
Lost & Found in Fog

Buried in Fog, Expecting to Be Found
Elation welled up in me as I spotted nestled in a sandy rut the shimmering, threadlike golden crescent of metal glinting in the bright midday sun and nearly the color of the sand that cradled it. That sandy rut was one of a pair carving a road that cut across a swath of land that lay under a length of a high-voltage power lines—a strip of spongy undergrowth stretched below the powerlines that slashed through the Cape Cod National Seashore. The power lines ran alongside a tangled, stunted forest of oak and pine sitting between my motel and Marconi Beach. I had been stood there the evening before, suspended it seemed, on the springy undergrowth, my tripod up to its ankles in vegetation. I was photographing those power lines strung along massive towers as fog shrouded the scene—the fog providing an element essential for finding my composition. And while lost in my own ‘fog’ of concentration and engagement, I unknowingly dropped my wedding ring.
The pure jubilation discovering the shining curve of gold snugged in sand immediately filled the pool of despair that eddied and deepened during the sixteen or so hours since I realized that I had lost my wedding ring—a band of gold engraved with an intertwining dog motif said to symbolize longevity. It was several hours after returning from the power lines that I finally grasped my ring was gone, my finger bare. I spent those hours oblivious to the fact it was missing from my finger. Not entirely surprising as I often took it off to cook or wash up, setting it down for stretches of time. It was not uncommon for panic to take hold before I recalled where I had placed it. That day, without it, I had ambled around Wellfleet, Truro and Eastham, scouting photography locations. Without it, I ate fried clams at a rustic clam shack. Without it, I smoked a cigar in the open air at the edge of the forest by my motel, John Coltrane for company, smoke keeping mosquitos away. Without it, I packed my gear for an early morning start, my finger bare.
It wasn’t until later, a baseball game murmuring in the background, turning in for an early start the next morning, that I thumbed my finger only to find it missing. Panic was staved off, mollified by my habit of removing the ring to wash up. Despair settled in as my search became frantic. Bags were disemboweled, pockets and pouches filleted by fraught fingers, blankets and pillows upturned and shaken like pickpockets in fables. No wedding ring turned up. It was then that I started trudging along a timeline of loss and grief, gloom coming in like the tide. At some point along that timeline of despair, as place after place I searched turned up nothing, I conceded that it was truly lost. I recognized that I would live my days out, forever worrying the spot where the ring had been, thumbing the empty space like a wound that would never heal. I comprehended longevity as I never had.
In those ensuing hours after I discovered the loss, I was on a journey with an end I could not fathom. I was traversing an arc of time—a timeline from lost to found. It was an arc of emotion from grief and sadness and remorse, to glints of optimism and a shimmer of hope offered by an innkeeper’s own story of lost to found that led, ultimately, to complete euphoria. That timeline from lost to found could not reveal itself while I was on that joyless ride. On that ride along the timeline from lost to found, a fog of sorts encroached, eclipsing hope, shielding me from inspiration. From complete ignorance I slid helplessly into entrenched despair. That despair sublimated into a vapor of rapturous elation when I came across that shimmering crescent in the sandy rut.
Looking back at my life, I understood that I had been on that timeline before—from lost to found—when I left behind creativity for career, art for law. And like my wedding ring, while ultimately, I recognized what was lost, I was ignorant that I was on a timeline back to found. This is so because, well, found was never an option when I left my ramshackle but ardent dedication to writing—to creativity—as the focus of my day-to-day life, for a “nine to five.” And who could have guessed that my finding once again that ‘ramshackle but ardent dedication’ to creativity—to writing, in particular—would be through the glass of a 16-35mm Zeiss lens and a passion for photography rediscovered at the age of fifty.
The parallels between “losing” my creative impulse, or more aptly, my ability—and inspiration—to pursue it, and “losing” my wedding ring speak to a compelling dynamic. A dynamic that, I offer, afflicts all artists. From those dedicated to their pursuits at all costs, as I once was. To those who succumb to the needs of stability, family, what have you, who shelve those impulses, to one extent or another, in service of meeting those needs, as I had. In short, inspiration, like my wedding ring, is never truly lost for most of us who shelve creative impulses—for whatever reason—to one degree or another. We may feel that inspiration and creativity are lost, just out of reach, perhaps, as they tug at us during odd, inopportune moments. But much like my wedding ring, those impulses to create were always there for me, somewhere, though concealed. Even if we cannot see or feel them, they surely lay wedged in a sandy rut, shrouded in fog, mere steps from ourselves and our dedication to our families and careers and the stability that comes from conformity. I’d like to think that my creativity—my drive to make things from nothing, courting splendor, discovering form from formlessness—was merely misplaced, just out of reach and out of sight in a fog. And that there it lay, like my wedding ring, waiting for happenstance to offer a path back to that which, in retrospect, was never truly lost, fog notwithstanding.

