On our back dock at The Store, we keep, among other things, a rack housing the supply of wood that we have on hand for various carpentry needs throughout the year. And many years–not every year, but quite a few of them–a bird, usually a robin, will make a nest in my woodpile. This year was no different, and as soon as I saw her making the nest I started keeping tabs on things. By sheer accident of a couple of pallets nearby, I was able to actually get a good vantage point to track the progress of Mama’s eggs and, soon, her babies. All this unfolded over the last two weeks:
Two hatched, one in progress, one waiting. Those little pink blobs are the brand new hatchlings.They don’t even seem to have eyes yet, much less feathers.By this day, they were starting to look like something bird-ish.Definitely birds!While taking all of these, Mama would be off to one side, yelling at me to get away. I made these excursions very quickly.This was this very morning. I went to check on the babies, and as soon as they saw me, they vamoosed in true bird fashion: they flew away. This one, the last to leave, landed on a nearby rail on a lumber cart for a few seconds before also departing. I like to think that they wanted to see me, their “protector”, one last time before heading out for their birdish lives.The empty nest.
Orion the Hunter, emerging from behind a tree. Soon the Hunter will have moved beyond my southern horizon, not to be seen again until late next Autumn.
A pretty significant winter storm rolled through the northeast the other day, and Buffalo doesn’t tend to get hit too hard by these when they roll through; we’re generally on the outer fringes of whatever dumps snow and ice (or rain) on the northeast corridor. But we did get some ice out of the deal. Here’s the resulting ice as it coated the berries that were left behind on one of the trees in our backyard.
Taken on Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/2.8, 1/640, 9mm, ISO400
Taken on Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/2.8, 1/640, 9mm, ISo400
I never knew about a thing called submechanophobia until we traveled to Hawaii in 2021, and The Daughter reacted very strongly against the idea of going to the Pearl Harbor Memorial and seeing the Arizona. The idea of looking down at a sunken ship freaked her out. I looked it up and I learned that this is very real.
Apparently this is a shipwreck off the shore of Tobermory, Ontario. Tobermory is a town at the end of Bruce Peninsula, which extends into Lake Huron, and from what I have found out, there are around twenty shipwrecks in those waters. (We may have just finished noting the power of Lake Superior, but there are four other Great Lakes, and each one has done in its fair share of ships.)
I’ve never found myself looking down at a shipwreck in clear water before (we couldn’t even visit the Arizona! there was a problem with the docks for the boats that go over to it), so I don’t know how eerie I would find this, but while I do not suffer from the phobia in question, I can certainly see why it’s a phobia. Human-made stuff isn’t supposed to be down there, after all, and human-made things in the incorrect context can be creepy indeed…plus it’s a reminder that there’s a whole part of our world, that comprises most of our world, that we can’t visit without help and for small amounts of time.
I remember one such instance when I was a kid. My parents started canoeing heavily when I was 10 or 11, and I often accompanied them on these expeditions. One favorite waterway was the Allegheny Reservoir, which is a large lake in both New York and Pennsylvania, created by the erection in 1965 of the Kinzua Dam near Warren, PA. The reservoir is over 20 miles long, and it flooded valleys and caused the ends of a number of hamlets and villages as it filled.
One afternoon we were canoeing at Willow Bay, one of the reservoir’s many inlets. Since the Allegheny had been dammed at Kinzua in 1965, my father had been through the region before its flooding and remembered it. Thanks to a sign near the boat launch indicating the former site of a village, my father knew that he had driven through the place where we were paddling…and minutes later he looked down to see, just a few feet below the water, a road.
And that road is still visible today on Google Earth. Here is Willow Bay. Note the road, what’s left of it, emerging from the woods overgrowing it and then plunging, straight as an arrow, beneath the waters of the artificial lake.
Fifty years ago today, one of the most notorious maritime disasters in American history happened when the Edmund Fitzgerald, a mighty freighter of the Great Lakes, foundered and sank near the eastern end of Lake Superior. The story is well known, of course: the huge ship with the long and distinguished career, famous for being one of the biggest ships on the Great Lakes, and the way it sailed into one of the most ferocious storms in memory, finding itself in a more and more harrowing position, and striving against time to reach the relative safety of Whitefish Bay, and Captain McSorley’s haunting last radio message–“We are holding our own”–likely send just seconds, maybe minutes, before the ship went down with all hands.
