crosshatch of snow shadows and solstice sun
We drove to Loch Garten - had it been any icier or the snow any thicker off the main road for any longer than we knew the drive would be, we would have turned back, or not gone in the first place. Compressed tracks of snow showed us the way, leaving a broken surface of jagged ice and crinkled snow between the tracks which scraped against the undercarriage. We went slowly, hoping there wouldn’t been an oncoming car to move us off our carefully followed lines into unknown snow. The snow and ice creaked as we imagined a layer of rust coming clean from under the car as we scraped along.
Our boots crunched just as loudly as we walked through the pinewoods on the west side of Loch Garten and along the edge of Loch Mallachie, the silence of the lack of wind and of the woods only becoming apparent as we stopped to listen to the non-noise of standing still. Looking into a small grove of birch outlined in pines, I stood and heard nothing but the quiet ring of my inner ears which was only broken after a minute or two by the tapping of a distant woodpecker.
The two lochs were frozen over, covered in bright snow that mirrored the sky above. A cold white haze but with the clarity of blue sky just beginning to break through behind it. Where trees stood in shallower water, dark rings encircled them, water steeping up through the honeycomb of the ice sheet. The edge of each loch was clearly outlined by a metre of snowless ice too, dark loops around the circumference to give away the size and shape of each loch from above. I wondered if they became markers for the geese. They flew by in groups of four, five and six and I imagined seeing a map of the landscape from their heights where everything was white except for rings and curves reflecting lochs and bays of still water, or sweeps of dark peat-stained burns and rivers rushing through low valleys. Any snow that landed in those boundary edges of the lochs did not accumulate but softened and melted, re-freezing to form a smooth but knobbly surface. My hand stuck to it when I briefly laid it on top.
We continued to follow the edge of Loch Mallachie as it bent around, choosing our spot along it just before the curve started to circle back. I pulled out the two pots I had brought along and started photographing them on the ice boundaries and on broken branches - straight arms sticking out from old pines and curved sculptural things on the ground that formed soft fencelines.
I brought Ling and Harvest Moon bowls along, expecting that it would be Ling I wanted to photograph in the long blue snow shadows. I imagined a subtle backdrop, camouflage rather than contrast. But I ran around, perching myself in awkward positions to snap Harvest Moon mostly instead. It felt like bringing the blue shadows and the warm light of sunset forward a couple of hours. I put my camera away after getting lost in it for unknown minutes.
The sky had cleared in that time; I hadn’t noticed. I sat in the sun and expected to feel its warmth but in December, just a couple of weeks away from the solstice with the sun low along the horizon, it was only enough to offset the cold, but not to warm my skin. Direct afternoon sun hit the mounds of heather, the dried flowers of the ling were lit, but weakly. The light had a quality of seeing the world through underexposed film. Sitting in it, my back against an old lichen-covered pine, the edge between my face and the air became blurred so that my face extended into the space beyond it and I had the sensation of not being aware of of my nose, my eyes, my lips, my cheeks until I brushed a few flakes of fallen snow from my cheeks.
The blurred boundary layer between the two were reflected in the criss-cross of of clouds blowing over the upper ridges of the far hills. The blue of the hills and the blue of the clouds mixed in a pattern of lines and curves and ridges so that each component became indistinguishable.
I looked at my photos later when we got home and felt surprised that it had been as cloudy as it was while I was taking photos. My memory of the place was entirely of sun. My memory then corrected by seeing the images. Mixing and blurring, a cross-hatch of image and memory of place.
