Threaded Icebergs: An Interview with Adriene Hughes

Threaded Icebergs: An Interview with Adriene  Hughes by Deanna Witman

I first became aware of Adriene’s photographs when she received a number of awards in 2018 for the Threaded Icebergs work. There was something in these photographs that resonated within me so very deeply, perhaps connected to my own area of interest. In 2019, we both attended Photolucida a professional event for photographers in Portland, OR. A mutual acquaintance introduced us, and there was an instant kinship. I want to bring Adriene’s work to our audience.

How did you come to photography as your medium for expression?

Adriene Hughes: I began to study film photography when I was 11 years old and continued that practice through high school.  But when it came to college, rather than pursue an arts degree, I leaned in the direction of literature and poetry.  The construction of words is much like the construction of an image, and literature turned out to be the perfect teacher.  After college I continued to take classes in painting and drawing, and I also learned the craft of quilt making from elder women in my neighborhood. In the end all of these art practices led me to photography as my current expression. It is what informs my work, in the way I approach subject matter, and the way I ultimately see the environment around me.

Was there a specific event that led you to pursue an MFA?

AH: I moved to Boston with my partner and had taken a tour of the Museum School. At that time I didn’t know what conceptual art was, but I discovered on that tour the kind of artwork I made was considered conceptual vs. commercial based photographic work. I felt excited, challenged, and knew it was the right time to apply for a graduate degree. I submitted a portfolio, and was accepted into the program. I was rather naïve about the process of graduate school, and it turned out to be a very challenging time. But what I learned at the Museum school has carried me my whole adult life.

Your multi-portfolio series “Threaded Icebergs” could be interpreted in a number of ways. What do you hope viewers will understand from these images?

AH: With the threaded iceberg series I wanted to speak to what it felt like to be in the Arctic, more than what it looked like to be there.  Sewing into the images helped me express that experience.

How did the experience of spending time in and photographing the Arctic landscape shape your personal connection with the landscape? 

AH: Being in the Arctic felt like coming home to a place I had left long ago. The Arctic came alive for me and I knew I had to communicate that feeling I experienced between spirit and place.  Now I see everything around myself as relational, and my presence within nature is an extension of the whole. 

One of the unique qualities of the work is the handsewn threading—can you speak to the process of threading? What is it like for you, and how do you go about it?

AH: I use my quilting tools: ruler, fine needles, a particular type of quilter’s thread that has tooth and kink. I treat the measurement much like I treat fabric. But the threading is not planned. The image is story, and the geometric design is a building of shape and form, one leading to the other. I reflect on the iceberg, what it felt like to be in front of it, and to tell the story of my engagement. How did the wind feel, what were the conditions, what sounds were floating above, around and over its shape?  The shape and pattern is inherent to the remembrance of my experience. 

Does climate change and the sense of urgency related to the melting of the Arctic direct your work? 

AH: Climate change is an emotional topic.  We can see the loss of the ice shelf as a formidable footprint to the global crisis. Urgency is at the forefront. I believe it’s imperative that I not only document what I see as the truth, but to tell the story through the personal.  And I do that by weaving a narrative of the experiential, through threading the images, as well as using expressive color and light.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

AH: It’s important to travel and to experience the world in order to be informed and have opinions of your work.  If that travel is in your own backyard, then that is where you need to be, but having an experience which takes you outside the confines of your own space is necessary for artistic growth (though Emily Dickinson might disagree). 

 

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Adriene Hughes is a San Diego based fine art photographer with an MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. She is a multi-media artist whose current body of work is based within the genre of grand landscape and the effects of global warming on the environment through the use of infrared technology, photography, and video installation.

Deanna is a Maine transdisciplinary artist working with photographic media. Her creative practice is a merger of inquiry and discovery with that of experimentation and expression.  Her work questions our relationship to the natural world, our place in the universe, and our responsibly to this earth and those who inhabit it. She is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Unity College and the Managing Editor of Hawk & Handsaw – The Journal of Creative Sustainability.

Pillars: Garrigan and Friedlander

Michael Garrigan / Yoav Friedlander

Barrel of Eels

My grandpa told me back before the dams
he’d take a wooden barrel and carve holes
down the sides curving around nails, sun shone
a kaleidoscope of wooden shadows
and coke oven light on diabase rock,
he’d sink those barrels into the river
small weirs
with bait hung inside, nightcrawlers bloody
chicken livers, eels would squirm their way in
moulded pig iron until the morning,
he’d stand on limestone banks and drag barrels
thick rope calloused hands shoveled dead skin shad
scales on top of eels oily river snakes
floating then flailing as the water drained
he’d shove his hand down into the jellied
mess and grab one, nail down its head while
he sliced the top seam with a buck knife, skinning
it for the meat smoked over catalpa
and cherry, now it’s just flathead catfish
carp mercury those eels tasted so good.

 


 

Pittston, PA, 2017, ©Yoav Friedlander

PA-54 Girardville, PA, 2017, ©Yoav Friedlander

 


 

Severance Tax

Vultures pick deer carrion in the gravel edge of Route 81
they mean no harm in their clean up but get no love,
their beaks are made for the job they do.

Dragline excavators and drilling rigs fissure the horizon
steel rails and pendulums offer no buds in spring, rust yearlong.
Anthracite, now Marcellus Shale.

All – flesh, water, rock, dirt, stem –
pay a severance tax for existence.

Some of us band together, use language to make lines on paper
to create larger illusory selves that exist yet can’t be touched
or handcuffed or kissed or made omelettes on a rainy morning,
becoming an incorporated capital W and E and fracture geological lines
and shoot water down encased wellbores, flood the ground, pressure against pressure
to rupture gas, suck it dry, raze whole mountainsides, leaving only smears of burnt coal and gas
hazy like an August day even in December. We let
vultures pick at what’s left, and the individual I and lowercase
we pick up the bill and sweep the anthropogenic debris downstream.

 


 

State Route 901, Coal Township, PA, 2018, ©Yoav Friedlander

Coxton Road, Duryea, PA, 2018, ©Yoav Friedlander

PA-54, Girardville, PA, 2017, ©Yoav Friedlander

 


 

Diadromous

 Catadromous

A mythical west of riprap peaks
pulls into elixir of salt
water trenches, cheap beer bays
blurry steep stairs relentless
pedals pounding up Pittsburgh
inclines no rock to hide under
no fallen tree to slide along
Hand rolled cigarettes clasped
between chapped lips
currents catch pectoral fins
under indiscernible storms
smoke so deep
sunlight can’t reach
eyeshine through thin nylon
tent walls perched in the San Jacintos
the Siskiyou, on granite banks of tarns
vision blurry in each new water
shoulders raw from backpack straps
heavy with clothes, a book, a journal,
a caudal fin relentlessly swaying
back and forth back and forth
I flounder.

Anadromous

A cup of coffee each morning
weekends waxed and waned on water
sometimes a summertime jaunt
to Maine woods. A paycheck every two
weeks, dead batteries, budgets blown
annual floods from hurricanes that clip
us off the coast, from ice jams that thaw
suddenly in fifty degree January afternoons,
from dams that don’t release water
quick enough into the bay.
Deep breathes, dorsal fins
treading before a final run
upstream until we hit a dam
or get pecked by long knife herons, clamped by eagle talons
or we make it to where we started
and we wait and we are there
and we leave what there is left of us and water
recedes eelgrass strapped
across rock husks
drying out spent
insides wither
to dirt.


 

Hazleton, PA, 2018, ©Yoav Friedlander

 

Pittston, PA, 2017, ©Yoav Friedlander

 


 

Robbing the Pillars

Poppy Augustine crawled into the deepest
part of the Shamokin mines as a kid to rob the pillars,
drilling holes into the anthracite, placing dynamite
into walls of stone left to hold up the mountain,
lighting the fuse and running until he was far enough
to sit and wait for the blast
the settle
the quiet
that had to last
at least sixty seconds.             In that silence he made
eye contact with the mule, and if he fell still the oxygen was gone
sucked back to the surface and that meant to chase it. Retreat.
Once that silence was long enough
and those breathes taken
he’d grab his short shovel for his short arms and small hands
and start filling the carts with the blasted coal.

Did he blow out his carbide lamp and rest in that dark silence?
Did he play with dirt between his fingers? Did rocks become
toy trucks in those seconds of possible collapse?

I strand myself in streams and close my eyes
and wait for water crashing collapsing that covers
but does not bury become a silence that settles
onto me the bank the clouds of bugs the breaths of woods
gripping the soil and geology of their seed.

Everything becomes a silence if we give it long enough.

 


 

Coxton Rd, Duryea, PA, 2018, ©Yoav Friedlander

 

 

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Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the banks of the Susquehanna River in southern Pennsylvania. He enjoys exploring the river’s many tributaries with a fly rod and hiking the riverlands. You can find more of his writing at www.raftmanspath.com.

Yoav Friedlander born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1985. He received a B.A in Photographic Communications from Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem in 2011 and left for Queens, New York where he still works and resides. In 2014 Yoav received his MFA from the department of Photography Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The Other: Skaar and Kelly

Anneli Skaar / Mark Kelly

The Other

A Story in Five Parts to Accompany The Other, a photo collage by Anneli Skaar and Mark Kelly.

E PLURIBUS UNUM

It might come as a surprise to some that, even in the 1700s, really important arty stuff was being designed by committee.

The responsibility for creating a great seal for the newly formed United States of America was not immediately handed over to an artist — it was referred to three guys who were on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

In a testament to their wisdom, they soon realized that it might be a good idea to consult with a professional designer. They engaged a recent immigrant as a consultant, Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere, from Switzerland by way of Jamaica. Together, the four of them made several mock-ups, yet each of their proposed designs was immediately and unequivocally rejected by Congress.

In subsequent years two new committees were formed to attempt an approved design concept and both groups hired consultants to do the artwork. In March of 1780, a mediocre effort was submitted, created by Francis Hopkinson, the designer of the flag we know as the Stars and Stripes, but it was rejected. In May of 1782, William Barton, a twenty-eight 

 

year-old heraldry designer, submitted his version of the third committee’s ideas. It was rejected. It wasn’t until Charles Thomson took up the challenge in June of 1782, that the Great Seal as we know it was formed.

An Irish-born immigrant, patriot, and an outspoken critic of slavery, Thomson was a wise man, well-respected by his political peers. Thomson wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1785:

“It grieves me to the soul that there should be such just grounds for your apprehensions respecting the irritation that will be produced in the Southern States by what you have said of slavery. However, I would not have you discouraged. This is a cancer we must get rid of. It is a blot on our character that must be wiped out. If it cannot be done by religion, reason, and philosophy, confident I am that it will be one day by blood.”

He was also involved in the local Delaware and Shawnee Native American tribes, studied their customs and policies, and even assisted in their councils.

Thomson was the Secretary of the Continental Congress for fifteen years. The United States was still without a president 

 


 

and would be until 1789. The government was run by the Continental Congress and functioned both 
as the Executive branch and the Legislative branch. There was only a President of Congress, who was elected by Congress. Thompson’s job as Secretary combined the duties of Department of State, Secretary of the Senate, and Clerk of the House of Representatives. Thomson’s name was synonymous with honor and wisdom, and his signature on congressional documents would be met with respectful murmurs of, “Here comes the Truth.”

Thompson drew his rough sketch of notion for the Great Seal without group input. He incorporated elements from all three previous groups’ ideas. The drawing was quite good for one who wasn’t a professional artist, loosely sketched as if on a napkin, and the image is undeniably recognizable as the version we see today on everything from money to passports. His design was proposed to Congress entirely on the basis of its written description, only later to be realized visually by a variety of different artists. His text reads:

On a field … Chevrons composed of seven pieces on one side & six on the other, joined together at the top in
such wise that each of the six bears against or is supported by & supports two of the opposite side the pieces of the chevrons on each side alternate red & white. The shield born on the breast of an American Eagle on the wing & rising proper. In the dexter talon of the Eagle an Olive branch & in the sinister a bundle of Arrows. Over the head of the Eagle a Constellation of Stars surrounded with bright rays and at a little distance clouds. Motto In the bill of the Eagle a scroll with these words E pluribus unum.

The eagle’s head points to its right, as freedom favors peace.
 The written proposal was presented to Congress on June 20th, 1782, and immediately ratified.
 Never codified by law, E pluribus unum was the unofficial motto of the United States until 1956 when Congress passed an act adopting “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the country. This was at the height 
of McCarthyism and the Cold War. What is not commonly known is that the words E pluribus unum had been established very early on in the first committee’s sketch as a potential motto for the new nation, and it was inspired by a surprising source.

