Boston: River Sunsets

Looking back through old photos in recent months, I came to realize that, despite thinking of myself primarily as a landscape and nature specialist rather than an urban or street photographer, I had become just as attached to my odd, mostly spontaneous snapshots of Baltimore City as to my more thoughtful, rigorous landscape work from around Maryland - if not more. Proximity breeds affection, I suppose. I had come to think of those streets and alleyways and public squares and green spaces as my home, to know them in all sorts of moods and moments, all kinds of weather and lighting conditions. In my mind’s eye, I’d memorized the shades of sunset that the sky would traverse from the tip of Fells Point on a long summer evening. I remembered the way the harbor smelled on the first warm day of each spring (bad). I’d developed my own favorite pace for walking the mile down from our hill to the water’s edge - a brisk stroll that invigorated the spirit while still allowing me to look around and soak in my surroundings. This was the sort of familiarity that could only come from living in a space, from being in love with it day after day, for years on end. It literally inspired poetry.

So, quite cognizant of the role that Baltimore played in my growth as a photographer (and a person), I’ve been trying to approach Boston with the same wide eyes, the same devotion, and the same heart-on-sleeve openness to all things beautiful. It is quite a beautiful city. Much like Baltimore, the neighborhoods here echo with grit and history and culture and character, all quite different from one another. The physical space of the city, and the experience of being alive in it, feels cohesive and full of heart, as if it were designed by a single master architect with an eye for aesthetics and a sentimental core. And the green spaces - they are, simply, jaw-dropping. I cannot wait to see what the rest of the year holds, and what sorts of scenes and emotions will be revealed as the seasons fall one after another.

On this, the first weekend of September and two of the last balmy evenings of summer, Jane and I visited two different points along the Charles River for sunset. On Saturday, we drove to Jane’s workplace in Cambridge and walked to the eastward lane of the Longfellow Bridge. Standing over the railing, we ate a picnic dinner (cauliflower and broccoli rabe paninis from Flour Bakery) and watched light fall on the Charles River Esplanade and the city skyline, before circling to Toscanini’s for ice cream. On Sunday, after an early dinner, we parked off the Charles River in Allston, and walked back along Soldiers Field Road to the Western Avenue bridge, where I photographed the golden hour light on the tower of Harvard’s Dunster House. Hard to believe we’d first walked past that exact spot nearly twelve years ago, and several times since. It sometimes feels like we’re entirely different people now. And at other times, it feels as though almost nothing has changed.

Massachusetts: Summer's End

Falling in love again is a slow, steady, effortful process. After you lose a piece of yourself, it takes a constant sort of energy to unravel the tangled web that you call your personhood. To hold the frayed and tattered threads up to the light and examine each of them one by one, inch by inch, carefully imagining their place in the completed tapestry. In who you’ve become, and who you’re going to be. After leaving my twenties behind in Baltimore, it feels like I’ve lost a piece of myself, and I’m still recovering from it.

It’s no fault of the place I now find myself. Boston is as lovely as a new home can be. It’s been a dry summer; from my new hospital’s oncology ward solarium, the hills to the west are dense and verdant, and endless, bluebird skies have been shining down on us all August. I’m beginning to appreciate the terroir. The earthy, green smell of the Necklace as I cross over Longwood Avenue on my brief walk to work. The ever-changing light - each sunset now falling substantially earlier than the one before. The incredible character of my new Bostonian neighbors and colleagues, virtually all of whom are masked and distanced as the pandemic stretches into another season - a deep, stoic spirit of collective pride and mutual support that could have only been engendered by decades’ memories of the New England winter. Sure enough, and lucky for me, this place feels like a place. Which is more than one can say for… certain places in this country.

And yet, when I wake up in the morning, and hear the bubbling courtyard fountain in place of East Baltimore’s ambulance sirens, helicopters, and ice cream trucks, I can’t help but feel - weird as it sounds - that a thread of me is missing. I’m taking new photographs now (beautiful ones, too) but they don’t yet strum at my heartstrings or evoke an entire life dreamt, built, and lived to completion - the way my images from eight years in Maryland do.

But I’m learning. I’m going to fall in love again. It’s going to take intentionality, and the passage of time. During the week, my new job takes me away from thoughts of the past. I throw myself willingly into the work of supporting seriously ill patients and their families - and am stunned, gratified, grateful, to discover that the full-time stuff is just as meaningful as I always hoped it would be. It makes sense - sitting or kneeling by the hospital bed is the place in my life that has changed the least. Here is one thread that remains, that I hope will become woven more tightly, intricately, and beautifully over time. And during the weekend, when there is time and space to reflect, I’m choosing to do it where I always have: outdoors, at sunrise, beside a lake, within the eternal, forgiving woods.

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To wit, photographs from our weekend walks in August:

August 15, 2020: A early morning jaunt in the Fells, around Quarter Mile Pond and to Pickerell Point. Horrid light - a heavy bank of clouds rolls in just before sunrise. Still, I can imagine some lovely golden hours in the future from the south shore of Spot Pond, looking out toward Great Island. I use my polarizer to photograph the lily pads on Quarter Mile Pond before we quit the lakeside, visiting our local Wegman’s for the first time.

