As a child, I talked to trees. My first tree friend was named Thistle. Thistle was a slender, graceful olive tree with shiny, white-green leaves who had the misfortune to be planted, alone, in my windy bayfront backyard. She stood bravely against the huge sky, but her silvery head grew ever sparser as she was thrashed about by the relentless onshore winds. She eventually died. There is still a little hollow at the place where her roots were pulled out of the sandy soil. 

While I no longer talk to trees, I still feel that they are persons, of a sort. That is particularly true in the place where I took these photos - a town called Toms River, New Jersey, in the heart of the Pine Barrens maritime region where I grew up. Having played in these woods as a child, it’s hard for me to see them objectively. Other woods are just woods, but these woods are special. Here, my friends the trees are scrubby, not human-like at all. They aren’t pretty like Thistle and they have no “heads.” But I see the entire landscape through a half-remembered haze of childhood imagination, and that’s how I have photographed it. I descend into the swampy thickets, which have vines that curl and fork expressively at eye level. I physically move those plants with my own hands, seeking a way to make the scene come alive for me. 

Because the thickets are dense, and the swamps often flooded, areas I can access are relatively small. Most of the photos in this series are taken within a few hundred yards of my car. I look for back-lit leaves and dash from tree to tree, often crossing sulfurous mud flats in my camouflage waders. But even when slogging through the mud, the air is always fresh and clean-smelling - in the spring and summer a green, fragrant blooming smell, and in autumn sort of a peppery decaying yellow smell. The relatively small areas I can access feel familiar to the point that each tree becomes like an old friend. My presence there feels quirky, self-affirming, and healthy.

I also see quite a bit of detritus - bottles and cans, food wrappers, the tents and duffel bags of the newly homeless, even an improvised mobile made of junk hanging from a tree branch. The town’s eponymous river, which runs through one of the parks photographed in this series, was the site of a scandal involving a pollution-induced leukemia cluster. The factory at fault, now a Superfund site, is just upriver from where I’m shooting. Still, in those photos, the woods are joyful. While in a sense that portrayal is not entirely true, in a different sense it actually is. The woods have somehow retained their integrity, in spite of still-audible highway noise, the ever-encroaching suburban sprawl. Immediately upon entering, there is a sense of regeneration, of communion with the natural environment. I feel as if nature acknowledges my presence, gathers everything before me in its arms and flings it upward in a slow-motion juggle, letting me participate in a silent ceremony of its own language.