Mirror Lake Review — A Family’s Looking Glass for Nature’s Past and Future

By Richard Register

In Mirror Lake: Images of the Fripp Island Habitat, you can walk the beaches of faded memories and almost feel the sand between your toes. This book is a loving ode to nature with a particular sense of place in a spare 44 pages, rich with color paintings, photographs, and meandering lines of poetry weaving the book together lightly, tenuously, skillfully.

The book deserves a long, strong reflection, or meditation. Deceptively pretty though many of Mirror Lake’s images appear at first glance—butterflies, orange and white crabs, flowers in opulent form and hue, pelicans in stately formation overhead, what its mirrors reveal doesn’t always put us at ease. This book elicits memories and dreams anchored in a reality that is at once sweet and raw, tantalizingly attractive yet tender.

Nature is fading away, swamped by development, climate change, rising seas. In this place, where the family likes to wander from time to time, the land, sea, and sky meet— with great blue herons, alligators, dead and rotting horseshoe crabs, small bees more green and glorious than emeralds, and hatchling sea turtles, scampering awkwardly with their outsized flippers, trying to make it to the ocean to eat before being eaten. Fripp Island ist a beautiful private island, and like the book itself is full of surprises under its surface. In these pages, beauty radiates out from intense paintings with hard edges following shapes alive and geometric. Its sincere photos seem all the more real and important because they have been lovingly taken, piercing time in the way of a scrap book; rare and important like history and its lessons.

The book’s introduction is written by Jan Camp, a talented electronic graphics and photography artist, who also designed and produced this inspiring book. She makes no bones about it: the person walking the beaches of this small island off South Carolina, (even if more gently than developer) and we, the world-wide makers of CO2 exhaust, are also pushing the natural habitat back, back, back. Even we who love such places, cherish things made smaller and sadder by our simple observation of them. We go there; the animals, knowing by now who we are, retreat a little; our footsteps fade in the wind but more come, especially when we write books, draw pictures, and compose poems. We can help protect the turtles in a kind of rear guard action, as celebrated in the later pages of Mirror Lake, but we see no plan, no path to accommodation between people and the place revealed. 

The paradox is not unraveled—but we get strong grounding and a direction to travel called respectfully, even as Albert Schweitzer called it, “reverence for life.” Thus the book is more than enough. Take the brushy grasses there on Fripp Island, the views of big sky and flat landscape punctuated with ancient sharks teeth sparkling in the sand under the moon. You can almost feel the wind rise the hair on the back of your neck as easily as the haunting paintings of Joell Jones can take you into an emotional swirl or intellectual contemplation of the highest order.

The book is a family affair. Would that many more families could so beautifully declare what they love and put their favored worlds before us, to speak as families often do—not of one mind, but of one heart. Joell is the painter and Mirror Lake is her gallery. Cassidy’s pictures were taken for fun and curiosity and there is a familiarity about her quirky captions. Will, who started going to Fripp Island as a boy, gives us diligent composition born of art and technology.

The book is anything but pretentious; it’s for everybody. Here is a line from Cassidy who made the photos she captions, “I always wonder about the sea oats: they seem like such a strange plant for this environment. There don’t seem to be any animals that eat them, but they taste good with brown sugar. Endangered oatmeal.”

Joell is ever looking for the wonderful in her world. She writes, “I once carried a large piece of driftwood back from Prichard’s. I tied it to my tee-shirt through the armholes with string so that I had both hands free for swimming.” Then later she worries: “I used to find large moon shells when I first visited Fripp. The shells have grown smaller and fewer as the years have gone by.”

Will says simply as experienced, “The oyster beds are a good place to go crabbing. Going at high tide, it’s a bit tricky because the oysters are so sharp they can cut you quite badly.”

Then with the edge of foreboding, Joell says, “One New Year’s Eve at Fripp, I stayed up all night and walked out onto the beach at sunrise. The gulls were viciously attaching the bivalves that had gotten stranded on the beach. I remember seeing the opened, emptied shells and there was blood inside. It seemed quite strange and shocking at the time.” Will adds in a mater-of-fact caption below his photo of the shellfish, “The blood of the bivalve is red due to the presence of hemoglobin; most mollusks have clear blood.”

Even more plainly, at the bottom of the page near the end of the book we read, “Fact: When the island became so populated as to endanger the hatching turtles, a turtle-watch group of volunteers was formed. Eggs are sometimes brought to higher ground where they will not be washed away. The hatching is closely supervised to prevent human interference. The area is fenced off and each clutch is labeled with a white stick: number, date, and egg count.”

This album of a family’s inner and outer world shows us responsibility and hope moving from their experience of nature, through our experience of their book, to a better accommodation. But is it enough? An how much time do we have? These are not the questions for this book, which is complete in itself as well as being a very good beginning. The real objective here is to enjoy the exploration it offers, and to wonder deeply at a place that is hanging on a thin edge between sea, sky, and changing times.

Richard Register is author of Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, a book that does try to systematize and plan for a regenerative civilization, specifically designed to redesign cities and towns for the long haul in a healthy biosphere.