A Solstice and an Earthquake

This week was a rather interesting week for cosmo-terranic phenomena. Not a word, I'm sure, but maybe it could be, someday. The first event was the summer solstice. This one comes as no surprise as it has happened with great regularity for as long as I can remember. This particular one was a pleasant enough one, as solstices go. A large bank of cloud sitting on the horizon blocked the view of the actual sunset, but the previous two nights had really nice sunsets, so I'm going to pretend that the two sunset photos posted here are official solstice sunset photos. A lot of nice colors.

The second event of interest was an earthquake. These occur with a little less regularity in Erie, but it is the third one that I have experienced since living on the lake. This one was the strongest and longest of the bunch. I would guess that it went for at least a minute.

Now I'm not an apocalyptic conspiricist, but I find it a little alarming that an earthquake could occur so close to the solstice. If the solstice is the 21rst and the earthquake took place at 2:00 and you reverse 21 and you get 12, drop the zero from 2:00 and you put the 2:0 in front of the 12, get rid of the colon and you get 2012. If that is not proof that the world is going to end, I don't know what is. Coincidence you say? You would have to be blind not to see the portents. You see, the epicenter was in Ontario. What? you can't see the connection. Look at the word...O-n-t-a-r-i-o. What does the first syllable sound like to you? Ont...ant..ent...end...End! now do you see? And that isn't all. What about the rest of the word? Tario...right! Get it? Tario...terio...terrio....terra...earth. Ontario-End earth. I rest my case.

With doom impending, I just want you to know that I am not giving up on my futile efforts to stack stones in some interesting configurations. In fact, maybe I will watch the end from atop the new project.

Here is how things look as of the solstice. I don't know exactly where it goes from here, but what stands at this point are two towers of stone about 8 feet tall. I've left a little gap between them and leaned the right stack in a bit.

The circular tower from previous pictures has now fed the project as has most of the old stonewave. There is a four foot tall wall about twenty feet long that is all that remains of the previous manifestation. The beach remains very thin, with most of the sand sitting about fifteen feet offshore. We'll see how the summer progresses.

The Olympians Pay a Visit

This weekend Zeus paid a little visit to the area as did his fellow Olympian, Poseidon. About 2:30 am on Sunday, I was awakened by some pretty impressive bolt tossing done by the big guy. One strike was so close that the thunder was simultaneous with the flash. The thunder was of the kind that seems to start inside your head and vibrates down your spinal column. The rain was blowing so hard it was sideways and actually coming through the walls. With storms like this you just assume that the beach is getting reworked into a new form. You could see the waves rolling in like a herd of horses tumbling over each other in a rush to get ashore. To say there were white caps on the lake would be a bit misleading as the entire lake seemed to be churned to a white froth .


When I got down to the beach in the afternoon, things had calmed considerably and I was pleasantly surprised to see my stonework had survived for the most part. A 15 foot section of wall will need to be reset, but the remains of the Stonewave were largely intact. Where the real surprise was, was at the retaining wall at the foot of the bluff. These first two pictures show that the water running down the bluff face had piled up behind the retaining wall at least as high as the wall itself before blowing through it. A good 12 foot section was just obliterated by the force of the water as it gushed out of the breach. Stone from the wall was strewn in the torrent's path a good thirty feet from the wall.

These photos show the next manifestation of the Stonewave and what's left of the wall in front of it. There are two rectangular towers at this point each are about 5 or 6 feet tall at this point. There is a gap between them that I'm coaxing into a curve as the left hand tower bends away from the right hand side. Behind to the left is a small circular tower that is for storing the stone before it goes into the fill inside of the tower. It will shrink as the other two grow. The Stonewave will also feed the two towers as it gets disassembled.

There is also plenty of stone on the beach right now courtesy of a couple of big Spring storms. So I will have plenty to work with for the rest of June I would imagine.

Water, Water Everywhere...

Finished a small painting of the lake surface this weekend . I shot the photos for the studies down at the peninsula a couple of weeks ago. There were some interesting surface effects that I've been playing with. This one is the first one that actually came out well. I'm not sure where these water images are going to go. I'm in the process of trying to cross-breed the Pattern Recognition pieces with some "color field" studies that I've been doing in my sketchbook, that were born out of looking at some Georgia O'Keeffe and Mark Rothko works mixed in with Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth and the monolith from 2001: A Space Oddyssey, maybe a touch of Franz Kline

thrown in there too. Maybe by the end of the summer, if I'm not distracted too much, I will get it figured out. In the mean time, I have been cleaning up the damage from the old Stonewave and incorporating it into the new one. Its final form is starting to take shape in my head, but a big part of that final form relies on the lake giving back at least fifteen feet of beach that it took.