Some believed the Latin text came from Cicero’s De Officiis, Circero’s treatise on human obligations and his thoughts on basic family and social bonds as the origin of societies and states. “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.”

However, it is more widely assumed—and more easily proven—that it was appropriated from “The Gentleman’s Magazine,” a well known and very popular London publication since the 1730s, read by the colonies’ educated class well into the 1770s. On its title page were the italicized words E Pluribus Unum, accompanied by a woman’s hand, offering a nosegay of flowers.

The flowers are an assortment; none of the illustrated blooms are the same and they are tied together with a loose knot of ribbon. It is a surprisingly delicate offering, a symbol of the

 


 

 ideal of coexistence, unity, and also individuality. Its visual symbolism is a far cry from the powerful grasp of eagles’ talons.

The text next to the bouquet reads in Latin—as the hand hands the gift from one to the other— “Out of many, one.”

 

THE STARLING

One spring day in 1890, a man and a group of his supporters let sixty birds loose in New York City’s Central Park. Forty more birds would follow the next year. The man’s name was Eugene Schieffelin, and the birds were European Starlings.

Eugene had decided to populate New York with every bird mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. Why this seemed like a good idea to him and his helpers remains a mystery. What can be safely asserted is that Mr. Schieffelin was quite the romantic and had way too much time on his hands. It is worth noting that Starlings are only mentioned once in Shakespeare’s plays, in Henry IV. Starlings have excellent mimicry skills—both in behavior and in calls, making them incredibly adaptable. Shakespeare’s lines are for

Hotspur, the charismatic Sir Henry Percy, as he plans to drive his enemy crazy with the constant mention of the name of a foe:

But I will find him when he lies asleep,
 And in his ear I’ll holla ‘Mortimer!’
 Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak

Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him To keep his anger still in motion.

I assume that the sixty birds, having made the long, arduous journey by boat from Europe, would have first been shocked to find themselves set loose in the bucolic setting of Central Park, itself only created a little over forty years before—a vast green lung in the midst of the growing metropolis. The 1890s was a time of anxiety: economic, political, and social—boundaries stretched to the limits by the massive influx of immigrants. The air would have already been touched by the filthy, black smoke introduced by rapidly expanding industry. In 1890, the population of the US was 63 million, a number that was compounding fast, wheels and engines churning.

However unlikely, I do like to imagine the starlings first getting their bearings and then rising far up, circling the park en masse, only to swoop down and around again, in that beautiful formation that starlings are known for: the murmuration.

 


 

Murmurations are named for the murmuring sound, presumably the sound the wings make as the birds swirl
like a black cloud. Sort sol, the black sun, as the Danes call it—is when a million starlings might hover at dusk
over the low—lying bogs and marshes and completely block out the sunset. The tips of their wings touch as the 
flock swoops left, then right, then left again—always following the lead of their closest neighbors, the formation designed to confuse predators. The shape shifts in the sky like a liquid or a mesmerizing fluid dance. I’ve never seen a murmuration but I imagine it looks like a brewing storm.

The problem is, for all its adaptability and sociability within its own species, the starling is a problem bird. As starlings raid other species nests to deposit their own eggs, the population grows. And grows. So successful was the European starling in occupying Central Park at the turn of the century that by present day, it has invaded every state in the union and beyond all borders north and south. Today, the population of starlings in the United States is 200 million. It was once suggested that a tasty starling recipe might be created to take a bite out of the population, but unfortunately starlings taste like crap.

In the Sonoran desert of Southern Arizona, the starlings have become a serious problem. The species have ousted the Gila

woodpecker out of their nesting hollows in the saguaro cacti—the 200-year-old giants who have witnessed centuries of shifting borders and contentious claims to the ownership of these lands—their prickled arms thrown up in exasperation.

This was Mexico not so long ago. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 secured land for further expansion west with a transcontinental railroad along the southern border. The signatory on the purchase, James Gadsen, was the grandson of Christopher Gadsen, the general and politician who designed the iconic “Don’t Tread On Me” flag during the American Revolution—the coiled rattlesnake then considered as much a symbol of the spirit of the United States 
as the eagle. That flag has enjoyed something of a resurgence lately, co-opted by the conservative far right. The serpentine trains for which the Gadsden Purchase secured the rails, still undulate slowly across the desert, laden with steel containers.

Along the most deadly desert corridors of the Arizona border with Mexico, poor migrants flock to begin their emigration north. It didn’t use to be like this, the funneling of people through a deterrent section of the border
—a hostile terrain where Nature itself can easily and casually kill them. Border patrol checkpoints are now set up strategically along the main roads and within the 100 mile rule of border enforcement, forcing migrants to walk
up to 80 miles into the desert

 


 

 to avoid them—deep into wildlife preserves and military bombing ranges. In the 
past decade, thousands have died along these corridors, but the exact numbers are unknown. The organic matter 
of a human being decomposes completely in three weeks under the Sonoran sun; bones turn completely to dust in one and a half years. Many bodies are never found, simply absorbed into the dry earth like water. Of those that are found, many are never identified and will never be reunited with their families. The cooperation and coordination between humanitarian aid groups and law enforcement has broken down over the past few years, due to the current administration’s directives. As a result of the new policies, there are fewer migrants but a higher number of deaths.

The civilian militia are prevalent as well, encouraged and validated by the increasingly audible murmurs of the current administration. You see NO MILITIA signs in small town storefronts here. No one locally wants the people with the big trucks and the fake machine gun turrets mounted to their flatbeds taking the law into their own hands. A few years ago, members of a militia group targeted a local man, mistakenly suspecting him of drug smuggling. They shot him, his wife, and his 8-year-old daughter. The wife survived.

Starlings are fair game and may be shot on site. They don’t belong here, they say. They have sailed across the ocean and now they fly right across our borders and into our homes.

They are taking food, they spread filth. They are foreigners who must be stopped.

Others say they that this is nothing new. They say the Europeans have invaded this land and displaced those who were here before them and aggressively claimed all this land for themselves. Shooting these birds won’t help much. It will make things worse.

In the words of William Shakespeare, it keeps our anger still in motion.

 

ST. MICHAEL

As we process prints out in the desert, outside a small border town, we feel a bit vulnerable. Every third car is border patrol. We know we aren’t doing anything wrong, but our very presence seems illicit.

“I really hope no one stops,” Mark says.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it would be interesting. I mean, we’re not doing anything illegal. It’s just art.” 
Mark shakes his head. 
Sure enough, 

 


 

a white truck with its distinctive green line slows down and stops on the trail. A cloud of red dust billows up behind it as it brakes. The window rolls down.
 I grab the bull by the horns and walk up to talk to the agent before they even get out of the car. Surprisingly, it turns out to be a woman, in her sixties, perhaps Latina. A velcroed strip of webbing above her jacket pocket reads: G. RAMOS.

“What are y’all doing out here?” she asks. Friendly. Wary.

“We’re artists. We’re making prints. Cyanotypes. We use water and the sun to process them. About 20 minutes for one print.” I hesitate before I ask: “Would you like to come see us make one?”

“Sure.” She unbuckles and steps out of the vehicle. 5.11 tactical boots on the ground. She hitches up a duty belt brimming with gear: Handcuffs, baton, taser, radio, Maglite, 11-round magazine clips and a Beretta 96D “Brigadier” pistol. We walk over to the processing area. Mark, nodding hello, has quite possibly shit his pants.

“See, this is what we do,” I say, showing her the watercolor paper. It’s greyish-green like the landscape, having been exposed to the Arizona sun. I hand it to Mark.

“Mark?” “What?”
 “Go ahead and show agent Ramos what we’re doing.”
 Mark dunks the crisp, thick sheet of paper in the pan of water to stop the exposure, and rinses it carefully with his fingers. He adds some hydrogen peroxide and the image of the starling blooms instantly from grey to a deep blue. Agent Ramos looks delighted.

“You see here, it’s a starling. An invasive species. But what is an invasive species, really? See the talons? It has the Virgin of Guadalupe and a coyote bone in one and the St. Michael pendant and the arrows in the other. Like the Great Seal of the United States. Both sides of the coin, you know?”

Agent Ramos looks thoughtful.
“Like your badge,” I add. 

“May I photograph it?” 
She hesitates for a moment.


“Okay. Why not.”
 Mark is holding his breath.


“You see these symbols?” I say, pointing at the soft patch, “It’s like this seal in the photo.”
 She nods—sideways—as though to agree, kind of. We say our goodbyes and finish our printing. We are relieved.

 


 

She seemed to like us.
 The area along the border of Arizona and Mexico has the highest presence of law enforcement in the entire country. In addition, the Yuma sector has the Marine training center, and close by is the Army bombing range. I-8 running east-west through Yuma, is studded with checkpoints.

When you are in line at a checkpoint, you drive up to someone who is looking at something—gauging someone—far behind you when he says, hello. His split-second evaluation of you is already done. “Have a great day.” Judgment made.

St. Michael is the patron saint of the military and law enforcement. This archangel traditionally has four duties: To wage battle against evil; to save the souls of the faithful; to protect the People of God; and to lead the dead from this life and present them to God for judgment. Medallions and pendants show the image of St. Michael wearing armor, wielding a sword or spear, and standing triumphantly on a serpent or some other symbol of the devil. He is often shown holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life. St. Michael is also the patron saint of the border patrol. Deter, Detect, and Apprehend.

“They rotate the border patrol officers often because they don’t want them to become too friendly or familiar with the

locals,” one man told us in Arivaca, just north of the Mexican border. “If they know you, it’s more difficult to 
be tough.” He lives in a town overrun by law enforcement, with a temporary checkpoint that feels more and more permanent.

It was late when we landed in Yuma earlier this week. We dumped all of our things in our motel rooms and
 didn’t have to drive further than a few blocks through the stripped down concrete slab of downtown before we saw the bar with the neon sign. It looked exactly as you’d hope such an establishment would look—like a rusty box of cheap junk in the very back of the garage, lit up with the bright blinking colors of a child’s toy. Strangely familiar, yet altogether strange. The kind of bar you can find anywhere, if you look. Two red felt-covered pool tables, and
 the accumulated bric-a-brac arranged like elaborate religious shrines amongst the bottles. Only a few people were at the darker end of the longish bar, and a cheerful but tired looking lady who was probably younger than she looked brought us beers and tequila shots. Short of driving the short distance across the border to San Diego, geographically we couldn’t be much farther away from Maine.

Later, a few more people filled the seats at the long counter. A group of young men, clearly military or border patrol, ended up on our end, their professions betrayed by their bold and cocky demeanor, good posture, and clean cut hair, high and tight. Loud but cheerful, they had a alpha vibe that you 

 


 

felt could dial either way. They might just come over and slap you on the back, their tan and powerful bodies crushing you in a bear hug. Alternately, a conversation could go wrong and someone might end up thrown over the bar and into the glassed-in stagecoach model above the extensive tequila selection. Mark and I are both a bit wary around this type of energy. It’s like we were sweating empathy and Bernie slogans out of our pores.

There was some activity on the other end of the bar and then Lana, the bartender, came back down to our end and handed us all small plastic tokens for free drinks.

“The gentleman at the end of the bar is buying this next round,” she said.

Mark went to the jukebox in the corner with a wad of dollar bills, and began to line up a playlist. Mark moonlights as a DJ, and his musical sophistication ranks above most mortals. The jukebox was digital, and the access to music was universal. He could choose anything. Pretty soon, a song started blaring out of the shitty speakers, one that had clearly never been played in here ever before, not at this dive nor on this particular strip, ever, in the history of Yuma. Lana perked up and nodded. “You picked that?” Reggae. An obscure 80s punk band. Soon, “Blue Moon” came on.

“What is this?” I asked when Mark came back to the bar, out

of cash. I was genuinely intrigued. The lyrics I knew, of course. But the wooden, hollow knocking, the splintered opening, and the soft cry of a voice was eerily unfamiliar.

“Elvis,” Mark said. “Probably his best recording ever and hardly anyone knows it.”

An older gentleman and his wife had moved up to our end of the bar to chat with the young marines at our end. He pulled out a couple of dollar bills and asked if there was any Johnny Cash on the jukebox.

“It’s coming,” Mark said. “It’s in the line up.”

