Ice

There generally isn't a lot of ice where I live now. Enough to skid out in the dark, but not much to photograph--or to describe, since black ice seems to demand an absence of description. It's an unseeable hazard, or a cold mirage, flip side to the illusory oasis all those cartoon desert stragglers seem to see.

Not quite ice as arrested motion--river ice, lake ice. 

When I was a kid, we used to skate on a nearby shallow lake. I remember a brief flirtation with speed skating--arms pumping, head down, amazing grace, exhilaration. Then wipeout, sprained ankle, hot water soaks, purple bruising, crutches. Toes so cold it still surprises me some days to find I still have ten.

Or ice as reasserted motion: thaw. We spent an hour once, maybe longer, watching the front slip of ice-turned-slush break up across one of the waterfall creeks in Ithaca. Lip after slip of softening, sloughing, lost ice. And then another, and another. Another. It was mesmerizing. (And yes, we did have television then. Just.)

Earlier this month, in Boston for the MLA convention, I huddled indoors, taking full advantage of the convention center-mall-hotel-enclosed walkway complex that meant we never had to go outside. But that gets old. It can't be healthy, even if it's warmer.

So I went for a quick, near-sunset walk along the river. It was supposed to be a speed walk (arms pumping, head up, no sprains). But I found myself taking ice pictures instead. 





Grainy, soft, unremarkable, curious, not-quite-transparent, nowhere close to spring pictures. 

What if the water were still moving underneath? pictures. 


Look at the rocks people have thrown to test the ice pictures. 

How soon do you think it's going to get dark and does ice hold shadow as well as it holds light? pictures. 

Even invisible ice demands description pictures. 

  

And so forth.

The Observer in the Frame

We spent the last days of August backpacking in the Three Sisters Wilderness, one of my favorite places on earth. Camped on a mini-ridge above Camp Lake, we watched the moon rise--fast!--and then the sunset and then, just barely (hurling myself out of the tent toward the pink glow, tangled in tent flaps and sleeping children and boots that wouldn't find my feet) the sunrise. Pink, and then bright yellow light, and then sharp shadows. And lots of photographs.

Two images from that trip in particular seem to focus my current revision preoccupations.  

I have been amply persuaded that the manuscript I'm working on (a novel I had fondly believed was finished, and beautiful, and ready to greet the world) is in need of major revision. I even have some ideas about the form that revision will take. But I'm caught between planning the revision--mapping out what I intend to do--and just jumping in. And how much will be enough--is it a matter of cutting or of adding, or more properly of replacing? It's a question, too, of framing and motivation: I know what the story is, but why is the narrator telling it? And just how far should the territory of that story extend?

Sunrise, then, above the lake, trying to arrest its different colors against the trees, and finding my own shadow contaminating the frame. Lean back, then, lean away, move the camera a bit. . . until I thought, here's my point of view picture, the narrator just off stage. But not all the way off. Whether visible or not, choosing what to include.

Framing the story just right is part of the problem. There isn't a story without a frame, something to give it shape--beginning, ending, even words trailing off at the end of the page or when the ink runs out, a de facto border, no less real for being accidental.

Other times the borders of story or observation become less and less clear. Heading up the hill above Demaris Lake, I almost walked into this spider and its home. And here's the story again, but the frame's disappearing, the web that barely shows up once I have the spider well in focus.

I don't know what kind of spider it is. That's one of the story's unknowns.

In search of lost pictures

A mysterious tech glitch having eaten a quantity of pictures off my memory card, I have tried to reconstruct what it was I saw, what I thought I wanted to remember. Snapping quick photos as a memory aid, it's easy not to look carefully enough; many of the plants are lost to me now, vague sketches of color that I recall wanting to be able to look at again. (Wasn't that Plato's warning about writing--it would make the mind lazy?) But I've salvaged a few frames:

A bright yellow orchid growing on a tree in a dusty paddock, admired just after we'd been horseback riding; we were waiting for our guide to unsaddle the horses. Bright, bright, unvariegated yellow, the flowers shaped like fans, the scalloped curve hanging downward, maybe dots of red at the base of the fan, and the flowers (they're not petals, are they?) jumbled and overlapping. The guide said it grew only on that particular tree, and that people stole chunks of it from time to time. 

