Crows!

I didn’t realize when I got up this morning that today would be a day I engaged with crows.  After breakfast I did watch one from the kitchen window as it worked on the remnants of the suet cake in the rather beat-up green wire cage I put it in.  I always replenish the suet knowing that the chickadees and jays will come, but also hoping for a return of the downy and hairy woodpeckers from previous years.  No woodpeckers this year, but a problem with the crows.  I haven’t seen them do it, but they (I’m sure it’s them!) seem to have figured out how the open the cage and make off with the suet cake, a reminder of the small steak one of them stole from next to the barbecue back in the spring.  This time, however, I’ve used a twist-tie to foil their tricks, and the cake has stayed.

This morning’s crow flew up to the slender branch the cage hangs from, held onto the branch with one claw and the cage with the other, and managed to twist itself around to be able to peck at the suet from underneath.  I went to get the camera.  When I got back to the window, our neighbourhood squirrel, whom I hadn’t seen since late summer, was on the branch approaching the crow.  I wanted to catch this confrontation, but just as I carefully raised the camera, the crow flew down to the ground and left the squirrel to chip away at the suet.

Before we went for our Monday swim we stopped down by the Dingle in Fleming Park to check on crows.  Lorraine had her Bronica loaded with a roll of black-and-white in the hope of catching some on film.  We heard and saw lots in the distance, way back in the trees, and I even saw some chase a small falcon that swooped through their territory, but none came anywhere near us; the best we were able to do was attract a bunch of mallard ducks who kept pecking (if ducks can peck with bills like that) in the bright grass to find and eat whatever they were finding and eating there.

Later we came back, parked the car by a yellow barricade where we had seen a few crows, and made our way down to the stream hoping to catch them this time.  We had a small bag of cookies from Heppy’s (really good raisin cookies!) and decided to try to attract the crows with them.  I walked along the path, feeling like Hansel, as I broke off little bits of cookie and dropped them behind me.  The crows began to call out and follow me, and then I felt more like the Pied Piper with these wonderful birds flying from branch to branch behind me.

We both got some shots of these intelligent black beauties.  Some even came close enough to catch the bits of cookie (the ones I didn’t eat myself) before they landed. 

I loved the fact that one brave crow came to within a metre of my foot, hoping I had another piece to donate to its cause.

And after we came back from buying more film, I found a black feather on the ground where we had been photographing.  For some reason, perhaps the lateness of the day, the crows were much less interested in bits of cookie and ended up flying off into the woods, but we had our images, ate the cookie remnants, and headed home.

I do love these birds, they are so smart and so beautiful, and I’ll bring cookies for them any day if it means they’ll come and engage with me!

Hirtle’s Beach

Anyone who lives on or near Nova Scotia’s Atlantic coastline knows about the fog.  It’s the reason Environment Canada’s forecasts in June and July often say things like: “Fog patches dissipating in the morning. Wind becoming west 30 km/h near noon. High 27 except 21 along parts of the coast.”  This is tomorrow’s forecast (tonight the fog has crept up the harbour and hidden everything but our neighbours’ lights), and the projected 6-degree difference between us on the coast and those who live more inland is caused by the fog bank that lies out on the horizon through the day and the breeze that blows from it to us.  Sometimes it is pleasantly cooling; sometimes it’s damned cold!

So when we drove with our friend G. toward Lunenburg County and Hirtle’s Beach on Sunday afternoon, we knew that the sunshine we were in might not last, and sure enough, when we passed somewhere near the Head of St. Margaret’s Bay, a huge plume of fog drifted over the highway and turned everything damp and grey.  Fortunately we drove out of that and Lunenburg town was sunny, but we knew that heading out past Rose Bay to Hirtle’s was likely to put us into the fog again.  And it did.

However, Hirtle’s is one of the most beautiful beaches on our coast, and it’s always worth a visit.  The waves were not much, and the wind and fog were really cold, but it was great to be there.

