by Susan D. Anderson

Created on: November 22, 2009

Meeting the Eagle.

I dressed in a hurry, trying to beat sunrise and make it out to the deck in time to shoot a scene I wanted to have for my photographic record of Flying Point Island, a little scatter rug of rock dwarfed by a surrounding bay. Bulked up with padding from a sweat suit, ski socks, and down coat, I leaned over the sink to check the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Twelve below zero; typical for the coast of Maine in January. "Not enough time to fiddle with the tripod," I decided, and sped outside.

My nose hairs stiffened to bristles with that first intake of air. The sound of my boots crushing fresh snow was an earful in the early morning stillness. Over there, across the bay, the sun was a minute or less from backlighting two small islands: Sow and Pigs to the left, Bustin's to the right. Between me and those islands lay the winter beach.

The shore on which I stood, Flying Point's skirt of odd-shaped boulders, had long since been spray painted by wind-driven snows into a clean, almost flat white canvas. Ice bergs up to twenty feet long and four feet thick had been thrust up, flipped sideways, and heaved into chaos by the incoming tides. In the last month or so the bay in front of me had become a salt water glacier so dense an occasional snowmobiler traversed it to get from one island to the next.

My ungloved hand, wooden in the sub-zero air, fumbled at the camera's settings, searching for the right film speed and aperture to match the scene that was coming. As soon as the sun cleared the horizon behind Sow and Pigs, tall pine trees over there were going to chop the light into julienne strips, giving the monochromatic landscape a moment of character and color. I knew that now, the way I knew how long a cord of wood would last, and which combinations of whoops and soft murmurs meant eiders were mating. I had been sitting at the plank table in front of the picture window that faced this bay every day for a year and a half, writing and observing.

Last year I had no camera. It wouldn't have mattered if I did. I was a greenhorn when it came to living in a place that required such unrelenting intimacy with the natural world. Sights worth documenting on film came unannounced, several times a day. My chief response to this constant novelty was to stay stock still until my mind could catch up with what my senses were telling me, until some vocabulary slowly surfaced to give it meaning. "A heron. Catching something. Big, long snake. Sea snake?"

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