Bernard General Store
The Hub – Kim Furlong, Storekeeper Kim Furlong has a single string tied around her left wrist. The string symbolically connects close friends in a circle of support and promise for a friend about to give birth. “When the child is born we will all cut the string together. It’s a way of celebrating a new beginning. I should’ve put one around this store years ago.” Kim, along with her partner, Carolyn DiCicco, own and operate the Bernard General store in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. “We don’t so much operate it as we run it, or it runs us, doesn’t matter, there is a lot of running. In the summer it is a 3-month sprint, for the rest of the year it is a marathon but we never stop moving. After 10 years of dreaming about buying this store and 18 years of owning it we are getting tired of all the running.” Being a general store shopkeeper means you are on your own most of the time. There is no field office to call, no mother ship for support. It’s just wits and wiles, 24/7. You are the plumber, carpenter, marketer, event planner, late night opener, all day listener, janitor, purchasing expert, financial guru and wizard of all things necessary for a disperse rural community. “I’m not saying it hasn’t been hard. We devoted 18 years of our lives to this store- lived upstairs, worked downstairs, raised our families here. Now we are just about done emotionally; this last year has been very difficult. We have no line of credit anymore; it’s amazing we kept it going this long. Without the support of the community we never would’ve. We give it our best.” With an 8-stool soda fountain in the rear of the store and Tuesday burger and Saturday live music nights, the store is the social, economic, political and in many ways, spiritual hub of this little village on the shores of Silver Lake. But a general store doesn’t just sell merchandise; a shopkeeper doesn’t just keep shop. A general store stocks its shelves with the needs of the community while a shopkeeper spoons out the nourishment to sustain its heart. “We’ve seen kids grow up and graduate and come back again with families. We’ve had births, deaths, weddings, divorces. Broken ankles, broken hearts, they all pass through this store. You come in a stranger and you leave a friend. That’s just the way it is. We wouldn’t have it any other way.” “It was the community that attracted us, the community that we fell in love with, the community that supported and sustained us, the community that rallied around us. We fed the community as much as the community fed us. But eventually we all lost our appetites. The community is shrinking; some locals can’t afford to live here anymore and with specialty stores and giant grocery stores a short drive away it’s near impossible to keep it going anymore.” Today the Bernard General Store is closed for the first time in 180 years. Kim and Carolyn are adrift, unsure of where the next wind will blow them. Kim cut the string on her wrist just last week.
Flying Time By
Midnight in mid-channel, mid-coast in Maine and I am adrift between two tides. One carries my small boat away as I pull to shore against its tidal tug. The other also washes through the starry darkness but I cannot pull against it. And so, thus caught in the middle, with raised oars I drift…… listening. From above “Churrs,” “cheeps,” “tinks” and “seets” rain down upon me, the notes of dark birds slipping through the night. In my boat as the water gently holds me to the coast I am carried away to places I cannot row by this current unseen and unfelt. There is a river of wings heading south overhead. A river of heartbeats pumping strong all around. It is the flow of migration. It is the passage of place. The Atlantic Coast ecoregion extends from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of more than 6,000 miles. To the north the landscape is fresh and clean and still recovering from its addiction with glacial ice. Once buried under more than a mile of ice the maritime coast of Maine and Canada is literally rising from the sea as it rebounds from the weight of its recent icy burden. Now a topography of rocky headlands and granite ledges dressed in spruce caps and skirts of green seaweed, the northern Atlantic Coast quickly gives way to the spruce-fir and hardwood forests that press against it. Only the small beaches tucked along the rocky coast like forgotten hammocks slung between rock walls are reminders of the softer southern coast. Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Long Island are depositional endpoints to the advance of the most recent glacial ice. Beyond these islands the coast turns south as soils thicken, headlands diminish and beaches, like long sandy ribbons, decorate the coast. From New Jersey south, barrier island beaches wrap the coast and cradle the breadth of the Gulf of Mexico and attract hordes of sand-crazed people. Yet despite the chaos of humanity and beyond the reach of dune-front bungalows these beaches, hunted by harriers and danced upon by sanderlings teasing the run of waves, are sandy slivers of wild land. Also included within this ecoregion is the Piedmont of the Gulf and the Southern Atlantic states. This coastal upland includes all the area between the dunes and the edge of the southern Appalachians, a stout crescent of estuaries, meandering rivers and rolling hills that narrows once past the Chesapeake to a sinuous tail in New England. Once heavily forested, the Piedmont is now mostly a crazy quilt of agriculture held together by looping stitches of hardwood hedgerows and coarse patches of pine woodlots. What ties together this most ecologically varied ecoregion is the pulse of migration that annually swings north and then south along the broad reach of the Atlantic. Caught between the mountains and the shore the ecoregion is a natural corridor to animals passing with the seasons. In fact, there is never a time when the passage of animal nations is stayed along this path. Somewhere, some kind of animal is on the move. And in someplaces, at certain times, some will be going north while others are going south. A calendar of bird migration for the mid-Atlantic Coast is a chaotic amalgam of arrivals and departures. In January the earliest kestrels and red-tailed hawks arrive from the south, usually males first, to stake out breeding territories. Pintails, the first of the northbound waterfowl, arrive in late January followed by swans, loons and cormorants in early March. Bluebirds appear at this time as well, encouraging the reluctant spring north with their song. Early spring is temperamental at best, deadly at worst. If winter is long many early migrants will perish, caught by late storms when their reserves are low. But if winter passes benignly to spring, the earliest migrants will get the best breeding territories and their families will prosper. Such is the push and pull of lives cast to the wind. In April and May, the river of wings overflows and birds flood the coast. First to return are the blackbirds. Then sparrows, hawks, gulls, terns, herons, swallows, thrushes, warblers, seabirds and sandpipers drop out of the sky to