Poetry Was the Plan
I spent my twenties in pursuit of art, avoiding conformity to craft a lifestyle where the opportunity to write was essential. Like photographer/author Guy Tal, as he said in his essay My Audience, “my primary . . . goal [was] simply to sustain the life I already” had. He called it his “mission statement.” We were on the same mission. Like Tal, I valued “stability” so as to maintain “my freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences.” I willingly, deliberately lived meagerly for a long stretch, following the whims of a muse I scarcely understood. I was thirsty for experience outside the confines of the mundane birth, school, work, death. At 23, with a one-way ticket, an army surplus backpack and $400, I caught a train for the desert southwest, thousands of miles from my hometown, having never passed west of the Mississippi. I was going to live in a town that was little more than spot on a map, where I knew not a soul—long before a smartphone and a search engine could have introduced me to the area. Years later, after a return to the East Coast, I repeated that venture, this time to the inland Pacific Northwest.
I worked in group homes, nursing homes and mental hospitals, was a dishwasher, a failed line cook, a mason’s tender, drove a forklift, was a cashier, clerked at a tuxedo store and delivered newspapers to convenience stores, among several other blue-collar jobs. I earned only as much as I needed to keep a roof over my head, books on my shelf and writing supplies in hand—literally paper and pens. I lived in rented rooms, didn’t own a car for long stretches and rode my bike, at times, 20 plus miles to work. I possessed little, my meager belongings—mostly vinyl records with no way to play them, books and journals and a pile of clothes—barely filled the back of the car I did not own. For several years, I did not even own the mattress where I slept. In other words, I was a poet and short story writer.
“Success” then was merely having the daily time, opportunity and mindset—the bandwidth, as we say now—to dedicate to writing. I published some, though not often—small press, burgeoning zines and the like. I read my poetry publicly quite often early on, the thrill of performance influencing my writing, sometimes troublingly. I belonged to writing groups but grew dismayed at the notion of my work channeling itself into a middling path, becoming generic through groupthink. At thirty I had the chance to add formality to my pursuit of writing by enrolling in a distance learning program whose bedrock was writing. Founded by Peace Corp veterans back from Africa in the late 60s, at Vermont College I studied all manner of writing. Each semester was centered on one thesis-based project formulated one-on-one with a professor—each of mine based on writers and writing. I wrote and wrote at Vermont College, obligated to produce about 20,000 words of “finished” writing per semester project—I regularly submitted twice and again that amount. And I tore through as much as I could from writers worldwide. One semester, while there, reading James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with Walker Evans’ exquisite photographs, I was reminded that photography, along with writing, had deep roots for me.
It was in elementary school that I was first introduced to photography. Vague in my memory, glossed by time, I still recall the first photograph I ever made. It was with my second-grade teacher and her aging 4 x 5 field camera—nothing less than a magic box to me then. My black and white photo, to the casual observer, was of a grand Victorian home perched in a small hill. The home, rising behind the bulwark of a rounded cement retaining wall, rose from the bottom of the frame, leading one’s eye to the peaks of a slate roof adorned with a large weathervane of an eagle in flight. The house, grand, somewhat forlorn, filled much of the frame, but, for me, the photograph was all about the tree, an American Elm, the Massachusetts state tree. It was under the shade of an American Elm in Cambridge, a few miles south of where my elm stood, that George Washington took command of America’s first army on July 3, 1775.
My elm, a regal verdant firework, splayed its crown, up and over the gabled peak, in an explosion of leaves spreading out and up, flirting with the rooftop eagle, frozen in flight. Though that photograph was made nearly 50 years ago, its imprint has never left my mind, though I admit, it probably looks much better there than if it were in my hand—one of the gifts of memory. Even so, that tree is rooted at the start of the timeline of my passion for photography. A timeline that, in fits and starts, decades later, led me to that swath cut through the Cape Cod National Seashore, fog enshrouding the scene, much like the fog that would set upon me—on my creative drive—on my timeline from lost to found when I chose a career over creativity.