The marines were gently flirting with the older man’s wife, who was giggling at all the attention, her crooked humpback resting against the bar. Her eyes sparkled. Her husband was a veteran and he started to ask questions of the youngsters who were billeted at the local Marine Corps Air Station.

“What do you guys do over there,” I leaned over and asked one of the men, the quietest one in the group. Young and a bit more shy than the rest, he reminded me of my son.

“Sweating and flying,” he said, “It’s just like Afghanistan here. Good for training. HEY! I’ll buy this lady a drink.” He pointed at me and I got another free drink chip. I had already

 


 

 

cashed in my first one for a fourth shot. Strangely enough, I felt completely fine.

Learning that we were from Maine, a marine named Justin cornered Mark. He wanted to know about lobster. How do you catch it? Was Mark a lobsterman? Mainers must all be lobstermen.

“No, no, no,” Mark had said. “I’m not a lobsterman. I do building work. Tile work.” “Do you build houses?” 
“I have built houses. In the past…but…I’m here as an artist–”
 “Could you build my house? Could I hire you? I need someone to manage the workers.” “Here? In Yuma?” Mark asked incredulously. “I don’t…”

“No, dude. In Texas. I’m totally serious, man. I don’t trust anyone. I trust you, though. You’re from Maine. You could come make sure my house gets built. Keep the workers in line and just make sure it gets done. Gimme your phone number. Here’s mine…”

I noticed Justin was wearing a small silver medallion. I knew what it was before I even asked. The oval silver St. Michael medallion gleamed on his chest like the moon.

COYOTES AND VIRGINS

“That was a coyote,” Mark says.

We’re driving the I-8 from Yuma, skirting the northern border of the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range. The road is endless; the landscape is an immutable backdrop of washed out grey green, like an old faded photograph. A rusty fence parallels us all along the way. It’s spiked, but doesn’t look particularly difficult to squeeze through. I’ve read that there are entire mock towns in the vast range contained by this fence, towns designed to look like middle eastern villages, with houses and mosques. Sometimes migrants stumble across these houses and use them as shelters, which for obvious reasons is risky in itself. Humanitarian aid workers need a permit to enter the area to leave water and supplies, or to recover bodies. It is a permit which is increasingly difficult to obtain. The number of corpses found in the 1.9 million acre range is generally considered to be vastly underreported.

I screech to a stop, squint at the image in my rear view mirror, shift to R for rewind and back up about 200 feet along the shoulder, to where the dead animal lies in the road. 
I’ve never seen a coyote before, not even in Maine. This one is flat as a mat, but strangely crushed as though it were still in motion, still running across the two-lane road. Mark makes a joke about Wile E. Coyote and an anvil and I laugh. As

 


 

we get closer we can see the bones and intestines pressed out between shreds of blood-matted grey fur. It’s not really the fierce animal I thought it would be, and that’s disconcerting. Both Mark and I stop joking. Maybe we’re both a little embarrassed at our flippancy.

In the noon heat the flies are ecstatic and buzzing all over it. We don’t know it yet, but the stench will stay with us for a long time on this trip. We poke around the side of the road.

Humanitarian aid is not a crime, but littering is, and besides trespassing, it’s often the argument against leaving water bottles in these areas. Also, water might just help drug mules get to their destination. This is true. The problem is that these couriers are often destitute themselves; the long journey by foot carrying marijuana on their backs is their hazardous and hard won ticket out. “We don’t judge the motivation,” the aid workers say. “We just want to prevent human suffering and death.” So they place water in the desert. Water for anyone who needs it. It doesn’t matter who the migrants are.

In January of 2018, the humanitarian organization, No More Deaths, posted a video on social media of Arizona border patrol agents slashing water bottles that had been placed in the desert. Mocking the videographer, they poured out the water gleefully on camera. A few hours after this film went viral, a man—Scott Warren, a professor at Arizona State University and a volunteer with No More Deaths—was

arrested for harboring migrants, a felony charge.

We’ll attend the court hearing this week. The defense will be filing a motion to gain access to evidence in this case—a request for the release of email records showing that this was a targeted arrest. We will be entering the courtroom, surrounded by 13 screens showing the Great Seal of the United States. The judge, after listening to both sides will ask the defense, without a hint of irony: “Where is it written that humanitarian aid is not a crime?”

Small tin or silver pendants bearing the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe often accompany migrants on their journeys. The story goes that in 1531, near the village of Guadalupe, Mexico, the Virgin Mary appeared to an indigenous farmer named Juan Diego and asked him to build for her a house on a hill. He told the archbishop of this apparition and was not believed. So the Virgin Mary told the farmer to gather roses from the top of the hill to bring to the bishop. Although it was winter and roses were not in season, Juan Diego found them in bloom and collected the blossoms in his cloak, and when the roses tumbled out at the feet of the archbishop, a life sized brown-skinned image of the Virgin Mary was found on the inside of Jaun Diego’s cloak.

Mark and I find an unbelievable amount of junk along the strip of land between the road and the rusty fence. Stuff that seems unlikely to have been thrown 30 feet from a

 


 

 

moving vehicle. An incredible number of water bottles lie abandoned under creosote bushes, and I find a pair of cheap polyester pants. I’m tempted to check the pockets for a personal item, maybe a Guadalupe pendant or even a rosary, but I’m not enthusiastic about the prospect of discovering a scorpion or a spider in there. I read that as migrants reach the highway and catch the ride that their guide – or coyote – has arranged for them, they often discard all unnecessary belongings at the side of the road.

Protegernos, say the Guadalupe pendants. “Pray for us.”

“Look over here,” Mark says. He’s off to my right and is pointing to something on the ground. It’s glowing like a precious gem. It’s urine in a plastic bottle, glistening in the sun. The reality and desperation of this crossing is suddenly very evident, and Mark and I are silent.

Later, I send my son an image of the dead coyote on the road. He’s in Maine, and I promised to send him some odd photos from my trip.

“Oh. I thought a coyote would be bigger, like a wolf,” he texts me back.
 They are not so big, I explain. They are not much like wolves, more like dogs. They are strangely familiar.

THE DAHLIA

The dahlia is a particularly hardy genus of flower. Blooming well into October, when most flowers have succumbed to the cold here in Maine, the dahlia is unfazed by the cool autumn weather in the Northeast. I picked up a huge bunch at a stand just outside of town, and they look as enthusiastic as if it were a hot July day. The flowers of the forty-two species of dahlias can range from a two-inch tight pom-pom to a one-foot-wide dinner plate size. None of the blooms I bought were the same, and they were bunched together in Ball jars filled with water. I bought several bunches, so seduced was I by their variety and bright colors.

The dahlia is native to Mexico, and their tubers were originally cultivated as food and as medicine by the Aztecs, who called them “water pipe flowers,” but the practice faded after the Spanish conquest. The word pinnata, derived from the Latin word pinna, means “wing,” and the strong hollow stems can easily support even the largest of these feathery blooms.

In 1789, at the same time that Mexico’s neighbor to the north was instating its new constitution, the Director of the Botanical Garden in Mexico City sent this beautiful, native flower to Antonio Jose Cavanilles, the director of the Royal Gardens of Madrid. After some trial and error, Cavanilles was able to grow the flower consistently and successfully.

Cavanilles named the plant for Anders Dahl, a popular

 


 

Swedish naturalist whose work in hybridization had paved the way for the dahlia’s success throughout Europe as botanists, taxonomists, and growers sent documented and undocumented seeds to France, Holland, and Great Britain. Soon, there were more than 85 species, and it became more and more difficult to differentiate one from another. Eventually they would be classified by two color groups: Group I (ivory-magenta) or Group II (yellow-orange-scarlet).

There were dahlias for sale in Nogales, the mountain city split in two along Arizona’s border with Mexico. Mark and I had headed there from Tuscon in the early morning. We drove over the mountains of Route 82 and stopped to stare slack-jawed at an isolated parking area where hundreds of border patrol trucks were fenced in with barbed wire and surrounded by some of the most beautiful, desolate mountain landscape we had ever seen. By the time we dipped down into the outskirts of Nogales, it was 9:00 am and well into a bustling Wednesday morning.

Nogales used to be one city. In 1918, a Mexican civilian crossed back into Mexico after avoiding interrogation on the U.S. side and all hell broke loose, resulting in what is known as the Battle of Ambos Nogales. Fueled by anger on the Mexican side due to the killings of border crossers by the U.S. Army, there was a gunfight and even the Mayor was shot while he waved a white handkerchief tied to his cane. The

precise location of the official border at the time was vague at best, but in the aftermath of the battle the first permanent border fence was built down the middle of the city.

Today there is Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona. The wall is huge, almost out of scale with a town that seems small and almost quaint.

Mark and I had been told of a good place to park our rental car on the U.S. side so that we could walk into Mexico. So distracted were we by the massive, red-rusted steel fence snaking its way right up against houses along the hillside off to our left, that by the time we got our bearings, we had been funneled through a one-way gate and were face-to-face with a smiling officer.

I buzzed down my window.

“Good morning, officer” I said, sheepishly. “Where am I supposed to park so I can walk over to the Mexican side?” I hoped I didn’t sound too idiotic. Mark was rolling his eyes.

“Señora, you are in Mexico. Bienvenidos!” He pointed me toward a parking spot just beyond the gate.

 


 

“Well, that was easy,” Mark said, climbing out of the car, stretching, and looking around for somewhere we could grab a quick breakfast amongst all the cheap store fronts. I was dumbfounded, and keenly aware of the fact that our vehicle was not actually insured in Mexico. On the wall in front of the car the Great Seal of Mexico, formed in steel and painted with bright colors, welcomed us.
 The Mexican seal features an eagle, its talons grasping a snake and a cactus. The imagery refers to the legend that the Aztecs would know where to build their city when they saw an eagle eating a snake at the top of a lake. The lake in the seal is represented by the Aztec symbol for water, atl tlachinolli, which really has a dual meaning that means war—water and scorched earth.

After a quick breakfast of huevos with chorizo consumed under the watchful eyes of a plastic Virgin of Guadalupe statue, we survived a friendly assault by the salesmen of the local souvenir shops and were back in the car and ready to head north. One mile and a U-turn later we were in a bumper-to-bumper line to return to the United States.

Window washers, toy and candy hawkers, newspaper salesmen, paraplegic beggars and flower sellers, strolled and cajoled among the cars inching their way toward the checkpoint. It took two hours. Mark got a large plastic Guadalupe statue.

“What a life,” I said to Mark. “Can you imagine having to do this every day?” One particularly scrappy kid was at our

window with a pile of local Mexican newspapers. Mark rolled down his window and bought two. After disappearing for a while the boy returned, opened the page of the newspaper to the sports section and wanted to discuss soccer with Mark, which they did at length.

An old man in a remote desert town some miles north of the border had told us about the migrants who regularly show up on his doorstep. They are invariably dehydrated and in need of urgent medical attention after the miles
 and miles of walking. A simple blister can become a death sentence in the desert. Desert bandits—often Mexican nationals themselves—rob migrants of their last resources. Some are raped or killed—sometimes by the very coyotes they paid to protect them. Some travel alone, with little to lose. Many begin their walk outside of border towns just like Nogales.

The man up north had told us, “Once I had three visits in three months. Younger people. Really kind, polite people, not all these drug smugglers you hear about. People who have been abandoned by their coyotes and who were pretty much done. In those situations you don’t have very much time to decide what you’re going to do. Once I saw a girl along the side of the road, and I picked her up. I knew I could get in really big trouble. She looked like 
a little kid, like she was fourteen. Sometimes in your life you are met with a choice that is fairly black and white. For me, I know what is the right thing to do for me. I know I can go to jail for it, but it’s an

 


 

obvious choice. I know people who feel the same way as I do, who are doctors and nurses and who can help.”

He continued, “We all talk about the Mexico and the United States, but we don’t talk about the third nation.”

The third nation is the one right on the border, he said. The third nation is where the dirt and dust intermingles over the line in the sand and the birds fly across migrating north and south as they have always done. It’s where students cross to go to school, people go to shop, and to work. Where the people know each other and know they are the same. The third nation is the Other nation.

Mark and I returned to the United States side of the massive fence at Nogales without incident. The blond agent who interviewed us was friendly but firm, giving Mark an extra once-over on account of his darker, olive skin, before waving us through. The American flag and its bright colors waved at us cheerfully from the parking lot of a McDonalds as we 

drove north.

