DARIN HAYTON

Tag: Valley Forge National Historic Park

  • Winter’s Passing

    Winter’s Passing

    Winter never arrived this year. Except for a week in December, the winter months were balmy and snowless. Spring came early. The cherry trees had finished blooming weeks earlier than usual. While most people rejoice in spring’s colorful return, I don’t often join the festivities. I miss winter.

    Landscape #230114.0 A black and white silhouette of the end of a tree branch.
    Landscape #230114.0

    I enjoy the beauty in the stark landscapes, both large and small. The season and the bare trees and snow laden bushes lend themselves, I think, to quiet photographs.

    Landscape #230114.1 A black and white silhouette of the end of a tree branch.
    Landscape #230114.1

    Therein lies the key difference, for me, between winter and other seasons: winter is quiet, at times hauntingly so. Winter urges me to be quiet, prompts me to look carefully at the world around me, reminds me that I too shall pass.

    Come, come thou bleak December wind,

    And blow the dry leaves from the tree!

    Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’ me, Death

    And take a Life that wearies me.

    Fragment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    Landscape #230114.2 A black and white silhouette of a dead blossom.
    Landscape #230114.2

    Spring is here. Blossoms and leaves have brought color back to life. I lament winter’s passing but take comfort in knowing it will return.

  • Imagined Histories

    Imagined Histories

    We work incredibly hard to create remnants of the past that will help us imagine what it was like: think of ghost towns and historic monuments. National and state park systems have developed strict guidelines for how to repair “historic” structures, e.g., what materials can be used for public-facing projects (stuff visitors might see) need to be or seem to be authentic to the period (whereas non-public-facing projects can use modern materials). Valley Forge is filled with such structures — fences, cabins, embankments — maintained to give visitors a sense of history.

    Landscape #220312 is a black and white photograph of a cabin at Valley Forge National Historic Park.
    Landscape #220312

    That stormy March afternoon, the quiet, lonely cabin certainly didn’t help me imagine the history of the place — 244 years earlier I suspect it was a relatively loud and lively camp with perhaps as many as 1,500 cabins and more than 10,000 soldiers scattered around the Valley Forge encampment. This cabin doesn’t help me understand what life was like for the Continental Army, but standing there in the blowing snow and listening to the ice cracking on the tree limbs as they flexed and bent in the wind I was able to conjure up an image, a fiction of what it might be like to live in such a place.

  • Postcard Archive: March 2022

    Postcard Archive: March 2022

    I couldn’t resist the siren calls of a late winter snow storm. promising the chance to wander a desolate world, alone.

    The late winter snow adds to the atmosphere and makes glad for my gloves and heavy coat, luxuries the Continental Army did not enjoy.

  • Late Winter Storm

    Late Winter Storm

    It was a miserable day. Cold and windy, and then cold, windy, and snowy. Stores closed early because the “winter storm warning.” Most people wisely chose to stay home, warm and dry. A perfect day, it seemed to me, to go for a hike. Thick leaden clouds and blowing snow created a sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland of dead trees and empty spaces. There was no palette — everything shaded from black to gray. Nearly every scene was hauntingly beautiful.

    Landscape #220312. A black and white photo of a stand of trees in a snow storm.
    Landscape #220312

    On days like this I am drawn by the sirens’ songs and venture out into the howling winds. The discomfort and physical effort compensated for by the chance to be alone and the opportunity to photograph scenes few other people will experience.

  • Winter Wind

    Winter Wind

    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.

    #210106
  • Postcard Archive: September 2020

    Postcard Archive: September 2020

    This month’s postcard recalls a warm summer evening and swarms of mosquitos, oh and a comet too.