But there is something important to be said for completely being in the place you are in.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to the sights, sounds, smells of where I am. This winter I did a lot of snowshoeing in the woods, and sometimes I took my phone so I could snap a photo, but mostly I didn’t––just so I’d completely be present wherever I was.

Now it’s finally spring where I live. As usual I keep a journal to keep track of the spring arrivals. Not to put down the goldfinches (brightening every day) velcroed to my finch feeders in the front yard, or the industrious and friendly chickadees that we also have all year round, or the clamorous bluejays who’ve taken over the backyard compost pile, or the woodpeckers, nuthatches, mourning doves, owls, crows, ravens, hawks… But it is a miracle every year when the spring birds show up.

4/10 Song sparrows back, purple finches singing, robins in yard (robins had tried to show up in March but driven away by snowstorm), male cardinal singing in our cork tree

4/15 Heard golden crowned sparrow, song sparrows everywhere, white-throated sparrow at finch feeder, pine siskins at finch feeders (elbowing out finches)

4/22 Woodcocks taking flight in twilight in our field!

4/25 Flickers everywhere, heard first hermit thrush in neighbors woods

4/26 Phoebes everywhere, wood frogs clattering in our tiny fountain pool (to the amphibeans in our woods, it’s a vernal pool… most years we have wood frog eggs, salamander eggs, green frog eggs, toad eggs––it’s a veritable hatchery)

4/27 Chipping sparrows everywhere, tons of wood frog eggs in just 24 hours!

 

 

I’ve been thinking about the idea of place lately. How places call to us, draw us. Sometimes we can answer the call and actually travel to that place, but usually we can’t and have to make do with traveling there in our minds.

Maybe this is why all my life I have taken photos of places, much more than photos of people. I’ve always envied people who could take photos of people––that gift of being able to connect with someone and put them at ease with having their photo taken, that opening of self that the camera somehow, magically, captures. I’ve never had that. I’ve always felt apologetic and even furtive when trying to photograph people. But places––I’ve always tried to photograph places, I guess so I could try to bring them away with me somehow. Hoping that the photo might be able to evoke the actual place from far away.

Sometimes it can happen. I guess it depends on that moment the shutter clicked––did I get it?––and then later, what we bring to the photograph, doesn’t it?

Drink in the photo with your eyes, and then close them and try to engage every other sense:  hear the distant rush of a waterfall across the valley, a kinglet’s enthusiastic burbling song, the buzz of a bee in a blossom; smell and taste the faint mineral whiff of mountain water, the spicy scent of alders; feel sudden warmth on your face as the sun comes out from behind a cloud, the cool brush of a breeze that’s just breathed off a glacier.

We do our best to get back to the places we love.

I’ve just published my novel Raven, Tell A Story on Amazon (paperback and Kindle). I started it twenty years ago and it’s seen many iterations over the years; I’m grateful to the friends who have read it along the way and offered feedback, and so happy to finally send it out!

Raven, Tell A Story isn’t set in an actual place, but if you’ve ever flown in to Anchorage, Alaska, on a clear day and were sitting at a window on the right side of the jet, you were looking down on the place––pretty much. The islands of Prince William Sound, and then the tall mountains of the Kenai Peninsula to the west and line after line of the white Chugach mountains reaching off to the east, with the small port of Whittier passing below, and then Turnagain Arm, and looking down on the Girdwood Valley and the pure white of the Eagle glacier smoothing off to the north… well, it brings me to tears pretty much every time I see it.

So when I sat down about four years ago to completely rewrite this story, one last time, this was the setting I picked for it. But because being an author is a tiny bit like being God, I was able to make a few improvements (at least in my mind!). Anchorage became the setting for Fayerport, but Turnagain Arm and Knik Arm both became deep, clear bays, and the long gray inlet leading past the Kenai peninsula, with the Alaska Range across the water from Anchorage, disappeared… so that Fayerport now faced nothing but sea to the west, open ocean all the way to Kamchatka. And Tessa’s lake is one valley up from that bay that used to be silty, gray Turnagain Arm, and a valley or two west of the Girdwood valley. That seemed just about the perfect location for it.

The photo of the lake and the mountain on the cover of the book (and on the Home page of this website) is actually from the Yukon. If you’ve ever driven from Haines to Haines Junction, I’m sure you noticed Kathleen Lake, sitting just off the highway, nestled between two mountains that love to reflect in its quiet water. This is one of the world’s most beautiful places, as beautiful to me as the Chugach mountains near Girdwood, and it looks pretty much the same, so if you want to keep that image in your mind as Tessa’s lake, that would be fitting.