The Unbroken Ocean Was here Opened Out

CHARLES DARWIN: "The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from the continent by an open space of ocean between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists and received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken ocean was here opened out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be be brought somewhat near to that fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Through threaded mists of sea and sky the clouds scrape the parched, highland lava crust.  Mists and dews are precious now, and life is resourceful about collecting them and passing them on.

Booby Gyre

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  (Be sure to click on the image.) 

What is old is new, and what is new is very old. That's the lesson of Galapagos. What is the meaning of a day of life when compared with the ceaseless, spasmodic magma oozing from ulcerous cavities deep within the earth?  What is the meaning of this rock of ages without life and a day in which to be awed?

This is a high resolution image produced with magic. I assure viewers that the flock of boobies is quite real. A moment earlier we had all been facing the other way, gaping as four orange flamingos suddenly flew by in formation against the blue sky. Still earlier in the morning we had stood hushed, awed as the same birds posed, poked, stepped like high priests with backward knees and heads deep in water - four flamingos performing holy sacraments for their breakfast in a still lagoon. Now they streaked by in disciplined file.   

I had just time to snap those pictures and turn to see this gyre of boobies whirling around the tiny island, circling down in preparation for landing. The sound was effervescent.

The high resolution of the original image file reveals even the eye of one of a pair of birds perched in the tree, and if this image were printed large, the viewer's eyes could follow the boat out into the middle of the bay and to the far-off islands that show clearly on the horizon.  It is an odd landscape to photograph.

What is old is new, and what is new is very old. That's the lesson of Galapagos. What is the meaning of a day of life when compared with the ceaseless, spasmodic magma oozing from ulcerous cavities deep within the earth?  What is the meaning of this rock of ages without life and a day in which to be awed?

Galapagos Magma

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In my imagination, I suppose, Galapagos was always a pristine place and primordial, yet a place one could snuggle up to, a land out of H.G. Welles, foreign yet familiar, sinfully lush yet innocent and chaste. In fact, when among the animals that is the reality, but there's another reality also true.  As a photographer,  I found that other place hard to get close to. First, what's new is often rough and raw. The islands are the scabs of raw wounds still oozing and simmering in cracks and crevices. Knife-edged lava shards slice through all but lizard skin.  Approach with caution or watch from offshore. And viewed from offshore, the cratered mountains never loom. Rather, they linger, obtuse cones often shrouded in haze or crossed by clouds with patterns as wide as the circumference of sky. Amid such breadth the mountains are dimples, their truths lie hidden. And when we do get ashore from small pongas, the land recedes gradually into lagoons and up bluffs of scrub and low trees and cactus and when we find a view it is spread wide as before; the shapes shift; that other truth evades my lens. 

The early Spanish explorers, Darwin, Melville all found it a bare place of drab colors. None cared to go back. It is an odd landscape to photograph, and I loved it.

What is old is new and what is new is very old; that's the lesson of Galapagos.

The Church Facade

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Sometimes a photograph gets so tied up with its subject that I'm not sure where one stops and the other starts. I am awed at the elegant simplicity of the details and refined proportions of this crumbling church. They speak to me clearly though I'm powerless to explain in words what I feel. I've sought to photograph the church so as to highlight those virtues in the hope that the photograph can convey my feelings as powerfully as the building itself.  

The big Church across the street was just seven years old in 1832 when this church was built. The two churches and the general store give form to the town's triangular green. What issues prompted the need for two meeting halls in what was at the time a small, frontier river town? What issues divided the congregants or brought them together?  Their buildings were so different, this one  modest, unassuming, forthright; the other, an exuberant white "wedding cake" of a spire. Who can engage them in dialogue or retell their stories?

I'm not religious nor am I quick to march.  The image calls neither to my sense of god nor country, but only to my sense of beauty. If the integrity and humility of the design is a reflection of its builders, then, in a sense something of the fiber of the men still holds services there, though pews are rotting, the lectern, mute, and the truth of the men's lives, unknown.

Luggage

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  When I was a small child I used to think it was possible to remember everything, and that somehow that continuous flow of memory was me. I couldn't have been much more than five when I conceived this universe. "Conscience," was still a notion too abstract; the memories flowed with no effect on guilt or pride, though I seem to recall worrying about space. 