There was fog around the trees on the other side of the lake back of the beach (where the water was much warmer).

The wild roses seem to thrive above the tide line, and the foggy air helps make their colours brighter.

I always like the tumbles of boulders on our beaches.

And the real treat, after G. and I searched all of the boardwalks, was finding the board we were looking for, the one we had dedicated back in 2002 to the memory of our Welsh terrier who died that fall. 

We remember him well, our dog Griff, whose spirit was large..

A Man, a Dog, and a Green Hill

One of the many joys of being part of Lorraine’s photographic practice has always been travelling with her to scout for locations. 

When we were looking for sites in various regions of Canada to make her Illuminated Petragraphs images (check them out here), we had a pretty rigorous regime.  In the evenings we had to be on location at least an hour before sunset to get the landscape image and didn’t usually leave until three or four hours later after darkness had fallen and the jewel-like projected image was double-exposed on top of it.  And mornings had us finding our way to the location at about four to photograph the projection in total darkness, well before sunrise lit up the surrounding landscape for the second shot.

We spent a lot of time waiting for the right light and watched a lot of sunrises and sets, which was a wonderful contemplative way to spend our time, but in between the morning and evening shoots we were always searching for our next locations.  What we needed was the right rock in the right orientation in the right landscape setting, and this took us down little roads to the shoreline, across fields, up rock faces, or through forest trails.  We were on a quest, the adventure was always in the looking, and finding the right rock for the next morning or evening was a shared moment of pleasure.

Other series took us to other places, like the ancient roadway in Jordan leading up to Herod’s palace or the rocky outcrops on the south side of Crete or the walled walkway in Jerusalem’s Old City, and every place, every location we returned to when the light was right, was the result of an adventure in looking. 

The forecast for last Sunday evening suggested that the fog wouldn’t let us get the shots we wanted at Crystal Crescent Beach, so Lorraine decided that we needed to go inland and we headed off to check out Laurie Park and Oakfield Park.  We went in roads and walked over fields, checking slopes and view planes and trying to determine without a compass or a clear location of the sun behind the clouds where it would set that night. 

We had a couple of reasons for being out there looking: the first was that the sky was supposed to clear that afternoon, so an evening shot was possible, as long as it was far enough inland to escape the fog; the second was that the man with the dog was available only on Sunday evenings and was getting married next weekend.   A further reason, of course, was that once the idea had taken shape it was important to get out and do the thing.

The park areas didn’t work, but finally we checked out the large dairy farms you can see from the highway  out near Milford where we found a couple of fields that were possible.  The first one we walked over had a transmission tower and power lines running across it.  A young eagle flew over and perched in the tower, which reminded me of the time in Oman we walked past power lines into the desert to check out a possible location and saw on our walk back more than a dozen vultures in one tower.  Just in case we didn’t make it all the way to the car, I’d guess.

The hay had been cut on the second one, which was clear of obstructions, and Lorraine decided it was likely the right one, so we found the owner, asked him where the sun would be setting, and got permission to come back to photograph.  So we came back that evening with the man and his dog in the back of our car and learned a lot about training dogs and their humans along the way.  

Another great joy for me is being there on the shoot, which it was, and recording some of the action with my little Lumix, but that may just have to be another story.

Two things today

There were two things that brought tears to my eyes and thickened my throat today.

The first was telling Lorraine and JE about the e-mail I received yesterday from XE, the high school student who had moved to Halifax from Beijing three years ago and who had just heard of the substantial scholarships she had been awarded by Dalhousie.  It doesn’t really make sense that it would affect me this way; after all, she had worked so hard, completing pre-IB in her first year here, doing IB A1 English in her second year, and taking every suggestion I gave her and applying it assiduously to her next assignments.  XE was an utter treat to work with that whole year, and I always looked forward to our after school sessions, the serious brightness of her attention and presence, the slippers they gave me to wear, and the huge mug of green tea that her dad kept refilling for me as we worked.

