A Certain Slant of Light

Can light be a natural resource? A national treasure? The defining trait in a wild landscape?

Completely dark. Not even a hint of dawn in the sky beyond the bedroom window. Only the 2:55 am in big red block numerals on the nightstand clock. I roll over and try to summon, through the haze of sleep, the reasons I wanted to drag myself out of bed in the dark, fire up the Little Dipper and boat alone into the constellation of black stars that is the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore at such an hour. Then I remember.

It is the light, always the light.

Just as wild landscapes each have their own keystone wildlife species, their own prevailing winds and weather patterns, they too have their own “certain slant of light” as poet Emily Dickinson put it, an individual quality in the way the sun hits the land. I recall once floating a river in the high Arctic of Canada’s Ivvavik National Park with the landscape painter Margaret Florence Ludwig. As I sat on a hillside watching her paint, I mentioned the light. “You see it too?” she exclaimed. “I thought I was the only one. The mountains, do you see, are coral-colored and undulating in the heat.”

It is everywhere, the light — the prairie, where Willa Cather writes, the air has “a gold light throbbing in it” just after sunset; Alaska’s Tongass rainforest wrapped in a fog-veiled light that writer and photographer Kim Heacox says spotlights its “hundred inventions of green.” John Muir thought the light in Yosemite was even more defining an attribute of the place than its corridors of stone and said “it seemed to me the Sierra should be called ... the Range of Light.”

If the Sierra is the Range of Light, the Apostles are the Islands of Light.

There are three basic characteristics of light: intensity, quality, and direction. The intensity of light is difficult for humans to fully appreciate because our eyes adjust automatically to varying light levels through the widening and narrowing of our pupils. A camera does much the same with its aperture. The quality of light can be measured on a spectrum ranging from hard (think of the mid-day sun) to soft as the glow of a campfire. And the direction of the light — side light, backlight, front lighting — dictates how the light and shadows weave the scene. As a photographer (literally “drawing with light” from the Greek “photos” light and “graphe” drawing) these characteristics of light become the tools of the art. A photographer can add light with a flash, subtract it with neutral-density filters, slow it down or speed it up by adjusting the shutter speed and ISO. But the main ingredient is, and always will be, the natural light. A photograph is created by capturing the various subtleties of that light reflecting from different elements of the scene before you — dark areas absorbing light hiding it from the camera while brighter parts of the scene fairly burst into the camera lens. Different hues bouncing at different wavelengths like some visual musical score. The photographer in between, creating a photograph by dancing with the light.

The same sun shines over every place on earth, of course but the way that light is filtered through the atmosphere, bounces off the stones, sifts through the branches, and doubles in the reflections off the water, creates a unique tapestry in each landscape, its signature of light. On an Apostle Islands summer morning the light glows orange off the sandstone cliffs on the eastern shore of Hermit Island, sinks into the soft yellow sands of Julian Bay beach or the Cat Island sandspit, and glows green filtering itself through the needles of the white pine on Honeymoon Rock. It is some mornings wrapped in gray ribbons of fog or stitched together with threads of cirrus clouds spooling across the sky and all of it reflecting double in the still waters of the lake as if it is just too beautiful to be seen only once.

Light is more than just the stage lighting for the land, of course. It also has effects on the what it falls on. Birds migrate, leaves turn color, in part because of clues written in the slanting light. Plants blossom, mating and birthing begins and ends, in a cadence set, in part, by the movement of light. And it is not just nature that dances to the light. Humans too are affected by it in both biological and psychological ways. Warm soft light can make us nostalgic. Harsh light make us tense and jittery. Low light make us sleepy. Sunlight boosts our vitamin D levels. It may strengthen our bones and trigger the release of serotonin. It can influence our circadian rhythms, increase or decrease our anxieties, reaction times, even cognitive abilities. Painter George Seurat famously exclaimed “Let’s go and get drunk on light again - it has the power to console.” But, it does more than console. The qualities of light can touch the heart like birdsong, or the smell of wildflowers, or the taste of wild honey. We are creatures of light reacting to its subtleties like the sensitive plates of the camera itself.

If all of this is true, shouldn’t we be struck with wonder each time the sun rises or comes out from behind a cloud? Knocked to our knees by it all? Shouldn’t poets write poems and musicians compose songs in tribute simply to the wonders of light? In places like the Apostle Islands, l would propose that light is as much a natural resource as wildlife or water, bears or brownstone, as important to the character of the place as lighthouses, piping plovers, and sea caves. The words of the 1964 Wilderness Act list “recreation” and “outstanding opportunities for solitude” as wilderness resources. Then adds “ecological, geological or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value” to the list of wilderness attributes.

What about the flicker of light far back in a sea cave or the glimmer in the wings of a passing gull?

We protect an area’s dark skies to celebrate the stars. Shouldn’t we find ways to protect and celebrate the light? The very symbol of truth and goodness and wisdom and beauty? “Let there be light” says Genesis 1:3 “and there was light and it was good.”

There is still no light in the sky as I finally sit up in bed. Do you ever sleep? People ask when they see my northern lights photographs or early morning shots from the furthest reaches of the islands. How do you get out of bed so early? The light on an Apostle Islands morning is a benediction, a gift, a blessing. And, reason enough to get out of bed.

Poet Tom Sexton wrote, “For all our sadness, melancholy and regret, / at times it is possible, even necessary, / to believe we are here for the sake of the light.”

For the sake of the light, I toss the covers back, roll out out of bed and go down to the dock in the dark. There in the sky over Basswood and Madeline Islands is the very first faint hint of dawn, a prelude to the light show of the sunrise to come. It is 3:30 am. I cinch down my lifejacket, take a deep breath, and steer the bow of the Little Dipper east, into the morning, into these Islands of Light.

— all photographs by Jeff Rennicke