August 22, 2020: A spontaneous evening visit to the south bank of the Charles River in Allston for sunset. Lovely colors and lovely clouds. Birch trees. Boaters. Beer garden. A birthday party with rowdy children. A Canada goose with a broken wing.

August 23, 2020: A ramble, shortly after sunrise, at the Breakheart Reservation. I can tell, rather quickly, that this is going to be one of my new favorite places. We circumambulate the forest path around Silver Lake (Upper Pond), photographing the pine-clad island at its center as the morning light shifts and changes. The compositional opportunities here are endless.

August 30, 2020: Another morning walk around the Lynn Woods, along the south shore of (the less famous, non-Thoreau) Walden Pond and through the Great Woods, and to the top of Mount Gilead.

Cape Cod: Chatham & Yarmouth

The third and final day of our trip, and it’s a lazy one. We’re up again before 5 AM, driving a short distance southward on the highway to catch sunrise from the parking area at the top of Fort Hill, just off the highway a few miles to the south of our motel. Past a series of old colonial houses, their yards decorated by whale jawbone gates, we arrive at a beautiful, panoramic viewpoint just as the skies are beginning to brighten. To the east, past Salt Pond Bay and the outer beach, a sanguine sun is beginning to crest the Atlantic Ocean. To the north, the house at Coast Guard Station, sitting high on backshore bluff, begins to gradually catch the light. And to the south, boats sit placidly in Town Cove, overlooked by the oceanfront houses of Orleans. I set up my tripod a short distance back down the hill from the parking area, using an old wooden fence as a foreground object of interest as the first rays of sunlight beginning to strike the backing vegetation, marshes, and waterways curving into the horizon.

After sunrise, we drive a short distance north to the parking area above Nauset Light Beach, which was completely full when we first swung by on the first morning of our trip. Today, at just before 6 AM, the lot is all but empty, and we leave our car their to leisurely admire the famous lighthouse, whose brilliant red-and-white façade adorns the exterior of so many potato chip bags across the country. I personally am finding lighthouse photography rather tricky; compared to shooting pure landscapes, there are simply not many interesting perspectives or angles for one to shoot a single, vertically prominent building at the edge of the sea. This is especially true outside of the golden hours, which provide interesting differential lighting and soft, colorful hues in the sky. Nevertheless, we make the best of the early morning light, take our selfies, and make a quick visit to the nearby Three Sisters Lighthouses before departing. On our short drive home, we stop by Hole in One Bakery & Coffee Shop for a breakfast of croissants, specialty donuts, and iced mochas.

Back at the motel, we have a leisurely breakfast (watching travel shows on TV) before checking out in the late morning. Scrapping our hiking plans for the day, we instead drive to the town pier in Wellfleet, where we see a cormorant catch an eel for lunch, as the local fishermen work the dock. We briefly browse the used books at the nearby, lovingly named Bookstore & Restaurant (an establishment after my very own heart!) before eating lunch next door - clams, a cod sandwich for Jane, and yet another lobster roll for me. Then, we’re back on the road, driving to the town of Chatham at the elbow of the Cape.

Chatham is a small but bustling little seaside village in the summer, even mid-week. We park off Main Street and set off browsing the stores. At the nearby bookstore, I pick up another title on my “to-buy” shortlist: Robert Finch’s Common Ground. Jane buys an iced lemonade, which we sip at to stay cool as we walk the mile toward the beach, admiring the town’s lovely homes and flower-filled yards along the way. A local kid, shuttling tourists on a golf cart for his summer job, eventually finds us and gives us a quick lift to the front of Chatham Light. We stop to photograph the lighthouse station, the nearby beach with its crystal-blue waters, and the omnipresent wild rose bushes, before making our way back into town.

Back on the road, we drive westward through the fishing villages of the Mid Cape, checking into our last night’s motel just east of the Bass River, in Dennis. After a perfunctory afternoon nap, we make our way to Skipper Chowder House, a famous seafood joint a few miles away, where we place a takeout order (more chowder, more seafood, and another… lobster roll). While waiting, we share what I can only describe as an absolutely sinful banana split (actual quote: “The chocolate fudge is… on the bottom. The bottom is all chocolate fudge. It’s all fudge”). Having eaten ourselves to oblivion back at our motel, we depart for a bayside sunset at Gray’s Beach, a short distance to the north through the town of Yarmouth. The marsh here is a photography hotspot because of its long, west-facing boardwalk, but between the throngs of summer visitors and the clouds of midges and marsh insects, it winds up being the least pleasant place I’ve photographed in awhile. Even with repellent, I come away with a disgusting number of little bites after taking some fast sunset shots. Were the photographs worth it? …. Someone else will have to be the judge.

The following morning, after a rather sleepless, muggy night in the motel, Jane and I walk the short distance up the road to the Bass River Bridge for sunrise. The insects are out again, and the air is preternaturally still, but I am able to get some nice shots of the nearby boat dock and the lovely houses facing us on the west bank of the river. We pack our bags back at the motel, and it’s a relatively brief (though somewhat… itchy) ride back to Boston by late morning.