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Surfing in the snow.

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The Yogi's were up-river--the Israelis, the Russians, the French who all descend on Rishikesh to get their Eat, Pray, Love on--crowding onto the steep steps of some Ashram for the Ganga Aarti.  I was down in the heart of the city with the Uttar Pradesh version of townies, eating fried cauliflower outside an auto body repair shop, waiting for the tailor to finish mending my anarkali, when the bells started.

There were never bells in Srinigar, just the crackle of the loudspeakers as 10,000 muezzins bellowed the call to prayer across the city five times a day. The bells were new. I followed the clamor to the river. The sun was setting, and the little leaf boats with gee-soaked wicks were starting to wriggle their way down through the current. 

Here were the priests. Here were the citizens. Here were the chaatwala boys, the lapidaries, the rickshaw drivers, the tailor who was supposed to be mending my dress. Here were the women who cleaned the ashrams, who sold flowers, who patted out tender chapati between their arthritic paws and pawned them at the foot bridges.  Everyone gathered to say good night to their river. 

I removed my shoes and stood in the cold waters that came down out of the mountains, and watched as the flames swung and the bells rang and the people bathed and drank and filled little tins with water to carry with them for the next day.  I held my breath while they prayed. 

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"This has been the most surreal experience. Coming back into the center of Kiev, to a place I've been a dozen times, walked and laughed and shot wedding photos of my friends, and to turn the corner from a pristine Lev Tolstoy square and see the Maidan completely upended--it felt like walking onto a perfect movie set of an uprising. All the burned out buildings, all the piles of tires, all the men in camo with puffy eyes from having slept on the ground for six months (and starting on the first beer at 11 am every day), but nothing is happening. No one is moving. They're just there, like extras waiting for a crowd scene...."

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From: http://www.latitudeslongitudesmag.com/journal/2014/4/22/-erin-brown

Many rhythms change when you trade in the city for the country. The sounds and cycles of everyday living churn at different paces, at different volumes, and at first it is easy to lose your bearings.  Before I left New York City for a summer on a small farm in Brittany, France, I made a field recording of firetrucks careening up Frederick Douglass Boulevard, alley cats having it out behind my building, and the Senegalese hip-hop my neighbors played at all hours of the night — just in case I needed the noise of the lively night to lull me to sleep in the silent rolling Breton hills.  

Soon, the rhythms of farm life swallowed up those of Harlem in the heat. Morning diner bustle and the hiss of an espresso machine's milk steamer gave way to the gentle waking rustle of the goats as we milked them, sleep-eyed and shivering, even streams of milk hitting the bottom of a steel pail, a sound like a cross country skier skating across the flats. The motions of turning up soil to plant a field of beans, singing Woody Guthrie and Otis Redding, supplanted turnstiles and headphones. Long walks, simple meals, sleeping tired at night but not weary. 

When the inchoate rains came, washing the topsoil from the fields and keeping us inside for days on end, my friend Ragnhild and I took to making mattresses and duvets for all of the workers' beds.  We hauled bags of washed wool from the wool loft, and began the long process of carding it on a tool that looks like something you might find in a medieval torture chamber, with hooked steel claws, used to fluff the washed wool, and get the fibers running in the same direction.  The wool needed three passes through the carder to give it sufficient volume to stuff a mattress; if it was to be turned into roving and spun into yarn, it would need six or seven passes, on finer and finer combs.  

The swing of the machine's arm became the rhythm by which we measured those long, grey days. Grounding, and, in a way, comforting, it assured us progress was being made, beat by beat. The arm swung, the baskets filled, the duvets grew plush as we quilted the fluff in between layers of calico.

Once the winds changed and the sun returned, the pace of the day shifted again, fluid and dynamic as the shapeshifting city I'd left behind. Only now, at the end of a long day of working I slept tired-not-weary on something just a little softer. 