What the Innkeeper Said
I was on the Cape for an off-season weekend, staying at the Wellfleet Motel & Lodge. The Lodge is set on the border of the National Seashore, edged by my powerlines and, further on, Marconi Beach, with a stunted forest spread between. I arose as planned that next morning after losing my ring and left with my gear. I was pulled more by the need to mollify the gravity of loss I felt every time I thumbed my bare finger than to photograph. I accepted my wedding ring was gone forever, lost to the world, a betrayal of my fidgety fingers. I was along the timeline of the stages of grief—just past denial, quelling anger, with acceptance a distant, insurmountable peak, the shimmer of a gold crescent in a sandy rut unimaginable. I was blind to the real timeline, the timeline of lost to found. The fog of loss tricked me into ignoring the comfort offered from a simple notion—that which is lost can be found. Shrouded in that fog, loss weighing on every footstep, I left before dawn, encountering a landscape that reflected my mood. Inspiration eddied against that current of grief running through me. After a few exposures, I returned to Lodge for breakfast and to search once again my room.
After breakfast, I went to the front desk to report my lost wedding ring. I met a middle-aged man, clearly a part of the family that owned the Lodge. Hearing my story, the innkeeper encouraged me to go back and look again for my lost wedding ring. I dismissed idea. Surely, it would only amplify my grief and frustration when it turned out a fruitless effort, as it certainly would. The innkeeper leaned forward on his elbows, a smile lurking behind his eyes, and told me his story. “We just over at Marconi Beach with the dog,” he began. He and his then new wife were at the beach, roughhousing with a golden retriever in the surf and sand. It was a sunny summer day, with the fine sand underfoot, golden, warm and forgiving. As he stroked his dog, his wedding ring flew from his finger, landing who knows where, unseen, buried in the soft, dry sand edging a surf dampened strip of the beach. Panicked, he scrambled, on all fours, trying to find his ring. Dread mounted as the tide rolled in. Rakes were retrieved, with the plan to literally comb the beach, before tide and time could wait no longer. The innkeeper fought off desperation, fearing the efforts fruitless, as he and his wife and friends tried to find something as unfindable as the proverbial needle in a haystack—a small band of gold buried in golden sands on a beach with the tide coming in.
“We raked forever,” he said with the polished tenor of a raconteur relaying his best-loved yarn. They refused to give up, the sun ever-slanting, the tide’s slow march like sand dropping in an unturned hour-glass. Then, from nowhere, as he raked over a patch of sand already gone over dozens of times, “I heard a small clink.”. There, dangling from a rake tine, liberated from the fine, golden sand, the innkeeper’s wedding ring glinted in the glow of the now setting sun. “Go back and look for it,” he finished, holding my gaze. Stirred by his story, my fog of grief and loss vaporized enough for me to see a glimmer of hope. Shaking his hand, I thanked him, confessed my inspiration and gratitude, and made my way back to look for my wedding ring. I carried with me the innkeeper’s gift of newfound hope that my wedding ring lay there waiting for me to complete the timeline he had completed years before where lost becomes found.
During college, my writing evolved in approach and output. My life had evolved as well, in approach and output. I was a fairly new father when I completed my first degree. And though I still maintained Tal’s “primary goal” of stability, that stability now included my family. I still craved the freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences. But those had transformed with my burgeoning family into experiences that were, paradoxically, at once more personal but less self-centered, less selfish. I could no longer approach life as I had, adhering to a mission statement that put writing above all else and at all costs. It was clear that next steps were needed on a new mission statement. I was, however, reluctant to leave behind altogether my pursuit of my creative impulses. I concocted plans to, at the very least, leave space for me to write—some of which included pursuing photography professionally, despite never even owning an interchangeable lens camera. But those plans adhered too closely to the old mission statement or seemed impractical if not unachievable—turns out, student loans are much easier to secure than credit to purchase professional photography gear. Teaching seemed to offer the best solution, with its summers off and frequent holiday breaks providing the space for writing. After being admonished by a friend who taught to “do it for the kids, not for the summers” I landed on the law, convincing myself that the profession would afford enough “freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences.” Talk about naïve. It took over fifteen years and the forced idleness of a global pandemic for me to even come to the threshold of the freedom to pursue the meaningful and rewarding experience of writing again. It was the purchase of my first full frame camera and that Zeiss glass in 2018 that provided the key to opening the door that stood at the threshold.
And even then, when I purchased that kit, I had no idea that my rekindled passion for photography would lead me to the door back to writing and forge for me a key for entry. A friend, a professional photographer himself, quipped that I had become a lawyer for the singular purpose being able to afford photography gear. That gear set me along the timeline away from lost, incrementally lifting the fog, and leading me to find and pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences of creative engagement. And back to writing. That camera was another innkeeper, inspiring me to seek that which was lost. My photography provided, over time, the same inspiration the innkeeper gave me that morning on the Cape. The inspiration to go back and look anew, to seek that which seemed lost forever, to find the slim crescent of gold of a passion left behind in the sandy ruts of time, lost to a new mission statement with no room to indulge any creative impulses. It allowed me to see through the fog of loss and to catch a glimmer of the timeline that would take me back to pursuing meaningful and rewarding experiences through photography and writing.

