Ogunquit

A year ago today we spent time inside the Ogunquit Museum of Art
in the town of the same name on the Maine coast.

Afterwards I clambered about behind the museum taking pictures of the rocks and tidal pools.

I never posted any of those photographs in 2018, so to make amends I’m showing you a few now.

As always, patterns and textures beckoned. So did colors, whether muted or bright.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Organic and inorganic

At Southwest Harbor in Acadia National Park on June 10, 2018, I photographed things organic and inorganic.

Jackson Pollock‘s got nothing on me:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Rhodora

A year ago today we stopped along U.S. 1 near Whiting, Maine, so I could photograph the pleasant scene shown here. Margaret Scheid of the National Park Service told me she’s 85% confident the plants are Rhododendron canadense, known as rhodora.

Years before I’d ever seen this kind of plant, I knew the great poem to which Ralph Waldo Emerson gave that title, and which I’ve copied below.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

 

The Rhodora

On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

 

If you’d like, you can have more information about the poem.

 

Earthquake

Not many people know that on this date in 1727 New England experienced an earthquake. You can learn about it in “The Earthquake of 1727” and “The Great 1727 Earthquake and the Wrath of God.” Not having any wrathful photos of New England, I’ve illustrated today’s post with a colorful scene I documented along U.S. 1 near Whiting, Maine, on June 8th. Margaret Scheid of the National Park Service says she’s 95% confident the red plants are blueberries.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Southwest Harbor

On June 10th we stopped at Southwest Harbor on Maine’s Mount Desert Island.

That’s the island most of Acadia National Park is on.

You’re seeing some of the patterns, textures, and colors I photographed along the shore.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

More from Schoodic

As we drove south into the Schoodic section of Acadia National Park on June 8th, it was the forest that first called out for attention.

But the forest had a way of creeping out onto the shore.

From then on, the coast made its claim on me.

Near the end of our visit to the Schoodic section of Acadia National Park I slowly made my way close enough to a gull (perhaps Larus argentatus) to get some decent pictures. I’d have taken more, and probably from even closer, if a guy hadn’t come by with his dog, paid no heed to what I was obviously doing, and scared the bird away.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Peak experience

Many people have their peak experience in Acadia National Park atop Cadillac Mountain. Not high even by Appalachian standards, the 1529-ft. summit of Cadillac Mountain nevertheless provides a view of the land and sea for miles in all directions, as we confirmed on the afternoon of June 9th. Because dozens of people were wandering about, I had to work quickly at times when a scene momentarily cleared. In contrast, one thing up there I didn’t want to exclude is this prominent boulder:

Smaller boulders adorned the mountain as well:

Look at the natural grooves in the top layer of rock:

And here’s a closer look at one of the many rocky surfaces covered with lichens:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

More than waves

In addition to waves shooting up from rocks along the Atlantic coast in the Schoodic section of Acadia National Park on June 8th, I paid attention to several shallow pools of water that had collected in depressions on top of the nearby rocks. The picture above, intentionally taken at a somewhat skewed angle, gives you an overview of how little pools form in the rocks. Below, seen more closely in other pools, you get a sense of the intriguing colors and textures sometimes found within them.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

What a wave

Our first contact with Maine’s Acadia National Park came on June 8th. That afternoon, arriving from New Brunswick, we visited the Schoodic section of the park, which is not connected to the main part across the Mt. Desert Narrows. Like other sites we’d already been to on the Atlantic coast, this one had rocky outcrops standing against the sea. In one place I noticed how the rocks caused crashing waves to hurl their water upward.

The difficulty for a photographer was that incoming waves didn’t consistently break in the same spot, so it was hard to know where to aim. I chose a high shutter speed, put the camera in a mode that would take several pictures a second, and then stood waiting, looking through the viewfinder in the direction where some waves had already splashed up, hoping my reflexes would be good enough to press the shutter release button as soon as a wave seemed to be beginning to break. Given the difficulties, most of the resulting pictures didn’t turn out great. Still, I was happy with a few of them. The one I chose to show here pleases me because, while we usually think of waves as horizontal, the water in this one formed a vertical arc. If you look beyond the wave, you might reasonably think you’re seeing portions of a man-made wall; in fact those rocks were all natural.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Mount Katahdin

I’ve been reading Laura Dassow Walls’s recent biography of Thoreau. Near halfway through comes an account of Thoreau’s 1846 visit to Mount Katahdin, which at 5267 ft. (1605m) is the highest point in the state of Maine: “From Quakish Lake they got their first glimpse of Mount Katahdin*, still twenty miles away, its summit veiled in clouds.”

On June 2nd of this year, driving north on Interstate 95, we took the pullout for a scenic view of the mountain. Unfortunately, as you can see in the photograph, we had the same experience Thoreau originally did, and the summit remained obscured by clouds. Oh well, maybe another time. No clouds obscured my view of some birch trees (Betula papyrifera, I believe) adjacent to the pullout’s parking lot. Given the briskness of the breeze, I used a shutter speed of 1/500 of a second to keep the leaves from blurring yet still let them convey a sense of the wind.

* By a curious coincidence, in the evening on the same day that I updated the draft of this post to include the information about Thoreau, we watched an unrelated documentary I’d taken out of the library. As the introductory credits appeared, we saw that the company that had made the documentary was Katahdin Productions.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman