In late September in northern Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains in the traditional and ancestral lands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute Nations and peoples, the waist-high grasses turn golden and dry into muted shades of red, copper, violet, and blue. The wind comes more often from the north as each day holds more darkness. And as the wheel of the year turns, so do the grasses’ voices in the breeze: the soft pffhhh of June shifting to the louder shhhh of August, shifting now toward the dry ckkkk of October.

It’s been over three years since I have strayed more than 15 miles from my home here in Larimer County. What began out of the government-enforced and temporary order to suspend travel due to the COVID-19 global health emergency has since emerged as a self-directed and lasting ethical imperative that’s altered my vision. Once I used to think I needed to see the land—bright fall leaves, winter snow—to know when I was in time. Now, I understand that relying only on my sight leaves me balancing on one foot. Now, I say, Blindfold me and let me listen.

I know that we have passed the Winter Solstice because the kestrels appear at the base of the foothills. They greet me each morning on a particular stretch of telephone line above an open field with their klee-klee-klee, swiveling their white, black, and rust-colored heads. I know we are deep in January because all along the creek, the red-winged blackbirds are calling, conk-la-ree, conk-la-ree, a welcome racket after their months of silence. A few weeks later, the northern flickers begin. Their wik-wik-wik-wik sweeps over the blackbirds, a duet that builds around the Spring Equinox, when the flickers pair their wik-wik with drumming on the cottonwood trees, whose buds shine with moisture that can brim into a drop in the cool morning air.

Later, running on crisp April days along the western edge of town, along the seam of foothills meeting the plains, I skid to a stop. I cannot stop smiling because swee-swee-swee-swee-dil-ooo—the western meadowlarks have returned. Each male flashes their bright yellow front, with their black “V” bib on the breast, as they bob on fenceposts and sing, revealing white tail feathers when they turn and fly nestward among the shrubs. Last year, a beloved trail took me near a meadowlark nest, built on the ground. The eggs finally opened, the parents swooped, the fledglings began to fly, and the nest yellowed in the summer sun and scattered in the fall winds. And the wheel of the year goes around again.

I’ve also learned to know when I am through scent. These last three years have opened me from just noticing the brightest flowers to the particular scents of each stage of the turn of the seasons.

Come summer, I cannot move along certain trails higher in the foothills without near-constant goosebumps from the rich, heady scent of the ponderosa pines in full release. When my partner and I first moved here eight years ago, we called them the vanilla trees, but now I think of them more as vanilla and patchouli, or butterscotch and sandalwood, mixed with apricot and coffee. Sometimes, when I return from these runs, my partner knows I was mingling with the pines from the scent of my clothes. A scent somewhere between clarinet and bassoon.

I have loved traveling. Some of my most beloved memories are from my few trips overseas—the cold waves on the shore of northern Denmark, the rose light of summer evenings in the Netherlands. I might cross the oceans again, but I know our world is on fire because of choices like that. Three summers ago, the evacuation line for the record-setting Cameron Peak Fire came less than ten miles from our front door. Ash fell from the sky, and lunchtime was as dark as midnight. How can I get on a plane and burn more carbon in one day than I would otherwise in months? How can I justify using our gas-powered car for more than essential shopping?

Besides, each season in this small circle of space that I have not left for 40 months now is its own kind of traveling. I remind myself that, after all, generations of my ancestors lived and died within Appalachian spaces smaller than this Colorado county. Each week, I walk a two-mile loop around a nearby lake. Before 2020, visiting perhaps once a month, I noticed only the largest changes: new leaves on the cottonwood trees, pelicans on the water in summer, the lake freezing over. Now, each week brings a parade of differences. One week in June: the first orange flowers, the first signaling by the new prairie dog pups, the first time orioles join the dawn chorus, the first time the sun reaches the trail before 6 a.m.

Here, among these shrubs, trees, and grasses, among these birds, animals, insects, and yes, other humans, feels more home to me than, perhaps, anywhere else I have lived. Still, I wonder, sometimes, how long I can stay here, as housing prices along Colorado’s Front Range soar; as the town simultaneously grows and becomes even whiter; as it is a rare two weeks when a driver doesn’t shout, race their engine, or more, as I run these county roads. Each year, multiple friends leave for other states.

Nothing lasts—and everything lasts, just in different bodies. The prickly pear cactus flowers bloom in early summer, a lemon-lime that deepens to buttery gold as the season progresses. After three years of waiting for them, of kneeling beside them and marveling, this is the first year I have witnessed rose-colored blooms alongside the yellow. I still have so much to learn.

Summer now, again, begins to tilt toward fall, with a cool morning, a day of northwest wind, the sky a deep sapphire blue, and the thistles crisping from raspberry pompoms into golden-brown discs falling across the trail, into my hands, into our classroom: a scarecrow’s corsage, a student once said. A faerie’s pillow, another student marveled. Settling deeper into place is an invitation to listen, come closer, be with. So, yes. Let’s begin another turn around the wheel of the year here, marvelous here, again.

