Category: Light

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Moon Camp Fire

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It started in September.  A group of us went for a full moon kayak on Pleasant Lake.  Then in November Anne, Alison and I hiked up Neville Peak in Epsom during the full moon.  While we sat at the top, the moon in and out of racing clouds, Anne had the idea of planning an outdoor adventure for every full moon.

Yesterday eight of us gathered in the late afternoon and hiked up Parker Mt. in Strafford.  Last weekend David and I had done the short hike to the summit, then across the ledgy ridge to the cliffs that overlook Bow Lake.  On our way back, we saw two young men starting a fire in a stone fire ring right off the trail.  “Perfect full moon hike gathering spot,” I said.

We brought wood and paper and matches with us, as well as snacks and tea and wine.  Soon a camp fire was crackling and we watched the moon coming up behind the trees.  When the moon rose high enough to clear the trees, standing out on the open ledges was like standing in a shower of silver.  We stood around the fire and welcomed the light, marking the coming solstice with talk of change, wishes, intentions and the fun of being in just that place, with a group of other like-minded people, the moon bathing us in luminescence.

We needed our headlamps to follow the twisty trail back, when our cold feet started to take over our delight in being outdoors.  At the open summit of Parker we paused, turned off our headlamps, and looked at the lights of Portsmouth on the horizon, the sprinkling of street lamps in the small village below the ridge, and the big circle of open moon now high above us.

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Sky Lights

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Our first night in Montreal, as we walked out of the Hyatt where Jen and Jill are staying, we saw search lights beaming up into the dark sky, crisscrossing each other with rays of white that swooped and turned and created a dance of light in the cloud muffled darkness above.

Last night, walking back to our AirBnB apartment (great way to travel, check it out), we passed the lights again.  Only this time we noticed there was a continuous design being beamed on the side of a large building, changing from a fox face, to a sheep, to sky constellations, to a swirl of back and white, moving lines outward to disappear off the edge, and a sun burst of light that tapered into an open circle.  The upper windows of a building across the street were cycling through a dark to fully lit cycle, and in the square where many of the search lights were standing, there were rows of small red lights in lines across the concrete plaza.

Then David realized there was a tall, white wand, a lever, standing next to one of the black cloth draped search light bases.  The wands are there for people to manipulate the lights.  You push the wand down, the light moves up to shoot straight into the sky.  Pull the wand back, and the light begins to lower.  There were wand operated lights on both sides of the square, their movement being manipulated by people enjoying the show, and mingling with the moving lights set on higher stands, and lights that appeared to be beaming from the tops of buildings.

A plaque on the side of the search light structure told us this interactive installation was designed by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art in celebration of the Quebec Triennial, 2011, and shows every evening from October 7 to November 2.  It was magical.

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We Did It Again!

Jill came over for dinner last night, and after she left, David and I went to look at the just-past-full moon coming up through the trees, a peachy orange that reflected the huge ray of sunset light that was streaming up into the sky from where the sun set behind the trees on the horizon.

“Let’s go kayaking,” David said, so we did.  Unlike the night before, it was a bit windy, and the moon cut a choppy path of light across the water slapping up against itself.  We sat for a few minutes, just looking at the moon, the water, the reflections.  Then the wind picked up and started pushing us, so we held our paddles across the two boats, one paddle face up to catch the wind on each side, and sailed back to the beach where we’d put in.  I used my rudder to direct us and we glided home, moonlight kayak sailing.  I’ve never done that before, and on a weeknight no less!

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Wildwood

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I know I said today I’d post David’s poem from our morning of poetry play, but I’m going to do that the next tomorrow.  Today we went to Wildwood, the next town south from Stone Harbor, and outside of being another beach town, about as different as it could be.  Wildwood has an enormous boardwalk, three piers of amusement park rides, water parks, motels that looked completely unchanged since the 50’s, scads of people, monster truck rides, and a complete lack of the kind of intellectual preoccupations David and I often spend our days slipping around in.

For example, this morning on our walk along the beach, David did his book report style recounting of the concepts about human evolution and the development of the cooperative brain through trade and specialization of skill from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist.  Earlier, I’d shown him the latest draft of one of the three poems I’m working on right now, and he helped me edit out a few more words, generally a good move in any poem.

But this afternoon we went to Wildwood and lost ourselves in the sights and sounds and sun.  This slide show doesn’t do the experience justice, because you can’t hear all the amplified voices telling you “We have barbecued chicken, we have fried flounder, come eat here,” and “Two for the price of one, two for the price of one, come in and buy.”  We walked and looked and listened until we were thirsty and hungry and tired, went to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant run by a family David’s second cousin in St. John knows (it’s such a small world), came back to the house and watched a royally brilliant sunset.  There’s a tiny bit of pink left in the quickly darkening sky, and the first star is out.  Time for a wish.

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Sunset, No Internet

I’m sitting on the curb as I write this, between 84th and 85th Streets on 3d Avenue in Stone Harbor.  This is the annual “shore” trip for David’s family.  His parents’ house is perfectly situated for watching sunsets, but there’s no internet, and the neighbors whose internet we often rely on aren’t here.  So I’m in the one spot I’ve found where I can pick up a bit of signal from some unsecured network, and posting briefly to say, the sunsets have been glorious, and a few days of paying attention to what’s right here, right now, not what’s on the web, is probably a good idea.