The Dry Lake

I went on a little photo assignment today, with the goal of capturing the beauty of our most plentiful wood, poplar, in a recently installed ceiling. It was a little awkward showing up at a stranger's house to photograph their ceiling, but the Sharon and Powell were great sports and even posed for me and rearranged furniture. Here's some of the pictures from the trip:










Powell is quite a nature aficionado, and showed me the trail system he built behind his house in a steeply sloping wooded area. The whole understory was covered in rhododendrons (laurel) and was quite beautiful. As we were walking around, we got to talking about the elephant in the forest.




At the bottom of the hill we were on was a little kayak dock, and the neighbors had a large dock with boats somewhere between skips and yachts. The water, however, was nowhere to be found. In fact, the South Holston Reservoir was been almost twenty feet lower than normal, leaving the inlet that Powell and his neighbors shared high and dry. Powell and Sharon told me that the Southeastern Drought was to blame. In the past few years, the South has been experiencing a massive drought, straining the water supplies of many southern cities. Seeing the dry lake bed made me feel like I was watching a glacier melt or New Orleans drown, not thinking about or imagining what the future effect of climate change might be, but seeing it, here and now, with my own eyes.

As I headed home, feeling the disjointment of driving through the mountains while listening to an electronic radio station, I snapped a few pictures of the dryness of the lake.

This is the first weird thing I saw as I was driving to Powell and Sharon's house. Its a huge, two level dock in the middle of what looks like a normal field, with no sign of the lake anywhere in the landscape (I'm not hiding it with camera angles).

In this dramatic shot, the normal level of the lake is the top of the denuded slopes, where the silhouette of the land is straight, rather than tree covered.