Monica posted on March 09, 2008 16:03 :: 2508 Views
Winter is such a liar.
When I felt the need for a photo fix a week or so ago, I grabbed my camera, jumped in the van, and headed aimlessly down the North Shore toward Duluth. I took the Scenic Route, driving slowly on the surprisingly deserted roadway, panning the terrain for something worth stopping for.
“There’s nothing here. It’s a blah day, a blah season. This is a waste of time.”
Those were winter’s words to me. It spoke in dirty drifts along black-sanded shoulders, in dark green conifers no longer draped in snow layers. It whispered from a sky where a greasy sun pressed palely against a nondescript haze.
I was disheartened. The challenge to SEE, usually embraced boldly, seemed to laugh at me. But I drove on.
Beyond Knife River, the Stony Point Rd. sign caught my eye, and without apparent thought, I swung left. I did so with no expectation. I was still surrounded by the gray and dirty leftovers of a well-used winter, and I glanced almost disinterestedly toward the shore. That’s when I got my first hint that something was amiss, that winter’s words belied the truth this day would hold.
What I saw was ice like shards of broken glass. Great piles of it, stacked haphazardly up and down the beach. My eyes widened in shock and delight. I parked quickly along the side of the road, jumped out, pulled up my hood, and headed down for a closer view. What I saw had me babbling aloud to myself, repeating, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
The lake itself was moving toward shore like a conveyor belt, forward, forward, never backing, carrying those slabs of ice on its surface, and depositing them upon the shore. They would stack, rear up, fold over on themselves, then slide back toward the water, to be met by other incoming shards, until eventually they’d be pushed up onto the existing piles.
The lake talked the whole time, a crackling, groaning sort of sound, softly, like a rough whisper. Although I was the only human in the vicinity, I wasn’t the only living entity. I listened to Mother Superior’s winterspeak, to her almost-gentle murmurings as she birthed her ice children safely on the shore.
To my right, the pasty sun threw its rays blanket-like upon the scene, and they reflected back in bright, icy coolness. A photographer’s dream. A photographer’s challenge. I took pictures, into the sun, away from the sun. I hopped gingerly from one ice-free space to another and then, when blocked by a solid sheet of slickly smooth ice flow, sat on my rear and slid down to the next patch of bare rock.
I listened to the lake, and scrambled closer to the shards. When I could stand it no longer, I picked one up and sucked on that clear, sweet, fresh taste. I would have savored it until the shard was gone, but its tongue-numbing cold froze my insides as it trickled down my throat. Lethally good.
For 45 minutes I wandered up and down that shore, squatting, stooping, standing, kneeling, even crawling on hands and knees and lying on my belly to capture icicle fringe, one spooky companion, and those wondrous, icy shards. All the while, the lake continued to deliver them, row after row after row.
Eventually, fingers numb, pants damp, photo card bulging with images, I reluctantly left behind the scene I knew would change with the shift of wind. What I saw was for me, and it was for me that day, and that day alone.
I drove home with a smirk. I hadn’t listened to winter’s lie. I had persevered beyond the blahs to the truth winter knew was there all along. Winter will never fool me again.
By Monica Isley - lablover47
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Monica Isley is a former newspaper reporter/columnist/photographer who once stalked the Lake Superior shoreline in northeastern Minnesota, camera in hand. She now lives in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., where the summers are warmer and the winters are milder than she's used to, but where photographic prey is just as available. Besides this column for JustNorth, she writes a blog called Monica's Pen at http://monicaspen.wordpress.com/
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