Winter Twilight in Rockport, MA

At the end of last year, I visited Rockport, MA, a quaint fishing village. Sometimes I encounter surprising traces of Finland in the US, and this was one of those times. Browsing Google Maps, I noticed an art gallery in town named after its owner, apparently a Finn. I of course walked in and asked the owner, an affable older gentleman, about his Finnish name, and he immediately proceeded to recount the family story, Finnish immigrants in the generation prior, their language now lost but some of the mindset still there. His one frustration: his name Lauri, which in Finnish sounds like a very normal man’s name, but here in the US had caused plenty of confusion about his gender. His complaint was in obvious jest; he seemed to enjoy this slight subversion of expectations with some mischief.

He told me about quarries near the village where Finns had worked for some generations, digging out granite for fancy facades in Boston and New York City. It was already somewhat late in the day, so it was soon about to get dark, but I set out to inspect these Finnish quarries nonetheless.

They were spread along the route north, the aptly named Granite St, with off branches with names like Quarry Rd. Most of the quarries were not accessible, with properties along their ledges, convenient for gazing into and contemplating the pits.

At last I came to the north shore, where one of the former quarries was part of a park. The quarry was flooded with water, and I enjoyed the sight of a small body of water presented right in front of the much larger body of water of the Atlantic.

It was around sunset, so it was time to head back, but I wanted to take a loop on the park trail. Right before I took the next picture, an old man passing by asked me why I had come with camera gear; was there something unusual in the vicinity? I thought he had to be joking, since the coast had spectacular vistas everywhere, including in the park we were in, but his tone was far from joking.

Perhaps even the ocean can become a mundanity with enough exposure, something like a parking lot for boats, but the park rangers were not going to let such tendencies lead to any complacency in terms of safety, as evidenced by the many signs they had placed on the shoreline warning of its dangers.

The following pictures are from the walk back to town, that I kept at a brisk pace in order to catch a bowl of chowder before the evening train. I used the Fujifilm XF10.