There’s an expression that was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, not that long before the Battle of Ambo Nogales: “The narcissism of small differences.” It’s a thesis which describes a pathology: the closer two communities or individuals are, the more they exaggerate the differences between them in order to retain their individuality. This happens in loving relationships, in consumer culture, in our relations with other nations, with those different than us. It happens at our borders, in regard to the other. If we see the other as part of ourselves, we feel we might lose our own identity.

In 1963, the Dahlia pinnata would be designated as the national flower of Mexico. It is a member of the family 
of Asteraceae plants, whose flowers look like one bloom with many petals. Asteraceae refers to its appearance of a star with surrounding rays. However, this type of flower does not have individual petals at all. They are actually made up of many, very small, separate flowers that appear as a singular beautiful bloom. It’s just an illusion, you see. They are all one.

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Mark Kelly and Anneli Skaar recently completed a collaborative project at the Arizona/Mexico border around the themes of passports, identity, and compassion. Mark Kelly is a multimedia, visual artist, and educator. Anneli Skaar is a painter, graphic designer, writer, and the Creative Director at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Poetry: Langfur & Riff

Charlene Langfur / Paula Riff

 

©Paula Riff, “Ginkgo’s Folly,” from the series Shibui, 16×10”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

 


 

Trying to Do The Right Thing Even When It Doesn’t Matter

My 13 pound honey colored dog and I are out walking
under the blood colored moon in the middle of summer,
under the ashes from the fire in Cranston.
Today the fire is on the other side of the mountains in 119 degrees
and this is the way of it now for those of us here near the old oasis,
troubles and omens around us, I call them signs and move on
but they are everywhere I look, past the fat old palm trees,
trees overwhelmed with their own fronds, burgeoning leaves, carrying
weight, trees trying to stick to a life plan, and we walk past the scrub pine,
and wild yucca in near bloom, whatever made it through the hottest
most humid of summers, here where life continues as if no change
is actually taking place in the world, as if no shifting to solar and low water use
is an imperative, nor focusing  on what is needed most in order to make it through to what is
we know we need in the future. We walk easy along the sand, a familiar sand path along
the canyon’s edge, each of us breathing in the darkening air as if it is easy
to react to what is around us, and we do our best to adapt to a new world.
I am of the mind to help with the earth changes around us. It is because
of the way I am, trying no matter what the odds. As I walk I plan
for low water gardens, calendula, aloe, planting a sweet orange nasturtium bed,
colors to enchant the heart when nothing else will, a plan to plant seeds to grow herbs
and flowers and to save the seeds for next year, for dreams and succulence.
Later I think we can walk through all the heat wave’s bad air
to the other side of it as if there is a door, past the wild air of trouble around us
which seems to have no end. Talk in Washington is we do not have the resources
to change what is happening, no money to help humans and animals.
But money is piling up, monopoly style, higher and higher. Green paper, gold bricks,
all that. This tender we use to represent our real needs in life.
My dog and I move on, speed up a little, waiting for what comes next.
The fire finally to be put out, or the air to turn even poorer. Tomorrow
we will pile all our recycling in the car to bring to the recycling plant
and we’ll buy up more seeds to plant for the next season. Planning to give back
and live with less. We head home, any way that works, here in the same world
we were both born to, with its earth and water and here where we think we can keep it safe
by changing our ways to plan for whatever comes next. We know how to make it home,
walking hard, reaching out far as we can until we catch hold
turn the key in the door, make it all right again for one more day. 

©Paula Riff, “Snapped & Crackled,” from the series Shibui, 8×20”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

©Paula Riff, “Indigo Dreams,” from the series Shibui, 16×20”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018


 

©Paula Riff, “Because of Sunflowers,” from the series Shibui, 8×20”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

Signs of Life

What survives the big summer heat in the desert always catches my eyes.
It’s easier to see the gains and losses here than everywhere else,
here where there are endless stretches of sand and the lavender survives at 117 degrees.
I am not sure how it does it but I see how what survives encourages me to thrive along
with it as if we are all part of the same life force. I see the plants grow, with such insistence
in spite of everything, taking what they need and letting everything else go.
Today I feel my life feels stronger as I am able to hold up against the force of the heat.
The rabbits bolting from behind the mesquite, I watch them carefully to keep them in my sight,
movement from out of complete stillness. All at once they disappear in thin air and never look back.
I see how fragile we all are here, here where the giant century plant takes 20 years to grow
and poachers bleed them dry to make the littlest bit of tequila. Here where the moon rises
over the mountains as if perfectly timed. I see how what grows here tells us more
about our future than we may want to know, how our government turns a blind eye to it all,
ignoring advances in solar, wind, anything that works to save what we have now for the years ahead.
Here in the desert it’s easy to see the advances needed. See what we need to do next.
This morning the cactus was in bloom, a single flower reaching out on a single stem
of its own, only inches in diameter, lotus like, full blooming with crème colored jewels,
a near impossible sight, I think, rare, miraculous, something from nothing even in times like these.

 


 

A Simple Life with What is Here

Today my plants became a way of life
for me. Transplanting the lavender takes time.
$3.00 on sale a Home Depot. Can you imagine
my good fortune? I dig up the dirt from an unused lot
and carry it home. A shovel full at a time.
Set the plant on top of the dirt with a half inch
to spare on the sides of the plant’s roots. Room to grow.
A rule of thumb for a job like this. Getting the room
it needs exactly right matters. And picking off the old growth to lighten
it up. I can smell the lavender on my hands and arms
as I work through the delicate leaves to thin them out.
And when the plants grow I know I will feel richer, protected.
Already I see how the plant takes to the pot quickly, how it settles in,
protecting itself, how the leaves are a sweet green, and I am sure
the healing color will help me live as the plant grows. That is how full life
starts here. From branch to root, everything I’ve put to a new life
more than I know.

©Paula Riff, “Beneath Her Feet,” from the series Shibui, 11×15”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

 


 

 

©Paula Riff, “Night Garden,” from the series Shibui, 11×15”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

 

©Paula Riff, “Day Glo,” from the series Shibui, 16×20”, Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

Catching After the Light

The heart takes me to where I feel at my best today,
helps me find a way for me to connect to a human place,

a path for me to follow when there is no other way

find a few words for what runs too deep for me to describe,
a simple way out,
a way for the 10,000 thoughts
the mind comes up with every day, to take me where I want to go,
thoughts that help keep me afloat

thoughts about saving what we have, gathering small seeds
getting ready for another season, tending the aloe plants for healing,

especially the soft, nubile ones,
take to what is around me in the dirt to help me start over no matter how much
I want to stick with the past and not move ahead,
I push forward on solid ground, gather what works,
the morning coffee, sweet red strawberries

looking for a path with patience to it,
today I’ve spent a good part of the day watching the road runner
idling on the back porch, the opal feathers glistening in the sun,

and the purple headed lizard
watching me from behind a rock and running off when
the time is right. It knows the exact moment to take off.
I feel better with them, the small animals
and the path we were on together, waiting for the earth to lighten up again

as if there is more to all our connections than we know in our bones,
staying true, sleeping long, catching after the light

one day another night until we know exactly how
to do it again and then again until it works.

 


 

©Paula Riff, “River Wild,” from the series Shibui, 16×10”, Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate Print, 2018

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Charlene Langfur is an organic gardener, a rescued dog advocate, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her poems are about the environment and how we all need to make changes. Her most recent publication is in Still Point Arts Quarterly, called “Chasing Home.”

Paula Riff creates cameraless images using the processes of cyanotype and color gum bichromate as a way to physically interact with the natural world as an artist.  She cuts the paper at various intersections which allows her to enter the conversation with the images in a very intimate way. Her intention is to strip away as much as possible so that she can focus more on the elements of design and consider elements of nature in a different way.

Shibui. The Japanese word shibui refers to a particular aesthetic of simple, subtle and unobtrusive beauty and it is this concept that reflects the spirit of this series, Shibui.  An object of art that employs these characteristics may at first appear to be simple, but upon closer inspection the subtle details and textures balance that simplicity with a rich complexity.

(Dis)place: Lyons and Lampton

Bridget A. Lyons/ Adam Lampton

Home on the Wing

When I blow out my birthday candles or find a fallen eyelash, I wish for a home. Some people in their forties may have outgrown this childhood superstition, but I feel like I need to hang on to anything that gives me hope—like the butterflies I’ve come to envy, who band together in clusters several thousand strong.
A boardwalk leads to their favorite gathering place. Unlike the more famous boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California, this one is quiet, shady, and secluded. It winds through a thick grove of trees where sunlight intermittently penetrates the foliage, allowing for the identification of a eucalyptus, a laurel, or a bay. Their greens are muted—dark sage, dusky olive, frosted pine—and the leaves themselves are thick and waxy, built to survive California’s dry summers. Frogs sing from their hiding spots in the swamp below, laying a melody over the irregular beat of footsteps on the wooden planks. And then there is the richly layered landscape of smell. It is a potpourri of the sweet and spicy eucalyptus magic that tickles the nose, a combination of the earthy odor of the swamp’s decomposing biomass and the pungent salt air that wafts in from the ocean, just a quarter of a mile away.
They are just around the corner, at the boardwalk’s end—thousands of them. Danaus plexippus, monarch butterflies. If it’s warm enough—fifty-five degrees and above—the air is thick with flight. Flashes of orange and black dash, dart, jerk, and jitterbug in every direction at every visible elevation. While the flying ones are most obvious, there are others, hovering as they drink from puddles between the tree trunks or wet patches on the planks. There are motionless ones too, resting on branches—right-side-up and upside-down, at every angle. And, unless the day is very warm, many of them are still clinging to one another, collectively hanging in clumps, resting in warmth and safety.
Once I located their winter hangout, visiting these migratory insects became part of my daily life. Their movements—flutters, dips, dives, and swoops—convinced me that insects must feel joy because joy is what I experienced while watching them. I also found myself admiring their community-oriented approach to survival; their clustering behavior protected the many at the expense of just a few.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

 

Before my last move, I had made a list of what I wanted in a new hometown—access to open space, a good swimming pool, regular farmers’ markets, progressive values. Santa Cruz fit the bill. I tested the waters with a month-long sublet, and, when I didn’t want to leave, I signed a one-year lease for an apartment down the street. It was a two-room back portion of a 1911 house with a kitchenette tucked into a former bedroom closet and a stained-glass window embedded in the front door. I spent sizeable chunks of my days in there, editing documents and assembling newsletters for my clients, occasionally looking up from my computer to observe the pattern of daily life in my little neighborhood, Beach Hill.
I made a habit of walking every day, always starting under the neighbor’s ginkgo tree with its exotic-looking leaves—the ones carved in the shape of Ginsu knives. Just beyond it were a couple of bush-sized jade plants and a twenty-foot long rosemary hedge. I marveled at both of them, having grown up in New Jersey where jades live indoors in small plastic pots and rosemary is confined to glass bottles on the spice rack. At the end of the block, I’d turn and cut through the parking lot of the Art Deco motel, heading downhill past the bowling alley to the Boardwalk—the famous one, with the historic carousel and rickety wooden roller coaster. Eventually, I’d make my way out onto the beach, stopping at the water’s edge to look for sea lions or otters.
When I walked in the morning, there were often people sleeping in the sand up above the tide line. Wrapped in sleeping bags with shopping carts next to them, they stayed huddled until the fog burned off and the sun warmed them into motion. Sometimes that process was accelerated by the Boardwalk employees cleaning up trash or the police shaking them awake and announcing that camping is illegal on all city beaches. Then they’d gather their belongings and head towards the park benches by the bathrooms or the green space next to the river.
When I was considering Santa Cruz as my next place to live, several people intimated that the “homeless situation” should scare me away. It didn’t; in fact, it drew me in. I had spent the majority of my adulthood living in ski towns and guiding in wilderness areas. There were no street or van dwellers there. I had begun to forget that hundreds of thousands of people in our country lack safe, warm, and regular places to spend their nights. I knew that acknowledging the problem did nothing to solve it, but avoiding it certainly didn’t help.
Beach Hill is situated right in the middle of three areas some locals call “ground zeroes” or “zombie zones.” One of these is the Main Beach, the huge expanse of sand in front of the Boardwalk. Another is Lower Pacific Avenue, an area to the north of my old apartment, down the outdoor staircase. I walked those blocks almost daily, and, on my way, I passed the Taco Bell where men and their Chariot baby strollers filled with pillows and sweatshirts commonly congregated, smoking and chatting amongst themselves. Sometimes they asked me for spare change, and sometimes I gave it to them. Other times, I said hello and smiled, starting a friendly but short conversation. But, still other times, I kept my gaze to the ground, trying to avoid provoking a man who appeared to be yelling at no one in particular.
To the east of Beach Hill lies the San Lorenzo River, a waterway which flows into the Pacific Ocean on the far side of the Boardwalk. Above it sits an asphalt pathway, ideal for crossing town on foot or bicycle. When I ran there in the mornings, groups of three to ten people would be sleeping under the protection of the bridges, hiding from the overnight fog or winter rains. Later in the day, I would weave a route through clusters of younger homeless folks. Their pit bulls scared me, with their bony heads, stocky bodies, and sharp, raspy growls, and the cloud of marijuana smoke was often suffocating. I never stopped to talk in those spots; I just slipped through the crowd, trying to make myself invisible.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

