Starting over

Once upon a time, I ranged far more than I do these Saturday mornings, when I go out to try to catch the dawn.  Maybe I'm less adventuruous.  Maybe I'm just more conscious of three-dollar gas. 

Maybe I don't go as far or hunt as well as I used to because these days ethanol has built a ton of new houses all over Siouxland, wherever you look, in fact.  And confinements by the score.  Sometimes I wonder if there should be a limit.  They're everywhere, steaming away on cold winter mornings.  If you want to leave them behind, you've got to cross the river into South Dakota.  These days there are just a few spots I visit regularly, a few places where a a tree or two and an open landscape create real possibilities for a composition really worth studying.

Somewhere I read that good photographers go back to places they mark like cats--go back again and again and again simply because what appears in the lens--the corners of an old barn, the kinky knuckles of a rangy cottonwood, nothing but open land forever behind them--because those lines arrange themselves in a fashion that is as unique and artful as the music of the spheres.  Maybe it's not just laziness that has made my Saturday mornings more habitual, more routine; maybe it's that I've come to recognize at least something of the composition of beauty.  I'd like to think that.

Saturday morning was perfectly clear.  I left when the east was just beginning to glow, its clarity itself a prophecy of what was to come, the kind of dawn when the sun is a startling wafer of brilliant incandescence.  No color to speak of.  No clouds.  Just a huge, daunting sun. 

I decided to stay close and go straight west to an abandoned farm place I've visited tons of time, just across the gravel from a huge cottonwood.  If you're not toting a camera, I can't imagine why that spot would distinguish itself; but I treasure a dozen really sweet shots I've taken right there.  One morning, right on top of me, a thunder storm broke up--rolling masses of colors so pungent it would have been heavenly if it wasn't so intimidating.  Like this--

Saturday morning I simply decided simply to head back to a place near Lebanon, an old favorite, a place that has paid off royally in the past.

From two miles away already, I could see that the cottonwood was gone--not gone, I guess, but down.  Massive chunks of trunk lay scattered around like elephant limbs, the stump itself pitifully hollow--I never knew.  No one cut Goliath down either.  Time itself had done the deed.

And just across the road, the neighbor had gone down too.  That old barn was still there, but a total mess, its firmament gone, its walls a heap of snapped and graying barn wood, ready for a match.  Right there, just a bit north and east of Lebanon, Iowa, the music of the spheres is no more.  One of my favorite places to shoot the dawn is gone.  My computer can show you what it was like; but I can no longer bring you there because, artfully speaking, there is no there there.

I'd love to create an enemy, some crass, grace-less capitalist farmer whose only god is efficiency and who wants every last bushel he can reap, fencerow to fencerow.  Wouldn't it be nice to ascribe the destruction to some unfeeling human being.  A villain is always a joy.

But neither the tree nor the barn fell by way of some human assassin.  Some might say the Lord did it.  I'd rather not blame him.  It was age or weather or some lethal combination thereof.  Today it's a mess.  Sad.  Nothing gold can stay.  How much less, wood.

I'll have to go elsewhere now, find something new, stumble on another old cottonwood--maybe out towards Inwood somewhere.  Haven't been there for years.  It's time I explore again, like I used to. 

Maybe I've just become too comfortable.  Maybe it's time to look around again, find some new places, hunt, range, explore.

I really can't go back again. 

Maybe that's the way it should be.