Creative trespass rules in the winter…no one is around and you get to go wherever you want.
We were out on the boat poking around the islands off the St. George peninsula, a perfect way to spend a winter day.
One of the great things about winter along this coast is that if you can get off the mainland, the whole place is yours.
Creative trespass rules in the winter…no one is around and you get to go wherever you want. It all adds to the experience I feel so often as a photographer, that of being an extremely privileged voyeur.
Being in a position to get intimate with people and places is a significant part of what motivates me…there’s something very sensual about that freedom. As I think about it, I realize that I was always like this, even before I picked up a camera. I used to make mind-images - “movies” if you will - with my grandfather’s naval binoculars. I would do that for hours and hours.
I still do. With a camera, now. It’s just plain in me. As are island places like this.
Here’s a poem written by Philip Conkling, inspired by Island Farm
The Winter We Needed Each Other
We stood night watches when the temperature fell
To single numbers and then plunged down,
Not into a hell of fire, but of ice that gripped
The chest where the heart is caged.
An elderly matriarch who had passed away
Was laid in a surface crypt with plastic flowers
Until the spring when neither pick nor crowbar
Could penetrate the ground of her rest.
When the deathless grip of ice sealed the harbor,
And the ferry stopped cutting the channel free,
Daredevils walked from across the Reach
For a story to tell their grandchildren someday.
Cut off in the backroom of the farmhouse,
The winter dark wrapped us in its tense grip.
We left the faucets running and checked the plumbing,
As if it were a patient on life support.
When well pipes froze six feet down,
Neighbors gathered mornings and afternoons
At a spring at the edge of town to fill water jugs,
During the winter we needed each other.
Fishermen tied themselves together to chop holes
Around their boats to move them to open water.
On still nights the trees outside cracked like rifles.
Old timers joked, “It was so cold, I almost got married.”
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