“Everyone’s from somewhere,” I always hear. I suppose that’s true, in the sense that we’ve all got city names on our birth certificates, and most of us can identify the hospitals or houses we kicked and screamed our way into. But I’m not sure that these cities and towns are where we’re actually from. I think that our concept of home is more complicated, that it has something to do with our connections to particular ecosystems, particular copses of trees, patches of beach, city blocks, or even highway vista points—places where we feel settled and grounded, places where we are who we think we are and who we know we should be.
Of course, it’s possible my opinion about personal provenance is rooted in the fact that I’m hesitant to own up to my New Jersey roots. Even though I spent eighteen years in a roomy colonial house on a cul-de-sac, I was never really comfortable there. The topography was bland—no big hills or mountains to help me position myself in space, no ocean to remind me of my relative size. And, the all-too-visible march of economic progress began to depress me as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I watched New York City’s urban sprawl steadily creep towards my hometown, engulfing the few patches of wetlands and open space that remained. By the time I left, the parcel of woods just beyond our dead-end street had been chopped down to make room for McMansions. It was no longer a “dead” end; it had come to life with in-ground pools, leaf-blower armadas, and professional dog walkers.
When I was old enough to pack up a no-frills Mazda pick-up truck and head out on my own, I began to search for my place. I knew where it wasn’t, but I had no idea where it was. Between then and now, I’ve found shelter in several Rocky Mountain towns, a southern Chilean city, and an off-the-grid Mexican educational facility, as well as in the myriad backcountry campsites I occupied while working as an outdoor educator. Santa Cruz was my latest stable sleeping site—until recently, anyway. I moved away a year ago.
The last time I was asked, I said I was from Santa Cruz, although I’m not quite sure that’s true.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

The butterflies that hang out in Santa Cruz are from somewhere. In some ways, they’re from Santa Cruz; after all, it is where the species returns to, winter after winter. When the world gets cold and dark, this is where the monarchs hole up. Home, to many, is where you go when things get hard.
But if where you’re from is where you were born, these insects are from fields and farms stretching from California’s Central Valley all the way to the crest of the Rockies. In those spaces, monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed plants which not only host the tiny eggs for their week-long gestation but also offer the creatures a potent natural defense: milkweed sap is poisonous to most vertebrates. When butterfly larvae hatch, they immediately begin chomping on the leaves that housed them. The toxicity of their food becomes part of who they are and protects them for the rest of their short lives.
Milkweed is not as widely distributed as it once was. Chemicals like Roundup, which are broadly applied to fields planted with herbicide-resistant GMO crops, have nearly eradicated milkweed from commercial agricultural land. At the same time, development transforms vacant lots and farms into more human housing every day—especially in places like California’s Silicon Valley.
Monarch-friendly residents in Santa Cruz, in their attempts to compensate for the dearth of milkweed in nearby inland communities like San Jose and Palo Alto, have begun to cultivate the plant in their backyards. It’s a thoughtful gesture, but Santa Cruz is not milkweed’s place. In the coastal climate, milkweed frequently hosts a protozoan parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), that appears to have coevolved with its butterfly host. Pupae infected with OE exhibit uneven dark splotches that are visible through their casings. If those insects don’t die before they emerge, they will be too weak to migrate once they do. Since their ability to reproduce is not affected, infected butterflies typically pass their OE spores onto their offspring, perpetuating the condition.
In addition to the threat of OE, the presence of backyard milkweed in Santa Cruz allows monarchs to stay in town all year, completely fouling up their complex multi-generational migration cycle. They’re meant to be snowbirds, not permanent residents.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

Santa Cruz’s homeless are from somewhere too; but, I don’t ask them where. I don’t know how to ask, or when. Most days, I could barely make eye contact with the woman in the pink velour running suit who talks to herself, much less figure out how to start up a conversation with her about her roots.
I’m not sure where my hesitation comes from; I just know that it feels like paralysis. I felt sick knowing that she’d been sleeping on a tarp under the footbridge. But, when I thought about offering her a spot on the couch in my heated apartment, I felt scared and uncomfortable, wondering if it would be safe to have a stranger—any stranger—in my space. If she asked me for money, my conscience turned into a battleground for the arguments I’ve heard: “Handouts enable our broken system; give the money to a support agency instead” and “If you have the money, why wouldn’t you give it to them?” Neither line of reasoning has ever satisfied me. For a while, I bought extra food on my downtown grocery store runs and gave that out in place of dollar bills. One winter day, when the woman had a plastic Hefty bag draped over her pink velour, I offered her a turkey wrap. She slapped my hand and said, “Whaddya think, I need your unwanted food?” My gaze dropped back to the ground, and I slunk away, feeling ashamed of my full bag of groceries, the apartment key in my pocket, and the family I knew I could call if things got really bad.
Last fall, just after I moved, Santa Cruz decided to establish a homeless camp on the east bank of the San Lorenzo River, in a spot people refer to as “the benchlands.” Police Chief Andy Mills declared a renewed effort to clean up the downtown area by prohibiting shopping carts—a curious law that happens to effectively displace much of the homeless population. At the same time, the chief openly acknowledged that a series of recent California court decisions, by upholding people’s “right to sleep,” have required cities to create enough overnight facilities to house their residents. Santa Cruz has fewer than 180 shelter beds and a homeless population of at least 2000, with no immediate plans for additional infrastructure. Knowing this, Mills relaxed the overnight camping ban and told his officers to quit issuing citations for erecting tents on the beach and rolling out quilts in doorways. Many residents expressed anxiety about their lawns and parks becoming crash pads, so the police attempted to consolidate people sleeping outdoors into one area—the benchlands encampment.
Last Christmas, I returned to Santa Cruz for my own winter break and semi-hibernation period. While I was there, I rode to the river on my rusty pink cruiser bike to see what the city had set up. The tents—all thin, worn, and poorly erected—were arranged in lines on either side of the lawn. In the open center aisle, people were huddled in groups of three to six, some gathered around a bag of chips, some reading books or napping.
I wanted to cross over the boundaries of survey stakes and flagging tape. I wanted to ask someone what it was like to be corralled into a designated area. I wanted to hear someone’s story and find out how what they thought the city—or any one citizen—should do to help out. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I already felt like a voyeur just watching; going in and asking questions like some privileged reporter seemed even more wrong. So, I just stayed on the sidelines, again.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

It is the tranquility of the sleeping butterflies that really drew me in. They are beautiful when they are flying, of course. But they are magical when they are sleeping. They cluster in groups of several hundred to several thousand, latching—one onto the other onto the other onto the other—until they form a two-foot-long mass of doily-thin wing, whispery antenna, and inchworm body. Then they sleep, or shut down, or check out. Really, we don’t understand where they go when they rest any better than we understand our own sleep consciousness. They stay put until the ambient air temperature reaches fifty-five degrees, when they start to shimmy, shake, and greet the day. If the sun keeps shining, they leave their clumps in search of nectar and water until the temperature drops again. When it’s cold, wet, or windy, they stay put, sleeping away the inclement conditions. Seeing them takes me out of my head, out of myself. Seeing people sleep outside is much, much harder for me. When I glimpse men huddled under bridges on slabs of cardboard, stretched out on the asphalt of the bike path, or burrowed into the sand of Twin Lakes Beach, I feel a hollow lurch in my stomach. People without shelter often cluster together, too, wisely seeking strength and safety in numbers, in community. However, witnessing their congregation deflates me and makes my head spin with questions. How have we gotten to a point where we—myself included—just take this in stride?

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

I loved living in Santa Cruz. I managed to tap into several communities—groups of writers, artists, swimmers, and mountain bikers—and, though I didn’t feel like I was a crucial member of any of them, I did feel like I belonged when I wanted to. I kept walking and exploring, making a habit of visiting the big bronze surfer statue and the spot along West Cliff Drive where people build towers of precariously balanced stones. When I finished a work project, I let myself browse the three or four thrift stores on Lower Pacific, just north of the Taco Bell. I was proud to live in a city that had outlawed plastic bags and declared itself a sanctuary for everyone.
Once a week, I drove a carful of donated day-old bread and grocery items to a soup kitchen in Watsonville, fifteen miles south on Highway 1. After unloading the food, I helped chop vegetables or roll burritos, chatting in Spanish with the kitchen ladies before serving lunch to the eighty or so people—almost all men—who showed up for the daily free meal. There were a lot of “regulars” there, so I got to know a few of them. I first started talking to Hector, who picked strawberries when the work was available, because he was wearing an old Guns n’ Roses concert t-shirt—an easy conversation starter for me. Martin scared me for a while; he had tattoos ringing his neck and a hunched, imposing presence. But he liked salad a lot more than the other guys, and since I was always stuck pushing the greens, I got to see him smile a few times before I introduced myself.
While having regulars meant I got to know some of them, it also meant that these men weren’t getting any closer to stability. They weren’t out working or at home cooking for themselves. They were making the daily migration from the city park to the food pantry for what might be their only meal of the day. Every time I took off my hairnet and apron and slid into the driver’s seat of my little car, I was exhausted—not by the work, but by the emotional turmoil. I got to drive away, back up north, to my small but safe, warm, and dry apartment perched up on Beach Hill. I knew how lucky I was, even though every rent check dug further into my savings account. I have a savings account. Many people don’t.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

The monarchs further captivated me when I learned about their migratory patterns. Santa Cruz’s butterflies leave the area every spring and come back to the same sets of trees every fall. Human beings do this all the time—especially retired ones who have had their fill of northern winters. When the butterflies migrate, however, it’s not voluntary; they’ll die if they stay where they are. It’s also not the same individuals making the journey from year to year. A later generation flies back to the historic wintering spot, and, that generation, often called “Methuselahs,” lives months longer than both the generation that preceded it and the two or three that follow. These butterflies spend up to four months on the coast, their longevity promoted by the state of semi-hibernation, called diapause, in which they spend much of the winter. When they leave in the spring, they head east over the Santa Cruz Mountains to mate, lay eggs on a milkweed plant, and die. These eggs will hatch into a generation of butterflies that lives between two and six weeks while heading further north and east, following the milkweed bloom. Their children, and their children’s children, will do the same. It’s their children’s children’s children, post-metamorphosis, that return to occupy the same tree branches along the Santa Cruz coastline one year later. This is mind-blowing to me—someone who has to muster up months of motivation to buy a ticket to Newark Airport, someone who’s not sure you can ever go back to a place you’ve left.
Much to the dismay of park management, their lepidopteral celebrities are spending less time at Natural Bridges State Park, where the well-built boardwalk welcomes the human voyeurs. The monarchs have begun to make their midwinter move down the coast to Lighthouse Field State Park earlier and earlier each year. Lighthouse Field is situated along the same coastal road as Natural Bridges—West Cliff Drive, the Rodeo Drive of Santa Cruz. On the inland side of the road stand the city’s most expensive houses, many of which are empty. They are vacation properties that rent for upwards of $500 per night on VRBO and Airbnb.
Lighthouse Field’s geographical position seems to be working better for the monarchs these days. It is possible that recent changes in the coast’s storm cycles—as well as the overall warming of the Santa Cruz winters—have precipitated the move. However, while the location may be right for them, the grove itself is becoming less and less conducive to their nightly roosting. Park officials have been clearing the low branches from all of the area trees in order to be able to better monitor the homeless people who often gather around them. Because the men and women who congregate there make fires to cook and keep warm, the park has to clear the understory to reduce the hazard of wildfire ignition. Apparently, displacement can have a domino effect.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

 

 

After a couple of years in Santa Cruz, I had to move away. I wasn’t getting the jobs I’d applied for, and my freelance work had started to taper off. I had applied to graduate schools that offered funding, and when one of them—one in a city with cheaper housing costs—accepted me, I figured I’d better attend. My landlords had bought a new BMW with my rent payments, and my bike rack had been stolen from the roof of my car. I wondered if Santa Cruz wasn’t really my place—or, if it had been my place for just a short time. How could I call somewhere “home” when it made itself, in some ways, so overtly inhospitable? Still, after I drove off in the U-Haul, I cried all the way to Watsonville.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

A few days into my Santa Cruz Christmas visit, the city announced that the homeless camp would need to be moved. There were too many complaints about drug use, prostitution, and theft, and city employees who work in the building nearby said they were scared to walk from the parking lot to their offices. In addition, the San Lorenzo River typically swells with the winter rains, inundating the benchlands. They said it was important for the health of the watershed to clear and clean the area before the flooding begins. They didn’t mention that it’s also impossible for human beings to sleep in an inundated field.
The plan was to move the encampment residents across Highway 1 to a city-owned vacant lot near the Costco while government officials and real estate professionals continued to search for an appropriate indoor facility to shelter them—a plan that went into effect in February of this year and was funded only through the beginning of the summer.
“Goddamned zombies,” a man said under his breath as he passed me on the bridge by the encampment. “They don’t belong here in the public space.”

