York Corner
At 12:40 p.m. two Saturdays ago, we thought we'd never seen the lighthouse at the Nubble looking more sharply outlined against the sky, nor the assortment of colors surrounding it seem so brilliant. There was scarcely a cloud in the sky, and, while there was a bit of a bite to the wind streaming out of the west, it was so much gentler than the howling gales we'd had for two days after the last big snowstorm that the Nubble was crowded with tourists - all of us dreaming, no doubt, that there really would still be a spring, and that it might be right around the corner.
Despite the strong, high sun, one woman there had the hood to her parka pulled in so tightly around her face that we could scarcely see it at all when we first approached her, but we spoke to her anyway, and she immediately volunteered, casting a weather eye out over the ocean, that, though she now lived in both Massachusetts and Vermont, she had "a great love for the sea," and that it was somehow "in her blood."
And that, she added, was no doubt because her mother had been a Nova Scotian, and because she herself had spent every summer of her life on the Nova Scotia shore.
She was Janice Roe, she told us, and her mother was Irene Lloyd, born in 1913 in East Sable River, Nova Scotia, where Janice still keeps a little cabin. East Sable River she described as "a tiny hamlet," and close to Nova Scotia's southernmost tip on its eastern shore; the cabin, built by her father and an uncle, she termed "very remote," and still accessible only by canoe.
Her mother had been a school teacher, Jan said, and served several Nova Scotia towns, including one 30 or 40 miles north of East Sable River, in a seashore village near Bridgewater called La Have. There, she lived on an island amid a cluster of islands, and, when she rang a bell to summon her students to their one-room school, she stood and watched as they rowed boats, each of them, from their islands to hers.
Her mother was also a writer, said Jan, and wrote a book about her Nova Scotia life, titled "The Heritage," that has never been published. Jan and a sister, she reported, have vowed to see it to publication some day.
Jan herself became a teacher and she reported that, at age 66, she's just retired from 35 years of teaching physical education to elementary and high school students "all over" Massachusetts. But she has also long been a dance teacher, she added, mostly of ballet and to young children, and she's continuing that pursuit privately in Massachusetts' Athol/Orange area.
Jan also told us that she lost her husband to cancer five years ago. Their children, she said when we asked - two girls and a boy, are now aged 40, 37 and 31, and have given her four grandchildren. The youngest child, Hannah, lives not far away from York with her family, including two of those grandchildren, in Newmarket, N.H.
Jan's own home is an 1850s farmhouse in tiny New Salem, Mass., just west of Quabbin Reservoir and about a 20-minute drive north of Amherst, but she told us that she's also been spending time of late in Wilmington, Vermont, at the home of her partner of over two years - and as she told us that, she pointed out the partner, a man down on the rocks armed with a full-sized Nikon camera.
Before he joined us, Jan told us that his name was Robert C. Angell, that he was 79 and had just retired from 39 years serving on a ski patrol, but still does downhill skiing himself every single day, and that, "years ago," as she put it, he'd worked at supplying and troubleshooting major equipment on oceangoing ships and submarines - of what kind she wasn't quite sure.
She was sure, however, of the fact that his major passion is and long has been photography, she avowed that it was of "incredibly" high quality, and she reported that it's been taking him - and now her, too - all over the world.
To substantiate, she went to their car and extracted a current calendar issued by The Nature Conservancy that featured, for one month's photo, a shot credited to Robert C. Angell, all in various shades of eerie blue, of an inverted iceberg floating in an icy sea. She and he, Jan said, had just returned from a three-week-long photo trip to northwest India, they celebrated her 65th birthday in Venice, had been in Paris "a summer ago" and he'd recently been taking pictures in Alaska.
He doesn't take photos to sell, Jan said, because to do so would, as she put it, "take all the fun out of it," and Robert confirmed that heartily when he came up off the rocks. He does, however, he said, share his work in digital slide shows given at places like schools and libraries, and, to give us a better sense of that work, he promptly presented us with four of his photos reproduced on glossy paper, note-card style: that one of the iceberg, one of a brown bear in a roaring Alaskan stream with two fish in its mouth, one of the stunning stained-glass interior of a 1241 Parisian chapel, and one, all in dusky pinks, of Venice's Grand Canal at dawn.
On the back of each card he'd printed some helpful commentary. That for the iceberg photo read, "This floating jewel was photographed from the bridge of a Russian icebreaker while crossing the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. The brilliant blue color stems from the lack of oxygen in the compacted ice, allowing only the blue wave lengths of light to be reflected. Adrift on the open ocean, and sculptured over the years by fierce polar storms, it became a brief haven for Chinstrap penguins. I consider myself fortunate to have been there at that moment in order to share this unique wonder of nature with you."
In speaking of the Nubble, Robert Angell expressed an appreciation, from a photographer's perspective, that we hadn't thought of. With a chuckle, he explained, "It's one of the few lighthouses nobody can stand in the way of." It's also, he added, "a sunrise lighthouse," since the sun rises behind it. Morning, he said, is the best time to capture it, and he'd been there, he added, "hundreds of times."
Robert and Jan, they said, had come down from Vermont that morning to escape the huge ski crowds there. They'd be heading, next, they reported, to Portland Head Light - and, come summer, to Newfoundland and Greenland, as well as to Nova Scotia.
To borrow a phrase from Robert, we considered ourselves fortunate to have been there at the Nubble when we were on that day, to learn their stories.
