Fifty tons of sermon

The sermon is printed, folded in half long ways, tucked in my prayerbook.  Six days in the making, its finished state is pleasurably unusual.  All it took was a schedule.  Research Monday and Tuesday.  Three hours a day for writing, Thursday through today.  Hard work.  Labor.  Like pushing something, awkwardly, uphill.   I'm not struggling with it tonight.  Blessedly.

That sermon intention this week wasn’t the only going.  Visiting with family for the Independence Day holiday, getting the camera out every day, meals, walks, our wonderful dogs, a needlepoint project I really dislike and a book I’m determined to finish all went into the mix.  The book is Walter Havighurst’s “The Long Ships Passing: The Story of the Great Lakes.”  It was suggested reading before our May/June historic waterways trip from Warren RI to Chicago IL, which – no surprise – I didn’t get done. 

The chapter I read on Thursday, “The Fleet that Sailed on Land,” was about ships moving between Lakes Huron and Superior before the rapids of the St Mary’s River were bypassed by the locks at Sault Ste Marie in 1855.  The first one was the Algonquin in 1838.  Here’s Havighurst’s description:

The portaging of the fifty-ton schooner was done by Achille Cadotte who went to work as though he was moving a house.  With a set of rollers, a horse and a capstan he hauled the Algonquin out of the water, cribbed her up in timbers and started her on her slow voyage over what is now Sault Ste Marie’s Water Street.  The vessel moved five lengths a day, crawling along in snowstorms and bitter weather past the houses, shops and taverns of the little town.  She took three and a half months to make that mile-long portage.  But with the break-up of ice in April the Algonquin dipped her hull in the cold blue waters of Lake Superior and began her historic voyages. (163)

Between that 1838 accomplishment and 1855 when the locks were completed fifteen vessels, totaling 3000 tons, had been portaged that mile along Water Street. 

Dragging 50 tons of schooner a rocky mile through town.  Funny, I'd liken that to what Monday through Saturday with a sermon in tow feels like to me.

A summer's morning

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

-- Russell Baker

See her as she flies

4:30, Sunday morning, 3 June
enroute to Manitowoc WI

I have to laugh at myself.  For several nights this week I have come awake enough to acknowledge that our bedroom was bathed in a soft light cast by the setting moon.  It never crossed my mind to get up and go outside, much less to find the camera as I went. 

Last month's experience was markedly different.  For June's full moon it didn't occur to me not to go out for a better look.  Aboard the Grande Mariner sailing Lake Michigan I couldn't get out on deck fast enough.

Lake Michigan versus Country Club Pond.  Being away versus being at home.  The novelty of places I've not been before versus a certain nonchalance, even a dreariness, for the familiar. 

No laughing matter really.  I think like myself more when I'm away from home.  In fact, I know I do.  I feel more interesting and interested, and maybe I am.  An experiment seems in order.  To look at my everyday surroundings with the same energy I do the places we explore in our travelers.  Something just might come of the effort of seeing home through a traveler's eyes.   

2:30, Monday morning, 4 June
approaching Chicago

  

Unfurled

The editing process for the photographs I made on our recent historic waterways trip has provided most of my post on this 4th of July.  I ended up with more images of the American flag than I'd realized as we traveled from Warren RI to Chicago IL for a couple of reasons.  First, it was windy and the flags were doing more than simply hanging there.  Second, I was playing with shutter speed, fast enough that I could handhold the camera and have stationary objects clearly in focus and slow enough to convey a sense of movement.  Flags were just the thing ...

Enjoy the flag waving and happy Independence Day.

at the locks, Oswego NY

Post Cemetery at Fort Ontario, Oswego NY

the Grande Mariner on Lake Ontario
between Oswego NY and Rochester NY

the Grande Mariner on Lake Erie
approaching Cleveland OH
(on a very windy day)

Cleveland OH

the Grande Mariner on Lake Erie
between Cleveland OH and Wyandotte MI

Sarnia, Ontario, Canada
at the mouth of Lake Huron

The Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island MI



The Field Museum, Chicago IL

The Field Museum, Chicago IL

Put it in its place

I removed the color from this photograph for a reason.  I wanted the eye to fall not on the flower but on the seed head sans seeds.  But, yes, the flower is yellow.

Yesterday it was the flower that slowed me down on my circuit through Orchard Estates, a stalled subdivision near the local country club. There are lots of yellow flowers along the way, but only a few with petals like this one.  I made several photographs to detail the flower, seed head and leaves in hopes I could identify it beyond the term "dandelion-like."  And, I kept walking.  Breakfast was waiting.

I am disappointed that it does not appear in my wildflower guide.  I am frustrated by the whole identification thing.  I was so busy thinking about getting that flower named that I missed that the seed head itself is an intriguing and beautiful structure.  I am sad that when I returned this morning to give the seed head attention of its own it was gone.

