Botticelli’s Venus. The cowries currency of Africa. The shell of St. James, the fisherman disciple of Christ. Closing one of his Taliesin Lectures, Frank Lloyd Wright described the seashell as the “housing with exactly what we lack- inspired form.” Shells were once the treasured objects for the wealthy on summer trips to the sea, but they have always been accessible and collected by coastal and island peoples regardless of economic class or culture. They are the essence of accessibility and simplicity, a “gift of the sea” wrote Anne Morrow Lindberg. Shells have a heritage of stimulating the beholder to find a playful solution to the great mysteries at the source of their creation.

“Can you hear the Ocean within a Shell?”

In Tennessee, “waterbound” apparently means “flooded.” The tone and lyrics are seeped with a special kind of agony, the kind that a flood or a shipwreck can cause. Not just loss. But the cleansweep loss that made the story of Noah and the flood so devastating, and the survivor’s guilt so poignant. Lyrics below.

WATERBOUND

I went out late one night,
The moon and stars were shining bright
A storm come up and the trees come down,
I tell you boys I was waterbound

Waterbound on a stranger’s shore
River rising to my door
carried my home to the field below
I’m water bound, nowhere to go.

Carved my name on an old barn wall
Or no-one would know I was there at all
Stable’s dry on a winter’s night
If you turn your head you can see the light.

Black cat crawling on an old box car
A rusty door and a falling star
Aint got no dime in my nation sack
I’m waterbound and I can’t get back

It’s I’m going and I won’t be back
If you don’t believe me count my tracks
The river’s long and the river’s wide
I’ll meet you boys on the other side

So say my name and don’t forget
The water still aint got me yet
Ain’t nothing but I’m bound to roam
I’m waterbound and I can’t get home

Our timelapse and landscape talent Eleanor is also a history buff. She made some observations about the stonewalls that we found in South Hope with the last timelapse we shot. Building stonewalls are experiences of Americana, of who we are and where we came from, in the big picture of the stone and wood we’ve literally held in our hands over the years. E.O. Wilson differentiates the living creation from the non-living creation. With this lead, my interests in this filmic inquiry are primarily with the living. But the American divorce from nature runs deeper than that.

FROM ELEANOR: “Rarely in need of replacement, constructing stone walls were massive undertakings. This is one reason why they are so familiar in the earliest settled regions of the country, like South Hope Maine, where the frontier mentality had yet to take hold: unlike their children and grandchildren, these farmers expected to spend their entire lives on a single plot of land. A worker could lay between twenty four and sixty four feet of wall per day, assuming that the stones, or “fieldstones,” as they were called, had already been transported to the building site.

Historian John Stilgoe notes that wooden fences, which became the popular barrier among farmers outside of the northeastern US, were replaced every fifteen to thirty years. When in the early nineteenth century, depleted woodlots triggered a timber shortage, it was the stone wall laying farmers that had enough wood to keep their fires burning. Of course, it was also these northernmost people who, hibernating from frigid temperatures, were most in need of firewood.”

For more information on the life and times of stonewalls, see: Robert Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (Walker & Company, 2004).
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (Yale University Press, 1983).

While today I look to the concrete weather models and primarily recognize storm systems as scientific acts of nature, in 1620 William Bradford looked elsewhere for understanding. He recorded how after one particular storm subsided, “the lord filled their afflicted minds with such comforts as every one cannot understand, and in the end brought them to their desired Heaven, where the people came flocking admiring their deliverance.” Bradford’s Mayflower crew saw the weather on their Atlantic crossing as an act of God.

Perhaps it is in the eye of the storm that I have the potential to be humbled by the experiences of my forbearers, experiences that were carried out not on the faith of forecasts but on faith alone.”

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.