I’m sure the utility companies have karmic hell to pay. They’ve done all kinds of ugly things to the “natural” landscape – which seems an oxymoron to me - and there’s probably no end in sight as long as we don’t care to make our own fires and learn to refrigerate great blocks of ice to cool ourselves off with. This particular cut was delivered to a block of great, full-leafed trees quite some time ago and looks almost as if it has always been there. But notice the serrated line between field and forest. It has a most unnatural look about it – unnatural in nature being anything symmetrical. If it were just an ordinary gap, caused by storm or fire, there would weedy expanses, scrub trees, a fuzzy periphery. As it stands, field and forest might as well be different elements, one not contributing to the other except as boundary.

Even in rural places, man has ranged somewhat irresponsibly. It’s easier to cover your tracks. Or, if your tracks stick out, rationalizing their presence makes balancing your checkbook look like higher math. There’s so much of this, what does a little swatch matter? Hey, we milled all the wood just as if we’d grown it for that. And: if you want to see a forest, look on the other side of the road.

Point well taken. On the other hand, this is the sort of attitude that contributes to wholesale slaughter of one kind or another. To what a former Sage of California, and Beloved President, said about redwood trees. To the callous displacement of wildlife – or its casual elimination. Of course, we’re part of the equation. If we don’t give something up, we get what other people say we ought to have.

Image makers don’t have to think about this kind of thing. If you create a reasonably truthful picture of something, however, you automatically set up a kind of call-and-response. You, the caller, present a certain kind of image, to which people are going to respond in possibly unexpected ways. I didn’t paint the picture as polemic, even if I’ve written a little one to go along with it. It’s just my response to something I did because I found the place itself compelling. But because I have come to it as a writer, I think about it much differently: I consider its ramifications, I am struck by its symbolic significance, and I’m troubled by what it suggests about who we are.