For all my wanting to put this flower in its place, or the place where we humans have put it, I failed to see what was before me.  But, it's what we do.  Whoever wrote Genesis knew that, proclaiming the idea that God told us to name things.  My vocabulary is full of it ... categorize, sort, classify, identify, group, name, rank, arrange, order, catalog, organize, file.

I know how important the process of arranging things is.  Life would turn pretty chaotic pretty fast without some sort of organizing.  And, I do enjoy being able to name flowers and birds.  But, what is the point of categorizing, classifying, cataloging?  To know?  To understand?  To find meaning?  In part.  I suspect it's also to keep ourselves feeling safe and in control and superior (likely a primary point of the Genesis story).

I am sorry to have missed admiring that seed head.  I'd like to be less intent on putting the next thing in its place.  I hope I'll be able to let myself linger awhile and admire what I'm seeing.

Same ol' same ol'

Tal and I, wanting to fish in advance of the day's heat, were up early Saturday morning.  The pre-dawn was, indeed, cool, gloriously so.  To put aright the first bird's nest of fishing line I managed to make on the spool (grrr) my headlamp came in handy.

I didn't fish with my whole heart though.  The rising light was giving the sky shades of color that coudn't possibly be named and the clouds mesmerizing definition.  I set the rod and reel down frequently to take up the camera.

It wasn't until I began processing those images that I noticed something beyond the pretty morning and the fish on Satcher Pond.  It's disconcerting.  I take the same photograph over and over again. 

See for yourself ...

The subject of each image might be different, but it is the same pattern:  lower left to upper right, subject in the foreground, Satcher Pond in the distance, rule of thirds strictly employed.  Sigh.

I will make an allowance or two for myself.  To use the camera one-handed requires a finger of the right hand to depress the shutter.  So, the bluegill had to face left.  In the case of the swamp rose mallow, had I photographed the other side (1) I would have had to wade into the pond at least knee deep and (2) the light would not have illuminated the veins in the pedals or outlined the anther and stamens. 

Those excuses aside, though, I'm wondering if I need to mix it up. 

While we do read left to right, is that the way we see everything?  How hard would it be to make photographs the other way  -- upper right to lower left, for example?  Would it be as difficult as my using a pen with my right hand?  Might that adjustment slow me down, make me see as though through new eyes?  How would the images I moved from the sensor of the camera onto the computer screen be different?  Could the change of direction be confusing or awkward for the viewer?

Photography questions aside, I suspect I see life and produce opinions the same way I use a camera.  Perhaps I need to apply my questions to more than the way I compose an image. 

Leading lines

Every Wednesday evening this part March I participated in a photography class led by Jon Holloway, owner of the Sundance Gallery in Greenwood SC.  The four sessions were interesting and I enjoyed a distinct take-away each week.  The best part of the experience, however, came during the following month.  Jon asked us to complete a project to share with the class at the end of April:  at least 10 images, printed 5X7, matted and titled, and an artist's statement to introduce ourselves and our work.  I have been meaning to post the images and statement, "meaning to" being the operative term.  So, here on the first day of July, I am at long last making my move.

Lines: leading and otherwise

Janet E Tarbox

 This series of photographs is a concluding assignment for a class I participated in at the Sundance Gallery in Greenwood SC during March of 2012.  The title, “Lines: leading and otherwise,” is intended to provide the viewer a vantage point from which to observe the images.

As children we are taught to color inside the lines.  And, we spend a lifetime trying to learn when not to.  If we’re lucky we reach old age knowing – at least sometimes – when we’re being fed a line.  In the intervening years, verbally or not, consciously or not, we draw lines in the sand, as it were, and then dare anyone – even ourselves – to step over them.

For me, more than anything, lines are connectors.  Sometimes they are difficult to see – like the bonds of love among people.  Oftentimes, though, they are like those lines connecting towns on maps – the better the map the easier it is to plot one’s course.  It is lines such as these – connecting lines – that run through a photograph.  Like maps and relationships, too, some photographs are easier to read than others.

My interest in photography began almost before conscious memory.  My dad always had a camera with him; there was nothing better than being his assistant.  In the decades since I blissfully held the camera cover or fetched filters, photography has become a daily contemplative activity through which I explore the landscape of my life, a lens which helps define the path I tread.

I hope you enjoy identifying lines in these photographs.  It is my wish that they inspire you to consider the lines running through your days.

"Signs at Key Bridge"

"Along the Edge"

"Live Oak Allee"

"Ridgeline"

"Bottomland"

"Funnel Web and Resident"

"Paper Wasp Curl"

"Rose in Profile"

"Solomon's Seal"

"Dragonfly"

"Clouds and Contrails"

"Window View"

"Deer Fence"

"Words on the Page"

"Three Arrows"