Why I'll Likely Never Visit Acadia National Park

Witchwood Rock, 2006

Arcadia Park Cracks Down on Rock Thieves

Arcadia…has become a hotbed of pilferers looking to pocket a handful of the smooth, speckled rocks that lines its beaches or the misshapen stones along its hiking trails…Certain kinds of people tend to steal rocks…artists, people looking to build a stone walkway…Schoolteachers are really bad about it…So are people from Florida because there aren’t any rocks down there.

New York Times, July 8, 2009

I’ll confess. I’ve been known to steal rocks.

Other people go on vacation and bring home little statues of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, or menus, glasses, towels and ashtrays from restaurants and hotels or, when all else fails, t-shirts that say “Mind the Gap,” or “I Got Crabs in Baltimore.”

I bring home rocks.

My wife laughs about this. But I like to think that my collection of stones is part of the long tradition of citizen geologists bringing back little pieces of the natural world to share some day with grandkids.

I try to hold myself to a single example from each place. A narrow piece of schist from the Red Rocks of Sedona. A large, oblong volcanic stone from the Pacific coast. Flat river stones from the Shenandoah and the Saint Lawrence. A chunk of marble from Italy. A blob of coral from Greece.

Some of the rocks I’ve brought home have ended up as accents in our garden. Some sit on shelves in my office. Some are door stops.

I have to admit, there’s something about the rocks of New England. It’s the one place I’ve collected whole bags of them. It’s surprising, though, that they’d complain about you taking rocks from there since practically everything you ever learned about New England had to do with how difficult it was to farm or do anything else in the region’s rocky terrain. Rocks are so plentiful up there that they build walls, houses, benches and anything else they can think of out of them. You’d think they might appreciate someone hauling a few away.

In any event, the rangers of Acadia National Park needn’t pursue me. There are stones from Maine looking down at me right now from a shelf. But I’ve never been to the Acadia National Park. Given the stern warning of the story above, I probably won’t because I’m sure I’d be tempted to bring a few rock samples home, and it would be embarrassing to have to explain to those hypothetical grandchildren of the future that granddaddy has a police record for transporting rocks across state lines.

The rock shown above is from the shore of Katama Bay on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t know how it attained its shape. It looked to me like Brancusi had gotten ahold of it before me.

Pet Cemetery

Champ, 2008

Photography is an art well suited to the curious. Unlike painters, who have the liberty of creating their own realities from scratch, we photographers are largely dependent on what’s put before us.

Last summer, I returned to visit Fort Monroe, once known as the “Gibraltar of the Chesapeake Bay.” Fort Monroe, or Fortress Monroe, as the serious Civil War wags call it, is an impressive sight, a six-sided fortification with high stone walls surrounded by a moat.

Throughout the Civil War, Fort Monroe remained in the hands of Union (Northern) forces. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation, former slaves were considered free men at Fort Monroe.

During World War II, Fort Monroe’s artillery, which ranged from 3-inch rapid-fire guns to 16-inch guns capable of firing 2,000-pound projectiles 25 miles, was part of a coastal defense network that warded off German U-boats from the U.S. Navy’s port at Norfolk.

Most recently Fort Monroe has been home to U.S. Army training and printing commands. Like many military bases, the modern Fort Monroe has a locked-in-time look, in this case, a small Indiana town of, say, 1940. Within the fort’s walls are spacious single-family homes with big front porches for senior officers, multi-family homes for junior officers and barracks for unmarried enlisted men, all surrounded by broad lawns and tree-lined streets and arranged around a large parade field.

The perimeter of the fort is where the serious work takes place. The walls of the fort are as much as 30’ – 40’ thick in places and as high as a three-story house. Along the top are aging concrete artillery placements. Underneath, where Jefferson Davis, last president of the Confederacy, was once imprisoned are now offices and a respectable little visitor center.

An unexpected find atop the Fort Monroe walls is a pet cemetery. Until 1988, military personnel and their relatives were allowed to bury their deceased family pets along the stone embankment. One family even hired three limousines to drive them nearly 200 miles down from Washington, D.C. to bury their pet here. Hundreds of dogs, cats and birds are buried here. Blacky. Benjie Boo. Spook. Winkie. Rob. Gypsy. Tinnie. Rupert. Imp. Homer. Tar Baby. Mitzy. Red. Rex. Sox. Stripey. Skippy. Dinky. Their lives and the dedication of countless other family pets are celebrated on formal headstones, modest wooden plaques and scratched out names on flat river stones.

I was most touched by the headstone that added, under the late pet’s name, these words: “Here Lies a Part of Our Lives.”

I made a series of photographs of the Fort Monroe Pet Cemetery. You can see it here.

Neutral Spaces

Neutral Spaces - 05, 2009

My mother is nearly eighty-nine and in frail health, which means I spend a fair amount of time in the company of doctors, nurses, specialists, generalists, technicians, therapists, care teams, pharmacists, people who read things, people who listen to things, people who call and check once a month, and people I have to call once a month to report her condition.