A Band of Gold, A Bend in the River
Turns out timelines are not so well bookended from starting point to ending point, from lost to found. I started this essay soon after that visit to Cape Cod. I am writing this now, over two years later. My timeline yielded once again to a fog, not of loss per se, nor even a purposeful shelving of creative impulses with respect to writing. A high-profile public-sector job and the vagaries of life encumbered engagement with those impulses but did not extinguish them. Image making remained, but was more and more on the periphery, more and more victim of obligation, if not outright duty—the haze between myself and inspiration. I turned to printing my work until my second hand, gifted Epson R2880 gave way to its own timeline. Printing was a creative engagement that fit the limited freedom that remained to me as a busy public servant, father and husband. When printing was no longer an option, I lamented the distance between myself and the space and time needed to engage creatively with the landscape, the world and myself. My lamentations were particularly acute during my hour-long commute from my home in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts to my office in Hartford, Connecticut. It was during one such commute where the fog enshrouding my creative engagement parted enough for me see that a timeline back to ‘found’ was right in front of me.
That morning, driving through the Oxbow of the Connecticut River—Interstate Route 91 now bisecting it—a literal fog lifted all around me, shot through with golden sun. Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) sprung to mind. That morning, from my car I watched the dance of mist and light as the sun rose over the Holyoke Range and lamented the obligations that had taken from me the opportunity to make any images from the sheer beauty imbuing the landscape all around me at that very moment. An indescribable epiphany washed over me viewing that lifting fog with The Oxbow in the back of my mind, as that masterpiece often is when I pass through the area. The epiphany stirred long absent emotions, and a long absent confidence and calm that I would, no doubt, find—had, indeed, found in that passing moment, that epiphany—"my freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences” through creative engagement, image making and through writing. Reminiscent of peering that sliver of gold, the slimmest crescent of my wedding band glinting in that sandy rut, I had found, once again, creative inspiration. A fog lifted all around me—literally and figuratively—as I drove, now blissfully, to work. Coincidentally, I later found out that, for Cole, the making of The Oxbow had lifted him from a fog of sorts that had set in on his creative timeline, his artistic inspiration.
In his essay “The Oxbow by Thomas Cole: Iconography of an American Landscape Painting,” Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, at the time a Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described Cole’s “happy accident” in coming to make the painting. His patron, Luman Reed, had commissioned Cole to create his now well-known series of paintings depicting the arc of human culture from the “savage state” through stages of “civilization” to destruction and desolation. Cole described The Course of Empire, consisting of five canvases, all somewhat large, as “higher style of landscape.” As the Exploring Thomas Cole website puts it, “one suffused with historical associations, moralistic narrative, and what the artist felt were universal truths about mankind and his abiding relationship with the natural world.” Cole also viewed the commission as “a prized opportunity to fulfill longstanding aspirations” by undertaking a work, he wrote, “on which I may hope to establish a lasting reputation” as an artist. However, according to Roque Rodriguez, “[w]ork progressed slowly and not to [Cole’s] satisfaction. He encountered great difficulties in painting the figures. He felt lonely and depressed.” He had lost his inspiration along his creative timeline. Sensing Cole’s difficulties, Reed made a fortuitous suggestion to help Cole find creative inspiration again and move from lost to found on that timeline.
Reed suggested that Cole set aside the commission for a time and “paint something in his ‘accustomed manner’” for an upcoming exhibition. Demurring, Cole recommended releasing one canvas of the commissioned series. Reed balked, proposing, rather that Cole paint “an arcadian scene” challenging Cole to create a painting along the lines of the second canvas of the commissioned work, The Pastoral Scene, which Reed lauded, proclaiming, “no man ever produced a more pleasing landscape in a more pleasing season.” Cole relented and, in a March 2, 1836, letter to Reed, told his patron that he “should take advantage of your kind advice and paint a picture expressly for the exhibit and for sale” rather than forge ahead with the commission. Cole, it seems, had seen the opportunity as a way for himself to move along the timeline on which the daunting commission had placed him, that is from the loss of creative inspiration to finding himself inspired once again through undertaking The Oxbow. That Cole recognized this dynamic, this ebb and flow of inspiration on the timeline of creative enterprise is evident from these events that led him to The Oxbow. Interestingly, Cole, later in life also ascribed a timeline to his chosen subject—the American landscape—and his philosophical approach to that subject. It is a timeline that resonates with my goals and philosophy in image making and writing.
