I’m in something of a travel drought: work has been madness and springtime plans got thwarted by a combination of bad timing and worse inertia. So it’s been a summer of routine routines to discharge the static in the overloaded head.
Enter: sunsets. I bought a fancy new lens a few months back, and took a personal oath to get better at low-light photography. I still should take a class or find a mentor or something. In the meantime, I’m dabbling…
Wearing a camera: I read somewhere a while back that to improve one’s photography, you should put your camera on each day, wear it so it becomes like an article of clothing. So I’m probably that freak marching around town with dog leash in one hand and a camera slung across my body, stalking sunrises, ocean fog, evening light and the egrets that hang around the docks. Some of my recent favourites, in no particular order:
Whirlwind guests: And my first visitors of the summer came a week or so ago, my co-adventuring Calvin brought his adventurers-in-training to my part of the world at the start of their whirlwind tour of the Northeast. We made the most of a brilliant summer weekend: Salem Willows arcade, an authentic New England clam shack experience at Woodman’s, swimming and SUP-ing right here in Bev, and topped it off with a diner brekkie at Cape Ann’s best-kept secret and a whale watch out of Gloucester!
We had the luck of watching local humpback, Dross, lunge feeding for the better part of an hour. In some of these frames, you can see the sardines escaping from her massive mouth, the gulls at the ready for any fish she’s missed. Also seen this day: a few minke whales and an elusive ocean sunfish (on my hit list for diving, but never expected to see one in the North Atlantic)!
My next summer visitor comes in a week or so, and I wonder if it’s cheating to repeat the same classic New England summer rituals? I take for granted that these things are in my backyard, never going on these excursions except when visitors are here, but feel grateful every day to live in a place that people from out of town come for holiday.
I’m writing this not-really-a-travel-post post, in part, to appease that feeling of restlessness crawling in my bones, as the sparks of the next grand adventure take form. I’m writing to practice the artform because I’m feeling rusty. I’m writing because I still wonder quite often if I’m meant to stay in one place, and whether some inner Gypsy isn’t being squelched by this traditional concept of home; whether home is a feeling or if it’s a social construct, fabricated to display tangible wealth. And of course it is both, since the universe as it meets the human condition is this deeply-layered paradox.
So, stay tuned to this space. Even I don’t know for sure what will appear next… but there’s a nagging urge to swim with big animals, and see island-nations that have their own ecosystems, and see rock formations where, for thousands of years, people have built villages into the stone, and animals whose ancestors once existed on this continent, and structures far older than this country’s years.
