Tuesday, December 26, 2006

A Field in Winter


A Field in Winter
Originally uploaded by BrettW.
Okay before you read this go here. This is the band Midlake, Midlake this is, well you know, what's your name again... Now I want you to click on the song "Head Home." I find this song very appropriate for this post. Listen and read...

I made this from a landscape I found a few miles from my parents apartment, which is close to High Fill a small town in Northwest Arkansas. The land in this part of Arkansas sets above sea level around 1900 feet. It's barren this time of year, the wind blows and the sun sometimes shines, as it is here. This landscape sets me in a certain psychological mood. I think of the past and my life and of what it would have been like to live with the land, not sheltered from it and having to rely directly on it for food. But this is not the world that I live in. I live in a world that seems, at least relatively to the past, to be over saturated with direction instead of a lack thereof. I think it must have been different in the past.

A few days ago my Father, brother and I were traveling in the mountains close to here. My father took me to a town called War Eagle. It is really just a Mill on the War Eagle River with a few houses around it. A man, Sylvanus Blackburn, traveled to War Eagle from Eastern Tennessee in 1832. He came with an ox driven wagon. Leaving his wife behind it would be a year before she would see or hear from him again. I imagined while I stood there looking at that mill what that must have been like that morning he pulled out. Catherine cried, Sylvanus didn't look back. He traveled for weeks without seeing a single soul. When night fell it was dark and the only light was that of the fire that he built. That fire at night when he stopped wherever he was in what must have seemed like an endless wilderness only threw light 30 or 40 feet and then there was the darkness ever eager to collapse on that space at the moment the fire quit burning. In 1832 Sylvanus didn't have a flashlight to pierce the night. Light, something that we are so used to was a luxury. In the deep wilderness in the night its not quite but the night makes it seem so. Day and night passing, the sun coming up and going down over what looked like the same trees everyday for months, I wonder what his ox's name was and what they talked about. I mean what Sylvanus said to the ox, who else would you talk to? I imagine he was a religious man as well. Even if he wasn't he must have talked to God out there, probably if anything about where to go. He didn't have gps, google earth, mapquest, a cell phone, email, letters, telegraph, or another person. No all Sylvanus had was thought, himself, an ox, and God. All he could leave his wife with was a word and when he left all he could have told his wife is, "I'll come back," with his thick southern draw. He didn't know, he really didn't know where he was going, much less how long it would take. All he had was hearsay. What he had heard from someone who's son-in-law's cousin was a surveyor for the Louisiana purchase and had seen an area in the newly ratified state of Arkansas that looked nice. I don't think that he ever questioned himself though, or maybe he did. Maybe there were times in the cold night by the fire with William, what I imagine he called his ox, when he thought why did I do this? "Why did I leave Cathrine alone?" I have this image of him night after night after night sitting at that fire a little farther along asking himself this question and verbalizing it toward William. He fought all the way and he found this piece of land and built this little homestead and a year later he made it back home to take his wife to their new place.

In the Mill there on the river they had a picture of Sylvanus and Catherine in their old age. You know after they had built the mill and it had been washed away a few years later when the river flooded. They rebuilt it and then they had to leave because the confederate army took it over. and then after they finally returned to live out their remaining days with their adult children they found it burnt to the ground by the army that used it so the north couldn't. Their eyes told a story of a long and hard life. The eyes, well maybe it is more what surrounds the eyes then the eyes themselves, the expressions. But it is the eyes too, how dark or white or bloodshot they are, they say something of the life a person has lead. So I stood there looking into their eyes and they into mine. Looking over all those years, over 160 of them through that photograph taken in their old age how telling me how hard a life they lead. In the truck driving away from that place on the backs of those mountains that I knew Sylvanus and Catherine had passed over all those years ago I sat and thought about their eyes and wondered at how differently they lived.

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