A WINTER COAST

Feeder, Beach 3, May 2010

A chronicle of an absentminded stroll, a pre-emptive waltz through my own torpor. Sort of like tracking the extinct through oblivion.

Note the looping circles.

Alder roots, Lake Crescent, May 2010

My yearly spring alder picture. Started hauling around the big 4lb xenar again. Something about wide open antique glass and spring light. I’ve been distant, dark and pin-holeish all winter, using small, dim and sphincter-like f16 lenses, so by comparison this was almost like stapling my eyelids to the top of my head.

Path, Kalaloch, March 2010

Awkward to emerge from under the darkcloth and find a patient few waiting to use the trail. I know I talk to myself but when surprised by company I can never remember exactly what I was saying. The expression of the crowd sometimes gives a few… hints. Suffice to say profanity fairly assures a largish elderly crowd.

It’s true that I often post a picture just to have an excuse to blather on about something, but this week I’m sensing a trend towards mutual irrelevance. Fact is I’m trying to keep a few things in suspension. Not sure if the effect is due to  a sense of being watched, but after 2+ years of blogging, there must be someone out there with an embarrassed expression.

Rosario Strait, October 2009

Forest 2, Kalaloch, November 2009

I kept to the woods on the last few trips, weather for aesthetic reasons, shelter from the wind and rain  or simply looking for a place to relieve myself it’s hard to say. While I had big plans to confound my own expectations, the truth is I quickly fell into old patterns.

But it did occur to me that since this is my idea of ‘elegant and balmy’, maybe I should just look for shelter in my own delusions. :D

Forest, Kalaloch, November 2009

A windstorm knocked power out here for 4 days so I spent much of the time out at Kalaloch.  Not very productively, seeing as the wind and rain was still knocking the coast around quite a bit.  Busywork or maybe just something to do with confronting your tormentor. Loosing, and getting soaked in the bargain. ‘Maybe tomorrow the power will come back on.’ Repeat.

Getting back home there is nothing it that dark to suggest even the invention of the wheel. Knuckling darkness, mind bending. As often as the power goes out here, I don’t know why I haven’t gotten a generator yet. The trips out to the coast helped to counterbalance the long dark nights a little, the animations of the storm and surf repaying the effort even at five am getting up freezing to make a fire outside, as if looking to finish some elemental thought.

Sunday night I had three trips festering in the exposure boxes and just couldn’t wait anymore. I decided to play frontiersman and develop some film. The water comes out of my tap at 5 C, so it was interesting heating up quantities of water on a camp stove and then trying to keep the solutions in the 20 C range. But the difficult part was keeping time in the dark. Counting 10 minutes off second by second is a direct route to sensory abandon, even minor hallucination, like repeating the same word over and over again until it sounds completely alien.

But the negatives turned out well, for what they are, and figured no great loss if they were ruined. But then again, I’m never sure how much I have at stake until the damage is done.

Beach 4, Kalaloch, November 2009

I’ve been struggling with this project, or at least this current incarnation of it. No matter how much I enjoy being at the coast, it’s not satisfying the way it once was, and I can feel a progressively thinner-veiled scoffing at my own work with each new post I make. Like some gaunt chainsmoking Art-hag is sitting atop a shoulder and offering withering opinions on everything I do. The polite version is Pretty, but not terribly interesting. I need to re-engage my interest; or rather to look much deeper for it, in places I never considered before.

Eudora Welty bemoaned something she called the Isle of Capri novel- those detective or romance novels with   idyllic if wildly superficial settings where it is always elegant and balmy and there are no alleys or restrooms (to paraphrase). I don’t know if restrooms are what my project is missing but I do know that my world lately is all front and no back; and as such I haven’t really provided a full or fair picture of these places at all. Which kinda sucks, frankly.