Road work.

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It’s another weekly photo, and it hasn’t yet been a week. I’m still working out a schedule of writing that I can live with, and that will allow me to keep myself organized and regimented.

(You should click here to see the larger version of this photograph, because the one above is slightly too small to work with. Until I learn to code things myself, alas, this is just the way it’s going to be.)

I took this photograph at Quarry Hill in Rochester, Minnesota, when I was there for Thanksgiving. We like to walk there; it’s peaceful and the paths skirt fields and forests. You can occasionally catch a glimpse of what we think is a muskrat in the lake—though now, the lake would be frozen over. The quarry itself yawns open wide and lazily, but we can’t get that close to it any more, because of the new pavement paths they’re going to lay down, sometime when the weather gets better.

Our elementary school classes would go to Quarry Hill on field trips, at least once a year, and we’d walk through the caves and across a high bridge on the edge of the quarry, after terrifying ourselves with stories of the escaped mental patient who had hid in these very caves and then hung himself on this very bridge. Thus while I like walking there now (nearly twenty years later), there remains a latent inexpressible loneliness about the place. For me at least.

What I like about this photo is three-fold.

First, the color of the sign, because otherwise the field would be relatively stark; I think the fiery orange, through its contrast, calls out the rich golds of the dead grass and the variegated browns of the sleeping trees, and makes you see more of the blue in the sky.

Second, the way the trees edge upwards, tendril-like, reminds me of when I first started taking neuroanatomy courses and after hours of studying pictures of the various dendritic structures of neurons, I began to see resonances, visual harmonies or reminders of them in nature, particularly in the branches of trees and bushes.

Third, the sky. I was talking to my dad last night, and he told me how one recent evening, just after a snowfall, he looked outside, out towards the woods. The trees were black shadows edged with white, which was eerie enough. But the sky, he said, the sky was this opalescent greyish color, glowing almost from the diffused rays of the hidden moon. I knew exactly what he meant. I’d seen it, too, at home as I pressed my nose to the cold glass of the front window in our house when everyone else was asleep, how the sky pressed too against the outlines of the rooftops, deep, thick, but surprisingly bright for the middle of the night.

The thing about not being in the city is that the sky will always look bigger. I miss that constantly. The sky seems a living thing, back home.

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