Helping  XE with her scholarship application letters, I came to know a little more about her and what the family had left behind when they brought her here to complete high school and apply to university.  It was that knowledge combined with the experience of helping her navigate a course that was difficult for native English speakers that flooded up in me when we parked the car in front of JE’s house and I started to tell them about the scholarship awards.  JE caught my eye in the rear view mirror and told me it was OK, and it was, but it still took me more than a minute to be able to actually say the words without choking up again.  When we crossed the street to the house, I felt a tear rolling down my left cheek and smiled at the thought of XE beaming with happiness.

The second happened a while later when Lorraine was reviewing the images she had got last night out on the Welland Canal spit.  It was a perfect evening for it with a sky that had cleared off through the afternoon and a wind that had dropped to nothing.  She and JE drove out the Seaway Haulage Road and then hiked out the spit to the small cove that was formed near the end.  She set up the camera while he gathered a collection of flat stones for skipping and slitting the devil’s throat. 

 

He stood where she told him to right at the edge of the flat water that had just enough residual wave action that it seemed to be breathing and skipped rocks out toward the gap between the lighthouse on one side and the Niagara River point on the other.  The night was perfect and the rock’s impact curled up the still surface and sent out a widening circle every time it touched down and then skipped ahead to touch another time and another.  The serious focus and beauty of JE’s stance and throw and the breathtaking poetry of each skip captured so lovingly by Lorraine brought the same welling up in my eyes and constriction in my throat.

That’s really all, a couple of occasions that made me so happy that I couldn’t speak.  Don’t need any more than that to make it a good day.

Easter Sunday, 2011

It is Easter Sunday and we are in Ontario.  As Nova Scotians we don’t necessarily love Ontario, but people we love live here and so we come to see them.  And to see parts of Ontario we've never seen.

This morning we woke up in Long Point in a rented cottage right next to the Long Point Provincial Campground and just across the road from high sand dunes and a pathway to a huge sand beach on Lake Erie.  It’s a beautiful spot, the beach mostly empty now because it’s mainly a summer resort area, and we were able to walk kilometres without seeing more than one or two others all along the shore.

Lorraine did some photographing there.

The dunes were lovely with variegated shades of sand and trees growing right through them.

E. and I. were walking up ahead as the lake fog rolled in.

There were wet marshes behind the beaches that the birds loved, soldier blackbirds everywhere.

Back in St. Catharine’s small flowers were blooming in the garden.

And on the front walk.

A squirrel watched M. and me from a tree branch.

She worked on another picture out on the sidewalk.  And then the Ontario sun started to set and she had a bath and went to bed.

This is the this

It is, as some of you know, my birthday today, and I am now 66.  It is important to me not just because I am beginning my 67^th year today, but also because of this.  What this, you might well ask.  Well, this is the this, this page I am just now composing and will some time through the day today post on my blog so that you, whoever you are and wherever you might be, can read it if you choose.

Two years ago today I decide to write and post my first ever blog entry (you can check it out here if you want to).  It was titled “They say it’s your birthday”, and it was built around the fact that Lou Reed (67 today), a boy named Levi (4 today), and I (66 today) share this day, the understanding that Lou was (and likely still is) in a relationship with Laurie Anderson, memories of the albums I had just taken to a used record store, and the connections to a couple of old Beatles songs that were in my head that day (and still are today, though I am no longer 64).

This is Post #130 of that blog, which I called Field Days: A Miscellany.  I have just learned how to pronounce “miscellany” through one of the wonders of the internet where someone at a pronunciation site just said it for me, and miscellaneous really characterizes the contents of Field Days.  It is subtitled “A Day Book of Sorts”, and one of the things I have truly loved is the ability to write here about things that happen in a day (miscellaneous things) and take my attention sufficiently to get me writing or photographing or googling them and posting the results here.

