Eleanor is getting to know this hill pretty well, having made several trips now to record time lapsing. The hill is also a location where my crew shot with musician Tim Eriksen and friends for BEHOLD THE EARTH. Her observations…

“We had an Edna St. Vincent Millay type morning on Beech Hill, shooting a timelapse of the sunrise. The bay was flat due to the air from the northwest, and as the sun rose and banked right, the reflection looked almost like the water does when the moon rises in the early night.

I keep returning to the islands, anchored stoically in the landscape. From above, you don’t encounter them face-to-face, but their articulated treetops that stretch across the view is, I think, at the heart of a dramatic encounter with the entire bay. The wind turbines that stretch from their foundations on Vinalhaven granite are the newest—and tallest—break in the horizontal composition. They interact with the natural environment in their own way, picking up the rhythm of the wind, and ceding their macbook white color to the oranges of the sunrise, later silhouetted with the pine trees against a pale, daytime horizon.”

DC NOTE: In 1917 Edna St Vincent Milay published a collection of poetry which included the poem Renascence. The first 16 lines are below. She penned this after hiking up another hill nearby in Camden, Maine.

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see:
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.

I watch him sitting at sunset and recall lyrics from a song that asks a question…”If you knew that you would die today, would you change? Would you change?”

My son, on the other hand, awakes the next morning and marvels at the movement of light and small fish within shallow water.

But the note did recall this unusual place and the morning we spent there. We had rented Stonehenge, so that we could record and convey these stones without the crowds… and only with the breaking sun and clouds and the small birds called jackdaws that live within the cracks of the stones. Maybe the young viewer -or his cat- noticed the birds?

Stone is an incredible medium. When I stop making movies, I’d like to carve letters into stone, then narrowcast them into the back woods.

The talk and screening is part of the US Environmental Film Festival, in its 18th year. For those of you who are enthusiasts for films about the people/nature connection, there are 155 diverse films screening between March 16th and 28th. Special programs exist for children and are marked by a family-friendly symbol in the festival program.

I do believe that at some point, engineering and ecology can go together. I do believe that environmentalists would do better in the long run if they embraced engineers and the future, rather than let past failures completely cloud their judgement. Yes, it takes effort to succeed. And observational patience. Failing equipment. More to come. Yet, cameraman David W and I are on to something now that’s yielding some success. Containment is part of the solution. Understanding boundaries. And timing. And yesterday, a girl named Ella and her mom Jenny. Thanks, all. Today, perhaps another try…

Humans often serve to speed things up, in the name of reaching higher efficiency, productivity, and the minimum threshold of mental excitement without which we probably would perish.

But sometimes we also serve to slow things down. This effort is not only directed at our own activities and perceptions. Dragonflies move incredibly fast. They shift in flight with abrupt angular turns. Their wings move at a speed invisible to the human eye.

Even with the best optical aids, we struggle to see a dragonfly like it was a mountain. Successes like the frame at right are occasional, fleeting, justifying a little celebration and a lot of gratitude.