When my older boys were children, we lived in Illinois, and occasionally when driving we'd see a hilly field of round hay bales out there, at which point the youngest would shout out, "round circle hays!" They were visible and dramatic, and he could relate to them somehow as something to point out, like a toy he wanted to play with. And often, with the rolling green fields and wooded forests around them, they were a pretty sight.
I would often think of Monet, the French artist who painted the same field many times, trying tp perfect the light and the shadows from each time of day. He was convinced that mastering the light and the shadows was the key to getting the right impression of the hay bales. When I first heard that story, I was more impressed that he must have spent weeks in the same field with those hay bales, than that he painted the same field over and over again with slightly different colors. When you're an impressionist, you have to master the impressions, and the feeling one field of hay bales might give the viewer.
Last night we set out from far northern New Mexico, down along the eastern border of the state, on remote and partly icy two-lane roads, a day or two after a snowstorm. There were fields of hay bales there, too, first a field of squarish ones (square-rectangle hays?), then a field or two of round ones. At the round ones I spoke out, "round circle hays!", but in my later family, which includes four teens, two dogs, and my second wife, they don't really get the reference. I might have explained a little about Monet to them at some point, but I don't think anyone remembered or cared about impressionism. Besides the New Mexico sun was blazing down on these fields, and they were flat as a pancake, out in the eastern grasslands, without even the purple mountains that so many barren fields in New Mexico offer. I dropped the issue and kept on driving. Later on we would be passing through Roswell, with its UFOs and aliens in front of every storefront, and maybe they could relate to that better.
I always thought you could look at an impressionist painting and see whatever you wanted in it - in other words, just because Monet or someone wanted you to feel a sense of the bucolic countryside, a sense of peace, probably the farmer looked at that same field and said, each of those bales is worth so much money, if I sell it on time, and it doesn't matter so much what the light does when it hits it around dusk. Just when we got past those hay bales my wife got sick, and then when we got to Roswell we missed a turnoff because the blazing sun was in my eyes and I didn't see the exit sign. Because I missed that exit, we missed the aliens at the storefronts, but we still got plenty of that unearthly, empty, wide-open fields that you could land a UFO on; it was a long trip and we were just lucky the roads were as good as they were.
Anywhere around Roswell you can see the mountains to the west, purple in the sunset but even after dark, looming on the horizon. One of our last roads is called the Sagebrush highway, a desolate two-lane through what can be generously called the middle of nowhere. The hot air comes down the east side of the mountains and just dries the place out so completely that I'm surprised you could feed five cattle on a couple hundred thousand acres, but that's what I'm sure someone is trying to do. Having all that hay back up the road would probably help considerably.
The dark set in as we got closer to home, and at the end our luck on the road conditions ran out. We picked up the other two dogs, much larger than the first two, and the six of us people and four dogs headed up over the last mountain to get to our home. This road is half gravel and has cliffs on the side, making it just that much scarier. And it was quite icy, especially on the way down. The oldest dog, a black lab, was jammed between my wife's knees in the front seat. This dog was so glad to be back with her family that she would have jammed herself anywhere, but she also is quite old now, and I could tell she was a little nervous about the trip, even though she was glad her kennel stay was behind her. The other dogs seemed to get along ok and would have protected us a little if we'd run off the side or down into the forest.
But it wasn't necessary; we got home safe and sound to notice that we had power; we had a house waiting for us way out at the end of the road. Everyone was glad to be home. They may not have cared much about Monet, but almost everyone could agree on the idea that home felt good, just about whatever time you landed there. The dogs definitely let us know they agreed with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment