The temperature in our yurt invites me to start the stove. There’s an espresso pot bubbling away as I ease into a chair. I can always sleep later. Right now, there is peace and the view out the window feels like something, that would be rude to ignore. We come here to recharge. Surrounded by energy it’s just so easy to do—we just need to open our eyes.
Eventually we make our way up to the lodge. Paul’s warm welcome invites us to a late breakfast and as we exchange turns at trying to describe how beautiful this morning is: “Want to join us for snowshoeing?”
Yes
This place is somewhere that we’ve never been on a morning that will never happen again. We’ve made a couple of new friends, only minutes ago, and I pause a lot. They’re falling in love, a feeling I know well because I have been falling into a love with Krista for decades now. This love is a life’s work. I think while walking so trail our party, part because the scenery is so beautiful I make time to study it all, and part because I wouldn’t be here if chaos hadn’t of created this moment. We were strangers until we met and here we are, wrapt in this good place, sharing turns at trying to absorb the wonder of it all. The water is frozen, and not, and where it’s not, the cool water feels beautiful on my face and through my hair.
This photo is Krista’s work. Maybe the reason I can’t take good photos of beautiful things is because I can only see them how I see them so need to learn to see the same beauty as it’s felt through another?
It’s finally snowed in Dartmouth. In five years I’ve saved just over a thousand photographs within a few hundred feet of where I’m standing right now. Leafing through them is a study of subtle change in details. Pages in a history I suppose? This fence. I love its form and how it wears its service and story. Also, how it bows to create a line into the scene, darting between 508’s power, and up to a building I mostly curse on sunny mornings.
“Athearn SD70 and a Walthers tank car staged in the yard”, I joked on Facebook.
How we make things can be about the tools and materials we select. Those are important choices. In that decision making process, those choices are guided by how we work and maybe even why we work at all. We share in an idea that modelmaking is about creating records of places for future reference; fabricating data to and tables of joins. Maurice Hopper wrote a simply beautiful article (Slow Modelling, Model Railway Journal) exploring the idea that why we choose what we choose may also be about access. Not just to store a record but creating it to access it at all. It’s fascinating to walk through the world and liberating to discover all the things we don’t need to model; all the things we can’t model.
And the tea’s made.
Chris
Categories: How I think
Prince Street 
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