There’s little dignity in aging, especially if you don’t have anyone to run interference for you. I suspect more older folks than we might imagine just throw in the towel rather than deal with the paperwork.

In my experience, hospitals are the worst. There you are, incapacitated by one thing or another, dependent on the skills and kindness of strangers. Just when you could use some “high touch” the most, what you get is a lot of people poking you with pieces of “high tech” and chummily calling you by your first name even though you’ve never been introduced. They get in. They get out. They give you that old rhetorical, “Let me know if you need anything,” and breeze out of the room before your brain can get word downstairs to the lips that you have a question.

My healthcare clients talk a lot about their cradle-to-grave continuum of care. But when do you ever hear hospitals talk about continuum of communication? That’s just as important as quality of clinical care, probably more for some patients and their families. Most people who go into a hospital likely do leave in better condition. But at any given moment between admission and discharge, you’re pretty much on your own. A little information would ease a lot of anxiety, especially if you’re older and easily confused when you’re away from your usual surroundings.

One of the things I find most amazing about hospitals, considering all the people in them, is how impersonal they are. I’ve spent entire days in surgical waiting rooms full of people who never said one word to each other. Maybe it’s the stress. Maybe it’s the mixed vibes of hospitals; as a friend recently pointed out, people are being born on one floor at the hospital while they’re dying on another. Hospital staff, too, seems to skew toward the cooler, noncommittal end of the personality scale when they’re around patients and family. I guess they save their smiles for when they’re in the back halls with each other.

My mother’s occasional hospitalizations in recent years have given me the chance to make occasional contributions to a series I call “Neutral Spaces.”

Mistakes

Surf Series I - 04, 2009

“The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them.”

Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw

You know all the clichés about mistakes. A mistake is a stepping stone, a learning opportunity, an escape, a sign that you at least tried. Blah. Blah. Blah.

My goal is to create visual images that have an element of the unexpected about them. That doesn’t mean they defy the laws of nature and physics. Rather, they present understood things and places in a new light, through a different lens, or from an unexpected angle. I want you to see something fresh in the subjects, not be impressed by what I did. (Haven’t we seen enough HDR, faux tilt shifts and Lensbaby blurs?)

I don’t achieve this goal every time I go out to shoot. Sometimes I forget. I’m also easily distracted. I’m not like Gregory Crewdson or Cindy Sherman, who create painstakingly detailed settings in which they can control all of the elements in the camera’s view.

Most of my subjects are things you know. My inspirations are photographers like Elliott Erwitt, André Kertész and Evelyn Hofer. Erwitt comes from a photojournalism background. His reporting is superb and touching, and his personal work is infused with good humor. Kertész was a master of giving dignity and independence to everyday subjects and moments. Hofer, who one reporter suggested might be “the most famous ‘unknown’ photographer in America, presents images of places and people that capture the essence of time and space and personality.

“Hey, Chris?” You may be thinking about now. “What does this have to do with mistakes?”

Just hold on. I’m getting there.

I used to think you had to travel to find worthy photo subjects. Now I know how silly such thinking is. Accordingly, I’ve been dedicating most of my photographic time this year to re-examining familiar things and places. The Surf Series is one of the results of this.

The Surf Series is also the result of a mistake.

Last winter I hauled an old, rarely used medium format camera down to the beach to make what I’d hoped would be exquisitely detailed film images of the ocean. But I was so rusty making my settings manually that I ended up with a set of overexposed and underexposed images, all of which were additionally so blurred that I wondered if someone had switched the film.

But those blurred images suggested to me another way of looking at water. And that became the basis of the Surf Series, work that’s given me great satisfaction. If you look at the series as a slide show, you can see how it has progressed progressed from traditional shots into something that was less about the ocean and more about the organic shapes and colors.

A mistake. One of many I’ve made. Only 3,357 more to go.

Bistro Vivienne

Bistro Vivienne, 2006

It was cold in Paris. Winds whipped up mini cyclones of sand in the Tuilleries garden. Rain came and went. Umbrellas blew up and away. My wife and I huddled close together as we walked across the Pont de la Concorde to explore some of the city’s old retail arcades on the rive droite.

The 2nd arrondissement is full of old retail passages. Not as majestic as the gallerias of Milan and Naples, they have a more human scale, like the Burlington and Bond Street arcades in London. It's said there were so many of them in the 19th Century that one could walk across Paris without stepping outside.

By the early 21st Century, though, most were gone and many of those that remained were abandoned, chopped up or otherwise bastardized beyond recognition. A few remained lively and well maintained. One of the latter is the Galerie Vivienne, which has entrances on Rue de Petits Champs, Rue de la Bank and Rue Vivienne. The passage Colbert is in the same block. Galerie Vero Dodet is close by. Both are far quieter than Vivienne.