The post Where I (Don’t) Go<span class="colon">:</span> Three Years in Northern Colorado appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Walking through London parks this November I noticed how nature around me was changing every day. Different weather conditions also contributed to these different ‘moods.’ Squirrels are very funny and expressive and I chose them to represent this ever-changing flow. Meanwhile a beautiful Koi carp was looking at me through romantic London rain,” she tells us. As you look at the pieces, notice how the lightness and flow of the brush lines are enhanced further when the black ink is digitally altered, and how it changes the color to allow for a more pronounced sense of foreground and background.

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That’s the question I often get when I enter the office of a feed mill or grain elevator, asking permission to make photographs on the property or inside the buildings.

Showing other photos that I’ve taken usually satisfies the operator that I’m not working for the local tax assessor or real estate agent, and I receive permission to proceed.

But it’s a good question: Why do I keep up with this activity? What is the motivation? There is no coherent explanation except to say that it is something I feel must be done.

For more than 45 years, I’ve been taking pictures of feed mills and grain elevators in the towns of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Here, the mills—plants that turn grain and other materials into food for farm animals—were once common enough to be taken for granted, even as they often provided a town landmark.

Now, changes in the scale and economics of the agricultural industry have made smaller mills and elevators redundant or inefficient. Some small town mills are still in operation—they might hang on by doing custom grinding (special mixes that depart from the standard recipe to treat particular conditions in animals), or selling lawn and garden products, or mixing for horses and other pets. One I visited even serves ostriches and llamas. But many smaller facilities have been replaced or engulfed by larger ones. Some have been torn down. Some have fallen into disrepair. A portion of history is slipping away.

My documentation of this history began as a passing interest. I worked—I’m now retired—as an industrial photographer, filmmaker, and later, video producer. I have no personal connections to farming or milling. But I like to get outside, and I take pictures of everything that catches my eye. One day in the late 1960s I photographed a beautiful porcelain door knob on a dilapidated building. Later, I saw a similar building while out riding my bike, and I asked someone if she knew what it was. “Oh, that’s the old feed mill,” she told me, and added that it had closed a couple of years before. It was scheduled for demolition. “They’re going to put some stores on the lot.” 

A few days later I drove back with camera gear.

I went to the library. I researched. I became a regular reader of Michigan Farmer magazine and the trade journals like the Milling Journal. I learned that 19th-century feed mills were almost always located alongside a railroad track, usually about seven or eight miles apart—about as far as a farmer would want to drive a team of horses on a hot summer day. My collection of pictures grew. I used photos on Google maps to follow train tracks to a likely mill. Often, I’d be directed to my next location by a conversation with a worker at the previous: “Have you photographed the mill in Jamestown? It’s back off the road on 180th Street … Better hurry though, they’re going to get rid of it pretty soon.”

I now have thousands of images of feed mills and grain elevators. I came to know the workers at various places. The owner-operator of a mill in Carson City still remembers when, just a boy, he left a tank of slow-moving molasses unattended, and it overflowed to coat everything—floors, machinery, stored feed. (He had to clean up the mess.) I’ve been told many tales, many as humorous as this one, but also some that bordered on the tragic. These include workers’ anxiety about a passing way of life, their resignation at changes, and their grief over accidents in mills and elevators—which are still more common than they should be.

My photographer’s eye remains fascinated by the variety of the structures. They’re true examples of vernacular architecture. As they age and undergo repairs, they often acquire a mix of building materials. One section might include wood shiplap siding, wood clapboard siding, metal siding and a metal roof, corrugated steel, brick, tar paper, and even a car license plate used to patch a hole.

What they don’t include is ornament or decoration. Except for the Christmas Stars. They are made on a framework of metal pipe with lightbulbs attached, mounted at the top of the tallest elevator. The lights are lit eight days before Christmas and are left on until New Year’s Eve. (I have asked a number of times about the reason for the eight days, and the only answer I’ve gotten is “custom.”) When I’m driving on an interstate in December, look out over the snow-covered farm fields, and see one of those stars glowing in the dark, I know that I am in the right place for me.

I’ve photographed mills in every season, even in the rain and snow. I focus most on light. At times, I prefer the low raking angle of a winter sun, which accentuates the deeply engraved textures of an old building. At times, I prefer to photograph when clouds veil the sun to produce a misty cloak over a sharply detailed structure. I capture the pattern of dappled sunlight coming through tree leaves, or I open a door to let bright outdoor light spill across the floor inside.

One of my influences is the French photographer Eugène Atget, who took pictures of Paris and its environs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on old and medieval parts of the city. He eked out a precarious living by selling prints to artist supply shops (who resold them to painters as references for quaint old scenes). Atget “viewed the whole world as a finished work of art,” said Berenice Abbott, the American artist who saved his negatives and helped his work achieve recognition, “and photography was just the act of pointing.”

So many old mills have been waiting a long time for me to appreciate them. For my part, I’m only pointing.

The post Capturing the Architecture of American Agriculture—and a Passing Way of Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

staring
up at

a map of
my own

mind the
elm tree’s

black
branches—

nothing
left to

catch
the wind.

