Following a Thread

This time at Cold River—the last time—his touch was light as pollen, no snapped twigs or boot-prints on the familiar trail. It was the place Gordon returned to no matter where he was, Blue Mountain Lake or Tahawus, a tiny clearing with a cabin no bigger than a queen-size bed, notched logs standing teepee style, another shed with the necessaries of Noah John’s life. The hermit was a contrary solitary, though, a gregarious recluse who loved the campers who dropped in.

There’s a photo of Rondeau with Gordon’s wife seated in front of a shack labeled “Beauty Parlor.” Perched on a stump, she’s smiling, the woodsman plucking her eyebrows with a pair of clamshells from the lake. At least that’s how the photo is remembered; the album with these once-vivid scenes was reduced to sodden gunk after a box of old stuff got flooded in a basement thousands of miles away.

Is there a name for the ghosts of photographs? The way we can conjure up something two-dimensional