A beautiful new dorm with geothermal heat, a fleet of bicycles, and the reflections of a spectacular sunset in the windows: this must be St. Lawrence.
Category: Canton
SLUperMoon
The last supermoon of the summer (such as it is) was hovering over the Adirondacks and over St. Lawrence’s sylvan campus. The interplay with the science buildings seemed appropriate.
Even better, though, was the alignment of the moon directly over the tiny tower in the Adirondacks (cell, I’m guessing?). Maybe it’s innocuous, or maybe it’s part of a plan by a mad scientist to finally control the Moon!
St. Lawrence Campus I
St. Lawrence is an amazing place to spend time in mid-September: the lushness of summer is just barely beginning to crisp into fall, an autumn chill creeps into the evening air, and students (and faculty) have settled into the rhythms of another year.
Zen at Lampson
The arrangement of tiny plants and epic trees and enormous boulders that makes up a Japanese garden is calm and beautiful, but to see the inspirations for those geometries “in the wild,” so to speak, is so much more impressive. Big falls and gnarly roots and little streams make the “real” world just as poetic.
Self-Portrait V
In the realm of landscape photography, I’m interested in the details and the gradients of the landscape, the way it stretches before the viewer and displays the gradient between dense urban environments and empty, person-less ones. In taking a self-portrait, I’m interested in the same types of details: the misting raindrops collecting on my hair and the herringbone pattern in my shirt and the field of stubble on my jaw, and the way these details of texture combine to make a collective picture of me. There, the dense information of my face tapers away to the less person-specific aspects of neck and shoulders that could belong to anyone.
Hoot Owl Express
Bleary-eyed, through a wide-open aperture with the last hints of sun and the now-dominant neon signage as its only lighting, I present to you: the Hoot Owl Express. This is (for the moment) St. Lawrence’s main “student bar,” its walls covered in old hockey jerseys and its staff preternaturally capable of spotting a fake I.D.
Flood Alignment
When the waters come loose from the dam above and run through the trees, the fallen limbs and detritus arrange and align.
Water’s-Eye View
Hiking the Raquette River made me constantly aware of the water that produced these geometries—and that was a bit intimidating. When the dam upstream opens, I would imagine that this is just about the “view” of that the enormous surge.
Torrent
This torrent of water is, if you can believe it, the Raquette river at a low point. (The gates of the dam up-river would be opened a week or so later, burying this area under an extra blast.) The primal force of a waterfall just calls for you to stick your hand in it—if you’re brave enough.
Resilient House
The North Country is green and lush at this moment, but it’s worthwhile to look back on the recently-thawed saltscape that was spring. I still feel a certain sense of amazement at the number of fierce winters homes like this have survived.
Morgan’s Ice House
Summer means ice cream! There’s no more fitting place for a crowd to be during the Dairy Princess Festival than crowded around the local ice cream stand. The contrast is strong and the setting is familiar in that “classic Americana” kind of way. Even the edge of the house next door adds that bit of small-town welcoming spirit. A scene of Norman-Rockwell-esque friendliness.
Morning Rain, Delicate Color
Up early in the morning (to photograph a horse show, naturally), I watched a storm brew over St. Lawrence’s fields. The model-railroad trees and fences and the morning colors scattered through the clouds made it worth being up at such an hour (almost).
July 4 Special: Muscle Cars and the Dairy Princess
Independence Day is a great time for an extra shot: down Park St. in Canton, NY on the first night of the Dairy Princess Festival. Ice cream and muscle cars and John Deere and music in the street. America!
Saints and Bulldogs
Sports! America! Red white and blue (uniform colors)! (And the reflection of a crowd full of families, watching the action.)
American Torii
The entrance to a Shinto shrine is normally marked by a torii. The posts on this cross country course at St. Lawrence University coincidentally share a similar structure with torii; I wonder if the American variety shares any of the spiritual properties?
Decaseconds 