Final Shot | ONC2022

Chapter 6: Snug Falls

Snug Falls turned out to be away from the sea, hidden in temperate rainforest along the Snug River. I pulled into a small car park off the rough, gravel road and we started along the Snug Falls track. The winding path led us on a gradual descent through tall trees and silver wattle and drifts of light and shadow. Leo walked ahead of me, his steps sure and confident on the narrow trail. The noise of the falls grew louder as we drew closer, and then a set of rocky steps descended steeply to the riverbed.

I knew from the photobook what I was going to see, but it looked better in person.

A tall, grey wall of layered rock rose in front of us, the water cutting through the top of the wall and falling with a soft roar. A great log leaned up against the falls and I stared, wondering how it had been placed just so before I realised a long-ago flood must have deposited it there by chance. The river spilled from the dark pool beneath the falls, flowing between lichen-spotted boulders and rotting tree trunks. Ferns lined the banks and sprouted from between the rocks, their green fronds vivid against the tannin-stained water. Small birds flitted through the undergrowth and a light mist filled the air.

Leo turned and smiled at me, his eyes catching a beam of sunlight. "The falls are bigger than usual. Must have been that storm."

I nodded, but I didn't look at the waterfall. I was lucky Leo turned back to the water. If he had not, he would definitely have noticed I was staring at him...and I could not stop. I watched him set up his tripod. His arms flexed and stretched and his skin was warm and brown and coppery highlights flashed in his hair and all I wanted to do was run my fingers through it. To touch him. My fingertips tingled with it.

"Hey, show me that photo again," Leo said, jumping across the rocks toward me and jolting me out of my daydream. I pulled the photobook from my backpack and he flipped through the pages until he found Ce-Ce sitting on a rock with a ribbon of water trickling down the cliff behind her.

"She was right there," he said, pointing to flat rock in the middle of the waterway. "It'd look different now. The waterfall is way bigger." He looked at me appraisingly. "Hey, if you sit there, I'll take a photo of you."

I put my backpack down and picked my way across the stream until I reached Ce-Ce's rock. I sat on the hard surface with the spray from the waterfall prickling my skin and let him take the shot. Of course, he took more than one, changing angles and asking me to smile or look serious or change the position of my head. I stood up when I saw people moving down the path toward us.

"Hey!" Leo said, but then he heard the newcomers scrambling into the riverbed and smiled ruefully. "I could have taken a lot more," he said, as I moved to stand beside him. He swiped through the images he'd taken on his review pane until he found one he was looking for. "Check this out."

I looked at the image and felt warmth steal through me. My hair tumbled down my shoulders like the fall tumbling down the rocks behind me and I was looking up and into the distance. I looked wild and fey, like I'd grown out of the rainforest, birthed by ferns. 

"That is...that's actually a great shot," I said, feeling my skin flush.

I fumbled for the photobook and flipped through it until I found the one of Ce-Ce on the same rock. Ce-Ce looked beautiful as always, with sunlight catching in her hair and on the wet, rock walls behind her, but despite the clarity of the image, it did not have the magic of the one Leo had just captured.

"I think the one I just took is better," Leo said, as though reading my mind, his breath warm in the shell of my ear. His breath made all the hair on my body stand up in a long ripple, as though he'd thrown a stone into a deep pond. I turned toward him, my lips ready to find his, but he was looking at the photo of Ce-Ce, not at me.

"I've got an idea." He reached for the photobook and turned its pages. "What if we recreate all these shots and make our own photobook?" He didn't wait for me to answer. He flipped the book open to a spread of images. Ce-Ce holding an oyster and a glass of wine. Ce-Ce about to attack a heaped cheese platter. Ce-Ce standing on a wooden platform far above two curving beaches. Ce-Ce standing on wide, golden sands with a curl of wave behind her. "We could go to Bruny Island," he said, his smile wide and boyish.

I wanted to tell him he didn't need to lure me with the photobook anymore. I wanted to tell him I would go wherever he asked me to, if it meant I could see him again. But he wasn't ready to ask me out without an excuse, so I nodded, feeling buoyant enough to lift from the ground. "Yeah! That'll be fun."

He closed the book, looking pleased. "Next weekend?"

"Sure." 

He was right. The photobook made it all so easy. 

#

I searched Leo Russo online as soon as I got home. There weren't any photos of him but there were plenty of his photos. He did a lot of work for Australian Geographic, Forty Degrees South and was known for his bird photography. Beautiful, clear images of rainforest pools and mist-sheathed rivers, arching auroras and waves aglow with phosphorescence, and crisp photographs of forty-spotted pardalotte, orange-bellied parrots and sweet pink robins. There were older images of a different landscape, too. Glowing red rock, dusty river beds, the white, reaching branches of river gums under the sparkling twists of the Milky Way, and fierce-eyed emus, painted finch and flocks of brightly coloured budgerigars.

"He's really good," Zomi said, looking over my shoulder.

"I know. There aren't any photos of him though."

"Look, there's an interview." Zomi pointed to a link to Nature Photography magazine.

There was an interview and, finally, a picture of him—with a lens blocking most of his face. I groaned. Not even one clear photo. For someone who lived through a lens, he was extraordinarily camera-shy. 

Zomi began reading from the screen. "'I collect moments. These moments are all around us, all the time. Moments we don't pay attention to or miss. When I use my camera, I'm seeing moments, as clearly as it is possible to see. And when the moment is perfect, I click the shutter, and that moment is mine. It becomes part of me.'" Zomi leant back. "Wow, that sounds super serious."

"Well, he is a professional photographer," I pointed out. "He has to be serious about it."

"I'm not criticising him," Zomi said, holding her hands up. "If I could take those photos, I'd be serious about it, too."

I read the rest of the article, but it was mostly about equipment and technique. I looked at one of his photos of a wedge-tail eagle, rising from the road with the remains of a fresh-killed possum in its talons, but my mind was not on the image.  I was thinking about the fey look of me sitting in front of Snug falls. That image...that was part of Leo now. And he wanted to take more. 

I could feel my toes curl. 

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