Adventure is the result of exploring unexpected and surprising occurrences

-some smart guy

 

OK, so now what? My sailboat is shipshape again after 10 months of work, but this season’s adventure plans are sunk by not being able to sail into Canada, my usual destination because of covid, and the local waters are now overcrowded for the same reason. This was already plan B as two local photographers and I were well into the planning stage of a once-in-a lifetime photo trip to Iceland this summer that got torpedoed early on. So what’s plan C?

Adventure comes in many flavors. I used to say that “when things go wrong, the adventure begins”. I wrote extreme sailing adventure stories that often involved some calamity resulting in a dangerous situation that I would somehow work my way out of. I appreciate a good adrenalin rush but enough things seem to be going wrong these days, which creates new opportunities. There is more time for reflection and introspection as we have to stay closer to home and away from other people. This is the perfect recipe for fostering a personal rapport with the abundant natural treasures we have all around us in the NW. 

I’ve always thought that getting out anywhere into nature is worth 90% of my needed refresh and exactly where I get out to is only good for the last 10%. But I would still succumb to the romance of exploring some far away Valhalla. Ironically, people come from around the world to visit here, our very own scenic and adventure destination, while we go explore theirs! For a while I’ve been lamenting the fact that there are many parks and trails near my home in Anacortes I’ve never explored. Now would be the perfect time to change that.

For me photographing nature is a wonder-full way to be in the world, full of anticipation and joy. It is a quest for beauty, the search for things visually interesting and amazing. I used to think that these things were always there to find if I looked closely enough. But its not really “looking” that works best for me, I think of it as “seeing”. Looking implies trying to find, actively searching for something. It requires a pre-existing desire as a model to search by and compare to. The problem is I might fail to see something I was not looking for! 

Seeing seems to work in reverse. I have no expectation of what I might see, something just comes into my awareness. I allow in whatever nature has for me to experience rather than look out for a particular thing I’ve already envisioned. Seeing assumes that nature and I are connected and I can therefore automatically share some thing with it, while looking implies that I don’t have a connection to that thing and so I have to go looking for it. 

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I had been using my frequent forays into the local forests to practice my seeing when I came out of the forest onto the sea cliff on the west side of Fidalgo Island on a very windy and sunny early evening. The sea was rough and breaking on the black cliff face and I began photographing the waves and spray on the rocks. The sun was bright and I was shooting towards it so my shutter speed was very fast. Upon reviewing the images I was amazed to see the most remarkable forms made by the splashing water frozen in time. I changed to a long telephoto lens to really get a close view and it became even more intriguing. I noticed that the waves would hit the cliff and rebound back out and collide with the next incoming wave and erupt in a fountain of splash so I began focusing on that. I was so enraptured in my experience that the hour or so that elapsed until the sun went down seemed like ten minutes and I found that I had taken close to 800 shots!

I would not know exactly what I had captured until I got the images back to the computer but at the time I knew that nature had shared with me an incredible insight because of being open to experiencing something unexpected and surprising. I think that should be one of the many definitions of Adventure!

 

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