Themes of uncertainty and anxiety have been common threads weaving themselves through my solstice vigil essays over the years I’ve made this project a central element in my solstice observations. The Long Night, that liminal space between the death of the old year and the birth of the new, is a time when I contemplate the year gone by and envision the year to come. As someone who lives with an anxiety disorder, it’s natural that anxiety adds its color to my experience of the solstice.
This year though, I’ll make no apologies for the tone or perspective found here. I’m a gender diverse, queer, disabled, pagan whose family is made up of other queer, trans, and often disabled folk. As we await the second inauguration of a man and administration who have repeatedly pledged to make the lives of trans people more difficult, if not impossible, and who are backed by a party that would end marriage equality, restrict the jobs LGBTQ people are permitted to do, and mandate Christian religious teachings in U.S. public schools, among a litany of other horrors, I am disinclined to wave away fear for the year(s) to come.
Sunset: Tower Viewer at Cape Mears
The last gasp of the dying year finds me at Cape Mears in Tillamook Oregon. At the risk of sounding disloyal to Maine, the Oregon coast is achingly beautiful and often majestic. Honestly, the sheer beauty of this place tends to intimidate rather than inspire me when it comes to photography. Also, the needs of working a forty hour a week day job have made doing the kinds of photography I did in Maine nearly impossible. I’ve struggled to find my voice as an artist in the past four or five years, a struggle that well predates us moving out west, and the change of coasts did not resolve those feelings.
Cape Mears is a gorgeous place, and I definitely encourage visitors to the Oregon coast to pay it a visit. I took some pictures waiting for the sun to disappear that are quite lovely. But they didn’t say anything interesting or new. They were taken from the same scenic viewing spots that literally thousands of other people have taken photos from over the years. That’s not the kind of art that excites me.
While there’s nothing particularly majestic or exciting about this photo, I like it. Perhaps it’s absurd to come to a place of sweeping vistas and beauty only to take a photo of an old tower viewer. But, with apologies to Leslie Gore, it’s my solstice and I’ll shoot what I want to.
As the sun slips below the horizon in the blurry background, the inscription on the viewer: “turn to clear vision” at once speaks to me, and feels like a taunt. The future is so very uncertain right now, especially for people like my family and I. Which takes us neatly to this year’s deep of the night image.
Deep of the Night: The Spirit Worker & The Old Merc
In times of fear and despair, it’s natural for those of us who experience religious faith as central part of our lives to turn to our gods and beliefs. I wear many hats, metaphorically speaking, and one of the most important in my life is bound up in the relationships I have with the gods and spirits I work with and/or worship.
I, and the community of people I’ve surrounded myself with, have spent the year since last Solstice praying, divining, and seeking wisdom from the spirits about what we can expect to see in the years to come. The answers frankly, have consistently been pretty bleak. No matter how we look at things, from researching policy positions and political theories, to divination, omens, augurs, and a myriad of other ways of searching for wisdom, be they mundane or supernatural, there is no escaping that the future looks to be dark and tumultuous for all of us.
Christian Nationalists in my home country have all but declared war on people who live, love, or worship differently than they are called to. They in turn have formed alliances with oligarchs whose wealth would make a Gilded Age railroad barron blush, and who will do whatever it takes to keep everyday people embroiled in a culture war so they don’t realize that they are on the losing side of a class war. Across the world today, intolerance, fascism, and wars both hot and cold, simmer and rage.
But simply surrendering to despair is not an option for my family or I. That brings us to the car I’m sitting in front of in this photo, which yes, is a picture of me.
On the morning of the Solstice, we drove into Portland to pick up this car, a 1978 Mercedes 240D. If you’ve been reading these solstice essays for a while, you know that old machinery is important in my and my family’s life. I have a particular love for vintage or antique cars, and we haven’t had one in years, not since we sold our 1950 Pontiac Chieftain to someone who was better equipped to give it the attention it needed than we were.
This Mercedes, which we’ve named Chester, comes from a family that loved and cared for it for many years. However, for a variety of reasons, it has largely sat undriven for over a decade. The owners did some heroic work to get it running enough for us to drive it home, but I think we were all a bit surprised when it made the journey without any issues.
Chester represents hope. In this year’s solstice essay, it stands as concrete evidence of us not giving up. Things may be bleak as hell, but we have hope that we’ll get to bring this car back to life, something that brings us joy and fulfillment. And if there’s some added security in the household having cars that run on all the different forms of fuel available, electric, petrol, and diesel, well that’s certainly not something we ignored when looking for a new classic to work on.
Also, for only the second time in eight years, I appear on camera in the solstice essay, this time clothed in some of my spiritual working gear. The chainmail shawl and hat I’m wearing are adorned with a myriad of items that connect in various ways to my personal or spiritual life, from antique keys, to a camera aperture, a self-winding watch, meditation bells that belonged to my deceased father-in-law, and even a worn out piece of one of my foreskin restoration devices.
The Winter Solstice is always about finding light in the darkness and turning our backs to the Long Night in search of comfort and hope. That’s why light is such a central part of this photo. After the picture was taken, I changed out of my working gear, and into scrapy jeans and a shirt I didn’t care about, and spent the hours after midnight servicing the old Mercedes. I changed the oil and filter, drained and refilled the manual gearbox, swapped out the air cleaner, and started prepping the rear differential for work it needs.
On a fearful night, as a bleak year dies and what may be a far darker one prepares to be born, I needed to do something concrete that made things better, even if only for one tired old car.
Sunrise: Pittock Mansion Viewpoint
I know I said that taking the same photo everyone else does from the same spot is the opposite of the kind of art that makes me want to reach for my camera, and that’s true. But for sunrise I did it anyway. You might be surprised just how challenging it is to find a good view of the sunrise in Portland Oregon on December 22nd. Most good sunrise views are optimized for the summer months, when the sun is at a very different angle than it is on the first day of the waxing year. I spent a great deal of time with the always invaluable Photographer’s Ephemeris trying to find angles that worked well, and in the end, I decided that I wanted to go up to Pittock Mansion.
For that matter, I should also say that the sun is above the horizon in this photo, but it was still about ten minutes away from rising over the distant hills. By the time it had risen high enough to be viewable from my vantage, rain squalls had completely obfuscated my view, and the photos I took simply aren’t worth sharing. So I’m bending the rules ever so slightly (again see: Leslie Gore).
This is the fourth Winter Solstice I’ve spent on the west coast, and I felt it was time that Portland featured in this project in some way. Portland is honestly a pretty great city, and I’m glad we live here. That said, the reality is that I’m not a city person in most respects. Before moving out west, our closest neighbor was a Christmas tree farm that was only open one weekend a year, and we liked things that way.
But there’s safety in the city that we don’t find in the country. My household consists of three queer, polyam, pagans, two of whom are trans and one of whom is… not exactly cis but not entirely sure where the gender journey is going to lead. It simply isn’t as safe for us to be in a rural area as it is to be closer to the city. There is safety in numbers, and the culture in the city and surrounding suburbs is far more welcoming than in the countryside and smaller towns that we might prefer otherwise.
Still, as I look out on that sea of humanity, waiting for the sun to rise on the dawn of the waxing year, I can’t help but wonder how many of the people who fall under the gaze of my camera embrace a movement that wants to eradicate people like me and mine from society and culture, if not from the realm of the living entirely. All I can do is hope that they are outnumbered by friends and allies who will stand with us in the dark and trying times ahead.