Sunset, Sunday, 31 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20.

Snow-covered, clear and calm (I’m sure about that part), and headed for 10°F (maybe).

There was a sort of Good King Wenceslas moment that came to me years ago, in another place. I was gathering cedarwood by moonlight, walking in a luminous field of frost, the moon a great frost mirror, so bright it blew all stars away except a few frozen points. A plane overhead, two prop engines, flashed one running light cherry frost, the other vanilla. I realized I felt warmed by the frost, that cold could be deceptive, and frost a flame.

Sunset, Friday, 29 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Perhaps a little snow in the offing. 

This was one of those days when water freezes in the ground and makes magic little ice caverns, or castles, underfoot – dense combs of gleaming, finely striated vertical ice crystals, just an inch or two tall, pushing up the red mud.

When I was a kid and encountered these on the walk to school, they seemed amazing. There was that sense of having discovered something new – I mean, really new – had anyone ever seen such a thing? After all, no one had ever said to me, “Listen, someday you’re going to run into these magic ice crystals in the mud – don’t get too excited, we already know about them.”

Quite a few things appeared that way – enormous roots bulging out of a creek bank might have been the most spectacular sight of its kind, for all I knew – and had anyone else ever been to this spot in the woods ... in all of human history? My brother Steve and I would find things like that and, like all great explorers, give them names. An abandoned gravel pit far off in the woods – I’m not sure how we managed to consider an abandoned pit something new, exciting and exclusively ours, but that was Frying Pan Canyon. An arena custom-made for throwing rocks.

Even something new only in the sense that it happened to be in a transient state or condition could feel like a discovery. If a bit of swamp froze over enough to allow a rare game of ice hockey – slapping a pine knot around with broken branches – that day of a frozen swamp qualified as something like an unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable miracle.

Today by the Rivanna, after this week’s floods, Flint and I walked through large areas of woods that had been under water. Along the banks everything was covered in a heavy layer of silt (marbled with what looked like black sand – topsoil?) and small trees nearest the river were plastered all over their skinny branches with papier-mâché handfuls of leaves, twigs and mud. Flint was excited by the fresh stratum of earth; to a scent hound, it seems when there’s any new covering on the ground – snow, or in this case silt – it’s not so much that a place has changed in one aspect, the geography of scent is so different it’s an entirely new place.

Finding all the changes wrought by the flood, and being the first and perhaps only one to see them, at least here, was like the first time seeing ice in the mud. To be discovering things is very fine.

Sunset, Thursday, 28 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Midafternoon, a pale winter sun presides over an uncertain pastel sky of vague blue and white. From the road, at least, the world seems dominated by dried mud, dead pine needles, cold and naked cement and stark gray tree trunks repeating endlessly into empty woods.

Close of day comes along, seems to tell us, if that’s how we thought the world is, maybe we should think again.

Sunset, Wednesday, 27 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I don’t quite feel that I can, so I’ll let Prince:

Put the right letters together
And make a better day.

Sunset, Tuesday, 26 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I’d heard of word clouds. This afternoon (when it wasn’t yet overcast) I started looking for cloud words.

slate – asphalt – pavement – stone

wraith – fragment – shred – ice – cold

temple-like – pagoda-roofed – Le Corbusier

screen – sheer – scrim – glare – glaze – mica – isinglass

flat – pancaked – held between palms – heaven on one hand – on the other hand, earth

gray-blue – blue-gray – blue – gray

geographic – territorial – map-like – coastline – blue lagoon – bay – continental drift

And not least:

stratocumulus

Sunset, Monday, 25 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Out today after last night’s deluge and the resulting floods, it was easy to see in the untracked mud that no one else had been in the “back thousand acres” of this place where we rent – in fact no one’s been back there since deer hunting ended three weeks ago.

(The Rivanna at flood, by the way, was amazing to see, close-up in the woods.)

The first thing I thought (smug) was, wow, I guess these guys never come back here if they can’t shoot at deer. But then I realized, wait a minute, what if we hadn’t gotten Flint (the foxhound), who needs to run? How often would we come back here – how often did we come here, before we found him (late 2001) at the Fluvanna County SPCA, convinced by the shelter’s benign speculation that he was a mellow half-Lab?

Answer: Almost never.

It’s not just hunters. A lot of us need another reason, or we just don’t seem to get out much anymore.