Resistance

Resistance, 2009

acrylic, toner, graphite, and wax on panel

10.5" x 10.5"

Click on image for larger view.

There are a good number of things in life right now that are providing a bit of resistance. I'd like to think that I'm standing as stoic and strong as these evergreens, but the truth is quite different. I have fewer years, less pith, and a great deal more awareness of discomfort; which I suppose are the hallmarks of consciousness, but do not necessarily yield humanity a more enviable path in the natural world.

* * * * *

I remember witnessing this stand in the snow atop Mt. Hood during a snow flurry and feeling very small. These trees had already lost ten feet to an accumulation of wind and moisture that would have consumed me in a matter of hours if I opted to stand still.

Winter has long been portrayed as a season of death, but ultimately this is a great simplification. Winter, like modern life, is merely a catalyst and punisher of inertia.

Lonely in the Snow

Winter Phoenix, 2009

acrylic, toner, and graphite on cheesecloth wrapped panel

6" x 6"

I didn't grow up with snow. Only in recent years have I had the opportunity to traipse about on mountainsides amidst snow flurries and I find the experience, for lack of a better word, chilling. Something about the silence of the snow enthralls me, but keeps me on edge. I cannot shake the awareness that this simple solidification of water has the power to bury the trees and smooth out cliff faces. 

My voice seems an ineffective tool against so much mass and, as I stand next to 100 foot tall conifers that have seen the first fifteen feet entombed for the season, I'm reminded of just how small a man is in the face of nature's simplest processes. 

* * * * *

I photographed this tree as it fought against the diminishing horizon line outside of Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. While it may have seemed lonely in the snow, there was something defiant in its shape. Perhaps experience had taught it that winter was transitory, and survival the norm.

Slush

I returned to Timberline last weekend and spent one day being abused by the slopes and the second day contemplating their rough beauty within the lodge. There were times that first day, while sliding through the driving snow, that I felt horribly lost— there were no landmarks and there was no horizon. The sky and ground were equally cold, hard, and grey.



Whiteout. That’s how my students referred to it.

* * * *

From within the lodge it seems less menacing. Around you people laugh and chatter, oblivious to the fact that the snow presses twenty feet up every side of the lodge. The windows on the first two levels are darkened by the wall of snow, its wooly grey giving way to blue as it thins towards the third floor and the wan daylight begins to sift through. People sit by the highest bank of windows and watch as the weather is thwarted by thick glass and thicker walls.



From this vantage all the flurry is just confection. A television dribbles out the news as pop songs bounce against the timbers. A few sniffling skiers sit at the bar getting sloshed.



It seems less menacing but I can’t concentrate. The wind is still blowing. The trees are bent under a terrible weight. The white noise doesn’t warm me.

Were I to stay longer I don’t think the snow would stop. It would rise like a slow tide over the lodge and all the trees. The white would consume everything on land until there was no land left— just a vast emptiness between heaven and earth: a whiteout.