rest and feed before again moving north. If over water a storm front collides with this passage of birds the fallout to first land is impressive. Enter a coastal Texas oak motte on a clearing April morning and songbirds, exhausted and hungry will adorn every branch. In two weeks they will be on home territory far to the north but now, for a little while, they will rest and feed among palms and live oak leaves. Summer is the season of overlap, when opposite migratory currents collide and the eager and idle are often indistinguishable. In the third week of July adult red knots and sanderlings, having finished nesting on the Arctic tundra, are returning to coastal mudflats where semidedicated semipalmated sandpipers and tardy ruddy turnstones are still heading to the Arctic. Juvenile knots and semipalms, left on the tundra to forage on their own, find these mudflats in September when the adults are already on their wintering grounds. By Fall, the migratory floodtide returns, now running even higher with the addition of birds born of the year. Fleeing cold weather and diminishing food supply there is a deliberateness to their southward push that is not present in the spring. It is a deliberateness to find high quality food and to store energy for the journey to come. Many birds make dangerous, long distance flights to get to their winter homes in South America. These are usually just the adults who are experienced migrants and in peak physical condition. Juveniles are inexperienced food collectors and are thus thinner than adults. More often than not they do not try to carry the treacherous water hazard but instead fly the longer, but safer land route. Guided by the stars and
Personal Resolution
What is Your Resolution? I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon (that is not entirely true) but what is it these days with this unholy quest for ever-higher resolution? It wasn’t too long ago when we were pretty happy about a 2000 ppi scanner, that is until the 4000 ppi scanners came out. But at least we were really happy with the 4000 scanners. With 4000 pixels per inch we could make big prints that looked great. Why would we ever want or need more? We didn’t until the 5000 ppi and the 8000 ppi scanners were introduced. Suddenly the 4000 ppi scanners we once loved were no good. After all, if 4000 ppi is good isn’t 5000 ppi better? This lust for more is not restricted to scanners, unfortunately, it has spread to everything and to all aspects of photography. If a 6 mega pixel camera is better than a 3 meg. camera isn’t an 8 meg. camera better than a 6? And if 8 meg. is really good than 12 or 16megs must really, really be good. Photographers are about as sensible as hound in heat. And let’s not even bring up 6 frames per second motor drives vs. 8 or 12fps or 11 auto focus points vs. 51. Here’s an idea: lets put so many auto focus points in our viewfinders that we spend all our time selecting points and in the process missing the shot. It will be like a Gameboy with a lens. Who cares about actually taking a picture? So as I understand this, the cameras and scanners (and printers, and memory cards, etc.) that we were so happy with a year ago (a day ago?) must actually have been inadequate and we just didn’t know it. It follows then that the gear we have now is also inadequate but we don’t want to think about it. Either we are all idiots or we are all ignorant. Take your pick. Here is what has happened: We have all been seduced into thinking that more megabytes and higher resolution are better and that somehow (apparently magically and without effort) if you have more and higher you are a better photographer. It doesn’t matter how the equipment is used, if you can get more pixels, dots and bytes you will be a better photographer. Spend your money, improve your photography. This is a wonderful world in which we live. But here is the question: You know what the resolution is of all your equipment but what is your resolution? What is the resolution of your technique, your craftsmanship? Can you get 4000 ppi out of your photography? Can you get 2000? If you have sloppy technique and awful craftsmanship no matter what the resolution of your digital gear is your pictures will be terrible. Let me repeat that. If your technique is sloppy and low res your pictures will be sloppy and awful. The resolution of your technique is far more important than the resolution of any of your equipment. Nothing contributes more to the outcome of your image. The problem is that you can’t buy technique (although coming to one of my workshops would certainly help!). Better technique can only be learned through practice and dedication. For you digital folks out there who don’t believe anything unless there are numbers involved, if your technique has a resolution of 1000 ppi it doesn’t matter what the resolutions of your gear are your images will have a resolution of 1000ppi. You all will recognize this as the much said but little appreciated: garbage in, garbage out. It doesn’t matter how much the garbage cost or how fine its resolution, it is still garbage. So what are the most common reasons for low personal resolution? 1. You spend $5000 for a camera and $50 for a tripod. You know you should use a tripod but you really don’t want to so you go out and buy the next to cheapest tripod you can find (you don’t want to be accused of being really cheap). Then you put your expensive camera on it. I see this every workshop I teach. For some reason photographers have a really hard time spending more than $100 for a tripod. They will spend $5000 for a camera they really don’t need but they won’t spend $400 for a sturdy tripod they do need. Go figure. Many of today’s cameras and lenses are getting bigger and heavier with every new model. This means you must have a very sturdy tripod to hold these new cameras. The ball of your ball head must be at least golf ball size. Cue ball size is even better (the bigger the ball the more surface area there is to grip on to, the steadier it is). If it is a particularly big camera or lens than your ball should be tennis ball size. Don’t bother arguing with me, you now I am right. Go out and get a good tripod and a good tripod head. Your pictures will thank you. 2. You rely on VR or IS technology when you shouldn’t. Image stabilization technology is never as sharp as using a tripod. Never. The only time you should use image stabilizing/vibration reduction technology is when it is not possible to use your tripod. Laziness, fatigue or my personal favorite, elaborate rationalization are not reasons to leave your tripod in your car. And no, you can’t shoot a sunrise or sunset handheld, at least not a good one. If you do manage to get your shutter speed high enough to justify hand holding chances are your depth of field is insufficient, the ISO is so high that there is grain every where, or the light is hideously contrasty. Even if you get a sharp picture hand holding your compositions will always suffer because you won’t be able to carefully consider all the important compositional elements of your picture. You’ll get a nice, sharp mediocre picture. Oh, joy!