One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
Dorothea Lange
I descend into Steep Ravine in Mount Tamalpais State Park following Lange’s ghost down the same trail she walked every summer, two weeks annually at those cabins perched where the ravine finally surrenders to the Pacific, where she’d come to strip away the noise and let the coastal light do its work on her vision. This isn’t about capturing beauty, that’s tourist shit, this is about getting low enough into the canyon’s throat where the fog moves like something alive and I understand why she kept returning here, why this particular gash in Tam’s flank mattered, how these redwoods and fern choked corridors and that quality of light filtering through coastal morning became part of her visual vocabulary. Every frame is a kind of pilgrimage or inheritance or both, chasing the same shadows pooling in creek beds she must have seen, the same indifferent march of Douglas firs toward the sea that didn’t care if anyone witnessed them then and doesn’t care now. I’m thinking about that stripped down urgency she talked about, trying to touch what she touched when she spent those summers down here at ravine’s end, living visually in a place that demanded it, where the trail drops hard and the ocean roars up through the trees and I’m not making anything, I’m trying to see what she saw before I go blind, before the fog swallows it all, before tomorrow comes and proves we’re all only ever just touching it, just touching it.