It’s been another tumultuous and challenging year, and I find myself going into this Solstice in a very different place than I was a year ago. For starters, this Solstice finds me not in the familiar surroundings of Southern Maine, but instead more than twenty five hundred miles to the west, in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The decision to move across the country to a place where we knew almost no one was a difficult one, and we are still very much adapting to our new surroundings, a process made far more difficult by COVID’s unrelenting presence in all our lives.
Sunset - Sunset - Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach - Cannon Beach, Oregon
There was never any question in my mind that I wanted my Solstice vigil to begin at the ocean. The sea has been such a constant in my photography work and my spiritual life for nearly a decade, it just made sense that I would watch the last of the year’s light disappear into the Pacific Ocean. But I’m not oblivious to the fact that this is the Pacific Northwest in December, and like New England this time of year, seeing the sun is something of a rare treat rather than a guarantee.
If you could see the sun in this photo, it would be dipping below the horizon just to the right of the basalt bulk of Haystack Rock, right about where the lights of a fishing boat can just barely be seen. I know that the last thing the world needs is yet another picture of this particular sea stack, one of the largest on earth, and one that is extensively photographed. But being there for me is a perfect blending of the familiar and the new. The beach and ocean are a comfortably routine subject for me, but the massive volcanic remnant serves as a stark reminder that this is neither the beach nor ocean that I’m used to. As the gray sky dims and the long night begins, I trudge back to the car through a droning rain that will follow me on the ninety minute mountain drive back to the valley where we’re making our new home.
Deep of the Night - Beaverton, Oregon
Last year’s Solstice vigil opened at our beloved rental home in Dayton, Maine. That house was everything we look for in a home, and especially in the days before there was a COVID vaccine, it was a treasured refuge from a world made newly-dangerous thanks to the respiratory pandemic blazing across the globe.
We don’t live in a house out in the country here in Oregon, but instead in an apartment complex on the edges of Portland’s suburban sprawl. It is a fine landing point for people who moved across a continent, but it isn’t a good fit for who we are and where we want to be. There are many conveniences to living in suburbia, but it’s also loud (both physically and energetically), and it never gets truly dark here. There’s a… garishness to this place that is at once seductive and counter-productive for the lives we want to lead, and people we want to be. The lurid glow of the hot tub and pool feel like a good representation of that dichotomy. We take advantage of the hot tub at least three or four days a week, but it nonetheless feels like a wasteful and gaudy distraction.
Sunrise - Jonsrud Viewpoint - Sandy, Oregon
Beyond the clouds on the horizon, about thirty five miles away, is Mount Hood, an active volcano that is a constant presence on a clear day, even from where we live an hour west of where I chose to greet the dawn. But if you can only appreciate the beauty of this part of the world on a clear day, you will quickly find yourself miserable here.
I chose the Jonsrud Viewpoint for the end of my long night vigil because I knew even if Hood didn’t make an appearance, I would still have the Sandy River and the expansive forest spread out before me as I greeted the dawn. And even without Mount Hood, nature and the fates still had a treat for me.
Rain was a constant companion through this long night, it is the Pacific Northwest after all, and the rain started almost as soon as my watch informed me that the sun had set at Cannon Beach. By the time I arrived at the Jonsrud Viewpoint, the rain had picked up enough that I had to crank up the volume on the radio to overcome the sound of it hammering on the glass roof of my borrowed Tesla.
Dressed in rain gear and using weather sealed lenses on my cameras, I shot a number of photos of the mist shrouded river valley through the rain as the sky lightened. Eventually, wet and resigned, I loaded my gear back into the trunk of the car and prepared for the hour’s drive home. But standing with the driver’s door open, I decided I owed it to myself to give the sky just another couple of minutes. I could see a crack in the clouds in the distance and the rain had begun to slack a bit.
Two minutes later, I was hauling my gear back out of the trunk as I prepared to give the sky one more chance. My optimism and persistence was rewarded when the sun briefly broke through the clouds, giving me the chance to take a number of photos of the first light of the waxing year. Some of those photos are honestly stunning, but it was this one that I felt was the best fit for this year’s Solstice essay project.
We expect to stay here in Oregon for the foreseeable future, though now more than ever that future is unknowable. My job, which was one of the factors in our move, feels very uncertain, and the world we live in grows more unstable every day in a multitude of ways, from the environmental to the political. And of course, COVID variants continue to disrupt the best laid plans and cast a pall over everything we all try to do.
I have never gone into the long night so unsure of what the waxing year will bring, but whatever the future holds, I’m going to try to go into it with patience and the hope for those glimpses of the sun, along with the surety that even when the light is hidden, it still burns somewhere beyond the horizon.
Note - where images were HDR the Exif information for the 0+/- image was provided