The New Wave Grows

Well, the Labor Day weekend turned out to be laborious. I spent about 4 hours a day on the beach as the water was calm and clear and the weather warm. Ideal conditions that have occurred only three times this summer. So the Stonewave has grown substantially. This is what it looks like from out on the water a ways. Took a little boat ride courtesy of a beach neighbor. The forms are not exactly what I'm shooting for, but once weather turns I can rework the wave crests to make them closer to what I want. If the elements permit, I might also get the fourth wave crest in before winter.


This is what it looks like from land and at this angle the waves look more like what I want them to look like.


Just since this Fall, the wall has stopped so much sediment from running into the lake that the ground at the back of the wall is now two feet higher than the beach side. The plant life is pretty lush as well.

The view from behind the wall out towards the lake is kind of interesting in the light at this time of the year as the sun barely clears the bluffs to light up the back of the wall.

I like the curve of the front of this wave and the color of stone and vegetation is quite pleasant. Very late summer in feel, if you ask me.

In the last two photos, the late afternoon sun really changes the stones' attitudes and they start to feel quite pleased with themselves, almost to the point where they imagine themselves stonework fit for El Dorado.

Prehistoric Beast Washes Ashore

Well, imagine you are walking along the shore of the lake. The water is calm and clear for the first time all summer. So you wade in and begin to pull out the trash that washes in with regularity from who knows where...bricks, chunks of concrete, rusted metal pipes, broken glass, etc. Then, about fifteen feet away, from out of the water, a head arises on a long slender neck. It hovers above you suggesting the creature may be thirty feet in length! Its small head lowers and you can see its mouth lined with tiny sharp teeth, perfect for snatching small fish. It looks directly into your face with its large lidless eyes and then backs away slowly and slips into the water and with a powerful sweep of its hind quarters it is gone. That most certainly has never happened to me. But wouldn't it be cool if it did! Instead what happened was, as I was wading along pulling crap out of the lake, I thought I saw a smashed can so I reached down and it turned out not to be a can at all, but rather a prehistoric beast that had washed ashore, just like I said in the title, but it was fossilized of course. Almost as cool as seeing a live lake monster.

It is about 7 inches in diameter and sliced about 3/4 of an inch thick. The back is the shell, but this view shows the inner structure. It is some kind of nautaloid/snaily looking thing with the inner chambers filled with different materials. Right near the opening there appears to be hardened sand. The next several chambers have a more quartz-like look. Some of the chambers are filled with dark brown material and some with a raw umber colored material. It's absolutely beautiful as you can see. If anybody out there knows what this is and when it lived in Lake Erie, I'd be curious to find out.

The stone wave is slowly growing as well. Here is what it looked like two weeks ago. It is starting to gather some momentum.

Semaphore Squares

An unseasonably cold and wet summer continues. There was a slight break in the clouds around the 4th, but things have stayed in a rather Scandinavian state of being in general. So this week I spent cleaning the beach of the wood-slick that washed ashore after the last rains. The silver lining to the wood-slick is that usually if I try to make anything that contains driftwood it is almost immediately burned, but now, there is so much lying about that the pyros are ignoring my piddling wood sculptures. So .... I've been making little squares and filling them in with sticks. I like the woven feel of the wood.
There is something about the way they catch the light when they change direction that makes them infinitely more interesting than your average pile o' sticks...

There is also a pleasing affect caused by the different types of wood, the different colors of bark, thicknesses etc. This circle never got finished because the 4th of July crowd trampled it overnight and I have yet to repair it, but I think it was going in an interesting direction, so I will try to revive it.

Here are the three squares together. They remind me of those little semaphore flags you used to see on boats. I don't know why they remind me of that, but I'm going to stick to that story. If I get a chance and can stay ahead of the ravages of time and indifferent beach-goers I plan a fourth square. We'll see how it plays out.

This week the Stonewave was vandalized again. Somebody keeps pulling stone out of the sculpture. Sometimes it is just malicious stupidity, but this time it was theft. Somebody is hauling the stone away, which I find to be even more maliciously ignorant. When these events occur I go around a couple of days in this kind of fog. I feel dislocated. It is then that I especially appreciate when people give positive feedback about the sculptures. It helps pull me out of the malaise. So thanks for sharing the comment, anonymous.

And to close things out for the day...here is a nice sunset. It's not always about color.

Antediluvian Days

Yesterday the rain came in epic proportions. Some of the worst flooding that I can recall. It fell for hours and at times in sheets that completely obscured vision. I've been in some pretty impressive downpours, especially when in Guatemala during the rainy season. It knows how to rain in Guatemala, but yesterday's rain was impressive for its density. At Tikal you'll get these downpours where the raindrops are the size of tennis balls, but there is an inch or so between the drops, but yesterday the raindrops fell so close together that they rubbed on the way down. It was quite an impressive sight and in this built up environment it had its destructive moments. I haven't been down to the beach yet, but usually downpours such as these have an impact on the bluffs and I even suspect some significant damage to the beachworks. But before the deluge I was working on a companion square to the solstice flower. Right next to it, I squared off a bit and went back to some stick work as there was an abundance of little fits of flotsam wafted ashore as of late. It took an hour or two and if it survives I have plans for a third square and who knows...

I also put a couple of courses of stone on the second wave crest of the Stonewave. This second curve will be a little higher than the first...that is if yesterday's storm didn't undermine things.

We'll pay a visit this afternoon to see how things are.