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It is spring break and we safari in the back yard, pellet gun and camera in hand, an extermination expedition of the most rudimentary and brutal kind. X goes barefoot through the underbrush, an experienced suburban poacher, moving soundlessly in search of prey. Under the air conditioner, in the hydrangeas, between the slats of the fence they rebuilt after hurricane Andrew.

Lizards. An invasive species.  But really, isn't everything in Boca Raton an invasive species?

Two shots. Two kills. The bullfrogs will eat the corpses during the night. 

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Autumn is a time to slow down.  The days grow shorter, but the light gets longer, and it feels right to take your time, bundle up, savor things while they are there to be savored. 

So after two years of pure digital, I excavated my Mamiya RB from the depths of my still yet to be unpacked boxes to come on a little weekend escapade to the Jersey Shore and Philadelphia on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy.  I had forgotten the joy of taking my time to make an image, and the pure beauty of looking down through ground glass (albeit a bit grimy) to see your image in reverse. 

I'm tempted to make this my autumn of medium format...but I also forgot the sting of paying for e-6 processing. 

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The boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, has been closed since Hurricane Sandy ravaged the shore over a year ago. 

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Seaside Heights, New Jersey, one year after Hurricane Sandy.

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A peat bog in western Ireland conceals the remains of one of the earliest agricultural settlements in Europe. 

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Killarney, Ireland

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From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through

Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,

Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding

The last tumultuous avalanche of

Light above pines and the guttural gorge,

The hawk comes.

                            His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look!   Look!   he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error, and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow.

                     Long now,

The last thrush is still, the last bat

Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom

Is ancient, too, and immense.   The star

Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history

Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Robert Penn Warren, "Evening Hawk"

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THE SMELL OF THE SOUTH

The summer I turned 17, I worked with a bizarre crowd of kids at the phone bank of a political research firm whose office abutted a Wonder Bread factory. Since it doesn’t matter what your employees look like when your clients only hear their voice, the phone bank employed an array of squeaky clean Mormon kids in polo shirts and khakis alongside be-dreaded potheads, tattooed rockers--a whole slew of run-of-the-mill dirty pretty things. It was my first brush with the rising generation of Salt Lake City hipsters, and I found myself edging across the aisle to get a closer look.  I wasn’t sure about Pabst or Parliaments, but driving fast, motel skinny dipping, and listening to Bob Dylan stretched out on a trampoline into the early hours of the morning spoke to a part of me I was just discovering.

Each night as we were leaving—off to one another’s backyards or bedrooms, to the all-night coffee joint or the salt flats—we would walk out into the wondrously sweet and gluey miasma of the aroma of baking Wonder Bread.  That smell defined that moment in my life. The first hints of yeast drifted into the office around 8:30, an azan of sorts, calling us out into the night. Even now, when I drive down 7th East late at night, just a whiff of baking bread from that factory conjures up a visceral reaction—not just the memory of that time, but the twinge of other senses and every particle of experience connected therewith. To me, young danger smells like baking Wonder Bread. 

Scent moves us, it drives us, it defines our individual experiences in ways we do not realize; it is the id of our sensory systems, lying quietly in wait under the bright analytical buzz of sight and sound, moulding our memories in its own way without our willing it to do so, and without regard for our consent. 

—

No one knows how smell works.  Especially not Chandler Burr, the former scents critic for The New York Times, who introduced me to this bizarre gap in scientific knowledge one terrifically rainy night in an auditorium filled with humanities majors at NYU’s Kunst Kamera lecture series. 

You see, there are two types of systems in your body: instant and universal. The digestive system is an instant one: we’ve developed a library of enzymes that instantly—though limitedly—work when outside molecules are introduced into it the system.  Hence, when you eat an Oreo, the enzymes in your saliva and stomach begin to break down all those fructose and glucose molecules and within a short period of time, your body is using that sugar; equally true, despite the valiant attempts by 4-year-olds everywhere, you cannot actually digest a penny, since we don’t possess mass alloy-digesting enzymes in our bodies—yet. The immune system, on the other hand, has to be able to deal with whatever is introduced into it, whether it already possesses the antibodies for that particular foreign body or not.  To recognize and eradicate a universal range of potential molecular interlopers takes time, which is why colds last several days or weeks instead of a few short hours. 

