When I first started writing the essays I used to send out to friends and fam through email, what I was sending was a sort of one sided conversation. Before that, I was writing personal journal entries that sit in notebooks and are never revisited, even by me (I’m sure my grandkids will be dying to read all those thousands of pages) and long letters to my friend Sharon, who also cannot keep her thoughts neatly inside her own head, and to my then missionary son. They were reports on my life, I guess, but more like a record of me trying to interpret life. Trying to find the meaning in it, or more likely, the connections between and among things that ultimately render up the patterns of meaning.
It really wasn’t arrogance that made me send these things out as letters. It was the need to throw bread on water, or to fling something into the sky to see if it would fly. I think I have discovered that, while many lucky souls seem to be able to process information completely inside of their own heads, I have to actually encapsulate the bits in words and arrange them and re-arrange them in order to be able to taste the world and make sense of it. I speak unformed ideas into realizations. Or I write them. And here is what may be termed arrogance: I am so fascinated and surprised, sometimes, by the things that come out of the chaos in my head into words, that I am sure other people are going to be just as amazed and intrigued and delighted as I am with the output.
The blog was meant to keep me in better touch with my mailing list and family. As I recall, one family member vehemently complained that I was jamming up their mailbox with all my interminable emails. So the blog could just be up there, and those who cared could partake, while those who didn’t wouldn’t have to worry that I’d know they weren’t that interested. The point is, these blog entries began as introspective or ironic pieces of personal writing. An offering. The best I had to give the people I love.
Then I finally, suddenly, realized that I could also use images.
I don’t remember when I got my first camera, but it was early on. The Brownie Starflash, maybe when I was eight. And from that moment on, I had a new way of dealing with beauty: I could flatten it out and stick it in a book and revisit the experience in tranquility (allusion, anybody?). But film, money – these were problems. Serious limitations. Which are gone with the advent of digital, a whole new way of stealing light and freezing time.
I hope you don’t mind the photo essays; I know many of you don’t. Maybe I’m not writing enough anymore. But the world is so full of sculpted light – and the light enters the eye and pierces the emotional regions of the brain like arrows, plunking directly into the heart of every apple I’ve ever worn on my head. I can’t stand not to try to capture it. Funny – eternity is one eternal round, where nothing ends – and everything that is beautiful is still beautiful – rolling on forever. And I try to achieve the same thing by stopping light dead in its tracks. The old thing about cultures believing that if you take a picture of a man you steal his soul? That’s what I do all day, steal souls. And love them.
My daughter outdoes me. And with some friends, like Ginger, there is a conversation between us of images alone – it is enough, enough to break both our hearts without a word spoken. Again, I hope you don’t mind, me shoving bits of my life in your face. I guess if you did, you wouldn’t look, eh?
This series of shots comes of a wonderful evening, pre-puppy, a couple of weeks ago when G came up with a spontaneous desire to drive the airport dike, and I – surprisingly – was not too tired or too busy or too staid to say yes and go with him. It was the most amazing, breathtaking evening. And I brought some of it home to share: (note: I have stolen precious puppy-napping moments for this. Because I miss my old life – the one I was leading last week.)
So it was this evening—as the light fades, the mountains catching the last brilliance—that we threw ourselves into the car and went off to drive the airport dike. It was cool, but not chill, and there weren’t more than three other folks making the drive. Going the opposite way, of course, which made for some jockeying around, the road is so narrow, and falls away to nothing on either side (either side studded with ranks of gigantic, sharp edged boulders).
I was astonished, in that dying light of day, to have come upon this staggering array of subtle colors, texture laid down upon texture. “Stop,” I yelled. And when G finally did, I shot these things, never dreaming that I would come home with these images. And “Stop—here—now!!” became the substance of our conversation over the next forty or so minutes. In these shots you can see flights of birds against the mountains: they look like dust. But it is these striking reeds that stopped me cold. If you’d like to see these in a larger format, simply click on them and navigate whatever comes up at Flickr.
Each of the following four shots were taken from the same position, but with slightly different exposures. In these first two, I am exposing for the reeds. In the next, I am gradually changing the exposure to accommodate the sky. Note the surprising oranges deep in the first rank of weeds, and flecks of it in the ranks behind.
This one is lighter. I’m reading off the closest values.
Here, as I move up for a reading, the light becomes a silver rime on the the closest of the reeds. But we are still missing the dramatic color in the sky.
Now, we have the sky, but we are missing all the foreground detail. I know I always ask you what your favorite is in a series, but I really am interested to know. If you have to choose amongst these four, what would you sacrifice – sky or foreground detail?
I was struck again by the richness of these autumnal tones. I liked the clear mountains and tower—they give a sense of depth to the scene. But it was that brilliant bunch of amber weeds along the road a little further that really knocked me out.
Yes. These weeds. To get an idea how deep the drop is off the side of the little road here, note the slope and the rocks that cover it. And then look at the reeds that are at least four or five feet high, growing at the very edge of the lake bed.
These glimmering pools, almost hidden by the banks of reeds, were compellingly beautiful. I wanted to tell a story about them, around them, because of them. The sky is deeper now into its sunset hues.
Big Sky Montana. Huh. Note the birds in the upper right corner. I have sometimes wondered what it must feel like to fling yourself up through the air the way they do – to stretch your arms out and lie on beds of thermal currents, looking down. Or do birds bother to look down? Maybe the air canopy is interesting a world enough to hold their attention.
Okay. Now this little pool really fixed me in place. Again, see how pale the mountains are behind – and the sky? But we can see the foreground detail. In the very front, the growth is so close to indistinguishable, it looks almost like some kind of coral formation. But the reeds and grasses behind are delicate and defined, reflecting in the twilit pool
Same shot, exposed for the magnificent orange of the sky. And that great bird, heading south. Again, the foreground is lost. But I took these two shots carefully from the same position so I could go home and play Master of the Universe with PhotoShop – because I want it all. So here are the two shots side by side:
Hard to believe they’re shot within seconds of each other, eh?
And now, they are one shot, and I have everything I want to see. It’s kind of a messy job, actually. But I’m still pleased.
More twilit pools. It makes me think of being on the moor or something. (Oh, Heathcliff, Heathcliff) except I’m not sure they have water like this on moors.
I don’t know what those clouds are called, but they remind me of handwriting exercises, somehow.
Here, I sacrificed the sky for the water. I could probably burn that orange in. But you’d have to have no puppies or children to have the time to do it. Almost done, here – almost at the end of the dike. And of the day.
This is how dark it actually was by this point. These are the runway lights at the airport. I love drawing with stationary lights. As we got to this point, we ran into (not literally) some birders who spend one Sunday every years (not sure how the Lord feels about this?) standing in exactly the same spot all day from pre-dawn to darker than this, looking through high powered lenses and counting birds. They were nice guys. Crazy. But nice.
The next shots are just more messing with lights. You can see the ghostly reeds to the side.
And there you are. No more light. Time to go home to bed. It had been a long time since we’d done something like this – just get an idea, pick up and go – no work, no kids, no church, no puppies. I’m sure we’ll do something else wild and crazy someday.
Maybe.
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