In responding to a widespread European view that the American landscape was bereft of true beauty for, in part, its lack of the physical remnants of epochal history, the scars of civilization, so to speak, Cole, in his Essay on American Scenery, “venture[d] a few remarks on what has been considered a grand defect in American scenery—the want of associations, such as arise amid the scenes of the old world.” “The Want of Associations,” as in historical associations, in the American landscape, seemed to inspire Cole to offer a counterpoint to the predominant aesthetic in landscape art. Cole, in one concession, however, noted that one “who stands on Mont Albano and looks down on ancient Rome, has [their] mind peopled with the gigantic associations of the storied past; but that [one] who stands on the mounds of the West, the most venerable remains of American antiquity, may experience the emotion of the sublime, but it is the sublimity of a shoreless ocean un-islanded by the recorded deeds of man.”
Cole, however, pushed back on the accusation that a lack of historical associations within the American landscape was a deficiency, arguing that “American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future.” In so doing, he set down a philosophy I now carry like a torch to light my way should inspiration be lost to a fog, enshrouded and unattainable. Cole went on, directing the reader, when,
[s]eated on a pleasant knoll, [to] look down into the bosom of that secluded valley, begin with wooded hills—through those enameled meadows and wide waving fields of grain, a silver stream winds lingeringly along—here, seeking the green shade of trees—there, glancing in the sunshine: on its banks are rural dwellings shaded by elms and garlanded by flowers—from yonder dark mass of foliage the village spire beams like a star. You see no ruined tower to tell of outrage—no gorgeous temple to speak of ostentation; but freedom's offspring—peace, security, and happiness, dwell there, the spirits of the scene. On the margin of that gentle river the village girls may ramble unmolested—and the glad school-boy, with hook and line, pass his bright holiday—those neat dwellings, unpretending to magnificence, are the abodes of plenty, virtue, and refinement. And in looking over the yet uncultivated scene, the mind's eye may see far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower—mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness; and poets yet unborn shall sanctify the soil.
Cole espoused that “Poetry and Painting,” and I would add landscape photography, “sublime and purify thought, by grasping the past, the present, and the future—they give the mind a foretaste of its immortality, and thus prepare it for performing an exalted part amid the realities of life.” And in so doing, he concluded, “they carry with them the power to mend our hearts.” The same mending, I felt when I grasped my wedding ring from the past of being lost to the present of being found and the future of possessing, once again, longevity in a band of gold. The same mending, I feel now, as I once again am embraced by the inspiration to create, write and make images—my timeline weaving out of the fog of loss—an opportunity to once again grasp the past the present and the future.
***
While all that is lost is not to be found, we all march, knowingly or otherwise, at points in our lives, along timelines of lost to found. From the fog of the unknown—unfathomable—to the clarity of absolute certainty. From grief to elation. From insecurity and doubt to composure and confidence. From motivation and creative inspiration to a timeline, a landscape, bereft of any incentive for imagination, creation. Some things that are lost are tangible, though no more precious that those bits of ourselves we lose along the way, like the inspiration that fled from my life when I chose career over creativity, stability to be free to stability from want, need. Or when, mired in that career, my desire to create bound by the strictures of obligation, life turned from solace to torment until the burdensome fog lifted in the bright glow of the illumination of epiphany. That innkeeper gave me a hope I felt was unwarranted as I made my way back to my powerlines and the thick, spongy undergrowth in which my wedding band was snugged, an artifact—an “Association”—in the making. That crescent in the sand was always there from the moment I dropped it, just waiting for me to realize that fact, to gain the confidence to believe that that which is lost is sometimes found. My embracing the wonders of photographic image making leading me back to writing was a crescent in the sand I only saw in retrospect, years later. And, the sun shot fog, golden and lifting over the Oxbow, immediately instilled in me again the same inspiration and confidence Cole bared in his Oxbow. I now, once again, strive to “sanctify the soil” with the art of my image making. Cole leaving me of one last lesson in his masterpiece, a reminder of the need of a buoyant self-assurance in the making of art. Thomas Cole placed himself in his painting, not only perched on Mt. Holyoke, but turned, full faced, his back to the scene, eyes squarely on the viewer. He reminded me that my images required a bit of me in each and every one for them to have any chance at succeeding as intended, any chance of even touching the power to mend our hearts. Each had to have a bit of the path I have travelled, a bit of the anguish of loss and, of course, that slim, golden crescent I came upon in that anonymous sandy rut.
