The New Year is like a phantom or ghost with a not yet fully formed face. Befitting to the New Year I woke up this morning to a very dense fog through which I could see essentially nothing and I starred quite a while wondering into that vague void. Yesterday we were walking along Cape Hedge Beach and I spotted the stone of Figure 1, which reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Whether the coming year will be friendly or unfriendly is TBD, to-be-determined.

“There was a Door to which I found no Key
There was a Veil past which I could not see.”

― Omar Khayyám

Happy New Year to all my friends and Readers. 2021 hangs as a big question mark still and the New Year an even bigger one. It struck me that A E Housman perhaps said it best in the Shropshire Lad (1896).

“Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,

And while the sun and moon endure

Luck’s a chance, but troubles sure,“

So, my friends, I’m going to recommend focusing on the positive for the coming year. Focus and remember that change, real change, is within our power.

I have, of course, been scanning my photographs for something appropriate and I want to share the image of Figure 1, which quite symbolic of the year’s last day, shows the cormorant beginning their migration in mid-October over Cape Ann.

The winter, really just new born, continues to ache with discomfort and misery. We look everywhere for some signs of happiness and I was thinking today of a similar gray day in November when I encountered a small flock of Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialus) at the head of the trail of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge.

So right now while I am looking out at the sea and becoming enveloped by a great gloom December umbra, my thoughts returned that moment last month. I pulled up the picture on my computer to post it here. I am reminded that in fact everywhere there is truth and in truth there is beauty. Always look to the sunrise and always seek the bluebird, that is the symbol of happiness.

Following up on yesterday’s image of Cairns at Cape Hedge Beach, today I worked on another moody image that I took there, about two months later. This was of a building partially obscured by the debris barrier and is shown in Figure 1. Yesterday’s image has intense depth of field which truly adds to the drama and today’s photograph failed miserably in that aspect. In trying to “bring it out” I realized that I could turn the fuzziness into an asset by using the image as a photopictorialism study and actually adding noise. That is I made the image look like an impressionist painting, thereby invoking the quality of the photopictorialist movement and in particular of the bromoil printing. So I added noise, playing with the kind and degree of the noise. The final result to me has the quality of a charcoal sketch

As winter here has gotten gloomier and gloomier one of my favorite moody photographs is the one shown in Figure 1. Cape Hedge beach is protected by a huge mound of granite pebbles that runs the whole length of the beach. I had assumed that these were put in by the town for flood control. This is not, like Cape Cod terminal glacial terrain. But, in fact, they are the debris of the great granite ships that sailed out of Rockport. To return from distant ports they had to be loaded with stones as ballast and this is what we see – a wonderful variety of colors and crystals.

People like to scale the treacherous – well treacherous for an old man – piles and build cairns on the top. Cairns have a wonderful history dating back millennia. Perhaps most interesting are the silent cairns left by the arctic explorers, complete with notes saying who was there and what direction they headed. Ultimately they were testaments to human endurance and perseverance.

“The quality I look for most is
optimism: especially optimism
in the face of reverses and
apparent defeat. Optimism is
true moral courage.”

Sir Ernest Shacleton

Happy Holidays to all of my readers at Hati and Skoll. Once again it is a both strange and trying time; so I hope that everyone stays safe and healthy and perhaps our troubled world will be in a better place next year!

I thought I would share a photograph that I took of the Ice Cream Store on Bear’s Neck in the little village of Rockport, MA a couple of weeks back. These days are dominated by the suffocating darkness of the Winter Solstice. It is dark, cold and damp. Massachusettsians will nevertheless think of the joys of ice cream. Ice cream brightens everything. According to the International Ice Cream Association New Englanders chow down an average of 22.8 quarts per person annually, compared to the national average of 15.1 quarts. I have been unable to determine if there is a coincident higher occurrence of gallstones in New Englanders.

This time of year we decorate with lights, but it is not merely a vain attempt to create a small shiny spot in an otherwise bleak landscape but rather it is an insistent optimism in the future.

As Voltaire put it

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

Two days ago I went for a slog in the woods at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. There was mud of all kinds everywhere. Yesterday the ground was frozen and all crusty. I am about to go out now in a gentle falling snow. Such is the variation of early winter in New England.

Ice is an interesting and varied material. This largely stems from a curious property of water, that it is denser as a liquid (water) at its freezing point than as a solid (ice); hence ice floats. Hence the water in your bottle expands and can crack the container if it is frozen. And hence you can skate on ice. Your weight on your skate blades applies pressure to the ice and causes it to liquify creating a thin liquid water layer to skate upon. This is the phenomenon of regelation and doesn’t happen on, for instance, dry ice or carbon dioxide.

As a result there are so many beautiful patterns in the pond as it melts and freezes multiple times, this time of year. Yesterday the most beautiful were these cracks and swirls on the ice where the day before were rain-filled truck ruts in the mud. I cannot wait to see what wonders today’s walk will bring!

I think that I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have attempted sports photography! Speaking of fingers mine were frozen yesterday as I photographed this wet-suited kite-boarder at Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, MA yesterday. Yikes! so windy and so cold. This guy is a superman!

Figure 1 Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 300 mm ISO 1600 Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/800th sec at f/7.1 with +1 exposure compensation

Figure 2 Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 260 mm ISO 1600 Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/320th sec at f/7.1 with +1 exposure compensation

As I described in my last post, there has been a lot of beaver modifications along Puffer Pond at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. This year for the first time I have actually seen these animals, the North American Beaver (Castor canadensis). I was particularly pleased to spot this young adult in mid October. If I may anthropomorphize, he seemed to be having a lovely time swimming among the lilies and periodically diving for some treasure. The reflection of the trees in the water added both color and drama to the image.

Most of the beaver quotes that I could find alluded to the old TV Series “Leave it to Beaver” that defined the myth of the American Family in the 1950’s or lawyer jokes. After serious chewing on it for a while I have chosen to just enjoy the damn beaver photograph.

Canon T2i with EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.0 L IS USM Lens at 275 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode1/2000 th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.