the harbor at Isle au Haut, Maine
Spiders on Gossamer Sails
A couple of weeks ago, tired after a day of raking leaves, T and I collapsed in some chairs in the back yard. The warm sun felt good, and I laid back and stared up into the big bell of a clear blue autumn sky.
Small insects were backlit by the sun, glowing brightly. Milkweed and ragweed seeds drifting on the breeze caught the light, too. Then I noticed a long bright silver streamer, and another, and another. Looking more closely, and shading my eyes with a hand, I saw the air was thick with them, blowing by on the wind high above the trees:
Little yearling spiders were taking flight on this clear windy day. Crawling to some high point, as high as they could get, they were spinning out long threads of gossamer silk like spinnakers, and setting sail for parts unknown.
There were thousands. It was amazing how high they were, too. You may not be able to see it in the video – Youtube degrades detail horribly, and photography is really bad at conveying distance – but if you watch it in HD you might be able to see that they completely fill the air column, some easily a thousand feet up.
It’s a behavior known as ballooning or kiting. Some of the hapless argonauts catch on tree branches or power lines after only a short flight, or drop to the ground not far from where they started. But others travel amazing distances. Human sailors have found these arachnid sailors catching in their rigging a thousand miles from land. They’ve been sucked into the analyzing equipment of weather balloons 16,000 feet in the air. They can even get caught in the jet stream and, surviving up to 25 days without food, travel profound distances, colonizing mountaintops and islands far out at sea, even distant continents.
Pretty amazing little buggers.
Archival Film of Skipjacks
Gavin Atkin over the pond at intheboatshed recently dug up some archival footage from the 1960’s. Most of it was filmed on and around Deal Island, Maryland, where we spent several days on the Chesapeake Float this year.
The film was shot forty years ago, but it’s amazing how little has changed. Captain Art Daniels is still racing his skipjack, or was until very recently. The churches I photographed are still there, though the one is under repair. Wenona harbor looks much the same, just fewer boats. That and They had enough watermen then to field a softball team.
The sail loft that served the skipjacks was still in operation then, though it’s been closed for several years now. And there are far fewer skipjacks now than there were even then.
Pretty cool to watch
Hour long feature film on Skipjacks of Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Float ~ Day 2 Video
A day on the Chesapeake Bay. Fog in the morning. Some wind. Wind dies. Nice wind in the afternoon. Wind dies. Dusk. Wind comes back.
music by
Charlie Parr Clearlake
Al Pettyway & Amy White Up on Flat Top Mountain
Ben Howard Promise
Chesapeake Float ~ Day 1 Video
Video from Day 1. Leaving Dames Quarter, into the Naticoke, the Wicomico, Ellis Bay, Monie Bay, and ending up in Pigeonhouse Creek for the night.
music by
Rafael Sotomayor Deustad
Dizzi Dulcimer Dizzi Jig
Epic Road Trip ~ the Full Time Lapse
music links:
- Fleet Foxes ~ Mykonos
- Ben Howard ~ Under the Same Sun
- Iron & Wine ~ Boy With a Coin
- Horse Feathers ~ Curs in the Weeds
- Fleet Foxes ~ Helplessness Blues
Finally had a chance to pull this together. It’s pretty cool to see the whole thing – 3000 miles and four days of driving compressed into about 21 minutes. Any faster and everything becomes a blur. Any slower and it starts to feel like doing the drive all over again. If your web connection will support it, you’ll definitely want to watch it large in HD. Go to the Youtube Link if you have to.
It’s a big country, with much to see. The camera rig and software used to record the trip preserved each frame as a full resolution photo on the iPhone – over 21,000 of them. Many, many individually are simply stunning. Those will fly by like the others, flashing on the screen for 1/12 of a second.
It’s amazing how sensitive memory is to vision. Almost four months later all but the most generic late night road images still bring back immediate recall of that part of the trip. Played at speed in sequence, some significant events go by so fast they are all but invisible – the train wreck, for instance. Others – the ground blizzard in Wyoming, the dust storm in Oregon with tumbleweeds darting across the road – are more prolonged, but far more brief and beautiful than treacherous. The smooth animation belies hours of white knuckle driving endured in real time.
I confess to cheating a bit. To have mercy on less engaged viewers, the long, grey, monotonous drive through winter-dismal Missouri has been accelerated by 400%. Trust me, this is a good thing. Sorry, Missouri. Most of the night driving has been sped up, as well. Otherwise, it’s all here.
Enjoy.
