Transcript
Hi. I'm Dan Slone, and this is Bits & Peaces.
Today, I'm gonna talk about a trip I took in 2022 to Providence, Rhode Island. I went on from there to Block Island, and then a little while later, I went out to Idaho. And part of the reason for the trip was to explore light, artificial light, and darkness, a subject that I've been working on for the last year since then.
I started in Providence because the WaterFire Festival is there in Providence. I was in Providence as the guest of Lori Volk and Todd Zimmerman, and Todd gave me a tour of the city that was amazing.
In fact, other people were jealous of the fact that Todd gave me this tour. He has such a great knowledge of the history of the city, the economic history, the political history, the architectural history, the artistic history in the city and the city is an amazing place. Todd and Lori were incredible hosts.
The reason I was there though was for festival that they do every year, and the WaterFire Festival involves exactly those elements. They set up bonfires in the the middle of the city in the channelized river that flows through the city. And they, through the course of the summer, do sort of larger versions and smaller versions of this event. I was there for one of the larger versions. A couple of friends came over from Vermont - Alex and Jerilyn Wilson joined me. They were my guides in some ways. They'd been there before. They'd actually been on one of the tender boats that help restock the fires, and it's a it's a fun event. It involves all sorts of buskers and street artists and food vendors. The restaurants all are full to capacity and there are gondola rides, and the crowds gather on the shores waiting for the fires to be lit and there are boats that are full of wood to restock the fires through the night. And it's quite a pageant when they light things up. Everybody gets very excited and they do it at dusk, and it's really well done. It's a fun festival.
The thing I was focusing on was the role of fire. Fire is such an interesting thing. For humans, it is the first artificial light that they control to push back darkness. It's been such a part of humanity for so long. It's central to our storytelling. If you think about it, whether it's bonfires or fireplaces or candlelight or gaslight, fire is a part of many human experiences associated with romance, associated with adventure, fire has a central place in human storytelling. In Providence, the festival goes on through the evening. Fire isn't the only form of light they play with and enjoy using some other things - the stars and lanterns and and other things through the course of the evening, but fire is the is the central character. Watching how enraptured the audience is in this process is part of the joy of of this. They're a wonderful crowd - quiet, well-behaved, and just fascinated by by the fire. After things have been going for a while people will walk up and down the the edge of the water just looking at the various ways the city has set things up and exploring the the different interactions with different art artists along the way.
After enjoying Providence, I went on to Block Island, and I really thought of Block Island is more of a side trip, not central to my light theme, but once I got to Block Island and realized that two of the most prominent landmarks on the island are the lighthouses. One of these lighthouses is relatively modern, sits up on the the cliffs within sight of wind turbines. It's beautiful. The cliffs themselves are fairly steep. I love this warning to be mindful of your physical abilities. I got down these steps, and at the bottom, which you can't see from here, which was my only objection. Should have gotten some warning, it becomes much more challenging than the steepness or the number of the steps because the stairway ends well above the surface of the beach, and you have to scramble down a bunch of rocks to get down there. I'm not exactly built for scrambling these days so, but I did anyway and got to enjoy this beautiful beach. I love that house up on the horizon there. It just seems to me that there ought to be a novel set there immediately involving this beach, but it's a beautiful place.
Todd and Lori had sent me here because they'd gone here almost every year with their boys when they were growing up, and they associate it with just fun in the family.
And they can tell you every one of the adventures that you can have at each of these locations. The other lighthouse on the island is a much older lighthouse. Thinking about the role of light in these things. Here, light, at first fire I'm sure, some version of fire. And then early forms of electrical light was used for safety purposes and to warn sailors away from the coast. This lighthouse, which I think has been relocated here, but this lighthouse is in the middle of a rookery. So as you come up to the lighthouse, the gulls are communicating to each other and then pause briefly to tell you how much they dislike you interrupting them,
but it's a beautiful location. When you walk along the edge of the beach, you see all these little black heads popping up out of the water, and those are the seals that come up and watch the people on the edge. Just couldn't be more charming.
I went from there out to Idaho. The reason I was in Idaho was to help in the city called Meridian. Meridian has these wonderful canals that are irrigation canals, and the city has used those canals as a base for creating walking paths that connect to the sidewalks of the city. They've done a great job, and they were just looking for some insight in ways to finish up that system. One of the reasons I had accepted the request from the Urban Land Institute that I come out as part of a team to help on this was because Meridian is near the Sawtooth Mountains, and there's a huge park in the Sawtooth, and that has the become the central area
for one of the largest dark-sky preserves in the lower forty-eight states. And I wanted to go see what a dark-sky preserve was like.
