To my surprise, many of the lupines near our neglected but still somehow fruitful raspberry patch are going to seed already. My 5-year-old noticed it first, as we stood in the cool grass after dinner last night looking over the lawn we’d just mowed. He likes to ride along on the mower with me, a delight expressly forbidden in the John Deere manual for reasons that undoubtedly relate to sharp whirring blades, gasoline and sensible parenting. When we mow along the edge of the raspberry brambles, we have to lean hard away from the bending, thorny branches which reach towards us as if to say “we will scratch you until you prune us, lazy man!” Leaning away from the scratches, we thereby lean into the small city of purple, white and pink lupines which grow wild along the periphery of our yard. Sometimes Percy reaches out a hand to feel the lupines, which are wicked delicate, and so it was that yesterday he detected the still soft pods that will eventually dry, pop, and disperse more seeds.
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Maybe this is when they always go to seed. For many annual events around here - the blooming of lilacs, the running of the alewives, the appearance of the eel fyke nets - I have reference points and expectations. The fyke nets are set out to capture the tiny elvers headed from the Sargasso Sea, where they’ve just been born, to their home streams all along the seacoast. Once caught they will be Fed-Exed live to Asia to be raised on farms and eventually eaten. The nets appear at the tail end of our long winter up here, so it’s always a sign to me that spring is nearly upon us.
This past winter we filmed with a man in northern Minnesota who walks the same 1-mile loop through his backyard woods every day, recording what he sees in a journal. He’s a phenologist. In his journals, stretching back thirty years or so, he has recorded the seasonal first appearances of hundreds of different species of butterflies, birds, dragonflies, flowers, you name it. He is the sort of fellow who could not only tell you when the lupines tend to go to seed, but also how this has changed across the decades of his observations. He is a quintessential and unsung observer of the natural world. He fishes and hunts there too, and there is nothing I could detect in his observations that suggests he has an agenda. Why does he do this everyday? He would never put it this way, I don’t think, but there is something in his relationship to time and the forest that we could call love.
One of my favorite moments from that shoot was when he took us through some brambly undergrowth to a favorite spot near a stream. It was the place where he first decided to pursue phenology three decades ago. At first glance, it was not a particular cinematic spot; you could call it swampy. But as our phenologist settled into the weeds, lying down to soak in the early sun and listen to the birds, I could hear our cinematographer Ezra utter a small breath of excitement. Ezra does this when he is particularly fond of how something looks, and as I glanced at his monitor I could see why: the light streaming through the early fog was enchanting, marvelous. Here, in a modest location that David Attenborough’s producers would have scoffed at, our phenologist and Ezra were silently collaborating to make something very beautiful indeed. Here was a place where our new friend had been transformed, and though we could never travel back in time to the moment when he’d dedicated his life to the seasons, we caught a tiny hint of it on film. Or, technically speaking, on a 1TB hard drive.
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Yesterday, as Percival and I were mulling the seed pods, and as the evening sun worked its own enchantment on the Maine summer evening, I got a text message telling me that we’d won an award for Shelf Life at the Tribeca Film Festival: Best Cinematography in a Documentary Feature, for Ezra Wolfinger. Way to go Ezra! I sent him a message and told the rest of the crew, but we’ll have to wait til we’re all together again on another shoot before we can properly celebrate. It’s a rare honor to win a jury award, at least in the Wicked Delicate universe, and not all festivals give awards to the often unsung roles of cinematography and editing. Ezra and I have been tromping around in various woods and far-flung locales together for 4 or 5 years now, and I’m wildly happy that his hard work is getting the recognition it deserves.
This movie with the phenologist - and a dozen other observers - won’t be finished til the autumn. I’m due to have a fine cut by Halloween, which is when we must build strange costumes and contraptions for our children, and which marks the start of the main deer hunting season in Maine. For all this reasons, lots of orange. That’s an easy time marker.
But now I have a mark in time for the appearance of lupine seeds: just before the school year lets out, and before the raspberries bear fruit, but right after the Tribeca Film Festival. Not exactly the kind of timestamp that Thoreau would have heralded, but we are all creatures of our habitats— shaped by the odd little film worlds we inhabit, scratched by the raspberry brambles we have neglected, but through it all enjoying the look of the light.
Congratulations Ezra, and do not forget to unsubscribe!
A big congrats to Eza and his ability to find beuaty in both the mundane and the spectacular. I am jealous of the buccolic season markings of early-June Maine. I have also been in our garden recently as well, which means scraping at the thin dusting of depleated soil over the unremitting bedrock that only the abundant grassy weeds and intrepid gophers seem to have the ability to penetrate. But the fog has set in, which means summer is here