The exact cause of the Edmund Fitzgerald‘s sinking has never been precisely determined. Can it be, at this point? I don’t know. It would likely take a lot more inspection of the wreckage on the bottom of Lake Superior, but there have been no expeditions to the ship in thirty years and I don’t imagine it’s exactly anyone’s priority. There are a number of theories: the ship’s hull might have been damaged when she hit a shoal, or the ship might have been swamped by a set of rogue waves that overwhelmed her. One account I once read (I can’t remember where, unfortunately) speculated that the Fitz encountered seas so violently rough that she plowed downward into the trough of a giant wave and then…kept plowing down. According to this account, the ship went straight down so fast that the engines were still running as it surged downward to the bottom. I find that prospect rather terrifying, to be honest. The Edmund Fitzgerald is haunting, I suspect, partly because its wreck is so unexplained and because it happened so quickly. This was no sinking, like the Titanic, that played out over an hour and a half and allowed for human dramas based on class to take place. The crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald had no time to think about their fate and to consider their impending mortality. The sinking was likely so quick that at least some of the crew didn’t know what was happening until they were already underwater.
Like all shipwrecks, large or small, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald provides yet another data point supporting one of my favorite adages: “Nature always bats last.” No matter how strong the fruits of our industry may be, nature will always have the final say. It may take years and years, centuries even, but eventually nothing made by the hand of humans can withstand the forces of the universe. And if you want to see those forces in action, well, just go look on any of the Great Lakes.
I’ve lived near the Great Lakes, in one way or another, for most of my life. Except for the years we lived in Hillsboro, OR when I was a kid, one Great Lake or another has pretty much always been at most a few hours’ drive away. Of course, since 2000, I’ve lived minutes away from Lake Erie, a stretch broken only in the winter of 2002-2003 when we lived in Syracuse, closer to Lake Ontario. These waters are easy to take lightly…but they are what they are. They are inland seas, and any of the five are capable of plunging a ship to the depths with all on board.
Plaque honoring Gordon Lightfoot’s classic song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, on display at the Ripley Aquarium, Toronto, ON
A much hoped-for phenomenon has come to pass: there is a little friend making a major change in his life, and he’s doing it in the milkweed outside our front door.
(OK, he hasn’t started his actual transition yet. But it’s coming!)
On a photographic note, there’s no way I could have captured this just a couple of years ago. Photography continues to excite and energize me.
The other day I went to Chestnut Ridge on what was the first sunny Sunday morning in what felt like months. Of course, being a typical Western New York spring, it was a cold morning and nothing at all is growing up there yet. But nature is nature, and photography is photography!
One of my favorite trees.
I almost love this shot…but the focus is off. I needed to change it to Auto-focuse Continuous, and I needed to set my auto-focus for detecting faces.
A bed of acorns and mossI love all the old crumbling stonework in this park.My new content-creation tripod fits perfectly in the leg tool pocket of my overalls!
I’m not sure why, but I find it comforting sometimes to think about the vastness of the universe and our own general insignificance when one thinks about that very vastness. And here’s the thing: you don’t even have to think about gigantic voids in space so huge that it takes light millions of years to cross it. We like to think that our own Earth is small, “it’s a small world after all”, and that our home in the universe is tiny. Which, I suppose, it is.
But compared to us? This world is still pretty gigantic and contains places that make us look individually like the tiniest of fleas on the largest mammal.
Consider a place called Point Nemo. This has been a particular fascination of mine of late (I even linked a piece about it last fall). It’s a spot in the southern Pacific that is the single point on Earth where you are farthest from any land mass at all.
Such places are called “poles of inaccessibility”. There are such poles on land as well–spots where you are farthest from any ocean, for example–but Point Nemo is the planet’s Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Point Nemo’s three nearest land masses–each islands in either the Pacific or off the coast of Antartica–all lie about 1,670 miles away. And not only is Point Nemo that far from human habitation (though at times there are humans within a few hundred miles of Point Nemo, whenever the International Space Station’s orbit takes it over the area), but Point Nemo is pretty much that far from life at all. Because of its distance from land and the ocean currents that surround it, the water there–all 13,000 feet deep of it–has virtually no nutrient content, and thus there is almost nothing living beneath the surface.
Because of that depth and the remote location, the region surrounding Point Nemo is generally the target area for satellites and spacecraft that have been abandoned and allowed to crash back to the planet.
I don’t know if it’s the times we’re living in, but where the idea of being stranded in a place like Point Nemo is genuinely terrifying, I also find it strangely comforting to remember that human concerns are still very small in comparison not just to the entire universe, but to this little planet of ours.
Here’s a video about an expedition to Point Nemo. Why go to such a place? I suppose for the same basic reason one climbs a mountain: because it’s there.
