I've been spending a lot of time going through my catalog of images in the past couple of weeks and I’ve noticed a trend. I tend to make photographs of specific locations, often times visiting them over and over again. In some sense this wasn’t news to me. I know that I tend to revisit locations but I wasn’t aware how much I tend to focus on a specific location for a period of time before moving on. One of those locations I’d like to talk about is a 3 mile stretch of the Stillaguamish river in Washington.
In some time in early 2017 my wife and I moved from our childhood home on the Kitsap peninsula. We landed North, in what is known as Smokey Point. Smokey Point is not even a town, it’s basically an exit with apartment complexes but it was where we could afford to live and it was centrally located for Jess’s outside sales job. I struggled moving from my tiny house in Kingston nestled up against nearly a thousand acres of forest preserve, where I would walk and make pictures almost daily. There was not much walkable greenspace around Smokey Point, and there’s probably even less now. But it wasn’t long before I found a small section of forested trail that meandered along the course of the Stillaguamish river.
The trail was the beginning stages of what would later become “The Whitehorse Trail,” a rails-to-trails project that would eventually span the entire 20-something mile stretch from Arlington to Whitehorse, WA. But at the time it was a slightly improved dirt trail, and I remember secretly hoping that I wouldn’t ever see them complete it. It felt like paving over the old railbed would somehow ruin it. I don’t know if they ever paved all of it, but I do know that now it is one continuous trail from Arlington to Whitehorse. But this place became an oasis for me. The section I walked over and over was only about 3 miles, or 6 miles out and back. But it was a place of solace, of communion, and I revisited it time and time again, making photographs of the beauty that I found in it.
If my Lightroom catalog is to be believed I spent almost a year, mostly walking and photographing those same 3 miles but also sometimes driving, following the meandering Northern fork and finding other little places to stop and enjoy the beauty of the river and its surrounding landscape. I eventually moved on, apparently deciding that I had photographed it enough. But even after moving on to focus on other places or projects the river still shows up every now and then in the chronology of my catalog. I’d be curious to revisit it someday, see what has changed, see what’s the same. And maybe to thank the river for the things it offered to me when I needed it.
There is a small gallery on the website now of a sampling of photos from this place. You can find it here if you wish to look further.
