The image of the day

Although I use images – many, if not most, of them my own – in this blog, it is not intended to be a photo gallery. I write these posts because I love to write and love what you can do in and with language, but I also love to be able to complement the words with some images. Sometimes those images are utterly jewel-like on the screen, and I do always hope that both word and image support and enhance each other in these posts.

Today I was in a situation where I wished I had a camera. The little digital was sitting on the table in the entry room but its case wasn’t there. I meant to get it but somehow we left without it, although Lorraine did bring her Leica, picked up a new battery for it, and loaded it with black and white film. She needed some negatives for her class and we were on a mission, though all I had for my part were my eyes, my mind’s eye, and the words I might use to recreate the images, if there were any to recreate.

The day wasn’t promising, with periodic drizzle, some fog, and plenty of flat light, not at all propitious for good negatives. However, we had some errands to do, one of which was on Cole Harbour Road, so we decided to give that area a try and headed out past Imperoyal and the Autoport and through Eastern Passage. Lorraine wondered about Devil’s Island so we drove out to Hartlen’s Point where the road ends.

Something I have loved ever since Lorraine began photographing is going on one of our missions where she has an image or images in mind. You can never predict what will happen, but you will always end up somewhere interesting where all you need to do is look at what is there. So we walked out the little road toward the point under a grey cover of cloud.

Sometimes toward sunrise and toward sunset there is clearing in the sky. I am not sure why this happens – we agreed that there may be some meteorological explanation for it – but it does often enough. I notice it some mornings when I wake early to a clear sky and think about sun pouring in our windows, only to see clouds or fog gathering as the day breaks. And in the evening the cloud sometimes lifts, just as it used to do in Vancouver winters, and the horizontal sun shines across wherever we are and illuminates the end of the day.

The explanation, if there is one, is much less important than the thing itself, and today it happened. I was looking at the lighthouse and house on Devil’s Island and at Chebucto Head way across the harbour and watching the waves climbing and curling and crashing on the shoal water when the clouds did seem to lift and the late sun poured through the opening. Suddenly everything was illuminated. The squat lighthouse became a sharp dark shape against a golden sky. The clouds around the sun and the sky behind them turned gold. The westerly wind picked up the curving tops of the waves and blew the spray back, also gold. I held in my hand some tiny purple sea growths attached to small golden rocks. And Lorraine stood in the magic light, camera to her eye, photographing.

You need to be there. The camera, for all its magic, captures only a little of the huge beauty that surrounds us at a time like that, not just the golden sights but the sound of the waves breaking and the salt sea smell. So you do need to be there and hold in your mind’s eye the glory of such a day’s ending. We were there and it was worth the trip.

And we did get the negatives, which, once they are processed, will be another thing. As for me, I don’t have a single image for you of the day that was. You’ll just have to use your imagination.