Sunset, Thursday, 21 January 2010

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

Rain verging on sleet and snow – the approach of our old friend ‘wintry mix’.

I’m not sure anyone wants to see a rainy sunset on a wall calendar or, if today’s their birthday, receive a print of their special day as all gray. These are not merely commercial considerations – perhaps the time will come when I can find and show something of the inner nature of an outwardly dark day.

Sunset, Wednesday, 20 January 2010

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

A cold rain at sunset.

The so-called Alley Field is a sloping area of some four or five acres of grass with a narrow lane at its entrance; the alley runs from a broken metal gate next to a small tangled dell of honey locust, blackberry and wild rose, then opens into the field.

Along one border, over the past couple of years, big oaks have been falling into the field – first one in a windstorm, then one after heavy rains, and another – and then yesterday I found a 60- to 70-foot red oak had simply heaved up out of its roots and crashed out onto the grass like a building in the street.

What’s funny – sort of – about these trees is that all of them have been very much alive. On yesterday’s oak I couldn’t even find the typical one big dead branch anywhere, and all the twigs were in bud and flexible. Yet a huge oak on the very same fenceline, a neighbor to all these collapsers, bleached dead for decades, which I’d cut 95% of the way through and then tried to help along to its fate by driving seven big iron wedges into the cut, refuses to fall, or budge, or even teeter just a little for me. No felling, no firewood. Kind of embarrassing.

Turns out the tree has a structure well known to timberers – and it’s the reason I originally didn’t just go ahead and cut through the remaining 5% of the trunk. It has two major upper portions of canopy, two massive uplifted limbs, almost perfectly balanced. So you can have no idea which way it’ll break – for example, on you.

Dangerous types of trees earn names from wood-cutters. A tree hung up on another is called a Widowmaker – a name that has effectively deterred me every time I’ve been tempted to mess with one. This other type of tree – the equally divided one – is called a Schoolmarm. Can’t make up its mind. Do you think these lumberjacks might have been just a little bit sexist?

Sunset, Tuesday, 19 January 2010

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

Out in the fields/woods, while Flint chased what he contended was a fox, it was a transitional day – or a day that gave the illusion of transition. With a mild west breeze, it was more like margins of January and margins of March and April overlapped, throwing the day out of time. Patches of granular icy snow bordered lanes of thawed mud the more slippery for overlaying frozen earth. Ahead on the jeep trail, the sun bounced off a wet mat of dead leaves and snow melt. In the cutover field of scrubby trees, the immature trees let in the strong sunlight, but today you could believe it was the force of the sun that blasted the field and stunted the trees.

The sun was merely making a feint toward another season. For someone like me, with my vague grasp of the calculus behind the duration of winter, it seems on a day like this that the sun can do anything, that it can hold back and keep winter here, or pour down and make winter spring.

Sunrise, Tuesday, 19 January 2010

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

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.

                                                                   – Walt Whitman

Sunset, Monday, 18 January 2010

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

Sunrise, Monday, 18 January 2010

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

Route 20, Stony Point to Barboursville, 9 a.m.

The Southwest Mountains, the low mountains, the Southwest Mountains here more brown than blue without benefit of distance, with the brown-violet woods of winter, the soft rounded summits barely distinguished one from another, a comforting line of friends along my right shoulder, like the song my father used to sing, “There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder” – the Southwest Mountains, a rainbow ’round my shoulder.