Waiting for the world to turn
It’s rare anymore to have any real stillness in our lives. So rare, in fact, that when we do have it, it kind of freaks us out.
Such was my situation on Friday night taking the photo you see on the front of today’s Eagle. It’s a 20-minute exposure, which means that for 20 minutes I looked over my shoulder every so often to make sure the proverbial bogeyman wasn’t sneaking up on me.
Actually I took three frames and ended up standing on the shore of Flathead Lake for about an hour with nothing to do but make sure my tripod didn’t fall over in the stiffening wind and ponder the mysteries of the universe. That, and watch for shooting stars.
It’s a funny thing, because taking “star trail” photos is incredibly simple. Put the camera on a stand, open the shutter and wait. No trickery here; you could teach a monkey to do it. Really impressive shots sometimes have exposure times of four hours or more, turning the sky into a pinwheel of light. But waiting — especially on a cold Montana winter night, isn’t the easiest thing to do. The first time I checked my watch I was sure I must be closing in on the 10-minute mark. It had been two.
As soon as I got down near the lake shore, I started hearing strange noises. My first thought was that some wayward ducks were startled and taking off from their roosts, until I realized that there was no open water anywhere in sight. The light bulb slowly illuminated in my mind and I settled in to listening to the huge sheets of ice that reached more than half a mile into Flathead Lake pop and groan out there in the dark. A few of the cracks felt seismic, the kind of noise that things much heavier than we can fathom make when they collide or separate. It would be an extraordinary lie to say that I didn’t jump a few times, even after I’d been out there for most of an hour.
Many writers have observed that it’s a shame we don’t get any sensation of speed, despite the fact that our planet is both spinning on its axis and hurtling through the cosmos at a pretty brisk clip. We can stare up at the stars and understand that as the sun sets and rises we are on the move, but the beautiful thing that the camera can see is a record of just how quickly our position in the universe changes without our realizing it. Even when we’re not moving a muscle, we can never stand still.