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Category: Kalaloch

Open in the event of calm

Creek, Beach 1, February 2009

This one has festered into a vicious little twitch…I took it back in February and bring it out to work on it occasionally when things are going well and I’m feeling good about myself.  No compromise of contrast or tone circumvents the dust storm of hairpulling and pacing around my tiny darkroom and muttering. Even my most sedate Mendelssohn is no buffer against it. But something about the opposable trees and folds of the creek in the bluffs keep me coming back for more punishment.

Winter Trees

Beach 1, February 2009

I thought I’d celebrate the 1 year anniversary of this blog with a little WCW. I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about spruce, but what the hell, other parallels might find their home here.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

-William Carlos Williams, Winter Trees

Light front

Beach 1, February 2009

This is a revisit of an earlier photograph,  this time looking north.  This one nags a little more than usual; I like many of the elements but it’s missing something as a whole. I’m posting it because it won’t occur to me what that might be until I do. But it does represent what I like most of the coast here- an astonishing sense of light and brightness always battering at the edge of an immovable darkness like some terminal meridian, a storm of light struggling against the impenetrable treeline.

The landscape marches on

Beach 6, February 2009

I came across this yesterday crashing around in the salmonberry and salal above Beach 6, trying to pick up a trail that vanished. I soon found the reason the trail disappeared- a good portion of the bluff had been undermined by relentless surf and storm and collapsed. And continues to do so, really- the collapse is taking a good part of the forest with it in an exquisitely minute, almost glacial ride down the incline, like an amusement of epochal measure.

Note: I  tilted the horizon out of level to the left a bit to visually counter the leaning of the trees, and the lilting cloud line. I considered leaving it level, and using the optic trickery to emphasize the sense of imbalance and general flailing, but I just couldn’t see anything past it. Funny how that works.

The shallow end

Kalaloch, February 2009

Anticipating tide patterns is great fun, almost like sorting puzzles out of the infinite. All the more so with a view camera  because there’s no way to see what’s on the viewscreen when you trip the shutter (er, lift the lenscap- no shutter on the Protar). It’s easy to burn up film walking down the beach as your focus deepens and new patterns emerge. But then that’s also the hard part:  resisting the temptation of waiting for just one more tide cycle. But I got lucky this time out- only 3 shots and a half-decent triptych for the day’s work.

Skinny Woman Blues

Kalaloch, September 2008

I’ve been overdoing it lately, blues-wise. RL Burnside, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James..Oh, the humanity!

Now, I don’t want no, no skinny woman
I want the woman, she got-a plenty of, Lord!
I don’t want no skinny woman, I want some
A woman wit’ a-plenty of meat
Now, we can roll all night long, an this woman
Won’t have to stop ‘n eat

-Sonny Boy Williamson

Or another favorite:

Hey Miss Maybelle let me be your hoppin’ frog
drink muddy water sleep in a hollow log
Hey Miss Maybelle let me be your hoppin’frog
I got 10 little puppies and 12 shaggy hounds it takes them 22 dogs to run Miss Maybelle down

– RL Burnside

A ghost of music

Creekbed, Kalaloch, March 2008

I wanted to capture the sounds of pouring rain, the ocean breaking and the alders mingling. I sought out a composition simply to be able to spend some time in this wonderful sound resonating up the creek bed. I respond to sound much as to light, and there are as many perfect sounds here as there are tones of light, and the scale of each describes the infinite.

Sound can be an achingly elusive thing to capture on film. It sounds odd, of course, but some images come so complete within their moment that the natural progression of appreciation gathers sounds, smell and memory in weightless ascension, almost like falling upward through an experience, finally bumping your head on epiphany. The heartbreak is that photography’s a visual medium, and there’s no hitting anyone over the head with it outright, and subtlety is usually an entirely conscripted event. So the sounds of rain look like a pale alder, and the music of the breeze looks like a ghosted branch, and the rest of the forest can be a tuning fork for all resonant concerns of tide and season.

Her eyes are a blue million miles

Highway 101, Kalaloch, April 2008

I’m a big Captain Beefheart fan. His music tends to frighten some, but it has a rare disordinate beauty that works well in the spaces here, especially on crappy days like this. Almost insulting and confrontational at first (like any harsh weather here) it’s hard not to take some of the songs personally when you’re first accosted. But after a little acclimatization it’s easy to yield to things bigger than yourself.

At first I tried to compose the road out of this shot. My best intentions- postcard tendencies as I think of it- often work against me and I need to be a little more skeptical. I actually said ‘Leave the road in the picture, twit’ aloud and startled myself a little. Leaving the road in the picture is certainly a baby step as far as artistic expansion goes, but hey. Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles is certainly one of Don Van Vliet’s most accessible songs, but you really should start somewhere…

Then again, there’s always Big Eyed Beans from Venus. :- ]

Plant a flag

Beach 1, Kalaloch, April 2008

I made it a little further south down the coast this past week. A goal was to make Elephant Rock eventually this year, but I haven’t gotten half that far. I keep telling myself these aren’t proper goals, these trips aren’t consumables, nor is there anything to claim even if there is an end. I’m not Shackleton. Being a typical white male I sometimes feel as if I have been bioengineered to invade, sack and reclaim. Photography has these tendencies, if in relatively benign ways. Still, A little sign I’ve managed to miss completely these many trips reads Beach 1 along a turnout and the feeling of greedy urgency is undeniable.

The forest is dense from the road so it’s easy to miss it, but the reward is immediate. First a burl forest. Giant growths nest in the prime of sitka spruces like an unearthly egg in the throat of a python. There’s a short path that meanders around select deformities; boils, cysts and tumors often split open in a rictus of arboreal torment. Yet, as fascinating as the forest was –is– the sounds of the Pacific and the light streaming around the grotesque shapes were irresistibly compelling and I had to make for the bluffs.

The view for me touches off associations with classic empire building, manifest destiny, westward expansion. As if to emphasize the metaphor, a road of bone-white driftlogs at the foot of the bluff stretch north and south for miles like progress’s collateral damage. This is quite a ways north of the Columbia River and the Lewis and Clark route, but the differences seem academic. How they must have felt hearing and smelling the waters and crashing though, so close, your heart almost running ahead of you like a pathfinder. Yet once the awe settles, who could actually claim it?

Chronic winter

Kalaloch, Beach 3, April 2008

Since these fretted sandstones along the western reaches often emerge out of the mist like ruins, and since the vegetation often dissembles in the fog without the slightest regard to color or form, there is a sense of perpetual winter here; especially since the snow is still flying this late April in the high stretch of 101 between the Aurora Range and Bear Creek on the way west. This morning I woke up and the ground and hot tub lid alike were covered with frozen snow and hail; the hills around our home have a fresh January coating, and did I mention it is late April?

I haven’t given much thought to what I’ll do with this blog in the off-winter months. I know I probably have enough work from this year and last to keep me busy until next fall but who’da thunk I would still be going out in the field to burn more film for this project? I suppose I never really thought of winter in Winter Coast to be literal, but really- this is much too easy.