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The rabbit brush is what locates us

on the lateral side of what, in Spanish, is an acequia
and, in English, a drainage ditch.
It’s hard not to have a preference
between language’s two tines for the same place.

The monsoon soaks the chamisa
bright as dill in homemade pickles.

Brickled stones dot the river bed,
threaded in grit and wise as a milk gap,
where only Woodhouse’s toads gather anyway,
shaded, in and among the cheeseweed.

The two distant nighthawks that angle swiftly for insects
(and were recently displaced by multitudes of kingbirds)

are cyphers, an organ key depressed
without the valve for air that corresponds to sound.

 
2. Open Spaces

The visitors’ center optimistically offers
a rubber mold of a pronghorn’s hoof—

as if these long-ranging beasts might linger here
among the subdivisions
only to skitter up the rocky wash

dashing through rabbit brush over and past
the idling commuters

jarring up stones, quartz,
and bits of broken sidewalk in their wake.

But why shouldn’t the pronghorn,
evolved to outrace an American cheetah

long extinct, take top speed
over our chain-link and Apache plume?

They are not house sparrows
who accept our dingy pale of settlement
(sage, mallow, thistle, brush),

their folded wings like bracket fungus on black bark
in the tannic forest we turned away from years ago.

 
3. Thrasher

Stone makes the wash’s mortar,
underneath the space where the chicharras
were once insistent and high.

The cranes come back in a southern prong
that lands them in dry-stalk fields along a braided river.

Beneath them, Woodhouse’s toads make no sound—
the last rain washed away any sign of their scooping out
and burrowing in.

This last half-moon before the solstice
is a smudge stick
for the memory of rabbit brush and mallow.

This was the space where summer was—
and will return to,

nomadic as cedar waxwings
and only by its own cipher.

The post Words With Landscape appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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The headlines these days all seem to demand exclamation marks. Iraq is teetering on the brink! Russian troops are massing on the Ukrainian border! Gaza lies in ruins! World’s worst Ebola epidemic afflicts Africa!

Oh, and it is also National Goat Cheese Month. Welcome to another quiet and peaceful August.

Yeah, right. One of the puzzles of summer is why so many of us persist in pretending that August is a month when nothing happens, when we can step back, tune out, take a break, and recharge. Europeans even think they are entitled to take the entire month off.

Perhaps there’s something about late summer, a couple months gone since school let out in June, that makes us forget our history. This year, August is full of reminders. We’re commemorating the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.

Bellicose August also brought the Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered our involvement in Vietnam, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the failed coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939 that enabled Hitler to invade Poland on September 1, and the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 and ensuing Japanese surrender. Hurricane Katrina also occurred in August, but let’s leave Mother Nature out of it.

There’s a melancholic quality to August, a month nearly synonymous with “waning days of summer.” Less acknowledged in our cultural vernacular is the extent to which the “waning” feeling is as much about the end of another year as it is about the end of summer.

Sure, we sing “Auld Lang Syne,” kiss under the mistletoe, and wish each other a “Happy New Year” when December turns to January. But who among us doesn’t feel that the real reset moment each year, the new beginning, comes in September, the day after Labor Day? The fall is when we start school and football season and the U.S. government fiscal year, and when we get serious, if we ever do, about our work.

August, then, is about the waning not only of summer, but also of each passing year, and lost possibilities. It is about the waning of life, even. There is a grasping, desperate quality to many of the historical events that took place in August—hence the resonance of the title of Barbara W. Tuchman’s historical bestseller about the outset of World War I, The Guns of August. It’s quite fashionable to study the sequence of events that led to the so-called “Great War,” which in retrospect appear like dominoes falling as if on a predetermined course. The rest of the war is far less fashionable to read about, as it proves too muddled a narrative. Best to focus on the August beginning, and how it ended all that came before.

Mischief conspires with melancholia in August, the notion that mice can play while the cat’s vacationing. It’s not clear whether Saddam Hussein thought he would get away with taking over Kuwait if he did so while the American president was summering in Maine, or whether that president’s son, when he was in office a decade later, would have taken warnings of an airborne Al Qaeda plot more seriously had he been briefed about them at some time and place other than August at his Texas ranch.

August and the waning days of summer (and of the year, I insist) is when we let our guards down, creating an opening for those with an agenda, be it the invasion of Poland or Kuwait, or the shorting of the pound (George Soros famously bet against the British currency in August 1992, and won big). So keep your eye on colleagues who seem especially busy and eager to stick around the office this month. Who knows what they’re up to?

Financial markets are notoriously slow in August, the month of lowest trading volumes, when bankers follow their clients to the beach. But “slow” can be a deceptive term in business as in life, given that lower volume and less liquidity in a market can make it more volatile, and more susceptible to speculation. If you buy or sell 1,000 shares of a company, you are far more likely to influence that stock price on a day when only 5,000 shares trade hands than on a day when 100,000 shares trade hands.

That same dynamic applies to anyone seeking to influence the outcome of any event: your influence increases the fewer people are engaged. Which is what makes this such a dodgy month, and the current news headlines so ominous.

And now, I’m off to the beach for a week. It’s August, after all.

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