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

During that same visit, I eagerly reinstated my old daily ritual, the one I call “butterfly church.” On one of these pilgrimages, I met a scientist who monitors the Lighthouse Field grove on behalf of the city. After explaining his system for tallying insects and recording weather data, he paused to show me a patch of young plants adjacent to the eucalyptus and cypress stand where the butterflies commonly spend the night. “See this? It’s a butterfly-friendly native garden. The local native plant society thinks the monarchs should be eating only native nectar. You see any butterflies in there? Of course you don’t. They prefer the eucalyptus and cypress nectar—or even nectar from the ice plant across the street. Eucalyptus, cypress, ice plant—these are all invasive species. That’s why the park is letting the big eucalyptus trees die—or even cutting them down. Their policy is to let non-natives disappear. But when they go, the butterflies will go with them.”
Before returning to his paperwork, he reminded me that fifty years ago, none of these giant trees existed in the park. Historic records indicate that, back then, Lighthouse Field was a grassy, treeless, open area. There were no butterflies.
In time, it’s likely the monarchs will be displaced—from a place that wasn’t really theirs to begin with.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

The Santa Cruz County Point-in-Time Homeless Census is conducted every other year during the last two weeks in January. The most recent count, finished in January of 2017, put the county’s total homeless population at 2249[i]—a number that seems a little low to me. Of those counted, 80% were labeled as “unsheltered,” and within that group, 36% of them were sleeping on the street, 30% in their vehicles, and 10% in encampments. For whatever reason, lots of people in Santa Cruz think that the majority of the county’s homeless migrated from other states to take advantage of warm weather and liberal attitudes. According to this census, however, almost 70% of the individuals surveyed claimed to have lived in the county prior to becoming homeless.
The questionnaire didn’t ask them whether or not they call Santa Cruz “home.”

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

Every year, on Thanksgiving, citizen scientists throughout the nation count monarch butterflies. The Xerces Society, the invertebrate conservation organization that sponsors the event, reported a total of 192,692 butterflies spread throughout 262 sites in California in 2017.[ii] When this tradition began in 1997, California tallies registered over 1.2 million butterflies. Although the total number of monarchs counted was at its lowest point in five years, Natural Bridges and Lighthouse Field, the main two sites in Santa Cruz, were actually among the handful of sites where numbers stayed roughly the same as last year.
The study acknowledges that the fall of 2017 was unseasonably hot and that California experienced unusually severe fires, smoke, and mudslides. These factors—and climate change, their underlying cause—may have contributed to a later migration and overwintering cycle.
No one questions the undeniable reality of ongoing habitat loss.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

On December 21st, a radio snippet reminded me that the solstice is the day traditionally set aside to remember the homeless people who died in the previous twelve months. The reporter said that the names of fifty people would be read at the Homeless Services Center in the City of Santa Cruz—the highest number of deceased homeless recorded in the county to date.
I decided to run to Lighthouse Field to catch the sunrise, expecting to see the same huge clumps of earth-toned butterfly wings that I had seen earlier in the week, since it was an inhospitably cold morning for flying. I did see a few small clusters, representing maybe a few thousand insects in total—a far cry from the 13,000 the scientist had counted. I walked all around the grove, unsuccessfully searching for agglomerations in other trees and scanning the sky for individual airborne insects.
Suddenly, two young men appeared, each with fifteen or twenty butterflies in their cupped hands. “Want some?” one asked me. “They’re dead.” I told him that they might not be, that when monarchs are asleep, they often look dead. “Nah, they have no bodies. See?” he said. “They’re just heads with wings. Definitely dead.” Right. I had read about this phenomenon in the local paper. “Zombie butterflies,” the article had called them. Wasps pluck the butterflies’ fatty abdomens from their exoskeletons and abandon the carcasses. The wasps actually shouldn’t have been there; temperatures should have been low enough by then to kill them off for the winter. But it was an uncharacteristically warm one, so, they were there, they were hungry, and they were taking over the cypress grove.

©Adam Lampton, From the Series “Portland”, 20×30”, Archival Inkjet Print, 2000-Present

I started back towards the apartment where I was dog-sitting. The sun was shining on the surfer statue, and the surfers themselves were out patiently waiting for the right wave to find them. The illegally-parked van dwellers were just climbing out of their rusty vehicles, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and firing up their propane stoves. City employees were reopening the parking lots to day users and plucking abandoned sleeping bags from under the eucalyptus trees. I decided to run up Beach Hill, past the jade shrubs, the rosemary hedge, and the ginkgo tree, looking longingly at my old home with someone else’s plants on the front porch.
Meanwhile, the ocean was pounding the beach below, as it does each winter, slowly but surely repossessing this section of coast.

 

[i] Santa Cruz County 2017 Homeless Census & Survey Comprehensive Report, produced by ASR
[ii] Pelton, E., S. Jepsen, C. Schultz, C. Fallon, and S. H. Black. 2017. State of the Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Sites in California. 40+vi pp. Portland, OR: The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. (Available online at https://www.westernmonarchcount.org/data/)

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Bridget A. Lyons studied at Harvard University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University where she also works as an editor and composition instructor. Her essays have been published by
Atticus Review, Wanderlust, 1888 Center, and Elephant Journal.  She was recently awarded a Voices in the Wilderness writing residency in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In addition to exhibiting internationally, Adam Lampton’s work has been seen in publications including Art in America, Maisonneuve Magazine, and Polar Inertia Journal. He is a recipient of a 2006-07 William J. Fulbright fellowship to Macao, SAR., China. He currently is Chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Stonehill College. He lives in Maine.

 

Portland, Project Statement
These pictures were taken on the outskirts of Portland, Maine in a particular wooded area of only a few square miles formerly known by some of Portland’s homeless population as ‘The Jungle’.  Starting in 2000 I roamed the area that functioned as a dump, homeless shelter (usually devoid of any people during the day) and illicit playground for local youth. I returned four years later to find the land changed by an addition of a newly constructed off-ramp and many more semi-temporary living shelters.  In 2006 construction crews began work on what is now the completed “Mercy Hospital” where my daughter was born in 2011.

Initially, I found the area interesting both for it’s surprising quiet and for it’s darker connection to the struggles of the people who use it as home, drug store or escape.  As I have returned there throughout the last ten years I have begun to understand the landscape not just through the lens of geography or aesthetic inquiry but as inexorably entwined with my own story in a way that feels inevitable.  This shift from public exploration to private expression mirrors what I see as the fundamental issue at stake in contemporary photography: No longer is it simply a choice between taking pictures of either what is “out there” or what is “in here,” but every corner of the physical world is assumed to be contaminated by the individual.

Interview with Susan Metzger

An Interview with Susan Metzger

by Ben Potter 

Ben Potter: You recently moved to photography after many years as a painter. Does your long engagement with painting influence your photographic work?

Susan Metzger: I’m sure it does but not necessarily in the conscious, everyday kind of way.  As an artist, I have a particular aesthetic that carries across varying mediums, but what drives the content and more formal issues such as composition, etc. also carry over.

BP: How does your sense of place direct your work?

SM: ‘Sense of Place,’ that can be tough to describe in the bigger sense of it. I have always been lucky enough to live near the coast, and that brings in lots of other meanings. The coastal landscape is also an edge, a threshold. It’s liminal – it forms a margin- and in doing so creates an actual state of ‘in-betweenness.’  The tidal zone is a threshold of land, a distinct place between high ground and water; it is in-between and what lies on the other side can be unpredictable, and dangerous, and beautiful – it can be everything. So those connotations inform my work.

 

 

BP: In particular, why are you interested in your local fisheries?

SM: That’s complicated I am interested in how people make a living using the immediately local ecology.  I love the idea that one’s work is dependent on natural rhythms, tides and weather, and the scarcity or plenty of other creatures – all dictated by the environment.  I also was not conscious of an underlying current that was driving me in the background – that my father was an obsessive fisherman and would sometimes take me with him as a kid.  His life ended in a tragic way but while I was working on my own project I sort of suddenly and unexpectedly realized I understood his obsession.

BP: You use vintage film cameras to make your negatives. These are then adjusted and printed digitally. What are your thoughts about the use of old and new technologies?

SM: This is where it gets a bit political for me.   I grew up during the sixties and the Vietnam War was a dark presence in our family – my brother was there, and the rest of us would watch people like Walter Cronkite read the names of the fallen and it was somber – we’d see these incredible photographs by people like Larry Burrows and we trusted it. We trusted the information and the people delivering it. Journalism had a kind of dignity that is now lost.  It’s devastating to me, really, what’s happened to media and how it’s now manipulated and the feeling that you can’t believe anything anymore.  So, in that sense, it’s personally important to me that my photographs simply show what was in front of me at the time.

BP: Do you see your work as a type of antidote or example?

SM: It’s certainly an antidote for me.  I only create work for myself, not thinking about how it might be received.  It’s a way of working out things that you may not even be conscious of at the time. I always- absolutely always – find that by the time a body of work is completed, it tells me what has been on my mind under the surface.  It ends up informing me.

 

BP: Anything else you would like to add?

SM: Thanks for the opportunity to show my Up River series and I hope your young students will get out and VOTE. And if they are artists, I hope they might consider the idea of making work about what is true for them.  I’d like to include some notes I learned from a wonderful photographer and person named Keith Carter. These don’t only have to apply to photography:

“Tell the truth about what you know.
What’s your story?
What do you want to say?
Who do you want to say it to?
How do you want it to look?
What is your relationship to the subject matter?
It’s not what you see, it’s the significance of what you’re seeing.
Make friends with uncertainty.”

INDENT
[Keith Carter]

 

 

 

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Susan Metzger is a painter and self-taught photographer living in Maine. She studied painting at the Museum School in Boston and has been the recipient of two fellowships; from the Wurltizer Foundation and the K2FF Arts in Sustainability Grant. At this time she is practicing a documentary style of analog shooting that is strongly place-based.

Ben Potter was born in 1970 and grew up in Tennessee.  He majored in Art and Biology at Williams College. He received his M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Arts in 1998. He lives in Belfast, Maine, and is a Professor of Art at Unity College.  

Tenneson and Short: Trees

Kayann Short / Joyce Tenneson

 

Bones  Beneath   Bark: The   Ecological   Kinship  of    Trees   and   Humans

“[W]hat ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness . . .” – Virginia Woolf “On Being Ill”  

The trail in the Rockies is steep, but pine roots stretch across the dusty path, creating steps my feet can find. Because I am still weak from an early summer flu, I watch for these roots to help me climb like rungs of ladders nailed across the face of the earth. Roots are limbs without bark, growing down instead of up, exposed on the mountainside by the wind and rain of violent storms, bare as skinless bone. If all goes well, those roots will anchor their trees for many more years than I will live.

The mountains are covered with pines in all stages of growth—and death. Pine beetles have chewed rusty swathes across high slopes; deadfall and forester-felled pines, fir, and spruce lie like scattered toothpicks atop millions of acres of national park land. A warming climate means the beetles survive the winter and the infestation spreads among trees already weakened by lack of rain and snow, with the health of the forest at stake. In some places, crews have piled logs and branches like makeshift bonfires, but not for burning. Some of the material will be used for building trails in the park itself; firewood can only be taken out of the park by those with permits.

