Seeking the Stones...

   Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal on September 23, 1858 of Dogtown,

It's "hills strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down, on every side..."

    That is a very apt description of this wilderness area...everywhere there are stones of immense size scattered randomly through the landscape. This is what we had come to see.

    Seventy three years after Thoreau's visit, Marsden Hartley came and painted those same rocks, fascinated by their form and intensity of presence.  Just three years after Hartley's work in Dogtown, another man came to leave his mark, quite literally, on the self same stones.

     Roger W. Babson hired out-of-work stonemasons during the 1930's to carve many of Dogtown's largest boulders with mottoes.  After visiting the site of the now broken Whale Jaw formation, we set out to locate some of these motto stones.  It wouldn't be as easy as we had thought.

  I'd left our map in the car.  It wasn't that good anyway but it may have helped us avoid a two hour hike that took us up and down hills, along the railroad tracks and right back to where we had begun with no sighting of the famous boulders.  We were hot, sweaty and discouraged.

   On our way back to the road and our cars, we tried one more turning and there, just a few hundred feet off the trail we had hiked in on two hours before, were three of the stones! 

   Perhaps Mr. Babson was having a bit of fun with us or, more likely, we were able to see the lovely landscape above, along with many other sites just because we got "lost". 

   I've often said that some of the best things I've seen in my travels were discovered when I'd gotten side-tracked from my original destination...today was no different. 

   We were only able to see three of the twenty four Babson Boulders and vowed to return in cooler weather to see the others.  If you would like to see what they look like, you can visit the link below but if you are able, make your own trip to Dogtown.  You might want to bring along a map or just let your internal GPS lead you along, either way, you won't be disappointed.

The Babson Boulders

 

Returning to Dogtown...

...as with sacred places, so with the murderous spots. The record of events is written into the earth.

  - Henry Miller

The Colossus of Maroussi

   The last time I was in Dogtown, on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, was in 1974.  I was a freshman at university and my photography teacher had taken us on a field trip that autumn to walk the wilderness trails of Dogtown.  It was the first landscape I had been in that had a powerful energy and sense of place.  Forty years later, it is the kind of landscape that I fervently seek out.

   I really hadn't thought of it for decades until a serendipitous occurrence brought it flooding back. I'd asked a friend to give me any unwanted magazines for my SoulCollage® work. One of the ones she gave me was a copy of the Cape Ann magazine which featured an article on Dogtown.  That's all I needed.

   I knew she and her husband had lived on Cape Ann before coming to Maine so I asked them if they would like to visit the famous, or perhaps infamous would be a better description, landscape.  They said their friends, the ones who had given them the magazine in the first place, would welcome us to stay with them so we were all set.

 

   The area is about 3,600 acre's so we knew we couldn't see it all on our brief visit so we chose two parts.  The first was a walk to the Whales' Jaw formation...one of the ones I had visited forty years before on my field trip.  It had, sadly, been inadvertently destroyed by some people building a fire under the big stone, heating it up to such a degree that it cracked and broke away.  Now it is a sorry sight, covered in even more graffiti and surrounded by cast away beer cans, not an auspicious start to our outing.

   I wish I still had my photographs from that field trip in 1974 but they too, like the whale jaw, have disappeared.  It was time to make new memories, as well as new photographs, so we didn't tarry very long at the broken jaw.  

An old photograph of the Whale's Jaw.

   Dogtown is a mysterious and haunted location, one that you are advised not to hike in alone  It was the location of a horrific tragedy just ten years after my visit which has added to it's tarnished reputation.

   A fascinating book, Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town: Dogtown, written by Elyssa East, will give you the complete story. In my next post I will tell you about my own minor adventure in this fascinating place. I had returned to Dogtown by a series of interesting coincidences which simply said to me that I was meant to return.

  

Cultivating the Art of Seeing Simply...

   Being surrounded with visual possibilities, it is sometimes easy to become overwhelmed.  I feel that way sometimes at the pond where there is so much to distract me, so much to pull me in.

   When I become visually over loaded, I close my eyes and whisper, "See Simply...Simply See." I repeat this little mantra several times and it calms the visual receptors in my brain so that when I again open my eyes I can refocus them to perceive simplicity rather than chaos.

   This day I tried to cultivate the simple image.  An image that is soothing and sparse but still rich with texture and meaning.  This is one of my pond "Simplicities" - Wind on Water.  Although there was a subtle sense of movement, it also had a contrasting sense of calm with the great expanse of textured blue water.

   Haiku is the poetic equivalent of the image perceived simply.  This is the one I wrote as I sat on the edge of the pond after I made the photograph...

