An organ mixture; Mount Edith Cavell
Les went on a service call, so I spent most of the day alone in the shop, racking the mixture for Drayton. Most organ pipes, at least the smaller ones, are held in place by rackboards over the windchests, which deliver air to the pipes. A hole must be drilled and filed to the exact size of each pipe.
Most organ stops contain only one set (or rank) of pipes. The mixture is a peculiar stop including multiple ranks that sound at octaves, fifths and sometimes thirds, so each note in the scale is equipped with its own harmonics. The mixture is a touchstone, adding richness to the overall organ sound. It's time-consuming to build and service, of course, because while most stops have about 61 pipes, a mixture has several times that many. When out of tune it sounds particularly horrible.
The mixture in Drayton was in bad shape, many pipes mangled by careless tuners over the years, so Les decided to replace them completely. The original had only three ranks, but he likes more, especially in the higher registers, so the new mixture increases from three ranks in the bass notes to five in the treble.
Of course we had to make a new rackboard for the new pipes. On Friday afternoon I drilled the holes, 250 or so. Today I spent several hours putting the pipes in place and filing the holes to get them just right. Racking pipes is a humble job. Like so many tasks, it doesn't contribute to the look or sound of the organ, but it's an essential part of putting the instrument together.
Okay, about Mount Edith Cavell....
Downtown Fergus at lunchtime, since I was there alone, I took a few extra minutes and did my daily walk there. In the 1930s someone built an elaborate terraced garden in the side of the gorge along the Grand River, with exquisitely hideous stonework.
I was more intrigued with the plants colonizing a natural rock garden below the park. There was nothing special there-wildflowers like yarrow and purple loosestrife, with hens-and-chicks and other garden escapees-but it reminded me of a camping trip through the Rockies with my parents, my brother and his wife when I was 16. Everywhere we went I found wildflowers growing out of rocks, in crevices on mountainsides.
My sister-in-law was eight months pregnant, and the five of us were miserable cooped up in the Jimmy for two weeks together. I was miserable in that particular adolescent way, but my Canon AE-1 and the macro lens I borrowed from Dad provided endless escape.
We visited Mount Edith Cavell on a gloomy day. No, the weather was gorgeous that entire trip-the peak must have been shrouded in cloud. There, below a glacier on rocky moraine with no apparent soil, tiny heaths gave forth delicate white and purple flowers. Everyone else wandered around admiring the scenery, but I spent the time focusing on the ground.
My old bedroom wall at Poplar Bluff still displays two floral photographs I took that day. The light was terrible, so the depth of field in those images is bad. But they are emblems of a revelation about life, an essential chapter in my love affair with plants and photography.
