These months I’ve been gone, I have thought often about the narrowness of your life at the barracks. I know all too well how meddlesome that society can be, & it grieved me to think of you so confined. I should have known you better. Of course you would buy a camera & build your own dark room. School teacher or officer’s wife, you are every bit the woman I fell in love with.
This is what we will do, as soon as I am returned to Vancouver: I will leave the service, as we have planned & I have so long desired. We will pack up our camp, your camera too, & we will go to the wilderness, you & I. Yosemite, yes. But for your photographs, the Cascades, the upper reaches of the Columbia River, the high deserts to the east of the mountains, or we’ll go to the Coast, the tide marshes. We’ll sleep in a tent beneath the stars & make love & listen to the wind through the trees, & the hours will belong to us alone. We will report to no one. When dawn comes, we will go looking for your birds, & you will teach me their names.
Yes, there is most certainly something in this photograph, Sophie. It is in that blade of light at the edge of the humming bird’s wing. Something wild & beautiful. It is something of you, my love.
Sophie Forrester
Vancouver Barracks
July 29, 1885
I cannot categorically name it, any more than I can be sure of my own faith, for it is not the photograph itself as much as the impression it leaves upon me. The moment the fledgling humming bird perched at the edge of the nest and stretched its small wings, and the late sun shone along the river, my breath caught in my throat, and I released the shutter.
It was just as Mr Redington described?—?all my days spent in experiments and failures and near successes, and in an instant I was presented with this scene, a young bird preparing to take its first flight, and I allowed instinct to lead me.
All along I had imagined that it would be the mother bird that would figure large in any photograph. Yet when I returned to my dark room, I was full of the sense that I had something at last in this picture of the fledgling, even as I was afraid to hope for so much. Could the young bird have held its position long enough to be more than a blur of motion? I was cautious and methodical in my every step. I waited until dark before I bathed the glass in pyrogallic solution. I then fixed it in hypo-sulphite of soda, and at sunrise this morning I prepared to make the prints. When the sun was high, I latched negative plate and nitrite of silver paper into the frame. I made many prints, varying the exposure from less than a minute to more than ten minutes, tempering my developing solutions. I moved back and forth from the bright day to the red glow of my dark room, testing and looking.
Still I was not sure, not until I chose the best print, not until I toned it in chloride of gold, floated it for some time in clean water and let it hang to dry, not until I brought the print out into the day.
There, along the bird’s still, outstretched wing: an unexpected sliver of white light.
It is only an effect of a beam of sun glancing off a branch behind the subject and can be explained rationally & scientifically.
Yet this cannot account for the remarkable sensation it evokes in me, a trembling, thrilling exhilaration, as if I have set something right, and long to do it again and again.
My excitement comes, in part, from the knowledge of how easily it might have slipped past me. It was a singular event, the tentative young bird at the edge of the nest, that allowed me to photograph the unfolded wing. Within seconds of my releasing the shutter, the humming bird took flight, its wings beating so rapidly as to be invisible to the human eye. I doubt it will ever return to this nest again. What if I had not been at the camera at that precise moment? What if I had hesitated with the shutter, or the day had been overcast, or my eye had been drawn away? What if the wing had extended slightly higher, or slightly lower, so as to obscure the gleam along the branch?
The dark foliage and gray nest, the bird’s small eye and pale breast, the slender black beak and, then, the wing?—?like a hand that has drawn back a curtain?—?and my gaze is seized by that unexpected, graceful arc of light.
When I look upon it, this bend of bone and feather and sunlight, a tender place in my heart is healed even as it is torn, again and again a thousand times over.
I am left to wonder, will anyone else see it?
That day in the forest when I looked upon the marble bear, alive with the setting sun, what did I witness? Was it only sunlight on stone, or Father’s spirit, or a reflection of my own?
It seems to me now that such a moment requires a kind of trinity: you and I and the thing itself.
Part Six
Midnoosky Birch-Bark Basket.
1885.
Allen Forrester Collection.
Birch-bark basket formed in traditional style with flat, square base, oval mouth, folds in bark at either end. Reinforced with spruce root stitching. Used for gathering and storage of food. Also for cooking by filling it with water and heated rocks.
This example, however, is unusual for its small size: 3 inches in diameter.
Sitka Herald, May 14, 1907