A WINTER COAST

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.

Alders, Lake Crescent, April 2009

With a little room to work the alders do nice things- around lake fronts especially. The boughs have these sort of aching leaning gestures that hold the wind so well. And the tracings of the limbs are brought a little lower each spring by the winter’s snowfall and rain, finally exploding in a million emerald medallions as the leaves open up and tantalize the rising lake. All is lit from within, and it’s a thorough and grand contagion.

My black and white version is a little lacking.  I guess it holds my memory of it well enough;  it’s transitional enough anyway, as the local slides into another monochrome winter. Whether that memory is accurate is beside the point. Even if my impressions are proved wrong, at least I get to be surprised all over again next spring.

I actually dreamt about this photograph, which is a new one for me.  I always dream about 9-5 work,  but never about taking pictures, or the pictures themselves, which is just now striking me as fantastically odd. Most of my dreams are simple filterings of the day’s minutia, but with the workfront quiet and anxiety on the rise, this one danced in my head even while the negative remained undeveloped and nestled away in the film holder overnight.  This dream was like  a sleepwalking grant,  a shift paid to spend on the bench, supervised by particle drift and accelerating erosion with no clear task, shoes tied to the wings of scavenging and brawling birds, pecking at my kneecaps before ultimately climbing into the ribcage to roost.

After developing the picture it couldn’t not disappoint, but I’m hoping for a sequel, or a least some Cliffnotes.

Details:
Memorial Bench and Urn, Crescent Bay
5×12 camera, Emil Busch WA Aplanat

Another from the same day, further along the trail. The trail is the Spruce Railroad trail, which connects Fairholm and the Discovery Trail along the northwest shore of Lake Crescent. All the abundant spruce was meant to be harvested for airplanes during WWI, but the railroad wasn’t completed until 1919, hindering it’s usefulness somewhat, and not a single log was ever run for the war effort.

Hard to imagine the scope of the project now. The ‘Milwaukee Road’ grade is now little more than a well worn foot path around such dramatic but very, very small tableaux; tiny coves, stunted trees and corkscrew trails, giving the illusion of a 1/4 scale enterprise, perhaps attended by Lilliputians and Rube Goldberg contraptions that run on steam and wishful thinking.

Details:
Devils’ Punchbowl, Lake Crescent
5×12 camera, 150mm Emil Busch WA Aplanat

Only some short forays to the Lake so far this fall, for the spectacle of the big leaf maples, the mosses and the damp perpetual twilight of the Lake’s boundaries. I have a special hat for this trail; the rain under the canopy like a chronic condition, dripping well past sun and blue skies, grandfathered in somehow.

There is a density here like a warble in the manner of things, a buckle in the casualness of the moment, something that is difficult to portray except through failures; harsh light, flare and overbearing shadows. It somehow reminds me of misremembered conversations deep in drink late and early hours, fringed in numb poetry and practical impossibility, with people I once thought I could know.

Details:
Maple and Alder, Lake Crescent
5×12 camera, 150mm Emil Busch WA Aplanat

Oof, my scanner is down again. More literal snaps from the archives.

This was taken after a monumental (for us) 16″ snowfall several years ago. Not as much snow down at sea-level, but we are about 350 feet above this and got buried. This was a November just months after I finished building the 5×12 camera and one of the first hikes of significance I took it on. I was fortunate in finally finding a backpack where everything fit very well, with a decent harness for the 40+ lbs. Still, fully outfitted with boots and tripod I’m around 300lbs and tend to settle in the deeper stuff. It’s a 3 mile round-trip down to Crescent Beach and back. But it was a good way to stay warm, as out power was out most of that week.

Shoveling snow is of course another proven method. Earlier, I’d climbed up and shoveled off the roof instead of the driveway to the amusement of wife and neighbor alike. I was worried about 14-16 inches of snow half melting and turning to ice and collapsing the 4/12 pitch roof. Not much point in clearing the driveway as we wouldn’t start to see snow plows for a few days yet.

Yet another method to keep warm is sawing firewood from rock maple and oak woodscraps with a thin dozuki saw. As it was mostly too cold to sleep, I’d get up at 4 AM some mornings and dig out the firepit and build a fire with whatever scraps I could spare. I’m glad the camera was finished at that point or I might have been tempted to burn it.

All good prep for the upcoming… winter. I am attempting some preliminary leanness in good faith, but am irrevocably soft in spots. Which tends to take the poetry out of such withered optimism.

Details-
Snowfall, Crescent Beach
5×12 camera, 450mm fujinon C

I wonder how many pets get inadvertently left here on the peninsula after family vacations. Everyone seems to have a story, if not one strictly from here. I remember our ancient Scottish Terrier ‘Slash’ falling out of a moving van in the hills of Tennessee when I was young. We recovered him- although whether lucky or not wasn’t immediately apparent- the dog was a terror and promptly bit my dad. My wife’s and my newest dog Emily was a Clallam County Humane Society rescue, after being found wandering by the side of the highway in Sequim.

Our recent trip to Idaho and eastern WA involved two lost dogs- one was just a pickup slowing to ask if we had lost the dog they’d seen back down the highway. The other involved a friend’s border collie that disappeared in the Quincy Lakes Coulees. Blaze, a charge of our friends, was also a CCHS rescue, a sweet dog, if utterly inbred and nuts. The long trip in the back of our friend’s pickup with 2 other wound up dogs and a horse trailer clanging behind was enough to send him yipping off into the void when she arrived late that night to the campsite and dropped the tailgate. The unspoken assessment was that coyotes probably got him the first night, but I actually found the dog hiding in a draw by Dusty Lake two days later. Sadly, only a brief reprieve- Blaze ran off again a couple days ago on a horse ride in the lower Elwha area.

Anyway, all this reminded me of when I turned off 101 around Lake Crescent to take this shot last month. A camper across the street with a family I thought had stopped to enjoy the dramatic view was instead looking for a dog. The father trying to gather up the family, saying ‘There’s always one that doesn’t want to go home. Cmon let’s go.’

Details:
Sunburst, Lake Crescent
5×12 camera, Yamasaki Commercial Congo 360mm

Walking the spit of Ediz, there is the sense of fringe decay, atrophy at the unattended frontier. There is a sense of depopulation, as if through plague or economic collapse. Looking back to the mainland, Port Angeles also slumps at the base of the Olympics like so much uncontested Brink. Only the grandeur of Miocene tumult saves the town from it’s true scale, and its own teetering references.

Camus comes to mind:
The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. *

Granted, I have a certain animosity towards the town, and vaguely towards the country beyond it. Its social conservatism, lack of culture, willing absorption into the harvesting combine of Walmart, Costco, and the big box socio-economic model make me feel a bitterness that is ultimately powerless against the futility of such a place, and such an era. I wonder about the level of inertia needed to introduce change into this place, and others like it. No one mentions sacrifice anymore. Am I prepared to sacrifice? Prepared, no. But willing…? I wonder.

To entertain thoughts of economic collapse and other such irrevocable devastation seems unpatriotic, anarchistic and probably even criminal to some. I can’t help it. The need for the populace to succumb to the first reassurances from candidates has so far outlined our doom, even if it’s a contented one. Maybe the violent cycles of regeneration found in nature are a good model to follow, something that will ‘Rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.’*

*Albert Camus The Plague

Details:
Graffiti, Ediz Hook
5×12 camera, 183mm B&L Series V Protar