Winter Light

Growing up in California, my experience with snow was fleeting and recreational. We would shoot up to the Sierra Nevada Mountains on Interstate 80 through 15 foot banks cut cleanly through the snow to ski for a weekend and return. Sometimes we'd have to install chains to make it there or back, but we always returned to the green and verdant hills of the San Francisco Bay.

My experience of Winter since moving to Iowa 7 years ago has been vastly different. I have yet to see snow higher than 2 feet, but neither can I drive away from it in a couple of hours. Today it is -3 degrees which is also a bit different from the Sierra Nevada, where it is the sheer perseverance of storms that keeps snow piled up through the winter, as opposed to bitter cold.

But this is not a complaint! I truly love the Winters here in Iowa. I love the dramatic change of the seasons which now mark my continued annual existence. It has forced an awareness of time and a necessity of planning not required of my youth. If you want to build something in the ground, you had better plan to dig before it freezes to granite-like density. Or if you want to eat fresh vegetables you had better plan and time your garden carefully in the Spring. (I missed mine by a week last year, and a month and a half of carefully nurtured kitchen table seedlings turned to dripping sludge as Winter cast a parting shot across my delicately manicured new garden one evening).

I enjoy this sense of time and place the seasons bring and the meaning and humility they bestow.



But what I think I love most about Winter in Iowa is the quality of light. Or perhaps a better term would be clarity of light. It was one of the first things I noticed after my move here. The quality of light was different. Sharp and crisp in the Winter, rich and warm through the summer. My early interest in photography has never left me as my career has taken various turns toward a path following light more directly. In Winter you can see the stars more clearly and crisply than any other time of the year here in Iowa. They literally explode across the moonless sky. It is almost enough to make you forget the cold creeping into your toes (which are singularly not impressed by the heavens above and would rather you had the sense to go inside and sit by the fire than hang around outside in the middle of the night in -3 degree weather while you stand dumbfounded at the magnitude of the heavens). I have never seen the Milky Way as I have seen it here.

One Winter I even witnessed the Aurora Borealis, something I was surprised at given our latitude. For someone impressed by light, that is truly a phantasmagorical experience.



In the morning, when morning breaks over the woods after a cold night, the trees awaken covered in millions of diamonds. The light refracting through ice on every branch.

The cold seems to make sound stand still and the snow commands calm all around. Watching the sun break into the day, slowly lavishing this quietude with a desperately warm embrace is exhilarating. The pink color of the early sun sweeps slowly up the white snow-laden hillside followed shortly by the warm orange glow of full day.

A strange thing happened on our pond last year one morning that I have never seen again. (And this is the nature of this Iowa place, you find quickly that if conditions are good, you must engage your opportunity in that time as it rarely lasts more than a day). I descended one morning that was exceptionally cold, easily into the -teens and encountered an acre of ice crystals standing straight up from the surface of the pond. Some an inch tall. It was a surreal and foreign environment on micro/macro scale.



The light swept across it, igniting each crystal in a micro fire of temporal existence.

It was gone the next day.