I especially enjoyed remembering dreams, whether glowing or haunted, but it couldn't have been too long before I discovered troubling gaps in the memory stream, and sometimes I experienced déjà vu moments welling up from oblivion. Clearly, I had been fractured.  How much of me was missing? Where had it gone? If it continued, what would be left?

I think that by age seven I'd forgotten to worry about the stuff gone missing, and was more concerned about the things I couldn't seem to lose. Friends tell me I'm reaching an age when I will be grateful to remember anything at all. It's funny how memory is.

Watercolors No.5, Resounding

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:   To feel the expressive capacity of texture, pattern, form and color alone, unallied to the concrete subject that stood before the actual lens; it is an effort natural to painting and antithetical to photography.

Watercolors No.4, Prelude

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The woods famously, lovely, dark and deep, have many trails to enter in. I've followed men's blazes, deer's tracks, and I've rolled logs and rocks to deeper recesses, but the way of water leads darkest and deepest.  A pond catching autumn color at my feet seemed a likely portal for photography, and through my lens I stood inside. While I stood alone, it was a grotto magnificently still, and when behind me the dogs finished clowning and went to the edge to sip, we were collaborators in the first trembling before the woods, like a bell, began to peal.

The Chameleon Chemise

PARIS HILTON:  "The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Upstairs: A Decomposition

the blue chemise,

if you please,

the glittering eye,

not asking why,

the folly,

the promise,

the end.

Watercolors No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

In the copper pools of autumn, thought 

accumulates and falling leaves, while 

the stream itself still surges and cascades

across old stones and windblasted hills.

What is there in us that is not of that crush?

Dressed for Success

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Forgotten Poem

Things forgotten:

umbrellas and underwear,

those shoes in Skye,

unwritten letters

of loathing and love,

the leftovers that were to be

a midnight snack,

ice skates and hats,

lots of hats.

What does it mean

to be a thing forgotten?

Watercolors No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

On Dreaming

Mute leaves 

slip, slide, wink 

on shafts 

of orange light, 

bending seasons 

from a cool, blue destiny, 

before landing, 

freightless, 

commadored by insects, 

ships of passage 

through winter's mutinies 

ice, ooze

and the forgotten dreams

of pond-bottom. 

Here in the autumn pond

is the mirror of spring.

Composition in Oak and Chestnut

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Sometimes images that most invite a journal narrative are best served by leaving the  motive to the viewers imagination.

Watercolors

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Walking along the towpath of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, it was hard to feel any of the energy that once surged along this artery. It was as still as a fossil, a byway of 19th century commerce, bushels of tobacco and cotton, barges of iron and coal preserved in a water-filled imprint, and it seemed to make clear how a society is a living organism and how barges on a canal can flow in packets over computer networks that catapult at light-speed through satellites in orbit around the earth. The web of communities and services that grew around the canal had all either fallen away or morphed into something new with an address in cyberspace, and the canal was left, a fit place to meditate on the stillness through which the sun was reflecting a clear, autumn afternoon.

Farmhouse with Bay Window and No Air Conditioner

Virginia Reel

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  What is it about these Virginia foothills that makes them feel so different from similar topography in New England? Perhaps it is the character of autumn in Virginia that made me feel it so distinctly this time, the way it connects landscape and architecture. Rusty roofs and rustic, gray wood are the dominant barn type. Many seem survivals from an era of subsistence farming now vanishing like the season.  These provide a different garnish to Virginia's fall display, a display that favors rust over brilliant red and yellow.  No matter how I try to name attributes, the distinction eludes me, but I don't think I would ever mistake this farm for one in New England.  In any case, hurricane Sandy has now wiped away the season in both places.

Autumn Staccato

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  An invitation from my friend Gary in Rappahannock, Virginia, to come shoot on his turf provided a welcome opportunity to start turning from processing and writing about my spring travel shoot and to put full focus again on shooting new and old subjects. Most of all it was an invitation to have a good time shooting new images. There are more Galapagos photos to come, but from now on they will be interspersed with more recent images. 

This nearly complete, abandoned farmstead, overgrown with weeds, came with a soundtrack of crows and a stinktrack from a skunk we never saw but whose presence we inhaled. This is the farmhouse. Inside the floors were frail.  We gingerly climbed to the second floor but then backed down. I took no shots inside.  Subsistence farms like this have almost disappeared from this area of Virginia, but many linger as phantom farms.

