The fall foliage has just been spectacular this year. Golden yellows, bright oranges, and deep reds, with mostly sunny conditions to bring out the most color. This past weekend was the first one in a long time where I didn’t feel like I needed to take care of moving tasks, so I spent it on myself.

Saturday, I’d decided to go to King Richard’s Faire, so I took the motorcycle down to Carver. Just as I was approaching the Faire, I saw an electronic sign that they were sold out, so I turned around and took Route 58 most of the way home, enjoying the glorious fall foliage. Then, I decided I hadn’t been on the bicycle in a while, so I chucked it in the back of the car and got directions to the nearest bike path, which turned out to be the Neponset Greenway.

I’d never done the Greenway before, but it was quite nice. I parked near a playground in Dorchester, took the path outbound just past the Red Line bridge, and then turned around and took to a point just past Mattapan station. The trail actually goes further, to Paul’s Bridge in Readville, but it was getting late and I had some errands to run. I definitely plan to do the whole trail sometime.

Sunday, I took the kayak out onto the Charles in Dedham. I was uncertain where I wanted to start from, but eventually decided to put in at the parking space along Great Plain Avenue, paddled past the put in at the Dolan Center, through Motley Pond, past the Bridge Street bridge to Route 109 and back — a round trip of around six miles.

It was just gorgeous. I had the Nikon with me, and did the downstream leg in very leisurely fashion, spending a lot of time taking pictures. I like bright saturated colors, with deep blue skies, so I used a polarizer filter on the lens. A polarizer suppresses white surface glare from objects, leaving colors more saturated. There is also a band of the sky that is also polarized; a polarizer filter with the proper orientation will deepen the blues and increase the contrast with the clouds. My sunglasses, like most, are also polarized, so I was experiencing the bright colors as I paddled.

Photography on the river is surprisingly difficult. In the sun, it’s a contrasty environment, as one side of the river is likely in shade and the other sunlit, and the dark water tends to fool the camera’s light meter, leading to pictures that are too light. The camera also tends to record the yellows of trees taken with the polarizer as more green than they appear to the eye; I’ve used a selective color correction to adjust the yellows closer to what I was experiencing.

Because of the drought we’ve been experiencing, the water level was quite low; there were visible sandbars in several places; in others there was just barely enough water to float the kayak, and I ran aground a few times.

The river meanders back and forth throughout Dedham. A little ways past the Dolan Recreation Center, it widens out to a broad area called Motley Pond; this is a great place to see birds. The river splits in two, going around a central island in two very shallow streams. I saw a couple of swans at the far end of the shallower branch. Motley Pond is not a great place to run aground; while it’s shallow, and you can run aground, the bottom is muck, not sand, and it’s not a place where you can get out and tow the boat to deeper ground.

Past Motley Pond, in the passage leading to the Bridge Street bridge, I saw a Great Blue Heron perched on a dead tree. The best way to deal with herons is not to make any sudden moves. I stopped paddling, and let the current take me closer, and used the zoom lens get some pictures. Herons, especially their eyes, always remind me that birds are dinosaurs.

Speaking of dead trees, there were a lot of them along the river. A tree growing along the river strikes me as a classic Faustian bargain.

The tree gets plenty of water and nutrients, but eventually the river will undercut the roots, until it starts leaning into the river. Finally, the tree is completely undercut, and will fall into the river, where it dies.

The goal was to reach the Route 109 bridge. Like most of the bridges on the river, the current bridge is an expansion of a much older, single lane stone bridge. The upstream side is concrete, with cast arches matching the arches of the original bridge. The current deck is much wider than the original bridge, and spans both the concrete expansion plus additional width cantilevered over the side of the original bridge with additional concrete supports outboard of the original bridge.

By the time I reached the Route 109 bridge it was starting to get very late, and the sun was starting to get low in the sky. It was still warm in the sun, but the sun was low enough now that a lot of the river was shady. So I mostly put the camera away, and started paddling at the fastest rate I could comfortably sustain. Back in the Dedham loops, I saw a doe and its fawn lunching on leaves.

I got back to the put in shortly before sunset.

It had been a great afternoon, though I was pretty stiff and sore — but in a good way. Mid October in the middle of foliage season is a great time to go kayaking.