Wind on water flows

Across a silent blue pond

Rustling leaves respond

   Seeing simply isn't necessarily a minimalistic approach, although it can be.  For me, it is, simply put, the art of appreciating a small number of visual elements within the pictures frame.  Textured blue water and oval green lily pads is enough...it speaks of wind and movement...nothing else is needed...anymore dilutes the impression.

   Photographer and teacher, Kim Manley Ort, offers an online tutelage in the art of seeing simply called  Keeping it Simple.  A new session begins October 6th.  You might wish to explore this type of contemplative photography for yourself.  Kim offers this quotation for the art of seeing simply...

The simple things are also the most extraordinary

things, and only the wise see them.

- Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist

The Poetry of Place - September 3, 2014

The Turning Point

  Red stems appearing

Fading green ovals gather

Slowly letting go

Gathering Breadcrumbs along the trail to Diana's Baths, North Conway, New Hampshire...

Crossing the Threshold

The Tiniest of Toads

Leaf Lace

Tree Scar

Contemplating the Falls

Roots and Rocks

The Final View

   There was so much to see, to stop and photograph, along the trail to Diana's Baths.  My favorite one, however, was the final image, the one of the water reflections and river rocks.  I think my time at Little Clemons Pond, enthralled with those reflections, had "primed the pump" so to speak. We are always the sum total of our past experiences.  I spent some time just gazing into the hypnotizing undulation of light and color.  Quite mesmerizing to be sure.  Gathering breadcrumbs along the way always leads you to your final destination and this was mine that day.

The Serenity of Fog...

   The lake was enveloped in a rolling fog bank.  It soften the landscape and imbued the water with lovely tints of blue and mauve.  I love fog.

The fog is an illusion—
A master of disguise,
Which hides the tangible
Before our very eyes.

 - Walterrean Salley

 

       Fog softens sounds as well, like snowfall does.  Before the lake awoke this particular morning, the landscape was hushed, wrapped in a cloak of silence and serenity.  A half hour later it vanished and the landscape came to life but for these tranquil few minutes, the world was at peace.

   In the Autumn in New England, we often awaken to fog.  The air is chilling but the land and water are still warm.  I experienced this lovely effect at "my" pond recently.  Even though the sun was shinning in my yard, less than a mile from the pond, here everything was enveloped in mist.  The sun was trying to break through but a moment later the distant shore disappeared entirely only to re- appear a few minutes later.

   I noticed the same raising and lowering of the veil out on Star Island where the Atlantic fog bank alternately revealed and concealed adjacent Appledore Island.

   Seaside or pond-side, the effect is always similar. There is a purple tinge to the air caused by the water droplets in the fog and always an enveloping silence.When you are by the sea you can almost taste the salt in the misty air.

   My poetic soul loves the metaphor of fog as well.  We see and then we don't see...things appear and disappear as if by magic.  There is a message here...

Sometimes we need the fog to remind ourselves

that all of life is not black and white.

- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Inspired by Alexandra de Steigeur

I photograph and write in an attempt to understand my place within this larger context, to delve deeply into a subject that has become familiar, and yet retains mystery.

   I was transported by Alexandra de Steigeur's powerful images of the stark reality of Star Island in the winter months.  Stripped of the hustle and bustle of the summer season, it reverts to its raw essence of sea, sky and rock.

   Attending her lecture while I was on Star was a gift and her passion for both her subject and her medium, monochrome photography, resonated with me on so many levels.  I had put aside my first love for the black and white image for the recent color work that has occupied me over the last year.  Now I felt I was ready to return to the monochrome image...it was an "Ah Ha" moment for me which I spoke about in an earlier post.

   It wasn't just a shift in medium that I gain from hearing Alex and looking at her images, it was a shift in focus as well.  I am always turning my eye to the small view; the intimate detail of the landscape.  Alex encourages us to consider the "big picture"...the more universal connection we share with the vastness of Nature which is so profoundly felt on this little island.  She calls this the "oceanic effect".  It is what she experienced as she sailed the Atlantic on a tall ship.

    And finally, I found inspiration in her adherence to a contemplative lifestyle that puts a greater premium on being with the landscape than on doing the photography...the need to be totally present and open to what the landscape has to say and not imposing one's will on either the place or the creatures that live there.  I hope to take this inspiration to the pond when next I visit.

Without the camera, I loved going outside. It didn't matter that the light be "just right", or the day dramatic. Only with the camera was there a certain expectation. I spent more time looking than appreciating, more time searching than seeing.

    Being a photographer can be a blessing and a curse, simultaneously.  If the head dominates the heart, which it often does as we struggle with technical considerations, when making takes precedent over meaning then the whole concept of the contemplative eye is lost for me.  I must remind myself every day that the personal encounter is my primary goal, not the finished photograph.