Category: Bowman Bay
Rosario Strait, October 2009
My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night
Out of this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me!
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free,
Oh for the life on the rolling sea!
One night, as I was a-trimming the glim
Singing a verse from the evening hymn
I head a voice cry out an “Ahoy!”
And there was my mother, sitting on a buoy.
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free,
Oh for the life on the rolling sea!“Oh, what has become of my children three?”
My mother then inquired of me.
One’s on exhibit as a talking fish
The other was served in a chafing dish.
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free,
Oh for the life on the rolling sea!
Then the phosphorus flashed in her seaweed hair.
I looked again, and my mother wasn’t there
But her voice came angrily out of the night
“To Hell with the keeper of the Eddystone Light!”
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free,
Oh for the life on the rolling sea!
-traditional
Ko kwal al woot, Rosario Beach
October 2009
I went east for the first time in a while, back over to the mainland- Bellingham specifically. I’ve been struggling with some sort of virus, so it was maybe unwise to stand in the wind and icy rain taking this shot, but I’d had a restless day of ferries and long slow caravans of traffic, the gathering weather turning the drive over Deception Pass into a sort of funeral cortege.
Rosario Beach is a short and welcome detour off 20, even though in the chute of Rosario Strait the wind was extreme. I found a meager lee in shadow of Bowman Hill and Deception Island and opened the lens and just let the wind and light mix it up. I like movement and blur in trees, and the low-fi anxiety of flying debris, and here I especially like that there is deception in the still statue, the only defined thing in the frame, as if legend can ever truly hold the day. And it doesn’t hurt that even the fish looks upside down.