I think that my blog posts are a bit like essays, in the original sense of the word, that is; they are essais, or attempts, to get at something through language.  One of the blessings in this endeavour is the ability to write of these things that have engaged me in the informal voice I am most comfortable with, a kind of conversation with the known or unknown you.  A further blessing of a blog is the ability to broaden the range of what can be written through the use of links, so that my side trips in exploring that thing or things that may end up ranging over the vast number of possible trails through the ether of the net can be shared.  And, finally, because I am such a happily visual being, I have the opportunity to include images, what the roving eye may see and try to hold onto with a small camera.

I know some of the people who read what I write here, either because they post comments in response or because I recognize their IP addresses or locations, but the majority who show up on my sitemeter are unknown to me.  I like that, the fact that my writing voice, my listening ear, and my scanning eye can be read, heard, and seen by others out in our wide networked world whenever they care to explore what is available here, and sometimes wonder why that person in Agawam, Massachusetts or Arlon, Luxembourg, or Broadmeadows, Australia dropped in for a visit and what s/he might have thought or felt.

So the subject of my 130^th post is not so much my birthday today, shared with Lou and Levi and family and friends, but the variousness of the world we live in and the things that take our (or, in this case, my) attention in it sufficiently to note them as they pass.  Composing a post for this blog has always been a great pleasure for me, and I always hope it may bring pleasure to you too. 

Happy (birth) day to you too, hope you have a great one!

Falling into Fall (for A. and others who love the season)

This post is about the season, and some of the signs of that season.  Like good old Canadian maple leaves.

Or maple wood stacked to dry.

Or the bright cliché of a burning bush burning.

Or a birch against a blue autumn sky.

Or the soft colours and delicate feet of a creature, this one a deer mouse, that made the mistake of moving indoors.

Or sunlight catching maple leaves.

Or last year’s hydrangeas in the green bin because we have more this year.

Or fall chrysanthemums at the doorway.

Or a rugosa putting out its last bloom of the season.

Or the faint lemon scent you get when you prune the morning star magnolia.

Or just more maple leaves.  Enjoy the season!

Chebucto Head

One of the things I particularly love to do is to go with Lorraine when she is looking for a location. We drove to Bayswater Beach a couple of days ago to look at a possible site there. Although we decided to look closer to home (this spot was on a small island out in the bay) and didn’t go for a swim, it was great to spend some time just sitting on the sand and watching the silvery ocean and the small waves that curled their fine edges and broke all along that beautiful beach.

This evening we decided to go and check out Chebucto Head. We were looking for the right angle and slope of land, and I ended up standing on some granite bedrock with the sea behind me while L. tried a few shots to see whether this location would work for the project she has in mind. What I love about it is being in a place, especially toward sunset, and feeling the quiet that is in it. I don’t have to think or make any decisions; my part in the process is to help look and to sometimes make a suggestion, but mostly I just have to be there in that place.

So I stood on that rock and noted the kinds of growth that survived on this exposed headland at the mouth of the harbour. I saw that the cranberries were beginning to ripen with a subtle cranberry blush where they were hanging on their tiny plants. The other interesting berries there were the grey-blue ones on the low ground juniper that grew around the rock outcrops and the occasional clumps of red bunchberries. Near the rock I was standing on were pitcher plants growing in the wet spots. I stuck my fingertip into one of the leaf vessels, felt the liquid in it, wondered if it was just water, and thought about how such a plant had evolved (I have since learned that the liquid in the plant’s pitchers is called phytotelma, which translates as “plant pond”).

Chebucto Head did remind me of Newfoundland, and not just because of the pitcher plants. There were a few alders out on the headland that had found a roothold there and just grew along the ground instead of growing up. It made me think of the stretches of tuckamore we walked through on the west coast of Newfoundland where the prevailing winds and salt spray keep the growth close to the ground – I remember an adult tamarack we saw there that was more than five metres across and no more than 20 centimetres high, complete with needles and cones and spread out along the ground.

