All’s usually well that continues well … wandering thoughts of a wandering mind
Peter Evanchuck
Well after a long hiatus dealing with my cancer, I’m back at the helm of my life despite the disease.
I’m working away on a series of short docs—because they’re cheap to make using digital gear and easier than fiction films that require actors/scripts etc.
Recently I’ve completed SOLITUDE shooting from my kayak, my panasonic 770 in one hand and my kayak paddle in the other. I’m not sure if that qualifies as a “run and gun” setup or a “paddle&cam” style of shooting. But it’s all very fast and very easy since I hand hold rather than “rig a jig.”
SOLITUDE was shot in three hours while the Fundy tide and spring ice melt raised the water levels on the Salmon River about 8 feet, which made the riverside woods a water wonderland—no earth to be seen. For a kayaker it was a miracle paddle weaving my way through birches and pines floating on water instead of stepping on earth—very unique indeed. Moments like this make kayaking a true communing with nature event.
For those of us who experience nature “real” not from our computer screens, the “feel” of such an experience blossoms our spiritus sanctus… it’s naturally a religious definition of a miracle lived in reality.
I wish others could realize such experiences and as Archibald Lampman poetically phrases it “and to experience joy like a child again.”
p.s. Just completing another short doc. REMNANTS which nostalgically traces the decline of the log river runs down the Salmon River to the mill—weaving the past with my present kayak paddle along the shore of the Salmon River documenting the remnants left of the old ways from those river log runs before they began hauling the logs with tractor trailers. Art never sleeps.