FIELD TRIP

The Ottawa River has two lives: the one most people see, and the one that happens down at the water’s edge in the shallows. These photos are from that second life: urban wetlands, slow water, sometimes ice, looking for the kind of light that shows up when you're awake early and not in a hurry.

Along this stretch, the river's edges do a lot of quiet work. White-tailed deer pick their way through the shallows at the wood line. Raccoons wade, forage, and stare back with characteristic indifference. Great blue herons hold their ground in the reeds or stand in open water as if they have nowhere else to be and know it. Beavers and muskrats tend their lodges in the margins where the river loses its shape and becomes something more like a wetland. It's a place I return to through every season.