Saturday Morning Catch

Really spectacular dawns require some clouds to light things. On the other hand, most naked early mornings, long before dawn, will flash colors that might seem, well, Halloweenish, if they weren't so fleetingly beautiful. Truth is, last Saturday's earliest hours didn't make headlines, but if you were out early--and November 2 was the latest dawn of the year--you couldn't miss this palette. Okay, the photo is nothing to write home about, but it's still enough to stop time--for a moment or so.

The Big Sioux River's been high for a very long time, but Saturday it was beginning to look restrained. Photography is all about light, and the places where I looked didn't have it just right that morning. Someday--maybe soon, maybe not--this giant cottonwood will fall victim to those flood waters, even though they've now passed by. This guy's roots have been laid bare where the river sculpted chunks from its own banks. Halloween had just passed.

But I was on my way to Jefferson, SD, to find grasshopper crosses. Getting there meant passing Broken Kettle, a preserve like none other in the region--and I'd be there close to dawn. So I kept going.

We had our first snow yesterday, but "first snow" generally sounds more beautiful than they are--and so it was yesterday: roadside straps of snow, here and there a smattering of white from a day of "wintry mix." 

"First snow" always arrives at the end of yet another prairie season, something called "harvest," when everywhere you look lumbering beasts are eating endless rows of corn and throwing dust up thick as smoke. What it leaves behind are bereft fields that offer their own kind of seasonal beauty.

What's close was corn until a week ago; what's far was beans. But everything is gone now, trucked off to markets that aren't promising rainbows this year. But what both leave behind can seem almost elegant.

 There's a snake uncoiling here on a land that, as far as you can see, is all suede. This is one of those shots that just won't fit in a camera.

But I came up in the loess hills for preserve, not farmland.

And it was worth it. Whatever leaves may have colored the place, they were gone by November 2. But what they left behind was still gorgeous in the morning's Midas touch.

Somewhere out there are 200 buffalo. Never saw 'em. Maybe that's okay. I'll be back.

From the moment I spotted this, I couldn't help but believe this image might well be the best of show that day. Don't ask me to explain why.

Here's another, also slightly Halloween-ish. 

There was no buffalo fur around the furrowed bark of this old cottonwood, but up here above so many beautiful miles of preserve, this hoary old giant still believes himself lord of all. 

That shadowy strap on the horizon outlines the Missouri River. Not all that far beneath the mound where I'm standing lies the Big Sioux. What's out there is an slowly widening isthmus of wonderful land once the home of the Omaha. I don't doubt for a moment that once upon a time Lewis and Clark stood right here and looked out at a world they believed no one had ever seen before. About that they were wrong, of course, but let's just give them their joy. In the 19th century, by treaty, for a time all of this belonged to the Yankton Sioux, still may, in fact. 

Jefferson was maybe fifteen minutes away. I could have done a lot worse on a sunny Saturday morning. But then what I've discovered in the last twenty years is that it's not all that difficult to be blessed by the beauty all around.