Visiting Gloucester

Hi Joey, 

My girlfriend (laura) and I just visited Gloucester and some of Cape Ann for the first of I hope many times. Its just an amazing and new landscape for both of us to experience, having just relocated here from Nashville we are in awe of Cape Anns beauty. Laura is a writer and I am a photographer. We have been traveling together and collaborating on travel and essay projects for the last year. We took this photograph overlooking Rafe’s Chasm on the morning of our visit, on our way into town.Fred Bodin encouraged us to submit it to you for possible inclusion in your blog. We would be honored if you would consider it! We love Gloucester and intend to haunt there often.

Regards Jeff

Laura wrote;

Wherever Jeff and I travel, we make friends. We make friends with people and we make friends with places: the places through the people who are their ambassadors and the people that give the places their character and spirit. This photo is of us at Rafe’s Chasm on our first morning in Gloucester, greeting the sea that is the port city’s power and sovereignty. To our left, the ancient Atlantic is surging up in a cleft and then lowering itself, again and again, in the richest dark green you could ever dream to see, veined with white froth and deepening to black. The twisty pale woods are behind us.

We must have made a good impression on the ocean because Gloucester welcomed us: the friendly folks hanging around the entrance of the Saint Peter’s Club; Fred Bodin at his historic photo shop, the prints a lovely counterpoint to his narration of the city’s history; Bob Ritchie at Dogtown Book Shop, who not only sold us lovely books about birds and codfish but told us the stories of the books themselves; Geno Modello with his Saturday-afternoon Dory Shop crowd, cooking sausage on his great iron stove, wood shavings everywhere from the gorgeous hull he is shaping, who gave us a Shipyard Ale and shared the inside skinny on The Perfect Storm. At the old-school Pilot House Jeff burrowed into a fish-and-chips and I had a big vegan spaghetti. It was a perfect day.

Everything wants us to come back. Everything in us wants to come back. Good morning, Gloucester! We love you.

~ Laura Marjorie Miller