Photographer's Log Photographer's Log

Evening Ride on Stage Road

On April 5th we awoke to a winter wonderland all around us. I had planned to go out shooting early that morning but was held up until late afternoon while I’d spent the day watching the snow melting and falling off of the trees. Saddened that I had probably missed all the loveliness I went out to discover my fears were well founded. The trees were spattered with snow held on by the early melt and then re-freeze, which had happened earlier. As I drove the back roads, the frozen snow being blown from the branches by the winds that had been gusting all day long continually pelted my car. After driving in circles for a couple of hours I decided to return home down River Road. Passing the Buskirk’s Bridge I suddenly felt a pull within me to go up Stage Road.

Approaching the avenue of pines along Stage Road it was obvious things were different there than everywhere else I had ventured that day. It was so quiet. Not one breeze seemed to have yet escaped Mother Nature’s lips. The trees were coated with thick, heavy snow. Branches bowed down gracefully from on high like elegantly powdered-wigged and finely garbed ladies and gentlemen of the court dancing together, yet apart, in 17th century France. I was caught in the mystery and aloneness of it all. It was sunset, making the atmosphere all the more close and intimate. If it were not for the sudden arising of the winds I probably would have stayed under those pines until nightfall but the wind came out of nowhere and began to blow the snow off of the trees in a torrent of whiteness filled with large chunks of ice. It was almost as though the road had been waiting for me to come and photograph it, holding it’s breath least it lose any of it’s beauty, and then, when I had finally seen it, photographed it, it could finally give way and behave naturally, getting on with it’s cycle.

Leaving the pines I drove out under a soft, pearly, blue-gray sky and found more loveliness around each curve in the road. Sumac’s gracefully highlighted against that sky, the mountains of Cambridge clear and dark against the luminescent sky on the horizon line of the road as I came down the hill. The night was beginning to close in quickly around me yet the day was still left enough to kiss light onto the landscape for me for a few more photos.

Reaching the bottom of Stage Road I had to turn up Turnpike Road toward home, leaving the light behind me as it caressed Cambridge a sweet good night. -June Mohan

Photos: (Copyright Mohan 2007) To contact the artist, please send email to: junemohan@hotmail.com