David Griffin Photography

Well, it is supposed to be the dog days of summer (and I’m sure they’ll be here soon enough) but the past few days here in New England have given us a taste for Autumn (my favorite season).

With nighttime temperatures dipping into the low 40’s and strong north breezes, it would be difficult to ask for a better weekend in the middle of August.

By sheer chance, this amazing weather was coupled with the opportunity to see the Indigo Girls in concert at the Stone Mountain Arts Center. We’ve seen Amy and Emily play at Great Woods, Harbor Lights in Boston, and the Tsongas Arena in Lowell — these are shows with thousands of people attending. To get an opportunity to see them play to about 200 of us was really special. As if to underscore that point, about halfway through the show Amy Ray noted that it was so small that perhaps we should just “go around the room and introduce ourselves to each other”.

I’m not a people-person, but I do enjoy watching them. This concert had another wonderful dynamic that wasn’t on the stage. I don’t know if it was by chance or design, but the audience was somewhat divided between “SMAC audience regulars” and “Indigo Girls Fans”. When I say “SMAC Audience” I really mean “people who probably haven’t seen Indigo Girls in concert before”. I best think of an Indigo Girls concert as “going to church”. There are times when you sit, times when you stand, times when you sing, and times when you let the rush of what’s happening in front of you penetrate your soul. It helps if you’ve been to church a few times.

Since we’re long-time veterans of several Indigo Girls concerts, and we happened to be sitting smack in the center of the room — we were getting as much entertainment from the looks of the right-hand side of the room looking puzzled at the left-hand side of the room as we were from the music coming from the stage. The former, were sitting and watching a great concert like good New Englanders are supposed to do. The latter were singing verses of the songs at the tops of their lungs, dancing in the aisles, cheering wildly after a favorite song, and just having a great ole’ time. The demographic of the latter, by the way, is overwhelmingly female. It’s an unusual kind of church – but it’s a church nonetheless.

(In case you were wondering, there was no photography allowed during the show — so I only have words to share.)

Betsy and I had decided to stay over at the Frost Mountain Yurts for the weekend — another fortuitous decision. When we left the concert a few hours ago we looked up and the stars were very much out on this moonless night (SMAC is, as they say, in the boonies). A 10 minute ride to the yurts and we’re in total darkness except for the Milky Way overhead. We don’t get this kind of a show back home in Maynard. The light pollution from Boston and the ‘burbs takes away most of the subtle night sky. We get glimpses of our galaxy on exceptionally clear nights, but it takes a power failure to have anything approaching what they have out here. As if it was a reminder that we’re not as far out in the boonies as you could be, a strobe light from a nearby airfield would occasionally brighten up the horizon.

We couldn’t see the Milky Way from the yurts so we hiked back to the trailhead, with camera, and I set the camera on the ground aiming straight up and took a few 30 second exposures. (Note of frustration: Canon’s 1DMkII placement of “bulb” exposure isn’t where it is on most other cameras — it’s actually a special exposure mode (like Av, Tv, M). Sigh!)

Astrophotography is a whole other level of difficulty. Turning subtle levels of dark gray into stunning images is hard work — and certainly I’m not up to the task. But I hope you get a little sense of the grandeur that floats above our heads during the summer months.