One Saturday near the Rock River

 

Went north, one Saturday morning in July, 2011, into the valleys of the Rock River, a tributary of the Big Sioux, whose valleys lack the depth and beauty of its bigger cousin's. Tougher area to get a shot that can take a viewer's breath away. But dawn is dawn, and the beauty isn't the river or the gravel roads or anything else. The beauty is in the dawn, here too.

What I came to understand fairly quickly into my journeys into early morning in the region was that the sky itself was hardly ever the whole story. Occasionally, the morning sun creates a sky full of abject beauty, enough to render  you unable to shoot pictures. There's just too much glory in the open world we live in.

But most often, what I had to learn was that a really good shot, like the one above, needs a character. The sky is a masterful setting here, but what makes the shot more memorable is the character of the story this moment on the Rock River creates, in this case, a half-gone elm (probably) reminding us somehow of our own tenuous hold on the reality of earth itself, our mortality.

So I shot and shot, in an attempt to let the space speak.

In this last, the tree up the gravel and the tiny little sign offer a little more to the story. 

Then I simply turned around to see what was behind me.

There's the Rock, and forever corn across it. It's catching, and I like it, but it's also, sadly enough, pretty much conventional Iowa--and therefore begets little more than a yawn.

Pointing the camera further south, I picked up an  unusual sight these days, cattle in an honest-to-goodness pasture (and not a confinement). Most foreigners in these parts might like to think this shot conventional, but it's rare, and that why I jumped on the shutter.

Honestly, this July morning you could take gravel roads all day long in this region and not see this--cattle in a pasture. It's a rarity.

And so, I went home. Not trophies, but blessed abundantly by simply having been out there.