This is Ralph King (c. 1970), life long resident and sometimes Chief of the King Bay Ojibwe Indian Reservation near Moose-Deer Point on the south eastern shore of Georgian Bay, Ontario. He and his extended family made possible many of the challenging logistics of my own family’s summer vacations here.

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He had a skill that so impressed me when I was a tween. He could drive his LARGE and very FAST boat down the narrow back channels that surrounded our island - AT NEARLY FULL SPEED IN THE DARK!!! and on even the blackest of moonless nights! The other kids and I - and even the adults - would sometimes discuss this with fascination. Unlike him we all usually puttered along at the slowest of speeds at night, as we struggled to find the shoals we knew were out there with our massive flashlights. One day my dad asked him the secret. Some of it was what you might expect. Turn off the damn flashlight and let your eyes adjust!! Duh! But he also said it was important to look not at the shore line but above it. This would let the relative brightness of the rocks near the waterline register in one’s peripheral vision. He could construct the scene in his mind’s eye by looking not at the thing directly but by glancing at the almost blurry outlines of the edges of the thing.

 

I go on about this because I think of Ralph every day that I work on drafts for my drawings. Visual reality is complicated and almost enough to make one run away screaming and overwhelmed. When I begin to lose the thread, and the subtle things I think I am chasing seem like just so much chimera, I take a step back and take Ralph’s advice for navigating #9 Channel in the dark. Then I often catch sight of what I am looking for - in the periphery. A valuable skill. Seems like Ralph will be with me for a long time to come.