I awakened this morning to a world the color of charcoal. In the predawn hours of winter, the sky is normally pure jet, clear and sharp-edged, beaded with the shimmering light of a thousand thousand diamonds. On this day, we were wrapped in fog as thick as a blanket, the headlights on the highway not beams but the myopically diffuse glow of twinned coronae.
Even now, sun fully up, the light is a pale yellow, hiding itself behind a veil of gray, as though unwilling yet to risk engaging fully with the world.
That will change, of course, and soon. By midday, the sun will have warmed enough to face its task, and there will once again be evidence of lines drawn and shadows cast upon the face of the earth.
Red Willow is a world of lines and shadows.
Five years ago, in the textual narratives accompanying the photography in his one-man show, Wings explored this truth at some length. It is an ancient land, one over which a still-older sun presides, creating for its trees and peaks and rocky outcroppings their own counterparts, smaller, flatter selves cast upon the snow. In the light of the high desert, even the most solitary soldier pine is never entirely alone.
Here, lone, in stands, or near-invisible in forests, the trees are part of the larger community, one with earth and sky but also with creatures four-legged and two-. For millennia, they have shared their selves and spirits, providing shelter, shade, and oxygen, the stuff of life itself. They provide protection, too, and more: long slender trunks, dried and stripped and planted in the earth, standing strong side by side. They are less lines of demarcation than of defense in its most gentle form, designed to keep out that which would do violence all while letting in the light.
In winter, the latilla fences take on a new character, one that emphasizes protection less than some small human means of connecting earth and sky. It is no small feat at this season, especially on those days — most of them, really — of blinding blue and a clarity of air so sharp it burns. It’s easy to see earth and sky as one when the snow falls, when the same dove-white blanket enfolds all.
On a clear winter’s day? They seem impossibly far apart, the space between them unnavigable, incomprehensible. Such a gap instills uncertainty, anxiety, even fear, as the air grows dangerously cold and the spirits seemingly just as dangerously distant.
But down here, on the ground, at the feet of the long slender trunks that keep the wolves of the spirit at bay, it’s possible to regain one’s footing — to recognize that, while they stand taller than we, they are there by the work of our hands. Their height gives us a sense of access, to the winds and the air and the sky, to the raptors that travel the currents and still descend to perch atop them, great spirit birds occasionally almost within reach. And they remind us of the beauty at the lower levels of the cosmos, the gold and diamonds that flourish around our feet, if only we take the time to look.
And the other beauty of the fences here is that, so very often, they do not seem fences at all: rather, they seem a part of the very earth, arising organically from it, blending into the scapes of land and sky.
In the summer months, the gray of the tree, living and otherwise, takes on a warm, earthy tone; it feels alive and warm, absorbing both heat and light. In the winter, the gray becomes the dusky defining hue of dormancy, a color to accompany hibernation, sleep, rest.
Except when it snows.
In the snow, the latillas come alive again, part of winter itself, at one with earth and mountains as they catch the snow. Rough edges and peeling bark make for a magnetic surface when what falls from the sky assumes crystalline form, as though jagged edge finds jagged edge with the certainty of a cosmic neurotransmitter. The poles transform from gray to white, and seem to meld into the blanketed peaks that form their backdrop.
Protection? Perhaps. Adornment? Of course. But in the snow they manifest a kind of oneness with the world around them not possible at other times, a unified front wrapped in a shawl of snow, casting shadows not only in individual lines but in broad blocks, too: a reminder that effort joined is effect magnified, and that real change occurs when the focus is less on the shadowy lines of individual legacies than on a transformation so complete that no one notices.
Of course, in this place, winter gives us occasion to be reminded, anew and on a regular basis, of the need for protection, and of the possibilities inherent in notions of legacy.
In a colonial world, fencing too often needs to keep out that which would do violence. And it’s easy to become caught up in the lines and shadows: in the hard reality of the latilla posts and the bonds that lash them together, in the blank spots where they block the view, in the dim and ominous gloom of the dark spaces they cast upon the earth before the light of the desert sun.
But a focus on the fences misses the broader view.
Step back. Turn from the lines drawn and shadows cast. On these chill winter days, look at the purity of blue sky, of snow-white clouds and peaks and flattened earth, of the fiery red of the willows that lend their name to people and place.
This is what needs defending.
This is where we draw the line; this is why a long, strong shadow must be cast in the right direction.
This is the legacy, birthright and bequest, of people and place.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