In the same paddock, an old red and white Chevrolet tailgate lying in the dust, faded toward pink, placed as a shallow water trough for the horses to drink from. The white quartz gravel of the road and the golden six o'clock light on the hills behind us.

Neat vacation homes on narrow lots flush against garbage heaps (residue of the last strike) and piles of brick- in-progress. Libros Moby Dick, a bookstore in Capilla del Monte; vultures and the more attractive Caranchos with their black caps or crests gathered around a dead cow.

My mother and my two kids high up on a granite boulder in another canyon, one that used to be called El cajón and is now called Paraíso, the river dammed above to make a reservoir initially intended for recreation purposes but now, after a three-year drought, providing crucial water to the area. Box canyon becomes Eden, with a water release at the base of the dam, a metal wheel like a ship's wheel and tall water sprays arcing off like spokes at intervals. Round boulders against sharper edges, common green parrots flying over the trees, a small rodent like a guinea pig across the stream from me, and water plants, deep green and red-veined, just under the surface in a cove of the creek.

But then, too, there are the pictures I never tried to take, because the car was moving fast: kilometer after kilometer of old stone walls crisscrossing the hillsides in the Sierra de Córdoba, supplemented now by barbed wire along the highway, but still standing, keeping cattle in or out of pastures. Up close, those pastures looked to hold enough rocks to rebuild all the walls twice over with material to spare. 

Borders, Boundaries, Aerial Photographs

Not having taken any such, I wrote a poem once called "Aerial Photograph." Years ago, but I still like the poem. Here it is, with several aerial photographs of a quite different landscape: the Andes at the border between Argentina and Chile, taken on a flight from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil. I was irritated when the pilot came over the loudspeaker to announce the border, waking me up (I had been up all night).  And then I was fascinated by the dry, wrinkled, not-quite-snow-covered mountains, the suggestion of roads, the possibility of habitation, but maybe not. What do the poem and the photos have to do with each other? Not much, maybe, beyond a preoccupation with landscape, and how it belongs to us, or doesn't. Or a fascination with naming, with the ways we try to fit words to the world around us, adjusting pronunciation, spelling, understanding, until we achieve some kind of congruence.

Aerial Photograph

Skin scratched red by thistles

the old orchard brush now

interpolated from an aerial map:  trees spaced so

must have been set on purpose.

The way a home site is suddenly

four survey markers and a view,

these trees bear no more fruit than elderberries

road-dusted and dripping off the stems

impossible to harvest. Ranks of purple cones

spread half a mile beyond the feeder,

that seed hung out for finches

and the orchard sinking further

into the hillside.  

Trailers and small sheds

are easily distinguished, even in the grain

of prints distilled for public use.

It's easy to count incursions, stumps

that shouldn't have been cut.

Ella's place, Bauker Hill--

old boundary names that took,

the lilac hedge patched Forest,

a flowering almond in the old front yard

really one blossomed twig against the pale shrub.

Here lives the uncle from Stober,

my grandmother says,

syntax so openly transposed

I want not to notice, or want to boast 

the proof my high school German offers--

this is where her accent lies,

not in the vowels but in the prepositions.

Or the fences. Dark indentations 

where water gathers, wire 

crossing otherwise unbroken woods--one side

is ours, and on hands and knees we grope

under rain and through a mesh

we didn't think to find. The posts

are far too new, fast question

following immediate suspicion,                                         

furtive occupation, a sliding of green

weather-treated steel a few feet south.

Like the map of certain states

shaped like limbs or articles of clothing

you can't see this place but from the air

or from a tree. Not the slow 

hazelnuts, long past production,

but from a taller fir, or the oak 

below the fence line. Like a branch 

grafted to an older trunk

this place is only what we call it.