Four Craigs and Four Maries at Hughlet Point, 

Northern Neck, Virginia

Two years ago I found a piece of driftwood along the beachfront at Hughlet Point on the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia. The coast has invaded the forest here; stumps of trees, smoothed and weathered gull-grey, stand knee-deep in the sea, as if forming a strange, permeable, erratic fence. Some trees lie flat, but most stand; the driftwood was a knotted arm broken off one of them. 

I brought it home and printed it with a photograph of my brother Craig and his wife Marie, who live just a few miles up the shoreline, at the mouth of the Wicomico River. They're new to the area: casting their image into the sea on local bark was an act of introduction.

I took these pictures as the driftwood bobbed and flipped and spun and stuck in the warm wavelets along the shore. It wouldn't hold still, and my back ached from chasing it in a hermit-crab position. But I got some good images at different depths, under and out of the water. The sky and colors kept changing, with the result that some images read blue, others green, others ochre-brown, so I followed the color-thought of the moment and encouraged the hues to continue down the paths they'd already begun in the sun--or lack thereof...