The Morning the Forest Went Quiet

There's a particular kind of quiet that only shows up in fog, different from the quiet of an empty room, or an early morning before anyone else is awake. The same quiet that settled over a beautiful hike near Eugene, Oregon, on a late October morning in 2016.

The air was brisk, the forest floor already thick with fallen autumn leaves, brilliant green still holding on beneath the canopy. Then came the fog, a slow, low mist that drifted between the trees and settled there, muting the landscape into something closer to a still life than a scene passing by. In moments like this, the fog asks you to slow down, to look a little longer than usual, and just be present.

That morning became October Mist, a photograph built around that stillness. The fog low through the evergreens, the forest muted, quiet, and still. It belongs to House of Adam's Stillness collection, a body of work made up of quiet landscapes, forests, mist, softened light, and calming natural scenes. It's photography built around paying attention and noticing the quiet landscapes instead of moving past them.

That's really the idea behind the whole collection. Nature has a way of doing that on its own, softening the edges of whatever else is going on, asking for nothing more than a little attention. Fog is an especially direct way of making that happen. It removes the horizon, narrows the view to what's actually close by, and makes the ordinary trees around you feel more as the main the focus.

The morning stayed with me well after the hike ended. Later, it helped inspire a short story I wrote called The Wolf.