Walker's Point

Author's Comments

The compound is the headline and the reason most people pull over, but it is not the photograph. The photograph is the granite. Walker's Point sits on a slab of coast that the Atlantic has been working on for longer than any of us can hold in our heads, and on a winter morning when the swell is up and the sun is still low over the water, the rock does something that no house on a peninsula can compete with. The light comes in sideways. The spray catches it. The tidal pools fill and drain and fill again. I like Parsons Way for this. It is a walking path, not a destination, and it gives you the coast in a long uninterrupted ribbon rather than a single overlook. Spouting Rock is the obvious draw a little further south, and on the right tide it earns its name - water forced up through a fissure in the granite, going six or eight feet into the air with a sound you feel before you hear. A long exposure here is worth the tripod. The water blurs to something closer to fog and the rock holds steady, and the contrast is the entire point. Come in the off season if you can. October works. February works better, if you can stand the wind. The summer crowds are not terrible but the light is. Morning is when this coast gives you its best angle, the sun coming up across Cape Arundel and raking the granite at a low enough angle to find every seam.

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