I take a lot of photos, way too many photos. And not just on special occasions either. Every single day just dozens, sometimes into the hundreds. I don’t know exactly when that started, but I think it was when I started carrying this little canon on my hip everyday back in 2011, before phones had good cameras. Ever since then I’ve pretty much always used a camera lens to take off bite sized pieces of life in order to process the hard stuff and better appreciate/admire the good.

For my spirit and psyche, digesting things frame by frame goes down better than the whole story all at once, and it especially makes tragedies easier for a mind and heart to metabolize. So naturally I documented everything as it went, from videos of the water rising, and blurry nighttime pics of the rain, to the muddy aftermath of documents and muck boots, to therapy dogs and porch comradery.

And among those moments was a family of white ducks who had weathered the storm and taken refuge on campus for several days after, watching us from the front of Mullins center as we unloaded truckloads of donated supplies. The ducks have become one of the paramount images for me and those who know the story. So much so that I hid them into the campus map in the back of the book. I think for us as a community the ducks became symbolic of resilience and unity through such a turbulent time, even though they were displaced they stuck together and floated with the current, until the danger had settled.