As the sun began to set, I remembered an evening in Labrador where we walked through a high boggy area near the sea. We knew that people had been picking cloudberries around there, but finding our first ones was a small miracle. We would see one perched on its upright stalk and notice the next one a few metres away and kept on eating and sighting them in the twilight as we grazed our way to the edge of the bluff. There is nothing like the delicate texture and sweetness of ripe cloudberries (aka bakeapples) fresh picked on a Labrador evening.

All this is why I love these opportunities – it is all about being there at that time and all the other times we have been present in some special place in the evening quiet. You don’t need to be a photographer to do it, though scouting for locations is always a good motivator to get you out there looking and a good enough pretext to fall back on should you feel you need one; all you really need is just to be there.

The Time of the Magic Light

I’ve been walking past the wheelbarrow for the last two days and thought every time about the loveliness of the tiny white moth that landed in the rain water collected there on Sunday, but I’ve always been too busy or too focused on other things to actually photograph it. Until tonight, that is. As I moved the camera in to eliminate the borders and show the moth closer, I realized how lovely the reflected sky was. So there we were – a little before sunset, some standard Nova Scotian clouds in the sky, and the time of the magic light – once again!

When I went upstairs I noticed the late sun illuminating a part of one of the maples below the house, but by the time I got the camera the light had shifted. So I closed in on Mauger’s Beach and caught the lighthouse glowing. Then I looked in the harbour at the container pier on one side and the refinery at Imperoyal on the other. One thing we have always loved is the shimmering brightness of Imperoyal on a clear night, something beautiful about it even if it is an oil refinery. So I turned the camera onto the oil tanks over there, lit by the low setting sun. It’s the light, a light I remember from so many places, the light that makes your skin glow and makes the world, for a short time, a little more glorious.

Sunday Night

Tonight, after supper, and after T&S went home with the little girls, Lorraine and I drove out to Sailor’s Point. It has been a clear cool day with a fairly steady westerly to freshen your face and blue the sky, a day to go before sunset to do a little work with Lorraine’s new camera. Of course you can do that work almost anywhere, and you don’t have to be on the rocks by the sea to figure out how it works. But, like they say, why not? After all, it’s only about a three-minute drive and there are few things to compare with being on the rocks by the sea. So we went.

The wind was offshore, but the ocean swells were still rolling in and hitting the rocks in a steady procession, nothing spectacular, but still great to watch. A grebe was working about 20 or 30 metres out from shore, disappearing with its characteristic forward flop and coming up with slender fish that it maneuvered into the necessary swallowing position, and then going down for more. Lorraine set up the camera and together we read through some of the details in the manual to figure out some of the settings and things like aperture override and bracketing, while the swells kept sliding in and buffeting the rocks, sometimes crashing, sometimes splashing, and never stopping.

It was a great place to be as the sun dropped and illuminated the few drifts of clouds to the north and west. The sky was beautiful, but what I loved the most was the colours in the water, the slight peach reflection on the backs of the small waves heading offshore contrasting with the turquoise tinge of the sea.

It reminded of so many sunsets on or near the water, and of a poem, today’s poem, written by Denise Levertov in 1956. Though this poem is about sharks, and is tied together so beautifully throughout by its assonance, like in the closing lines, “Dark/the sharp lift of the fins”, it is the colour of the water, “the time/when a sheen of copper stills the sea,” that so often resonates with me at sunset, like it did tonight.

Here, after all that, is the poem:

Sharks

Well, then, the last day the sharks appeared.
Dark fins appear, innocent
as if in fair warning. The sea becomes
sinister, are they everywhere?
I tell you, they break six feet of water.
Isn’t it the same sea, and won’t we
play in it any more?
I liked it clear and not
too calm, enough waves
to fly in on. For the first time
I dared to swim out of my depth.
It was sundown when they came, the time
when a sheen of copper stills the sea,
not dark enough for moonlight, clear enough
to see them easily. Dark
the sharp lift of the fins.

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.