I had this vision of myself going up in the mountains to enjoy the dark sky and being able to see the Milky Way and take those pictures that you see so often in, you know, phenomenal photographer's galleries or in magazines, the Milky Way splashing across the sky above you. I didn't do quite enough homework and I didn't have quite enough luck to get what I wanted out of it, but I still had an amazing experience.
I'd started with my my assistant identifying. I'd ask her to identify a place for me to stop and take photographs in the darkness and she identified a forest road up in the Sawtooth Park. And, I looked at what she'd identified and thought, well, this sounds like a bad idea to be there at something like midnight at the end of a forest road out in the middle of the of the woods. I should probably look for something a little more civilized nearby, and I saw this lodge, the Redfish Lake Lodge, on the map. And I thought, well, I'll go to the Redfish Lake Lodge. It has a restaurant that has a great reputation. And I didn't know when I decided to go there that the Redfish Lake Lodge is actually a fairly famous lodge there in the Sawtooth, and it's within the dark-sky preserve. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. Its campgrounds are usually booked up every year well in advance of showing up at a place like this.
If I'd thought about what I was doing in terms of driving in and out of the park at night, I would have tried to schedule it so that I could have stayed over at the lodge, but I was leaving on a plane early the next morning and this was gonna be just a drive in, drive out, sort of trip. I'd been warned that driving in would be fine. I'd be doing that while it was still light, and it would be light until about 10:30 so I wouldn't be leaving until quite late.
It would be the driving out that would be the challenge because there would be no other traffic on the road at that time of night, and there would be no nearby lights and the wildlife would take over the road, and I would need to be very careful because there were large creatures that I could accidentally hit coming out. As it turns out, leaving wasn't that big a problem. I had to dodge a couple of deer, a couple of raccoons, and a great big skunk that was really beautiful, but no moose or elk or bears or anything like that.
My luck and my failure to plan though manifest themselves in, when I showed up at the lodge, the folks there told me that it almost never rained up there in the mountains at this time of year. But, on that particular evening, it was going to rain and rain a lot, and that's what it did. It rained most of the evening. There were clouds over most of the Sky. The lodge itself is gorgeous. Its lighting is exactly what I would have wanted to see. They have indirect lighting coming from the lodge itself. You see it reflecting on the water there. You see how they've set up the pier so that the lighting is shielded and then ends up being footpath lighting. The one light that might not be technically compliant with dark light standards is there in the parking lot, but it too is subject to the canopy of trees above it. And, it's actually not as bright as one would anticipate a parking lot light being and is well shielded from the night sky. So I get to examine lighting, but not so much, the sky. For the most part, I had the bad luck of being there when it was raining, but then my failure to do my homework would have made it a different experience anyway because I didn't track the phase of the moon. And there was a full moon that night, which meant there was gonna be enough light in the sky that that picture that I imagined wasn't gonna happen. I got other beautiful pictures of rainbows and sunsets and other incredible versions of light, including the moon itself, between the storms, but I was never going to get the sort of dark sky picture side I thought I'd have. Much of my dark-sky experience was that experience then of leaving
the lodge and traveling back the couple of hours through through the park and through the darkness. And, I stopped at one point when the clouds cleared and I got out and and took this picture and you can see I'm cheating. I'm standing in the lights of my car, and part of that was because I found out, when I had pulled over another time, that even though I've come to respect darkness and have thought about overcoming fears of darkness in my youth, and in fact, remembered that I was rarely afraid outside, it was actually inside that most times I was afraid of the dark and I've overcome those things.
But there in the Sawtooth Mountains, remembering that there were bears, that there were wolves, the Sawtooth pack itself, a very famous pack of wolves, has been gone since 2013, but that there were wolves in the mountains. And my mind would just imagine that all of these things were sitting on the other side of that very strong band of darkness that would arise when the moon was covered with clouds, and you got out of the car and went just beyond the light. So, that actually has influenced the way over the year I've been thinking and talking about darkness and our fears that might be associated with darkness, but it was a wonderful set of trips and a wonderful way to begin thinking about light and darkness!
Thank you for joining me. Bye!