So this post is a bit different than most of the Newfoundland Journal’s I’ve done before. I’ve been trying to write more about my thought process and this is a few paragraphs I wrote for no reason in particular, I just wanted to type up my thoughts in order to better understand them myself.
I’m walking along the Humber road, the sun has dropped below the horizon and the sky is a bright shade of blue. It’s a quiet night, the kind that’s almost extinct from the big cities, good for thinking. I remember one night when I was doing a similar kind of introspective walking when I was living in Halifax, around the time when University students first start moving in, and every 5 houses I walked past I would hear the sounds of loud music and people singing along, their voices had the kind of volume that only comes with the assistance of alcohol.
I look at the empty road and the houses that all look a bit the same, the kind of bland design that’s a cookie cutter in most suburbs, but there are little bits of nice pieces on a doorway or a painted mailbox. I notice how the street lights are turning on in sequence and I’m reminded of the smell of a campfire, probably from one of the houses that still uses a wood stove for heating. The snow falls in big clumps at a leisurely, almost lazy pace. It’s the kind of evening I would dream about when I was a kid, the kind of weather where it’s not too cold and there’s a thin layer of sticky snow on top of the ground, perfect for friends to have snowball fights. Then I think about my friends in Halifax, and how they’re all probably admiring the grass right now, walking around with their jackets open to the wind, while the zipper on my winter coat is still very high. A small part of me wishes spring would get here already, but then I remember I came here to immerse myself, and subsequently photograph, the winter.
My mind starts to wander and I think about what it’s like to be one of the people that live in a desert, and how many people have only ever seen snow on such a massive scale in photographs or film. The idea of having everything building and road in the entire area covered in a blanket of frozen water must be odd. And that’s when I start to really notice how the mixture of blues from the sky and orange from the street lights combine onto all of the snowbanks and houses around me, the sky turns to an almost purple shade and I realise how rare the atmospheric conditions must be to produce such a wonderful color. When the sun stops hitting the sky in a few minutes, this magnificent shade is going to be gone and I’m reminded of the quote by Cartier-Bresson “Life is once, forever.”
So that’s my first attempt at any kind of narrative storytelling, I hope you enjoyed it!