A Spell of Winter, and A Scene for the Taking

By Richard J. (Rick) Hilber

A photographer who is an artist of similar talents lives in the farm country of the Red River of the North not far from Alvarado, Minnesota.  Her name is Therese Masters Jacobson.  As 2015 was winding down and 2016 was just getting under way, she and her husband Dale would make trips to visit Dale’s mother whose health was at risk, a trip of some distance. 

The farm roads and highways that took the couple for the visits must have been repetitious for them although winter travel in the Red River Valley of the North can turn treacherous with winds across the flat landscape that take even a dusting of snow off the fields and twirl and twist a blizzard of ice particles and snow into the sky just above the Earth.  This happens with much frequency without any regional weather forecasters to ward travelers off, encouraging them to stay home.  Ground blizzards just are, and then they are not.

But something else was going on this particular winter’s day in early January 2016.  In the car as usual on such a trip, the poet husband and his artist wife share the miles and the space whether either speaks or not. Today something is different, at least for Therese.
 
Was it the light of the sun on a near perfect winter morning?  Suddenly, the wife, urges her husband to pull the car over onto the roadside.  He does.  She powers the window down, and moves her cellphone into position to take a photograph of a setting.

Dale, the husband, is not surprized at all.  In this case it is no concession, no marital rebalancing of the relationship.  He is recently retired, and this is the very kind of spontaneity that makes time with one another new and special each day.

Even the untrained eye can make easy sense of scenery.  Dale the poet perhaps does not think he stands for that proposition, but today in this story he does.  He might be thinking of some poem with winter imagery for all we know.  Maybe “Snowbound” by John Greenleaf Whittier.

 Now a disruption.  Just a tad really of analysis which I hope does not ruin the scene for anyone listening or reading.  I mean only to practice with you the delight in talking one's way through a scene, a particular scene, the one of which Therese took a picture.
 
The story now is not so much about Therese and Dale however.  It’s about the composition that the photographer Therese has produced by capturing the scene for us, and sharing it with us too.
So here goes.

©2015 by Therese Masters Jacobson.  All rights reserved.  Used above by this essayist with permission.

The perception of depth in the photograph is created by distinct and distant shelter belts as if inked in on the blue sky were individual trees and then so distant more like shrubs of full grown trees. This result though is eased by the horizontal lines like the edge of the field and the distant horizon too so much so that it's like a graph of the elements in the photo is just behind the vertical and horizontal elements. These lines are certain for the eye which being so tied to meaning by practice, our brains hardly need to supply the information that makes sense of this particular scene (call that activity "feedback").

I believe the simplicity of the photograph is very much a product of its ease of interpretation by the viewer, at least at first. However, humans are social animals, and interest quickly settles on further details.

The story in the picture though is what calms the mind of the observer and that is what looks like a meandering path through the plant stalks. The problem with analysis of the photograph is too much angst.  For example, the path may actually provide some drainage in a wheel rut for all I know.  However, that is a "brain fart" in my humble opinion and for photo appreciation we benefit nothing by being too technical or expert (as an actual farmer might know exactly what the path into the depths of the field happens to be).

But for a moment let's go toward the expert's appreciation, the farmers and the hydrologists. The stalk stems have been left on the land to catch the snow and keep it where it can help plant growth in the spring instead of blowing off into the ditches and rapidly exiting the country into the feeder streams that feed the Red River of the North and flood farm lands of other folk down stream.

So an important story is being told in this picture. The shelter belts may have been planted already several generations back during the recovery years from the Great American Depression when soil conservation for the first time had the attention of the federal and state governments.  This particular field may be slated for being left fallow for a year of rest from being just crop land.

When the thaw is complete, its farmer may harrow his or her field.  The plant roots and  shortened stalks will be turned over into the field, thus returning to the soil needed ingredients for new plant growth.

A photograph like this one is really a shrine like emblem of our culture in the Red River of the North. We are quietly appreciative and worshipful of our Mother, the Earth.   The farmer and the city dweller share that commonality.  We are indeed one in the spirit of a place, which though rugged for its weather, we call home.

©2016 by Rick Hilber, poet of "Down the Highway, a Peace" (Friesen Press, 2015).  All rights reserved including the photographer's rights.