Pemigewasset River at Lincoln

Author's Comments

The East Branch is the kind of river that does not announce itself. Most of the cars on the Kancamagus are headed somewhere else, and the pull-offs in the first few miles east of Lincoln are easy to drive past entirely. That is part of what I love about it. You park, you walk down a short bank, and you are standing on river rock with the White Mountains rising behind you and clear water moving over stone in a way that has not changed in any meaningful way for a very long time. I come here in early October, late afternoon, when the hillsides have turned and the calmer pools begin doing the work of mirrors. The trick is to wait for the wind to drop. It will. Usually right around the hour before sunset, the air settles and the surface goes still enough to hold the ridge above it, and for a few minutes you have two mountains instead of one. A long exposure smooths the riffles into something closer to silk and lets the still pools stay sharp. That contrast is the photograph. What keeps me returning is not any single composition but the restraint of the place. There is no overlook, no sign, no crowd. Just a river doing what rivers do, in a valley that happens to be beautiful, on a road most people are using to get to somewhere more famous. Step out into the shallows if the water is low. The mid-stream perspective changes everything.

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