I wrote this little essay a while back.
There’s a stretch of highway from Paradise to Dixon, Montana, that I’m crazy about. This 30 mile stretch runs parallel to the Flathead River just before it meets up with the Clark Fork almost directly at our farm. Part of that section of highway got a big face lift a few years ago and the road is mostly smooth and wide. But I’m especially fond of a dangerous little section which narrows before it dips and curves right to the rivers edge. On this edge tilts a drunken row of white rectangles which look like tomb stones but serve as an archaic guard rail. The beautiful water there is an incredible ride by inner tube or canoe or even slow fishing boat in the middle of July when it’s finally warm enough to jump in and swim.
I drive this road often because I take organic produce to the Missoula Farmers Market all summer and classes at the University the rest of the year. I’m thinking more and more lately, that I do these things because I’m so in love with that landscape and the way it feels to drive through it. (I am more than a little embarrassed to confess that I’ve made over one thousand of these trips.) I’m thinking maybe I’m a little addicted or obsessed.
Early last spring, I went out to take photographs just off of this road. I had a problem with my camera battery because it was cold. I’d take a photograph, but then I’d have to warm my camera in my coat and wait a while for it to recharge before I could take another picture. At first, waiting in the chilly rain was annoying. Later, while I was standing there holding my camera under my coat to warm it up; I started to notice things that I hadn’t really seen. I was standing near a creek and I saw a zigzag deer path that ended directly at the water’s edge. One minute that path wasn’t there and then the next, it was. It made me wonder about what I’m missing that’s right in front of me that I don’t see because I’ve got an agenda.
When I developed the pictures I had taken, I noticed almost all of them contained images of zigzag trails, s-curves on wet roads, water running down the side of the mountain or icy cracks; frozen water, melting water, running water, and trails to water. What was happening in the woods was spring run-off. It was that little bit of time when the pussy willows burst and low lying trees leaf out. I didn’t intend to photograph winter changing into spring, but it was there behind every picture I took.
This wouldn’t have been visible to me if I hadn’t taken a lot of pictures and noticed that they had something in common. I might not have seen that common thing (something I’ve seen ever year) if I hadn’t had that moment of stillness waiting for the camera to work.
Soon after that, I was standing on a high place overlooking Paradise and the river. I’d decided to revisit places I’d photographed in the past. I was looking through the camera’s view finder, not really looking to take a picture, just focusing and framing. I hadn’t been there very long when I heard a rattle of hooves on rock and a big horned sheep walked directly into the view of my sighted camera. It was startling and amusing. He just stood and stared at me for awhile before ambling off. Maybe he was checking out his territory but it felt like he came to look at me. Or that we were both called to the same spot, a twin set of the eye of that place, watching each other and ourselves; earth’s eyes and mirrors.
There’s a stretch on the road that reminds me of that experience. Hardly a house exists except for a white clapboard shack that has lost all of its window panes and most of the roof shingles. This landscape is open and empty and seems to me to be all at once, lonely, stark, heart-breakingly quiet and far from places where people are present. This place feels like it has an observing presence. It feels like that when I am looking, that something is aware and looking back.
I think something does look back. While it may be that the place and its creatures sense me as I drive by or walk around with my camera, my memories are there too. I’m the one who is looking back. All of my other experiences are there like old misty photographs. They take the trip with me and call up other experiences that seem like the present one. These memories make everything I see a little familiar.
I’ve seen things on the road so many times that often I know what’s coming next even before I’m there. I anticipate the way the road slithers around the edges of the Flathead River when I navigate the Perma curves and how turquoise the river looks on sunny days. I am never surprised when I see yet another blue heron or eagle or owl flying low directly over the roof of my car. I’m not taken aback when three ground squirrels attempt suicide one morning by running directly in front of my car one after another. I just finally mutter at the third one, “Enough, already!”
I am surprised by the way the fusion of old memory and new experience creates richer layers of meaning and awakens a sense of thankfulness for this creative space I find on the highway.
This morning, when I saw a huge yellow moon in my rear view mirror that followed me even further than Dixon, I thought about all of the beautiful moons that I have seen traveling that road. I thought about how thankful I am to be on it when night turns to day.
I feel grateful when I see yet another blue heron because it leads me to muse, “How does the bird flying over the roof of my car see me?” As a curious metal monster on that dry river or perhaps as a blue green fish (Subaru outback wagon) swimming down that dark road. And in my mind, it makes the huge yellow moon which followed me at daybreak, an eye in a dark bird sky.
This creative way of looking gives me extended moments of pleasure and deeper awareness. This happens with my camera but the window of the car on this road is where I spend the most time. Driving the road is one of the things I do repetitively- and it’s where I’m open to the act of being there—where I drop all of the other things that I bring with me—where I’m most often the observer. It’s where I remember experiences of beauty and wild things and link them to things that are happening on my current trip.
While what puts me on this road is going to market or school, what I love is the part of the trip that joins memory to new experience. I understand that for me the car window is like a moving viewfinder—a focusing point—or orientation device that directs my eye. What the window and the road orient me to is not where I’m coming and going but these fused observations of present and past.
paulajean
