Rosslyn Redux

Tag: Moonrise

  • Moon Over Lake Champlain

    Moonrise over Lake Champlain with Rosslyn boathouse in foreground
    Moonrise over Lake Champlain with Rosslyn boathouse in foreground

    Last night’s moonrise over the Vermont foothills (south of the Green Mountains) was absolutely sensational! The moon started out fat and orange as it made a dramatic appearance. My bride and I first spied the moon over Lake Champlain while driving home to Essex from Willsboro after dining at Johnny’s Smokehouse. Breathtaking. And elusive because it kept disappearing behind the trees.

    Filming the Moon over Lake Champlain

    Once we arrived home, I grabbed a camera and headed down to the waterfront where I tried to capture — albeit in blurry facsimile — the less orange and smaller but still exquisite orb shimmering across Lake Champlain. The view in this video was shot from the flood damaged but finally dry waterfront of our home in Essex, New York. You can see the Essex ferry dock where the Essex-Charlotte ferry delivers and picks up passengers, and the Old Dock Restaurant is even slightly visible beyond the illuminated ferry gallows. Rosslyn’s boathouse is silhouetted in the foreground with a Lake Champlain moon beam inviting you to begin enjoying summer after Lake Champlain floods put such a damper on the first half of June.

    Lake Champlain Flood Update

    As of this morning, the USGS website reports that the Lake Champlain water level has fallen to 100.33 feet. Most of the bottom terrace of the waterfront is now water free, except for where flooding damaged the stone retaining wall and eroded the lawn. This weekend we’ll remove the remaining debris and begin to repair the damage. We’re still waiting to hear what New York State has decided about stabilizing the embankment and repairing the road, so we’ll need to hold off on significant repairs in the area where NYS Route 22 (aka Essex Road or Lakeshore Road) collapsed at the end of May. But hopefully by next week we’ll be able to start windsurfing and possibly even install the boat lift and docks so that our ski boat can be launched. A late start to summer, but hard won!

     

  • Green Mountain Moonrise

    Green Mountain Moonrise

    Green Mountain moonrise over Lake Champlain. Tricky to capture the surreal size and color of the moon as it burbles up out of Vermont's “Greens”. (Source: Geo Davis)
    Green Mountain moonrise over Lake Champlain. Tricky to capture the moon’s surreal size and color as it burbles up out of the “Greens”. (Source: Geo Davis)

    Smart phone photography (i.e. “iPhonography”) inevitably includes some limitations. But the biggest upside (that in some respects outweighs many of those limitations) is its omnipresence. The mid-July moonrise in this image — a martian mime lifting up out of the Green Mountains, a fiery moonbeam searing the surface of Lake Champlain, a blurry silhouette observing, and the viewer’s vantage that of a voyeur peeking over the shoulder of the silhouetted observer — is possible because my phone was with me when my camera was not. Returning to Essex by boat from dinner at the Red Mill at the Basin Harbor Club in Vergennes, Vermont. At the helm, piloting a crew of close friends homeward at the end of a celebratory evening. Late at night. In the dark. Miles from my camera.

    Smart phone photos will inevitably be the subject of academic scrutiny some day, an unwieldy proliferation of self referential documentation offering powerful insights into our era for some distant descendent curious about her/his/its anthropologic backstory. But for now I offer up thanks that I so often have this device close at hand when the moment demands recording. A photo. A video. An audio clip…

    This Green Mountain moonrise is fuzzy. It is unexceptional its photographic integrity. But it nevertheless possesses a certain energy that wouldn’t have otherwise been captured. I so rarely bring a camera with me any more unless I plan to take photographs. But the most important images appear when unexpected. It’s a law of the universe. Probably.

    I realize in these times of introspection, digging deep into the repository of images and documents and artifacts that have accrued since the summer of 2006 when we purchased Rosslyn, that a vast documentary already exists. It is the story of our time in this home. Recorded, by and large, because phone cameras made it convenient and quick and possible to record the myriad moments. Early images are poor quality by today’s standards. But they possess a certain intrigue for their inexact verisimilitude. They leave room for memory and imagination to conjure a crisper story. They are romantic in that sense. Allusions. Illusions.

    So many mornings and evenings I’ve gazed at the Green Mountains. So many celestial gazes focused on the moon. Moonrise. Moonset. Full full. Delicate crescent. This curious device we call a smart phone has become a participant, a filter, a scribe, a documentarian. It is rooted in the way we see Rosslyn. The way we see our time at Rosslyn. A fuzzy collage of moonrises. Sunrises. And the interstices where sixteen years of life germinated…

    [NB: I’m not 100% certain what or why this post is. Nor why I’m inclined to share it despite the meandering, inconclusive foray. Some how a snapshot of a Green Mountain moonrise evolved into a meditation on fuzzy photography, smartphones, and the peculiar documentary amalgam these omnipresent devices co-create…]