Culture clash
A few days away in a National Park in the heart of Italy’s Apennine mountains, mostly walking with my husband, a “real hiker” with a brisk pace and (alas) little patience with a pernickety macro photographer. Then one day, he decides to go where my ageing legs are loathe to take me and I find myself alone in the beech forest with my trusty OM1 MKII strapped to my waistband. Bliss. Macro photographically speaking, well, it wasn’t the most exciting of walks, but oh what a delight to simply be there, just to stand in awe at the play of light filtering through the leaves tinged with just a hint of autumn, tread softly to better listen to the myriad of forest voices, sniff the air to catch the faintest whiff of the wild animals who call that forest home… wolves, bears, red deer to name just a few. A place where anything could happen.
So there I was, rolling around among the beech leaves on the forest floor, evicting small ground-dwelling spiders from my lens hood and shaking twigs from my hair, looking for the best angle to photograph a magnificent coral fungus, when I heard the joyful chattering, babbling, prattling of a large number of people heading towards me along the footpath. Peals of laughter. Shrill screams of delight. And all that mystical deep wood atmosphere was shattered in an instant. I packed up my gear as swiftly as I could and crept away, drawing the few remained tattered fragments of silence around me like a cloak. I walked briskly uphill and looked back just once. To see a man in a bright red sweatshirt holding my coral fungus high in the air and laughing, a triumphant trophy to mindless destruction. Why? I just wonder… why?
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.