A WINTER COAST

Ko kwal al woot, Rosario Beach, October 2009

I went east for the first time in a while, back over to the mainland- Bellingham specifically. I’ve been struggling with some sort of virus, so it was maybe unwise to stand in the wind and icy rain taking this shot, but I’d had a restless day of ferries and long slow  caravans of traffic, the gathering weather turning the drive over Deception Pass into a sort of funeral cortege.

Rosario Beach is a short and welcome detour off 20, even though in the chute of Rosario Strait the wind was extreme. I found a meager lee in shadow of Bowman Hill and Deception Island and opened the lens and just let the wind and light mix it up. I like movement and blur in trees, and the low-fi anxiety  of flying debris, and here I especially like that there is deception in the still statue, the only defined thing in the frame, as if legend can ever truly hold the day. And it doesn’t hurt that even the fish looks upside down.

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.