While biking around the peninsula I came upon a female snapper in the process of excavating a nest. A little late for that I thought and she chose a particualrly bad spot, so I think eventually she will have to move on, but in the mean time she allowed me a photograph or two. Pretty hot, as snappers go.

Solstice Flowers and Hookah Smoking Caterpillars

A splendid day for a solstice. In preparation for the ceremonies I made a pretty good sized "flower". I'm getting pretty good at these. It took a couple of hours and held together pretty well. I put a stone square around it, which ultimately helped to keep it from being walked all over. I finished it off on the solstice and adjusted the square in order to have the corner align with the setting sun. It turns out that I anticipated a bit incorrectly, but you can't really tell from the photo. So I'm going to pretend I was in sync with the cosmos. After the setting of the sun the fatted calf was slaughtered. The augers read the entrails, burnt offerings were made, the dances were danced, the fasts broken, the visions visioned, the oracles oracled, the coracles coracled, the fish smacked the water and the dish ran away with the spoon.
And so ended the l o n g e s t day of the year.
In a footnote, just after girding my loins but before descending to the place of sacrifice, there in the sacred grove at the top of the bluff, I came upon a fungus of immense proportions. The fattest man in the world would be delighted to have a dinner plate this big! As fungi go, it was one of the biggest I've ever seen. A movement in the grass just nearby attracted my attention and when I investigated I was surprised to find a sizeable caterpillar dragging a hookah behind him. Subsequent discussions revealed that he was leaving his mushroom behind as it was too large, expensive to heat and frankly he was tired of the life of conspicuous consumption he was living. In light of current environmental realities he was moving to a more modest shroom where he could live in a less destructive manner. Unfortunately, while crossing the parking lot he was run over by a Hummer.

2 Explosions-Millions Dead

On the 14th of June I was down working on the beach at sunset and as the evening progressed a humming sound became audible. In the back of my head I was hearing it, but not noticing it. When its real quiet, you know how sometimes you can hear your blood pulsing in your ears? It was just outside of my attention, but then it began to get louder and it became clear that the sound didn't originate in my head. Like a dynamo it increased its intensity and even changed frequency. I just assumed it was some insects up in the woods on the bluff, but at some point I looked up...

The evening sky was absolutely filled with what must have been Mayflies. Zillions of them. I've never seen anything like it. They were along the beach as far as I could see and hovering about 15 feet off the ground. Hmmming as they floated and shifted about, layers and layers of these ephemeral little bugs. I'm assuming that the whole phenomenon was mating related. One grand orgy of desperate winged lovers. Out over the water some of them would tire or lose focus and drop to the lake surface where they would become meals for fish whose lips would kiss the surface, leaving a ripple and a love affair abruptly terminated. Living along the lake one gets used to huge populations of various bugs with the coming of warm weather, but this explosion would be hard to match.

A second explosion that is familiar to natives of the area is that of the Poplar/Cottonwoods. Late May/Early June brings a snowfall of poplar fluff. It can be really annoying when you are trying to bike through a wave of them. In the sky they are as dense as paratroopers at D-day. On the ground they eventually become amassed in drifts. The fluff also clings to trees giving the feeling that you are in a southern swamp where the trees wear Spanish moss. It can be quite beautiful.

Sometimes it will clump together on the ground in snowballs. When the wind blows these guys roll along like the ghosts of tumbleweeds.

I did a little sketch this weekend. I found a nice gnomon so I planted it and ringed it with sticks and then white cobbles and finally with some small squarish flat stones.

I had hoped to continue playing with this sketch next trip down.

But somebody had built a fire in the center of it over night, so that plan went by the wayside.

It had the potential to be interesting I think....

Quick look at the left side of the Stonewave as the top starts to come together...

Saw a turtle on the peninsula yesterday while biking around . It was about a foot long. I flipped her over just to take a look at the under-carapace. Nice colors. After flipping her back, I had to fight the desire to help her on her way as she was in a dangerous place, but unfortunately not being able to tell where she was going, I hesitate to play god.
Nice shell, huh?

Sunset and the Second Stonewave

This weekend was just about as close to perfect as one can get, sunny but not scorching, breeze but not a wind, and a lot of empty beach. I probably spent about four hours of quiet, uninterrupted work on the new Stonewave. And on top of all that two magnificent sunsets to close the day. The next three shots are Saturday's sunset in three acts about three or four minutes apart.

People from Erie will tell you that we have great sunsets and give some stat like we rank in the top ten or something. I don't know the origin of this claim and I'm sure there is some rationale for it, but I can't imagine how that is determined. I know we get a lot of snow. It's easily measured, but how does one measure sunsets? With a sunsetometer, perhaps? The claim is clearly unsubstantiatable (Is that a word?). But I will say this; if you go 5 consecutive days without seeing an absolutely soul-wrenching, pyrotechnically spectacular solar decline, then you are not in Erie.

Work continues on the Stonewave. This one is not as tall as the first, but is already twice as long. It is finally starting to look like a wave of sorts. Lots of stone has been washing up so I've been working slowly. I'm to the point where anything that is to be added will be new stone. The old Stonewave is now completely metamorphosed into what you see below.

The contour along the top will start looking a little more wave like. The plan is kind of an undulating line running from the highest point on the left to the lower end on the right. It will start to look more interesting I think once that starts to take shape.

I like this little gap between the first two segments of the wall. You can see some green between the stone which feels right. I'd like to get a better shot of this when the stone is lit up with late afternoon gold.

PS to the Walden fish enthusiast. Thanks for sharing your observations. Always a pleasure to hear from the piscean inclined.