Lava Heron

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Down in cool, shadowy hideouts where mangrove roots reach the sea, small fish and crabs will never see the lava heron, perfectly still, waiting above them. Along with flightless cormorants and marine iguanas, he is one of the animals shaped by the fresh, dark lava of the archipelago, and he has become invisible. Contrary to what I read in the guidebooks, it doesn't appear that any of them are hiding from predators. Mammals are scarce on these new islands.

This lava heron is hunting beside a small bridge connecting our trail with a landing area where we will meet our ponga. Twenty of us are passing within half a dozen feet of the lava heron, and he hasn't moved a muscle since he found his spot. He is indifferent to our commotion. Perhaps he knows our vibrations may chase fish his way, or, much as this may not occur to us, he ignores us knowing we are irrelevant.  This is a cool, tenebrous part of paradise, good for him to hunt in.

Liquidity

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Bobbing

Tidal stirrings,

treading transience,

always looking for the fix

to an unbroken horizon

girdling round,

no docks in paradise,

treading transience.

Viridescence 1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The white sands lay rippled like fish-scales just where the ocean, winds, plantery motion, and whirl of the galaxy had dropped them the night before, except at intervals where the pattern of scales was interrupted. There the sands had been cleft as if by a wide, balloon tire. One might almost think motorcyclists had ridden up out of the lagoon, crossed the beach and vanished miraculously in the brush. Except when one looked closely at a tread mark in the sand, each tread bore the imprint of a single, triangular flipper to the left and right of the central mash. So closely were they placed that they looked like tire treads. They testified to the laborious journey the sea turtle had taken the night before, dragging herself over the deep mound of white sand, then digging a hole to secure her eggs and covering them, finally leaving them forever and dragging herself back to the sea. These were tasks her body was ill equipped to accomplish.

And when, at last, at the end of her night of labor, as she eased into the water, melted back to a realm where she is agile, graceful, sleek, even beautiful; did she feel fulfilled? Did she find solace? Did she take pride? What powers her inner bunny?  What is the stuff we sometimes call, "instinct," and sometimes call, "spirit"? Where does it come from?

Looking Back

CHARLES DARWIN:  It is a hideous-looking creature of a dirty black color, stupid and sluggish in its movements. The usual length of a full grown one is about a yard, but there are some even four feet long. ... When in water this lizard swims with perfect ease and quickness, by a serpentine movement of its body and flattened tail, , the legs being motionless and closely collapsed on its sides. A seaman on board sank one with a heavy weight attached to it, thinking thus to kill it directly, but when, an hour afterwards, he drew up the line, it was quite active.

The nature of this lizard's food, as well as the structure of its tail and feet, and the fact of its having been seen voluntarily swimming out to sea, absolutely prove its aquatic habits, yet there is in this one strange anomaly, namely, that when frightened it will not enter the water.. Hence, it is easy to drive these lizards down to any little point overhanging the sea, where they will sooner allow a person to catch hold of their tails than jump into the water. They do not seem to have any notion of biting, but when much frightened they squirt a drop of fluid from each nostril. I threw one several times as far as I could into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood. It swam near the bottom with a very graceful and rapid movement, and occasionally aided itself over the uneven ground with its feet. As soon as it arrived near the edge, but still being under water, it tried to conceal itself in the tufts of seaweed or entered some crevice. I several times caught this same loizard by driving it down to a point, and though possessed of such perfect powers of diving and swimming, nothing would induce it to enter the water; and as often as I threw it in, it returned in the manner above described.

Flightless Cormorant

WILLIAM BLAKE: "Without contraries is no progression."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  What misplaced vanity causes the flightless cormorants of Galapagos to lift their pitiful wings and strut against the wind on the blackness of these crooked lava shores? There are monsters in paradise. 

Galapagos was created sterile. It remains arid and scrubby. Everything that lives here came once by sea or air, and those that remained found themselves freed of old enemies and in need of new talents. Paradise transformed them. The cormorants stand this way because once, far away, on a distant shore their ancestors did the same to dry their wings for flight. Thus these cormorants, though not quite fish, have learned to live by swimming and are matchless in water, but not quite fowl, they prepare for flights they will never take, their muscles redesigned for underwater gymnastics.