As so often happens when you travel, our dining habits were all shaken up. We’d have something early in the morning and then have a full lunch and no dinner. Or a late breakfast and no lunch. Or a light lunch, wine and cheese in the late afternoon and a late dinner. Or a late lunch and a late dinner. You get the picture.

Just after 2:00 p.m., my wife informed me that she was ready for lunch. Such pronouncements require immediate action if peace is to be kept in the valley. Right at hand was the Bistro Vivienne (4, rue des Petits Champs). It might not qualify as an officially authentic Parisian bistro—it's not in that charming little book so named—but it quickly won our respect.

We came in out of the cold and were promptly seated. The lunch rush was over. The staff was relaxed. To fortify ourselves for more walking, we ordered salads, steak frites and a bottle of the house red.

I have friends who can remember the taste of any meal they’ve had, or distinguish between wines made from grapes from the same vineyards. But I’m not one of them. I can remember the taste of just a few meals: the sweetness of watermelon for breakfast on the back porch in the summertime when I was a child, baked Arctic char at the old Chez Delmo in Montreal, an exquisite garlic roasted chicken at Los Caracoles in Barcelona, and my wife’s sautéed vegetables from our garden.

That was it until Bistro Vivienne. That blustery day in Paris a new meal was added to the list. Three years later I can still taste that steak, grilled just to the right shade of pink and covered with a grainy pepper and mustard sauce. French beef must be grass-fed because it has a richer taste and rougher texture than beef at home. The potatoes were at once crispy, light and buttery. I can even remember the taste of the Bordeaux.

A few days later, our daughter and her husband passed through Paris on their way to somewhere else. We celebrated her birthday with a fancy dinner at Le Grand Colbert. It was a wonderfully festive evening. But I don’t remember a darned thing about the meal.

Borders

Nogales, Arizona, 2006

We all have borders in our lives. When we’re younger, they’re referred to as “limits” and our parents set them. When we’re older we’re told to “stay within the lines,” and society defines the borders.

I’ve had many fences in my life. Some were metaphorical, and easily toppled when I realized that. The real ones—they come in all sizes and shapes: pickets, wire, stockade, split rail and cast iron—I’ve tried to use sparingly. Good fences can make for good neighbors. But I’ve tried to live in places where good relationships with neighbors didn’t require hard physical barriers. Besides, I’ve been suspicious of fences ever since I fell on a fence post when I was in sixth grade, breaking my nose, deviating a septum and therein becoming one of the youngest snorers in history.

Our first house came surrounded by a hostile and unsightly chain link fence. Within weeks of moving in I started dismantling the chain link fence and replacing it with hedges and, where fencing was necessary, a wooden fence. Almost immediately, neighbors who’d been cool to us up to then warmed up.

Most of the property where we live now is either wooded, covered over with gardens and ground cover or under water. We like our neighbors, but there is enough vegetation between most of us to provide ample privacy. We have only one short run of fence, but even it is hidden behind vegetation.

The photograph of the international border at Nogales, Arizona, above, was taken, coincidentally enough, on the same day that tens of thousands of people in cities throughout the country were protesting the Bush Administration’s stance on immigration. I didn’t know this because I was in my own little self-imposed media blackout, literally walking along the international border in Nogales, a focal point for illegal border crossings so busy that there are frequent roadblocks on the Interstate highway north out of town to check vehicles. I tried to talk with some of the border guards; in Nogales, you’re never out of the sight of one. They were politely professional, but not forthcoming with any casual chat.

There’s another little bit of irony attached to this photograph. A year after I took it I was contacted by a private foundation in Israel, a country that has its own issues with borders and walls. The foundation asked for permission to use the photograph in a new science textbook it provides to all Israeli middle schoolers. I was happy to share the photograph for educational purposes. But I insisted on written assurance that the photograph would be used to advance the cause of breaking down walls between people rather than creating walls between them.

Rebel

Rebel, 2003

I was sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting for novocaine to numb my mouth for a root canal. No matter how good the drugs or gentle the dentist or assured that the procedure would bring an end to what had been a lot of pain, I was having a hard time getting excited about it.

Then I noticed this tree outside the window. (Or maybe it's just a big shrub. Whatever.)

My spirits lifted immediately. Here was nature doing her very best to stick it to the will of man. I’d been coming to this dentist for years, so I remembered how this window had once framed a view of a whole bunch of these trees (or shrubs). But over the years they had either died or been blown down in hurricanes, leaving just this one survivor.

As the dentist drilled away at the roots of my sorry molar, I searched for metaphorical connections between my roots and the tree’s roots. But that journey ended quickly. What did occur to me was that the white building in the background was a juvenile psychiatric treatment facility, where despite efforts of a landscape crew to control it, to keep it shaped and within the lines, left to its own devices for a few months this tree went in search of its own bliss. How many young boys and girls who were feeling painfully out of step with themselves and the world around them do you suppose looked out their windows and saw that tree as a fellow traveler?

Talk about your metaphors.