walking to the dock tricia enns
walking filming recording ritual
Travel can take many forms. For the sake of the journey we will be embarking on, we will travel by foot, therefore walking. The act of walking, is as old as humankind, and tends to involve using your body. Walking, historically referred to moving, with multiple legs, solely by one’s own body from point A to point B. I would like to extend this definition to include moving without legs, and with the help of others or mobility assistive devices, such as a wheelchair. Walking has been used in relation to religious rituals in the form of pilgrimages, such as the Hajj, Bodh Gaya, and Camino de Santiago. But for the sake of our journey, we will focus-on and explore walking as a potentially spiritual, but non-religious ritual. Curious about the distinction between routine and ritual, a quick google search will tell you that ritual is ‘a type of routine imbued with meaning and intention’. 1 This speaks to Rebecca Solnit’s description of how walking is ‘a form of repetition that is also a form of self-expression, a ritual that can be spiritual or practical, deliberate or unconscious’.’ 2 But before we walk, we need to first take a boat, more specifically, a ferry. After an hour and a half on the ferry, we arrive on an island, presently, called Vinalhaven, Maine. The island received this name in the late 1700s, after colonial Anglo settlers arrived. Prior to this, the island was inhabited by the Red Paint People for thousands of years. 3 Vinalhaven was, and still is, known for its granite quarries and fishing industry. Today those quarries are primarily used as swimming holes for locals and tourists in the summer, and the fishing industry is dominates by lobster trapping. In June 2024 I was on the island to participate in an artist residency at a farm house, fondly known as ‘the Poor Farm’. The island, surrounded by inlets and fog, the gentle lapping of seawater and large seaweed covered rocks, is idyllic, yet for many reasons that week-long residency was challenging. Rituals, including walking, act as powerful anchors during hard times. Solnit, in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking , describes how walking can break us out of our mental routines, or even provide an escape, especially in times of confusion or difficulty. It is with this in mind that I will introduce the walk.
The walk we will eventually take is to the dock. I was told about this dock and all its splendour over dinner on the first night of the residency by a colleague who had stayed at the Poor Farm before. I was of course curious, therefore the first morning, after being woken by aggressively radiant sunlight and clambering footsteps I went to blow my nose (the mould, pollen and dust run rampant and free in the Poor Farm), poured a mug of coffee, and slipped on my shoes. Being my first walk to the dock it had yet to become a ritual, which requires the intentional repetition of an act. There was a thick fog squishing through the trees, and as I began walking down the path, the sound of birds registered in my ears and I felt the sun cut through the fog to warm my bundled body. I could smell the seawater and pine needles beckoning me forward, even as black flies circled and dived at my head. Walking can, if we let it, bring us into sensory intimacy with a place. Kate McLean, a walking and olfactory map-making artist and researcher, describes how walking engages our senses and it is in this sensory relationship, where our senses collide that we can build deeper connections to our surroundings. 4 As I walked, and sipped on my coffee, the world became increasingly curious: how could moss be so iridescent?, do the trees gossip with one another?, and, how will all this change with climate change? Walking allowed me to ground, feet on the soil and sky over head, and connect to where I was, before being swept away by the tasks and interactions of the day. Jenny Odell, author of How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy , writes about how what we choose to notice and give our attention to has a great influence on what we perceive to be possible at any given moment. 5 Arriving at the dock, after spending 20 minutes paying attention to the tiny and mysterious details of the natural environment, the landscape opens up to the sea reaching out, dotted by islands saturated by fir and pine trees, and the possibilities for my day, life and the future of the world felt endless. I was in awe at the calming solitude I felt as wafts of salty seaweed reached by nose. I dangled my feet off the dock, the cold water tickling my toes, and it was clear a ritual was born, if only for a week.
1 Ritual : Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/ritual . Accessed 1 Jan. 2025. 2 Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking . New York: Viking, 2000. p7 3 Vinalhaven, Maine. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinalhaven, _ Maine. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025
4 McLean, Kate. ‘Mapping the Ephemeral’, Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography , edited by Andrew Kent and Paul Vujakovic. London & New York: Routledge, 2017
40 on site review 46 :: travel
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