Here is a sampling of the 150 images
and 12 essays
in the new book,
L e e l a n a u
released
November 2000
(images are not clickable) :
Old trees were old before anyone we know was born. They're old and they're big -- it takes a crowd of kids to embrace them all the way around -- and so prominent they become landmarks. Tell a friend to meet you at The Old Oak and your friend knows exactly where you mean: the place where her childhood bloomed on a rope swing, where her parents fell in love, where her grandfather's father once tied his horse and took shelter from a summer rain. Old trees are rooted in our history. They slow time, connect generations, remind us that though we are temporary, we can linger.
(from "Old Trees")
We're fortunate in northern Michigan to do much of our traveling on country roads, fortunate also that our roadmakers seldom had the luxury of plotting the shortest route between two points. They were forced instead to follow the contours of the land, seeking plateaus, ridges, and valleys, getting nudged off course by bluffs, marshes, ponds, and lakes. If many of our roads have the circuitous and seemingly aimless appearance of game trails, it's because they began that way. On the best of them, even at forty-five or fifty miles per hour with the windows closed and the radio on, it's possible to feel yourself wandering rather than hurtling across the land. Go slower, with the windows open, and you seem to meander through an older, slower age.
(from "Country Roads")
I liked the work. I liked sweating in the sun, every inch of my skin alive under my teeshirt and jeans, pulling the drenched shirt over my head and flinging it under a tree and feeling the sweat turn cool with evaporation, my summer muscles taut, my bones young and strong. I liked the shock of cold water when I plunged my head into a fresh cooling tank, that white-painted steel cube four by four by four feet resting on forks on the front of the tractor and filled to the top with clear blue well-water, ready to receive cherries. I liked the hot wind in my face and the sun on my back, of being every moment half a breath away from laughing out loud at nothing whatsoever, wanting to leap straight into the air, high above the orchard, and take long greedy flapping strokes across the sky -- and being absolutely certain I was capable of it. I whipped a cherry at Steve and it struck his back with a satisfying wet smack and left a stain like a wound. I roared in triumph. Nobody was more alive than I, and I knew absolutely that I would feel exactly the same every day for the rest of my life.
(from "Farm")
text ©Jerry Dennis
all images are ©Ken Scott Photography
Jerry Dennis and Ken Scott
(click us)
or
These links will take you to the
for a
complete essay by Jerry Dennis
or a few more
from
Leelanau
the book.