Prairie Days
A year past, now, I was on the Bergen, AB tornado. My first wedge. My first tornado that did more than tear up farmland and startle quiet prairie hearts. My cousin lives close by and her kids were all strewn about the area and it was kind of terrifying in a way most tornados have not been. I spend a lot of time worrying after my own safety, and have done hunts for people in wreckage but Bergen hit a bit different.
And a lot of human loss happened. not life. but lives. homes. dreams. that perfectly sorted usb cable drawer. which we all know is one of life’s main accomplishments. Hewn to stone, trees stripped bare and nothing but marvel that no one died could be really felt.
above you see the scene from yesterday. The moment before we can know what lies over the hill. what lives are coming undone, and now from the comfort of my undestroyed home I wrestle with the glee I feel approaching. Struggle with the elation of a murderous errant wonderful monster crawling across our prairie in absolute disregard for anything we do and that duality is both the problem and the solution to the problem.
The very thing that attracts me to these horrible beasts is the thing that later repels me from myself, from whatever I might make of it to show you. That incredible awe of being before something so utterly and absolutely more convincingly powerful than all my petty hates, fears and gifts.
I have a profound fear of falling to my death, well documented by my broken skull x-rays. But to the edge of every cliff and wall and building and chasm I am not drawn uncontrollably.
I’ve no interest in my own debate about wanting to throw myself off the edge, as they say some will. I have no debate about the grace of my body, and if I might slip, or if I might trip, or do something stupid, I almost surely would, and will, and no one will be surprised, least of all me from the bottom of whatever I fell off. So I stay clear of these things. Aided by the good sense of an overactive reaction to the situations. my body tells me get away, and i get a way away.
but the edge is not swirling above my head. it is not an undefinable line moved by massive invisible powers. the edge very likely will never throw cool winds at my feet and threaten strikes of lightning, raising hairs and heartbeats. The edge does not promise anything but destruction.
if you google this storm you will find a lot better images of it than I have. I’ve yet to make a tornado picture that I care about and I may never. Everything happens very fast and tornados work on their own logic. Photos somehow become beside the point.
I watch all the videos. The insane intercepts from 50 feet away. I get lost in the rotating clouds above and never want to come back. The edge is alive and you’re always on it, and never on it.
The pull is not to the destruction. The pull is to the beauty that lives inside the destruction. The rich swell of every-sense experience that lives next to the possibility of destruction. Next to, and in, and beside and enveloped within.
but never the destruction proper.
The threat of destruction is the existence cost of the beauty. They cannot be unwound, or made separate. In the moment, this seems a fair and reasonable trade I’ll make pretty willingly most days—though some part of me cowers still.
But… this choice i make—i make for me. For my heart. I’ll trade a lot to transcend my weak and petty flesh. I’ll give most anything to exist entirely outside myself if even only for moments.
And when I get home, and look at the photos, it’s never what it was. Never what it is. it’s not even a pale comparison. The photos are a joke. The video is a video game highlight, but the homes thrown across the fields minutes from my home are very very much real.
the lives set back, set under and magically pardoned but thrown into another kind of hell are very much real, and without the winds rolling the fields like the hand of god waving away our foolish hopes none of it makes sense.
Which is a long way of saying I’m struggling to understand why I keep doing this and when people ask me I’m not sure how to answer or what to say to the conversation about the real costs of these monsters. I can’t reconcile my desires and their fallout.
Speaking of not being able to resolve anything I lost the thread of my “one edit to rule all edits edit” when work became overly much and pulled my entire focus away from photography a while and having had a breather now I’m back to not sure if I’m on the edge of something or i’m the problem.
I notice, recently a strong desire to hew as close to the original file as I can. being economical with my edits. I simply can’t abide adobe raw greens, but otherwise I’m back to trying to just focus on tonality over color manipulation and these photos are all rushed because work will be here tomorrow and I need to write you kind folks.
I am so close to just giving up editing entirely. Post the raw file. throw myself into the winds.
There simply cannot be a payoff for the amount of time i’ve spent on this problem. It might be better to just accept it can’t be solved. Who really cares anyways. Truthfully, my interpretation of the files isn’t going to change if you like them that much. they will work on their subjects, and composition or they won’t likely work at all.
I continue to wrestle with this. I do not feel satisfied. When i get close to satisfied I veer into some tangent and lose what I gained.
I will close out this letter with a few photos of the time of a storm I’ve come to think of as home. The raging violence has passed but not the threat of more, the world is transformed into riches under the blend of storm light and wind shaping everything. it’s dynamic and alive and just everything to me.
Hope you kids are safe and sound (or at least having fun being unsound). I’m about to—if I can ever get my workload under control—start experimenting with soft pastel landscapes so stay tuned to see if I’m truly awful at that.
I think these photos are amazing! Especially the image you called home. I am in awe and fear at the same time when I see a tornado!