The Angle of Regret

An Apostle Islands postcard

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.

In the Apostle Islands the light glows orange off the sandstone cliffs, sinks into the soft yellow sands of the beaches, and glows green filtering itself through the needles of the white pine that fringe the shorelines. Some mornings are wrapped in gray ribbons of fog or stitched together with threads of cirrus clouds unspooling across the sky. Some days are so still that the light reflects double in the quiet backwaters as if it were all just too beautiful to be seen only once.

But then on other days there is that certain slant of light. The sun hits just so, illuminating corners that can, most of the time, remain safely in the shadows, raising sometimes prickly questions that have gone not only unanswered but too often unasked.

That light comes in the late afternoon, most often in the nameless season between late fall and deep winter. The first shadows pooling in the foreground signaling the slow slide into evening. What has been accomplished that day, is done. What remains undone may never see completion. It is all there, in that certain slant of light that just seems to pierce the heart. Call it the angle of regret.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).