Video Visit: The Secret Pond

Two-minute video, narrated by Divine Bunbun, of the secret, intermittent pond below the silica cliff, a La Barque Creek floodplain area so loaded with briars, mud and vines that it is accessible only in late winter or early spring. The Secret Pond is the home of sweet spring peepers and summer skeeters, and is a watering place of all woodland creatures.

Robidoux Springs

You can't see but the bubbles, but there's a scuba diver in the water, and these kids wanted desperately to see if he was ever going to come back up, and how cool it would be if he didn't; this is the diver (I had permission to take his picture) who also had an underwater camera. He told me it was murky down there from recent rain, no good for photos that day -- but there's a huge and complicated cave under there that cave-certified divers can explore. This is at Robidoux Springs in Waynesville, MO, one of several scuba-diving spots in the great state of Missourah.

Waterfall #5

Waterfall #5, a drop of about 20 feet, is its most dramatic when the water's frozen, as it was today. Last in the Waterfall Photo series.

Waterfall #1

Yesterday's strange heavy rains inspired this first in a series of portraits of the 5 waterfalls on the Divine property, which is in the Meramec watershed. This waterfall plunges into a perfectly circular, stony-bottomed pond. I find waterfalls to be very sensual.

Backwoods Beachfront

You wouldn't know by looking, but this house was once a beachfront house, and it's sitting on a fortune.

Aeons ago a shallow lake covered the Midwest, and of course it had a beach. Its sand got weathered by wind, not water. The result was a vein of 99 percent pure white St. Peters silica sandstone, five miles wide, running from Minnesota down to to Missouri. My house perches right on it.

The cliff got detonated for road widening in 2002. Where it's been in the open air for some years, oxidation and water has turned the sandstone gray or red. Not far away there's a silica mine. In 50-lb. bags the old beachfront goes to make glass, chinaware, white paint, municipal water filters, and, coarse-ground, it's sold to make sand traps on golf courses. I like it just the way millions of years have left it.