The olfactory system, however, is both an instant and universal system.  You can smell anything, not just things you’ve developed a sense for, and you can do so instantly.  In fact, you smell on an atomic level: the rotten egg smell of sulfur, the sanguine tinge of iron, and the subtle bitter almond aroma given off by arsenic.  How it is we can catalogue so many shades of smell is still a mystery, and, despite an array of possible theories, at the end of the day no one really knows how it is we register brewing coffee, dirty socks, or CK One. 

That night, after fumbling through several obtuse explanations for how we smell, and failing to answer questions from American Studies majors like, “But how do you give fruit flies electric shocks? They’re too small!” (the single research scientist in the crowd emits an audible groan), Burr finally gave up and did what he does best for the remaining 20 minutes: tell gay men’s jokes and describe how certain molecules smell. 

He told captivating tales of smelling Mysore sandalwood, of real musk and its horrifying origins, of an original bottle of Chanel No. 5 that had been properly preserved.  Once he hit his stride he rushed to tell us about the wildest thing he’s ever smelled: there is a bush in the south of France—a totally, completely, natural plant—whose essence smells like a plugged-in photocopier on fire. “It is like the smell of burning plastic and electricity and toner and is absolutely, incredibly alarming.”

—

The day I arrived on Jean-Louis and Caro’s isolated herb farm tucked high in the mountains west of Montpellier, the mercury in their outdoor thermometer burst its glass casing.  That morning I had awoken in Tromsø, a good five hundred miles north of the arctic circle, and by that afternoon felt the rubber of my boots melting to the asphalt as I tried to thumb a ride in the scorching riviera sun to the closest town to the farm.  The heat could curl your eyelashes; Jean-Louis’ two young daughters were skinny-dipping in a kiddy pool outside the kitchen, the golden retriever was lying motionless in a ditch along the side of the house, and as soon as I set my bag down, Caro said, “Great, let’s go pick some oregano before it gets burned.” 

Thus commenced the fortnight that made me want to find every migrant field worker who had ever laid a finger on a vegetable I’d eaten, and give each a hug and a huge, cold, bottle of water. 

After I had sweat myself dry in the oregano fields the first day on their farm, Caro took me to the sechoire—a longhouse with wide-planked wood floors and hundreds of racks stacked along its length, used to dry the medicinal herbs they produced. The moment we stepped inside, my nose was flooded with the scent of sage, and my memory with the high mountain meadows just below the peak of South Thunder in Bell’s canyon on the clear October day when Felipe and I missed the summit by an hour; combined with another memory of staring out the moldy kitchen window of my apartment on Prospekt Mira in Moscow with the sense of hoping to feel like home on a bleak Thanksgiving Day. 

This pattern would continue the entire time I stayed in the mountains with Caro and Jean-Louis—engulfed by smells and the gut memories they conjured, almost to the point of distraction. Threshing the lavender and seeing Sarahlina push her purple-rimmed glasses back on her nose with the loveliest gesture while we sat in the Beehive Tea Room eating ice cream that tasted of soap; spending 12 hours collecting wild raspberry leaves in even higher altitudes while stirring up the colossus tree just across the fairway from my grandparent’s own raspberry thicket; cooking chestnut paste in an outdoor kitchen, but tasting the leftover stuffing Melissa Bradford fed me in her kitchen one November night in Paris while reading the last four verses of Luke 10 to me. 

I spent hours stripping verbena leaves from their stems, trimming oregano blooms, or harvesting fitzer flowers, all the while trapped in my own revery, standing paralyzed, sickle in hand, as I was pulled through time and space by just a scent on the breeze.  It was not a flaming photocopier, but it was often absolutely, incredibly alarming.  

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Don't Touch Me

Mumbai, India

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Mumbai, India

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Mumbai, India

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Tiny Sufis with Midget