I paused to rest and to watch the sun hang in the orange sky. Breathing heavily, salt in my hair, and dust on my legs. The weak evening light doing little to warm me. These are the sensations that remind me I’m alive. Exertion. Fatigue. Dirt. Offline. Alone. Chill.
What, I wondered, reminds him that he’s alive? Exertion? Dust? Sweat? Followers? Texts? Is he ever alone? Is he lonely? Why did he come to the top of the hill this evening to look at his phone? Perhaps he gets better reception here.
I had been driving for hours when the sun finally clawed its way over the horizon. The endless black that had enveloped me since I had started out was replaced by endless sky and grasslands. And wind. Always the wind. Barbed wire fences suggested that cattle grazed on the land, somewhere. Windmills suggested that they got thirsty now and then. The ramshackle houses and barns suggested that the few people who used to live in these grasslands had moved away. I stood there in the cold wind, listened to it whistle through the barbed wire, blow through the grasses, and spin the rotor on the windmill. I enjoyed the emptiness.
Then the drone of a long-haul truck reached me. Carried forward on the strong wind, its engine sounded much higher pitched than the Doppler effect could have produced. Then, as it roared by, the drone stretched out into a long, low moan. I turned, climbed back through the barbed wire fence, got into my car, and continued north.
A cold wind whistled through the branches. The winter wind is different. Not simply frigid, though it is surely that, even the slightest breeze produces a haunting, lonely sound. I stand at the edge of a meadow listening to an arboreal death rattle, frozen branches creaking as dry air wheezes through a bronchial network of branches. The winter wind is bitter and unforgiving. But to confront that wind, to feel the biting cold on your exposed skin, to shiver as it steals inside your collar, is to experience life. The cold is a reminder that you are alive.
Pause. Look around. Look closely. What have I not noticed every other time I’ve passed this spot. Whether mundane and dull or extraordinary and beautiful. Somewhere around me right now is a detail I’ve not seen before. Find it and add it to my “Museum of Overlooked Details.”
On a typical weekday afternoon, a line of cars stretches down to the stoplight at the bottom, often twenty or so of them stopped on their trip home. On the other side, cars that have recently come through the intersection careen home. Crossing, even in the marked crosswalk, is a risk.
This afternoon, I enjoyed walking down the center of the street without a car in sight. It was a moment. My camera allows me to collect life’s moments, the quiet ones, the daily ones, that tend to escape notice. Life’s moments, whether mundane or profound, are worth collecting.
Roll after roll. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, lie in fields waiting to be retrieved, moved, sold, or whatever. Judging by the hundreds piled around the edges of fields and along roadsides, many of these rolls will end up rotting, reminders of how difficult it is to correlate production and consumption. That day in western Kansas, standing in a seemingly endless field dotted with more than a hundred amber rolls contrasting with the pale blue sky, it was easy to focus on just the beauty and stillness of the place, to ignore the interstate highway just a couple miles away over the horizon, the interstate that has both facilitated the overproduction of produce and helped sell those surpluses.
It was a chilly afternoon, weak sunlight scarcely warming the few people sitting in the square or those walking their dogs. At the corner, two men stood across from each other engaged in a sometimes frenetic sometimes contemplative game of chess. In a flurry of moves their hands nearly collided as pawns, rooks, and bishops attacked and retreated. Then, like the kings they rarely moved, the two men stood still for minutes just surveying the board.
Whether moving pieces or considering the board, throughout the game the two talked constantly to, at, and near each other. A stream words tumbled from each man’s mouth. Now and then they responded to what the other had said, but most often they seemed to be sharing some internal monolog of strategy and tactics, of regrets for bad moves and compliments for good ones, of random thoughts that seemed to have nothing to do with anything.
When the game ended, they reset the board and started a new one, all the while talking without interruption. “We’ve done this a thousand times,” he seemed to say to me in answer the unspoken question in my head, “and he’s beat me most of them.”
Singular photographs are fragments, or perhaps illustrations waiting for a story to give them context. But series of photographs seem to prompt a different kind of reflection. Collect together enough individual fragments and arrange them in some order, and the begin to reveal something you can’t see when looking at just one. The photographer engages in a sort of Aristotelian project, seeking out as many discrete examples of something in its natural setting in order to discern the features and characteristics each shares. Or the ways that each interacts with, shapes and is shaped by, that natural environment. In this way, photography becomes a project of natural history.
The intentional and sustained effort to take a number of related photos and to assemble them into a meaningful series encourages reflection and a sort of tranquility. And, in the end, says as much about the object studied, e.g., windmills, as it says about the photographer. But then, that’s true of any natural history endeavor.
Linger for a moment to think about ruin and decay. What if ruin is not the result of neglect but is, instead, an expression of value? Ruin and decay are not accidents but choices, as is our fascination with them. The one, perhaps, creates the other.
We live and wander amongst ruin. Ruin dots the landscape. We work around ruin, seem to preserve ruin.
Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays
There by itself, in the weak sun that fall afternoon, The Aermotor windmill turned slowly in the breeze, marking time with a rhythmic scraping of the rotating axle. It was a sort of sentinel, standing watch over a barbed wired fence and wide open range. At some point, this windmill probably served some purpose, but what I can only guess. Like so many windmills, vestiges of past hopes and dreams, this one sentenced to a lone existence, forever spinning in the wind to no effect.
Every time I see one one of these windmills I recall those lines:
…
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.