That summer evening, women in white gowns went to a boat under a sky that didn’t seem to concern them. For the five years of my life since I first saw their image in that act, I haven’t understood. I’ve been trying to make the sky around them concern me, but I haven’t succeeded.
The women are present to us now only as a blemished, poorly processed image in an archive:
Petoskey, their place of being in the image, is a tourist town near the northern end of Lake Michigan, and there exist plenty of other archives that can easily define the women’s tour term “night boat” by placing it in historical context — for example, in detail that can be increased almost as much as you’d like,(1)
St. Joseph (Michigan) Daily Press, Monday, August 27, 1906, page 1
(2)
Grand Haven (Michigan) Tribune, Wednesday, June 27, 1906, page 4
But somehow the gowned women were also all of a piece with a cloud and a sun and some rippling water, and that plenum isn’t present except as an image.Left behind with me in the visible, the first traces of the image seem no longer to be apparent. They are no longer detectable in the present tense that once was written “going.” Perhaps they never were detectable, and perhaps that’s why the gowned women seem not to have noticed, there under the setting sun, what they were undergoing. At any rate, it seems apparent to you now that some time ago the women in white and their particular sun were erased to dark.
“Going to the night boat, Petoskey, Mich.,” 1906. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016800038/.