Courting Brown Pelicans

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  There are no docks in paradise. That's how they try to keep it pure, and when anyone goes ashore it is aboard small, inflatable pongas. Our first such landing was, I believe on Fernandina, newest and most westward island of the archipelago. Fernandina last erupted in 2009. It sits directly above the hot spot.

I wasn't prepared for the joyous greeting we received as we landed. It was like passing through crowds of well-wishers in costume at Mardi Gras. As we stepped across rocks to where stone steps climbed to a bluff above the sea, a booby was perched beside the steps, and we gasped. Three steps up and we were eye-to-eye.  Almost by habit I checked for my ID, and the booby might as well have been checking them, as each of us had to stop and pose for and snap a photograph before proceeding to the top of the bluff. 

Overhead, boobies and frigate birds cruised for mates from among the many birds who were building nests around us near the shore. Pelicans fished and sometimes carried food back to their young, and along the trails baby boobies were being groomed or scolded by their parents, or they played or pecked for our attention while parents watched.  The trail across the island was filled with the commotion of courting and mating and raising new families, and as we walked, birds looked into our eyes in calm wonder.  In mid-May Paradise is alive with the feracious celebrations of scales, feathers and fur. Even hermit crabs were out searching for larger dwellings, and we were privileged to be included in the ancient and annual pageant inebriations that had long ago adjourned on other shores.

Like all tourists, we thrilled, thinking we were part of the parade; the parade was for us.  Later I saw the next cycle of tourists pouring expectantly onto the tarmac from the plane that would soon carry me away. I understood then our place in this fearless bliss. I thought about that never-ending line of us, and I was glad the world had limited access here to small groups arriving via ponga.  I understood why new limits had just been imposed, capping the number of landings allowed at each site, and, as I fastened my seatbelt for take-off, I understood why paradise can never be reclaimed.

Blue-Footed Booby

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Imagine a world in which when we walk by, the birds don't fly to a bush further off and hide in the branches, the field mice and chipmonks don't scamper beneath rocks and fish don't shy away as we near the water.  Imagine a world where other animals, innocent of fear, merely pause at our approach and look back in innocent wonder at the odd new creatures with the clicking boxes visiting among them, strangers in paradise.

CHARLES DARWIN: "I will conclude my description of the natural history of these islands by giving an account of the extreme tameness of the birds. This disposition is common to all terrestrial species; namely to the mocking thrushes, the finches, wrens, tyrant flycatchers, the dove, and common buzzard. All of them are often approached sufficiently near to be killed with a switch, and sometimes, as I myself tried, with a cap or hat. A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree. One day whilst lying down, a mockingthrush alighted on the edge of a pitcher made of a shell of a tortoise, which I held in my hand, and began very quietly to sip the water. It allowed me to lift it from the ground whilst seated on the vessel. I often tried, and very nearly succeeded, in catching these birds by their legs. Formerly, the birds appear to have been even tamer than at present. Cowley (in the year 1684) says that the 'turtledoves were so tame that they would often alight on our hats and arms, so as that we could take them alive, they not fearing man until such time as some of our company did fire at them, whereby they were rendered more shy.' ...It is surprising that they have not become wilder, for these islands in the last hundred and fifty years have been frequented by buccaneers and whalers; and the sailors, wandering through the wood in search of tortoises, always take cruel delight in knocking down the little birds.  These birds, although still more persecuted, do not readily become wild. In Charles Island, which had been colonized about six years, I saw a boy sitting by a well with a switch in his hand, with which he killed the little doves and finches as they came to drink. He had already procured a little heap of them for his dinner, and he said that he had constantly been in the habit of waiting by this well for the same purpose. It would seem that the birds of this archipeligo, not having as yet learnt that man is a more dangerous animal than the tortoise or the Amblyrhynchus [local iguana], disregard him, in the same manner as in England shy birds such as magpies disregard the cows and horses grazing in our fields." 

Sea Lions on the Shore

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Fearless in Galapagos

Fear, like the sound of the wind,

may go unnoticed 

until branches scrape 

and canyons howl;

or most preciously 

when it is suddenly still. 

Imagine that fearless silence,

spacious as the horizon,

where the song behind the wind

rings clear, 

fills immensity -

Welcome to paradise.