It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Category: Photography
Changing States
For the second day in a row Scott and I were in the right place at the right time. Today as we were walking along the river all of the ice between the 6th Street Bridge and the Leonard Street bridge (about a quarter-mile of river) let go and thundered over the dam.
It was quite impressive. Some of the pieces were more than twenty feet across and about a foot thick, and must have weighed well over a ton.
The entire ice pack took half an hour or so to clear the dam. The turbulence at the foot was filled with huge ice chunks and tree trunks and old shoes and pop bottles and a single soccer ball. The local ducks like to camp out at the top of the fish ladder and some of them were doing small-scale reinterpretations of the Titanic, getting bumped around and generally pushed toward the dam. A heart-stopping moment occurred when a duck hopped up on one of the ice floes just before it want over, but the duck took to the air in plenty of time to escape.
Sooner or later one of them will be a little slow on the uptake and Grand Rapids will find itself a duck short.
Different Seasons
The upper river has been frozen since mid-December. Sometimes the ice creeps back from the edge of the dam. Sometimes the ice hangs over the edge of the dam. Scott and I contemplated walking across the river, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Something about river ice seems inherently less trustworthy than, say, lake ice.
This is what the river has looked like for most of the past three months:
Yup. That was pretty much it, up until this past Friday. The warm weather has been melting the ice at an extraordinary rate. This is what the dam looked like yesterday at around 6:00 pm:
About eight inches of water going over the dam. The ice was still touching the shore up by the 6th Street Bridge. Fishermen were braving the still frigid water and dodging the occasional chunks of ice.
At about 1:00 pm today the weight of the backed-up ice pushed a couple of trees over the dam, which had been hung up at the top for a couple of years. Scott and I had been saying for a long time “Wouldn’t it be cool…” and we finally got to see it. As he said, we deserved to see it.
At 5:30 pm today, this is what the dam looked like:
When the ice and the trees gave way there was a mad scramble as the fishermen sought shelter in the rocks and shallows.
By tomorrow morning the rest of the ice will probably have let go for the year and the river will be running high, and the fishermen will be pulling salmon out by the barrel-full.
Happy birthday, Virginia.
Happy St. Patrick’s day.
Macro Photo Appreciation
A Brief Respite
Cold Photos
Today I went to the beach and took pictures. The weather was wonderful, wind from the west at 5-10 mph, sunlight from the south at 186,280 miles per second. Slight, wispy clouds in the sky, and perhaps a dozen other people in the entire park.
I watched PI a couple of days ago, so I was particularly sensitive to patterns in waves, wind, sound, sand, light … Perhaps it was my unfamiliarity with photography, or perhaps it was just that a static picture of a dynamic subject will always feel flat. Regardless, I was proud of some of my dozens of pictures, and have posted them here . There are eleven photographs weighing at a total of around 650k.