It is winter in Humptulips County. Foliage is sparse and the days are wet and overcast, with only hints of snow. One wet day follows another in bleak and endless succession. So as I drive our back roads (as I am wont to do whenever given the choice), I look for little things, for details, for anything which might serve as cinnamon or raisins to relieve the monotony of these daily servings of nature’s porridge.
Days like these serve to spotlight humanity’s work. Against winter’s backdrop, each of the products of humanity’s efforts to tame the landscape stands out in visual relief: yellow fire hydrants; rust red or dun-colored barns; asphalt roofing in varying patchworks of green, red, black, or gold; black, red, and green metal fence posts supporting oxidized strands of barbed wire and enclosing fallow fields; tall brown telephone poles blackened with tar and crowned with blue or grey transformers; dirty off-white fencing surrounding mucky horse pastures; brickwork demonstrating all the possible manifestations of redness, stippled and striped with greying mortar; homes in all of the colors mixable by man (including several which neither nature nor any self-respecting plein air artist would ever include in any respectable palette); the immediate shine and gloss of the tarmac on which I drive.
Because these things are but details within a dreary landscape, because they stand out in isolation even as they strive to connect with each other or serve a common purpose, they seem transitory in their individuality and impermanent in their sum. I marvel at the effort required to maintain them, much less to have built them in the first place; the totality of humanity’s work product, each single one of these exemplars of sustained effort, seems to me little more than an unsustainable beachhead in the grey/green primordial soup of winter.
And while I understand that this is only a view from the back roads where man’s touch is lightest, I find myself pondering the universality of its truth as I find my way home.
