Eleven Minutes

I’d planned to be up at dawn. Instead I slept in. Took a hot shower. Knocked the mud off my hiking boots.

Almost 10am and still in the driveway with the engine running. Deep River county park was eleven minutes away. I hadn’t been there in fifteen years, maybe more. Couldn’t remember if it was trails or just a gravel path around a pond.

The parking lot was empty. I pulled the camera out of the bag, five pounds of body and glass satisfying in the hands, and started for the trailhead.

Good. Real trails.

Ice on everything. Sun coming through bare trees. Cold that felt clarifying, almost meditative. I stopped when I felt like stopping and grabbed frames without any particular intention. No project. No plan for what to do with the images.

I took a bend in the trail and the trees opened out to a snow-covered cornfield, frozen over in patches, glowing in flat winter light. A farmhouse in the distance. I stood there a while, working the frame. Just doing the thing in front of me. A monk with a broom.

Then a steep hill split off from the main trail. I took it sideways, hands down on the glassy dirt to keep from slipping, until I came out at the top with the river below me. Squirrels chasing each other over fallen trees in the clearing. I stood there fifteen minutes, smiling, then laughing.

The cornfield. The squirrels. The climb up the hill. After that it loses fidelity. Whatever I was thinking in the driveway with the engine running. Whatever was on the trail before the bend. More noise than signal now.

Memory is a butcher. It takes days, weeks, years, and guts them. You're left with an image, a feeling, a stray detail. You live forward. You understand backward. The awareness just sits there like a rock in your shoe.

So you make things. A record of your existence in a time and place. Because memory doesn’t serve. And because you believe someone else might want to share it.

The time and effort are easy. That isn’t the gamble. You have to put yourself in it. You have to ante up.

Maybe someone stands where you stood. Sees through your eyes. Knows you in a way you can only through experience.

Or maybe they look at the thing you built the way you look at a drawing on the refrigerator. Polite. Encouraging. They don't notice that what you built was an invitation. So you start building the next thing because what else are you going to do? Your life is a singular stochastic event. But the experience of it is ergodic.

You exist in superposition.

Eleven minutes from the house and still in the driveway.