Category: Indiana

Moss

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When it’s cold and cloudy outside, it’s time for a little introspection.The pictures here were taken with Laowa’s 2.5-5X Ultra Macro Lens, at or near the maximal magnification. DSC 5757

Focussing gets hairy, literally. What you see here are mosses, with some morning dew. Below is another variety.

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All this is in reality just a few millimeters across. This makes it hard to look for motives, because when you are standing up, you can’t tell what is at your feet.

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Below is an algae. The fine hairy threads are quite something up close. 

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The problem with this perspective is: If you have seen that much, you want to see more. 

Corona Walk

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When you combine a pandemic with spring break with bad weather, you get this view from the top of the Atwater parking garage. Below is Lindley Hall. That the lights are on is unusual, but what isn’t?

 

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I continue my campus walk past the tiny Beck chapel to get to the IU cinema. 

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In front of it someone has adorned the pianist in a timely manner.

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The cinema itself is closed, like almost everything else.

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The way back takes me to Goodbody hall. Its terrace is eerily vacated.

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The only people I saw were construction workers and gardeners. Life has been reduced here to maintenance.

Coal and Gold (Columbia Mine Preserve III)

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After two slightly misleading posts about a facility (inside and outside) near the Columbia Mine Preserve, the time has come to visit the actual place.

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Large open spaces (either prairies or lakes) allow to look far into the distance in all directions.

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It conveys an almost paradoxical state of mind: Being small and unimportant in this vast landscape, but also (subjectively) being at the center of it.

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Being there in the late afternoon gives the opportunity to experience another contrast. Just before the wintry gray turns into the black of the night, the sun makes one last effort, just before it hits the horizon.

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Then, for a short moment, the black and the gold coexist, and the limiting horizons become an illusion.

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The Dark Tower (Columbia Mine Preserve II)

After looking at the mining facility near the Columbia Mine Preserve from the outside last week, now it’s time to step inside.

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This is already the second floor, from a total of six. Thanks to the broken windows, the wind has done a decent job cleaning the place.

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Moving up. This feels like one of these dungeon computer games where you have to deal with cute monsters on the way up (or down). I am pretty sure I know where the undead from the three (!) cemeteries I passed on the way spend their free nights.

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Further up. It also reminds me of Snakes and Ladders. One misstep, and you have to start climbing all over again, if you can.

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The eeriest part of the place is the sound. Birds have conquered it, and the sounds they make are surprisingly close to human chatter. Maybe this place is some sort of temple for them.

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It also feels like I am an exploring some alien space ship. I have absolutely no clue what these enormous machines were used for. 

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Not only birds have left their stains. Monsters, undead, animals, aliens — what do we fear most?

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Down again, unharmed. Two decades ago, this place was busy with people who worked there. Where are they now, what are their stories?

Come in Without Knocking (Columbia Mine Preserve I)

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Spring last year, on my way back from New Harmony, I made a small detour to the Columbia Mine Preserve. The Vigo Coal Company mined the area in the 1990, then filled the holes, and let it sit. The Sycamore Land Trust acquired the area, turned it into a nature preserve, which is now part of Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge.

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Last year the early warm weather didn’t encourage any good pictures, so I decided to return a bit earlier, to catch the gloomy Indiana winter. When I entered Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge into my GPS, it took me to a dead end just outside the refuge, but I passed this wonderful relic on the way.

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About six floors tall, this structure was apparently used to do something to the coal before it was used to enrich our atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

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I am also clueless about the purpose of this truck, and why it looks so unhappy.

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This time, the door was missing, so again I couldn’t resist the temptation. There was quite a bit to explore inside, so I leave this as a teaser for next week:

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Thawing

After the temperatures finally dropped to proper levels for January, it was time for another serendipity walk in the lightly frozen landscape.

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Usually I know when I have taken a decent photo. This time, I was not sure. When the warming sun came out, the reflections of the light and the doubly layered images of ice and ground beneath created unusual opportunities.

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Thawing is a violent process. This has never been made as visceral as in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, in the scene where the visitor thaws.

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There, it’s the likeness of the alien that frightens. Here, the familiar shapes of leaves become alien when superposed with the fragile patterns of the ice that still covers them.

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There is a strange esthetic appeal in this violence, a desire to explode, and come to life.

Not yet. It’s January still.

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Acceptance

This morning I decided to replay the game Still Live that consists of walking around and taking pictures of things on the ground as they are. It is an exercise in acceptance.

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It was a crisp morning, nobody was out there that early on the first day of the new year.

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This time I made it even harder, by reducing everything to black and white, to dark and light.

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Maybe this modification of the concrete into something abstract is an escape to avoid comprehension.

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But by hiding the obvious, either the structural core becomes visible, or the underlying noise.

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Everything depends on what we want to see.

Courage (New Harmony VIII)

Walking a bridge always takes courage.

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This is particularly true if the bridge has been abandoned, become treacherous, or otherwise suspect.

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Why do we do it anyway? Walking across a bridge is the quintessential metaphor (the pattern) for change.

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When done right, it is a slow process, and involves looking at what we are transcending.

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It also involves facing, eventually, the other side.

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And finally, the test: Can we look back and accept where we come from? A bridge is not about abandoning the past, but connecting it with the future.

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Sunrise (New Harmony VII)

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While the absence of light in winter has it’s own appeal, we humans prefer it bright. We would be nowhere without having mastered fire. The pottery studio in New Harmony gives multiple evidence of this.

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For the photographer and everybody else who likes to see, these early hours just before sunrise are the most revealing.

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Everything appears gradually and returns to existence.

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Sky and earth are still in perfect balance.

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We get ready to continue to walk the mazes of the human mind. A new day has been born.

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