 

 

 

Along the trail, I’m on the lookout for anything of interest. At the ocean, I walk the wrack line for shells, beach rocks, and other artifacts thrown on shore by passing waves. In the mountains, I scan the edges of the trails for pinecones, stones, and small sticks in interesting shapes and colors. I search out visual patterns: the randomness of the fall, the grouping of the objects as they lay, the contrast between light and dark. I find bones, round and white against the rougher ground. Except these bones do not come from animals, but are litterfall: coarse, woody debris from fallen tree limbs, bleached and smoothed by the forest elements of wind, water, and weather, waiting to be broken down by microorganisms into finer humus, the rich topsoil in forests. These leftover bits are the bones beneath bark, broken by epoch and skinned by time.

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson


As a farmer and environmentalist, I write about animals and I write about vegetables, but the living organisms with which I feel the deepest ecological kinship is trees. Growing up, I thought nothing would be cooler than to live in a tree like run-away Sam in My Side of the Mountain or the Swiss Family Robinson in the movie my family saw at the drive-in one summer. I had a swing in a weeping willow in our backyard, but that was no tree house. Even so, when the tree was felled to build a patio, my heart was broken and I sobbed, inconsolable, to the chain saw’s drone. Any chance I’d had of living in that tree someday was severed with its trunk and limbs.

 

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

 

* * *

 

How like a tree our bodies can be, with trunks and limbs upright in our common standing. Beyond the shared basic biological fact of our existence–composition from living tissue and constant need for air, water, and food–trees grow branches and we grow bones, both structures forming a life support system that provides nourishment and strength. Like a tree’s trunk and branches, our bones allow us to stand upright, that upward stance of evolutionary development seemingly separating our industrious primate order from other species. Just as trees line the surface of the earth, humans, too, are vertically propelled, but with an important difference from our arboreal relations: trees are rooted in place, while our skeletal structure allows movement. We may break a bone, we may even lose a limb, but our imperative is always to use our skeletal system toward physical momentum. Any rooting we do is the metaphorical equivalent of stability and permanence. 

While humans are not exactly like trees, “upright” and “uprooted” describe an inverse relationship of health that further points to our ecological kinship and mutual existence. For both trees and humans, to be upright means to be healthy. Uprooting creates or indicates death for trees. Similarly, as Woolf suggests above, in humans, uprooting is aligned with illness and potential death. 

 

 


 

 

My metaphors here are toward this point: we are more like trees than we think. The ecological kinship between trees and humans goes beyond the analogy of bodies, however. The conditions that threaten trees threaten us too. If uprooting means disruption of normal processes, then climate change is uprooting on the largest of scales, affecting trees and humans alike.

Humans have long owed a debt of survival to trees. With the exception of water and soil, trees provide more benefits and resources to humans than any other part of our ecosystem. Trees provide shelter (think lumber, furniture, and shade), paper and fabric, food of many kinds, and, most importantly, clean air. Trees have been called the lungs of the world; they cleanse the air we breathe by inhaling CO2 and exhaling the oxygen we need.  

In “When All Trees Die, So Will You,” Adam Rogers writes, “Dead trees mean dead people, and scientists are finally starting to figure out why.” In other words, loss of trees means loss of human life because without trees to clear our air, more of us will die from preventable illnesses.

According to Rogers, scientists are attempting to correlate trees with public health and “differences in illness and death in populations that live near greenery versus those that don’t.” Some studies suggest links between tree loss and increased morbidity from lung and heart disease, as well as 

 

its inverse: higher contact with green spaces leading to conditions as diverse as higher-birthweight babies and lower rates of anti-depressant drug use. Studies like these are beginning to reveal the benefits of protecting and replenishing trees as part of our public health infrastructure.

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

A similar message is found in “Trees Are Our Best Defense Against Climate Change, But Forests Are Dying at Unprecedented Rates.”  As Eric Holthaus bluntly writes, “Forests are our last, best natural defense against global warming. Without the world’s trees at peak physical 

 


 

 

condition, the rest of us don’t stand a chance.” According to Holthaus, even though human CO2 emissions have flattened, climate change is still accelerating. That’s because even though we count on trees to draw a hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, trees are dying from drought, forest fires, insects, disease, and development encroachment faster than forests can recover or migrate northward to cooler temperatures.

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tennyson

Climate change creates an anti-arboreal loop which not only increases the likelihood of forest fire but in which forests have a harder time regenerating after fire because of climate change-induced conditions like drier, warmer weather. To mitigate these impacts, according to Holthaus, some conservationists “are considering tinkering with the ecosystems in various ways, including introducing novel species, replanting forests with climate change in mind, and even planting fast-growing species just to burn them for energy.” But if “an area equivalent to the size of India would be needed by 2100 to remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to help stabilize the rise of global temperatures,” can we plant enough trees in time?

With the loss of the resources and benefits trees provide—euphemistically called “ecosystem services,” as if trees make house calls–we should all be concerned about decreasing tree population. The truth is, however, forests will be able to adapt better than humans will. To use Woolf’s word, trees are “obdurate,” stubbornly holding to their course of action despite change. Their resilience gives me hope that forests will survive the changing climate in some form. The likelihood of human survival is much more tenuous. 

* * *

 

 


 

Now that I live near three irrigation ditches on rural land, I pay particular attention to trees. Our farm lies along the Front Range foothills of the Rockies. We can see Long’s Peak and Mount Meeker from our fields. Our land is crossed by vintage waterways that began as natural limestone gullies dug by teams of burly horses in the late 1800s. Willow, cottonwood, birch, ash, pine, and cedar grow along our ditches, some of them more than a century old, which for this dryland area of the country is considerable. Apple trees are prevalent here, too, some planted by us and some planted before our time by others, including squirrels saving seeds for winter food. 

I think and write about trees a lot because they grace my life with shelter, shade, and sustenance. They prevent soil erosion around our cropland and provide habitat for neighboring species. Without trees here, our land and our livelihood would be drastically diminished and eventually devastated. As old as our trees are, sometimes they fall. We have lost many trees on our farm, but they do good work before they go. 

One mid-summer night as I lay in bed with the window open, I heard a noise outside. I couldn’t tell from how far away the sound came; I’d never heard a sound quite like that before. It sounded big and brittle and thick, yet muffled, somewhere between a thud and a clunk. Even though the night was calm, something large had broken and fallen,  

 

 

 suspected, like a tree limb on a rooftop, a serious enough thought for that time of night, but it was too late to get up and look. I would investigate in the morning.

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

 

 


 

 

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

It wasn’t a tree limb that fell, but a whole tree of limbs, one of the largest willows on the farm, a tree that had been leaning for years across our lower ditch a quarter mile from the house. I wasn’t surprised it had fallen, but rather that I had heard it fall at all. What were the chances I’d be awake with my window open and ears attuned enough to hear something out back? Even though the tree was a giant—150 feet high and 6 feet in diameter–the impact must have been great for the sound to travel so far.

The impact, in fact, was hard enough to shatter the old tree, which was dying by degrees. Half the tree was in leaf from branches still drawing nutrients from the trunk, while the other half was already dead, its limbs standing without bark, brittle and bleached by the sun. Dead wood is heavier than live wood because the tissues compact as they dry; that’s why old logs burn longer than newly cut logs.

Dead wood also hits the ground harder. The cottonwood fell across the ditch. Where the lower tree spanned the water, the trunk was saved in one long slab like a bridge. But where the upper trunk and limbs smashed the ground on the other side, the tree now lay like a splintered skeleton, spine severed on impact, vertebrae scattered among scapula, humerus, and phalange. As the force of the fall from heavy boughs dug trenches into pasture grass, brittle limbs were thrown wide. The ditch company tasked with clearing the tree used their largest crane and heaviest chains to lift and swing the trunk to the bank’s edge, where it will


 

 

decompose in time. Walking in the meadow after this operation, I stumble over broken bones, the cracked ribs and bare-knuckled fingers that will lie in the grass for years to come.

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

The death of such a large tree on the farm fetched a heavy loss. That cottonwood framed our view of high mountains, especially lovely in the golden hues of fall against new snow on the peaks. The tree provided habitat for birds and small animals. Its limbs shaded the pasture and its roots anchored the bank of the ditch. Growing up along the ditch, that tree was older than our century-old farm. 

But as much as we cherished that tree and the homes it made for owls, squirrels, and raccoons, it didn’t provide food for our farm members. Not like the apple trees that died the winter before. That November, an 80-degree drop in temperature killed our largest apple trees following a mild fall. Our farm season ends on the last Saturday of October and we were still giving tomatoes for the last share, unusual for the Front Range where heavy frosts used to hit predictably between mid-September to mid-October. The autumn apple harvest was heavy that season, our best ever. We used the bucket of the tractor to raise apple-pickers into the top branches. We pressed hundreds of gallons of cider with our members, some to be made into hard cider for later enjoyment. 

Our first light frost finally caught up with us at the tail end of October, but the trees were still not dormant on November 10 when the killing frost struck. The morning started mild, but by the end of the day, the temperature dropped 80 degrees from summer to winter and the damage was done. 

A hundred years ago, Colorado’s Front Range was an apple-growing region. Now, with more frequent drought and less predictable climate, growing apples is a gamble. We plant varieties that bud later in the season in the hope of missing a late spring frost but that’s no guarantee. Warmer 

 

 

 

 


 

 

fall temperatures, a longer autumn, and temperature variability are taking their toll on apples here. The warmer conditions that created our best apple crop contributed to the death of the very trees that produced those apples. Ironically, heavy fruiting may have weakened the trees, making them even less resilient to the sudden temperature drop that caused their demise.

It will take years for newer apple trees to grow to the size of those mature trees. Some days, it saddens us to know it’s possible, even probable, we may never get an apple crop like that again. Other days, it frightens us. This loss of apples is, in itself, a kind of uprooting, one more reason to be anxious about the future of the planet. Yet as I worry about our apple trees, I can’t help but worry about myself too. How will I stay healthy on a planet in which human practices threaten the trees upon which I depend? How much of what trees provide will be uprooted as both our species adapt not just to climate change, but climate crisis? If upright is the word for our continued mutual existence, I think, then how will upright be sustained for trees and humans alike in the not-to-distant future? 

In illuminating our ecological kinship, I write to forge an alliance between humans and trees that will lead to our mutual survival, an uprightness that provides a future for trees and humans and all other living things, as well. Clearly, our future is tied to trees. If you don’t do anything else for the future of trees and all they support, do this: Get upright. Get moving. Go find some trees. Plant more. 

 

 

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

 

 


 

 

 

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

 

But if you can, go another step and join with others to preserve trees, cherish trees, and make and keep a home for them on this planet. We must, if we intend to make and keep our homes here as well. 

Hiking along a river trail on the flatlands east of our farm one cold, but bright, January morning, my grandson and I pick up what looks like a deer femur from a pile of leaves, only to discover it is not a bone attached to a chunk of hide we hold, but a stick wrapped with bark.

The stick reminded me of the deer foreleg the farm crew and I found while picking vegetables six months earlier, the animal’s rough skin still attached, a bone dropped by a coyote or mountain lion as it crossed the field one moonlit night. Instead of burying it, we threw the leg into the trees to be eaten by other animals, insects, and organisms, providing a feast, as nature intended. 

In reverence of that cycle, my grandson and I lay the bone-branch back where we found it to become litterfall, preserving, perhaps, one tiny, upright step in nature’s obdurate ways. 

 

 


 


Holthaus, Eric. “Up In Smoke.”
Grist. March 8, 2018. https://grist.org/article/the-last-ditch-effort-to-save-the-worlds-forests-from-climate-change.

Rogers, Adam. “All the Trees Will Die, And Then So Will You.” Wired. May 9, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/05/trees-will-die-will/

Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” The New Criterion. January 1926.

 

 

From the series, “Trees of Life”; Gold mixed media on plexiglass ©Joyce Tenneson

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Kayann Short, Ph.D., is the author of A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography, a Nautilus winner published by Torrey House Press. Her essays appear in The Hopper, Pilgrimage, Dash, Mad River Review, The Roost, Dirt: A Love Story, and Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Non-fiction. She farms, writes, and teaches ecobiography at Stonebridge Farm in Colorado. See more at ecobiography.com.

