photography | from the gap

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee.
– Emily Dickinson

Badlands sky. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

I wrote the first post of this blog on the Winter Solstice, the longest night. Yesterday was the longest day, the summer solstice. Throughout time, humans have marked the solstices and the equinoxes with special rites. They have built monuments precisely aligned with the rising or setting solstice suns. They have gathered in places that are sacred to watch the first or the last rays of the sun on these tipping points in the year.

The summer solstice is a culmination. Though the fullness of summer is still a few weeks away, the solstice marks the time of year when everything reaches toward the sun – every growing thing, every living thing. It is a bittersweet day, for it means that tomorrow the sun’s light recedes from us a bit every day, imperceptibly at first, until darkness comes earlier and we begin to approach the autumnal equinox, when everything has borne fruit and must dig in for winter.

When you live in a rural place where you can see the sun and how it moves throughout the year, this cyclical routine of the sun seeps into your bones, just as the lunar cycle does. We don’t even notice it, usually, because it’s so much a part of us.

A sacred place in southern Saskatchewan is the Big Muddy Badlands, also known as the Big Muddy Valley, or more simply, just the Big Muddy. This is a place of spectacular beauty, of exhilarating history. The Big Muddy was the Wild West. Outlaws, cattle rustling, horse thieving, rum running, it all happened there. Sitting Bull rode through it. Countless horses and cattle have grazed its grasses. Before all of this, the aboriginal peoples considered it a holy place, judging by the amount of effigies found there. Thousands of tipi rings stand in silent testimony of lives lived there for thousands of years.

The Big Muddy will be referred to again and again in this blog, I’m sure. It is a place of mystery and magic and legends and lore. It is one of my favourite places on earth, perhaps second only to the Gap country, its nearest neighbour to the east.

I travelled with good friends to the Big Muddy the evening of the solstice to watch the sun set at its late hour. No monuments are needed to mark the sacred solstice in the Big Muddy. The landscape itself is the most perfect venue imaginable for such a rite. The Big Muddy is a place of light and shadow, of constant contrasts. It is the only place I wanted to be to watch the sun set on the Longest Day.

Badland buttes. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

Grass, Sky, Song. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

Clouds over a coulee. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

By the shores of Big Muddy Lake. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

Badlands flora. Kristin Catherwood. June 21. 2014.

Solstice shadows. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

Big Muddy Lake. Krisitn Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

Hole in the Wall. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

The last light of the sun. Kristin Catherwood. June 21, 2014.

“Shadows lengthen; the sunlight fades from cloud to cloud, kindling their torn edges as it dies from softness to softness down the prairie sky. A lone farmhouse window briefly blazes; the prairie bathes in mellower, yellower light, and the sinking sun becomes a low and golden glowing on the prairie’s edge.

– W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind*

I arrived home earlier this evening in the midst of a thunderstorm. I’d had a long day of driving home from Winnipeg, and encountered more than one storm along the way. I both love and fear thunderstorms. They are a common occurrence here in the summer. I am awed by their power and beauty, but also frightened by the destruction they can cause. I also have a real fear of getting struck by lightning – which is a more common possibility than people usually think!

But no matter what a storm brings, it is always calm in its aftermath. There is nothing as spectacularly beautiful as the light after an early evening thunderstorm. The sun slants its golden rays, conspiring with the retreating moisture laden clouds to create rainbows. I waited for the storm to pass so I could take my new camera lens to chase some of the best light there is in the world, if you’re into landscape photography.

Sometimes I think I am addicted to this landscape. I can’t stop staring at it. If I could bottle it up and drink it, I would. The thing is, though the topography remains the same, the light is constantly changing. It’s like the sea in that way – always dynamic, never static. No two sunsets are ever the same, nor two sunrises, not even two noons. There’s nothing for it but to keep chasing the light.