms a hiding
place for fish instead of birds. And, on the banks, sun and Quaker ladies where
there had been shade, or shade and beds of Brandywine bluebells where there had
been sun.”— Henry Seidel Canby, The Brandywine, illustrated by
Andrew Wyeth (1941)
Sorry, I’m not ready--psychologically, at least--for Frankenstorm.
You see, I’m just back from a five-day vacation in the
Brandywine Valley. I found that even the affectionate reminiscence here from Henry Seidel Canby (1878-1961) — the
once-influential, now half-forgotten interwar critic and editor of Saturday Review of Literature and
first editor-in-chief of Book-of-the-Month Club—doesn’t give a full idea of all that the
stream and its surrounding rolling countryside has meant for generations of
farmers, millers, soldiers, writers, artists, and all those employed in the du Pont
industrial empire.
Ansel Adams preferred majestic landscapes, and the
photos I intend to post on this site from my trip—starting with this one today,
taken from the trail next to the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa.—can furnish only the most limited idea of
this corner of southeast Pennsylvania and upper Delaware. No, you’d need a
Thoreau of the camera, someone acutely attuned to the quiet charms of a stretch
of earth like this as redolent as any I can think of a particular kind of natural beauty in this country.
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