Joyce Tenneson. Internationally lauded as one of the leading photographers of her generation, Joyce Tenneson’s work has been published in books and major magazines, and exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Her portraits have appeared on covers for magazines such as: Time, Life, Newsweek, Premiere, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. Tenneson is the author of sixteen books including the best seller, Wise Women, which was featured in a six-part Today Show series. She is the recipient of many awards, including Fine Art Photographer of the Year in 2005 (Lucie Awards), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Professional Photographers of America in 2012. In a poll conducted by American Photo Magazine, readers voted Tenneson among the ten most influential women in the history of photography. In the Fall of 2014, Fotografiska Museum, in Stockholm, Sweden, mounted a large retrospective of her work which was seen by approximately 30,000 people. Tenneson’s work has been exhibited in museums around the globe and is part of many private and public collections. In addition to her photography exhibits and books, Tenneson has taught master photography classes in the U.S. and Europe for over 40 years.

Debra Small: Habitat Lost

Debra Small

 

Habitat Lost:
Negative Effects of Suburban Sprawl on Ecosystems

INDENT
The wild landscape of the western United States is being rapidly converted to a built landscape due to suburban development. The destructive nature of these large-scale developments immediately disrupts the ecosystems. Even after these developments are completed, they continue to destroy the adjacent environment in the wild-land urban interface due to human-caused wildfires, habitat fragmentation, enhancing invasive species migration, surface and groundwater pollution, soil erosion, and pesticide impacts on wildlife. Habitat Lost: Negative Effects of Suburban Sprawl on Ecosystems is a response to this uncontrolled ecological destruction.
INDENT
The work is comprised of large 20” x 30” black and white, digital, high contrast prints of the constructed environment. Furthering the dialogue of environmental loss from suburban development, small kallitype prints on fabric, encased in encaustic wax, of the lost wildlife and habitat, are hung in front of the large black and white images. This body of work relates both to western society’s desire to replace natural land and environments with contemporary construction and developments, as well as photography’s desire to replace the historical with the digital photographic prints.
INDENT
The environmental impacts from suburban developments are pervasive, widespread and not easily resolved. Changes to zoning requirements, community planning, and the use of infill development can provide short-term mitigation to the onslaught of environmental damage from rampant over-development. However, long-term preservation of biodiversity will require us to embrace the moral principles of ecocentric thought, accepting that all living things have intrinsic value and are interconnected. This conversion of ethical thought will not occur overnight, but failure to move in this direction will continue to adversely affect our ecological sustainability, leading to further disruption of habitats and the extinction of species.

Bombus californicus California bumble bee, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Branta canadensis moffitti Great Basin Canada goose, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Buteo swainsoni Swainson’s hawk (2), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

California oak woodland savanna (1), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Cygnus columbianus tundra swan, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Eremocarpus setigerus turkey mullein, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Erodium sp. stork’s bill, 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Sceloporus occidentalis western fence lizard (3), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Trichostema lanceolatum vinegar weed (1), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

Trichostema lanceolatum vinegar weed (2), 2018, Archival pigment ink / kallitype encaustic, ©Debra Small

 

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Debra Small is a fine art documentary photographer, based in Sacramento, California, whose work explores environmental issues. Her current body of work is a response to the wildlife and habitat loss from suburban development. She is pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in photography from New Hampshire Institute of Art.

Artists, Scientists & Madmen: Giese & Tagg

Amy Theiss Giese / Nathanael Tagg

Artists, Scientists & Madmen

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 6], 2016, unique silver gelatin photograph, 9×11″

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 40], 2017, unique silver gelatin photograph, 11×11″

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 4], 2016, unique silver gelatin photograph, 14.25×15.75″

Rewriting John

Scientist, you love the world enough to activate
Johnny, the only begotten nurseryman robot.
Whosoever believeth in you may wonder
not only if Earth will have everlasting life,
not only if a deus ex machina is in order,
but also if the kingdom has already arrived

and how we ought to live accordingly,
even if Johnny will plant stratospheric sunlight-
deflecting particles, his head the hardest of pots,
and transplant machine trees that perfectly
swallow up the glut of atmospheric CO2.
Different gods and priests, similar questions.
Also, a little more artistry and persuasion,
and I could call a story like this the good news.


Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 10], 2016, unique silver gelatin photograph, 20×13.5″

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 15], 2017, unique silver gelatin photograph, 24×20″

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 24], 2017, unique silver gelatin photograph, 41.75×25.5″

Haldane’s Last Words

I’m called “the man who knows it all,”
but do I know myself? I ought
to have as little reverence
for myself as I’ve had for,
say, the God of theologians,
those who asked me what could be
deduced about the creator

from creation. “An inordinate fondness
for beetles” was my answer,
given nearly half a million species
of them exist. Forget my cleverness;
I won’t recite my verse on rectal cancer,
which is killing me. Da Vinci-esque,

I’ll make a list. 1. To learn, I drank
hydrochloric acid, was locked in rooms
with toxic air and stuck in chambers,
decompressed, then suffered
migraines and perforated eardrums

and shattered vertebrae. 2.
But I gave little thought to animal cruelty
in experiments and agriculture—
not a moment of non-speciesist
consideration to a pig that has a higher
IQ than some unfortunate kids. 3.

I wrote Darwinian books and papers.
Hundreds. 4. And yet I penned
a measly paragraph or two
on the kinship of animals and humans—
less on kinship’s connection to altruism.
5. I was deemed “the cleverest man”
who’d make a mathematical system,

then write a Shakespearean sonnet—
left and right faithfully married in my brain.
6. However, I coaxed a girl to leave
her spouse and marry me.
I almost lost my post at Cambridge
thanks to the scandal. 7. I initiated

modern scientific talk on altruism. 8.
And still, at times, I enjoyed the war—
enjoyed its tanks and bullets,
gas and trenches—so much so
my commander called me “the bravest,

dirtiest” soldier. 9. Pursuing justice,
empathizing with the destitute,
I was a socialist, who had the wit
to say that Britain and the US
adopting communism is as likely as hippos
doing somersaults and jumping hedges.

10. But then I deemed a mass-
murderer, Stalin, a “very great man
who did a very good job.” 11.
In the end, I met myself on my deathbed.
12. My abdomen relaxed, and after weeks
of weight loss and fatigue came
a jolt of strength. 13. Though waste

refused to leave my body, a list
had purged my soul of something worse.


Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 2], 2016, unique silver gelatin photography 7×8″

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 26], 2017, unique silver gelatin photograph, 20×16″ diptych

Untitled Chemical Painting [IC 9], 2016, unique silver gelatin photograph, 6.25×8.5″ diptych

Dragon Sturgeon

Wildfire is not supposed to reach their area,
yet she sees what look like many a solar flare.
To prevent her kids from noticing the fire,
she blindfolds her six-year-old son and four-
year-old daughter. “A game,” says the mother.
She unplugs her hardly charged electric car.
As they approach the interstate, her daughter

says, “What’s that smell? Are we going to Daddy?”
Her mother circumvents the flames by driving
off the road. Her son enjoys the bouncing—
giggles since he doesn’t see the lifeless deer.
Around its neck balloons are tied, beside
a family of trees, ablaze. The kids’ mom and dad
separated recently. A decade ago, he wanted

to live with his wife—but also with friends;
the bunch would share a house. She wanted to live
with just her spouse and (eventually) her kids,
within a couple hours from her whole
tight-knit family. But the couple followed school
and work across the country. Then their separate
wants arose again at a wedding reception,

at an aquarium with a tank of sturgeons, which
anyone with clean hands could touch.
One was black and bright-eyed like a dragon
capable of starting instant wildfires. It swam
alone, evading fingers dipped into the water.
Other sturgeons swam together and tolerated
being touched, and one, the slimiest ham actor,

let itself be touched on every lap around the tank.
She’s since heard of the future possibility
of head transplants. This morning, she dreamed
that every time the slimy sturgeon surfaced, it was
her son’s or husband’s head atop the fish’s body.
Every time the dragon sturgeon surfaced, it was
her daughter’s or her own head on the fish’s body.

Wedding guests had human parts below the neck;
above were various aquatic creature heads.
A game of words on blocks had come alive;
the blocks arranged themselves: “community,
friends as family, village to raise kids, wildfire!”
She woke and saw the flames in which her home
is now engulfed. Her kids remove their blindfolds.

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Amy Theiss Giese is a Boston based artist and educator. Giese received her MFA from Parsons School of Design and her BA from Amherst College. Giese’s work is rooted in materialism, exploring what the fundamental forces are for a given medium focusing on photographic and sound recordings of spaces and places.

Nathanael Tagg is the author of Animal Virtue (WordTech Editions, 2018) and an associate professor of English at Cecil College. He has an MFA from Rutgers. His poems and reviews are published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Pleiades, Confrontation, Cimarron Review, and other magazines.

John Hirsch – “And Again: Photography From The Harvard Forest”

John Hirsch

 

Selections from

And Again: Photography From The Harvard Forest

 

Untitled, ©John Hirsch

Untitled, ©John Hirsch

Station For Measuring Colored Dissolved Organic Matter, Dissolved Oxygen In Stream Water, ©John Hirsch


 

A Harvard Forest Sense of Place (excerpt)

 

It is an extreme sense of place. A feeling that a landscape is right, even as it changes. And comfortable. A comfort that is grounded in an emotional connection and ease with the land and vegetation and with the smells and sounds that fill it. But it goes much further than emotions. The attachment is strengthened through knowledge of the place today and what it has been, and through awareness of the people and events that have shaped it over time. The connection grows with familiarity and experience and with the insights gleaned through an inquisitive eye. It becomes extreme when it is rooted in generations of such experience and is passed from one person to the other and then on again through time. That experience is the Harvard Forest.

~ David R. Foster


Soil Extraction Jars, ©John Hirsch

Shannon Looking For Ants, ©John Hirsch

Measuring Oxygen In A Pitcher Plant, ©John Hirsch

Screening Soils At The Sanderson Tannery Archaeological Site, ©John Hirsch

Soil Respiration Auto Analyzer, ©John Hirsch

Map of Sawmill Sites for 1938 Hurricane Salvage, ©John Hirsch


THE FOREST THROUGH THE TREES

How many trees grow in eighty-six acres—or about sixty football fields—of Massachusetts woods? Field crews at Harvard Forest can tell you: about 116,000. Over the course of four years, several teams of researchers identified, measured, and digitally mapped every woody stem in the study area—painting each one with a yellow stripe when it was counted. The plot will be remeasured every five years until well beyond our lifetimes. The result will be a publicly accessible map recording the growth and death of every tree in the forest, from saplings barely the width of a pinky finger, to massive hemlocks on the edge of extirpation, to towering, colonial-era pines. The Harvard Forest plot is part of an unprecedented global effort—involving hundreds of scientists from five continents—to measure forest dynamics in a time of rapid environmental change. More than forty of these large, intensive research plots dot the globe and are overseen by a partnership between the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) and the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory (SIGEO). The first such plot was established in Panama in 1980; the Harvard Forest plot, begun in 2010, expands the network from tropical forests into the temperate zone. The growing international network of sites, which now tracks more than 6 million trees, allows scientists to detect global patterns in forest health that would otherwise be invisible at local scales. Each measurement, over time, gives a better understanding of forest function and the impacts of global environmental change.

~ Clarisse Hart



Monitoring Sap Flow ©John Hirsch

Pollen Under A Microscope, ©John Hirsch

Warm Air Chamber, ©John Hirsch

Growth Rings, ©John Hirsch

Leaf Litter Basket, ©John Hirsch

Untitled, © John Hirsch

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John Hirsch: A photographer and educator, John received a professional certificate in photography from The Maine Media Workshops and College in 2002. He has taught photography workshops in Maine and Boston and is head of the Visual Arts Department at Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts. John’s work is rooted in a documentary style, illuminating quiet moments in emergent or changing societies as well as allowing us to probe and reflect on the ideas of community, recreation and land use in the American psyche.

John’s recent book is available now for purchase. This 136 page cloth bound monograph includes 70 images chronicling the research, scientists, and ephemera of the Harvard Forest―a 3,750-acre research forest in Petersham, Massachusetts. Essays by David Foster, Clarisse Hart, and Margot Anne Kelley expand the scope of this photographic exploration at the nexus of science and art.

This body of work is about a desire to understand, describe, and predict the evolution of our surroundings, while showing reverence for the possibility of sublime moments in a place. The forest is here a microcosm for the world in which we live, and this work helps us envision the future we may inhabit, making the book a useful and engaging vantage from which to consider pressing issues of climate change, ecosystem resilience, and land and water use.

For more information or to purchase the book please email johnphirsch(at)gmail.com