I turned back to look at the car I’d taken here, and the headlights I’d left on as my lifeline. I wasn’t afraid, which I thought was quite odd.
I took a deep breath and stepped forward, letting the music from my phone in my pocket play, the device idly vibrating against my leg as I walked further out into the empty field.
During finals week this fall, my personal essay writing professor, an eloquent and well spoken man named Justin, expressed to me that I write about the landscape of North Dakota in a unique way. I discussed with him that North Dakota has places that create an empty, eerie atmosphere that invites a singular experience for the lone soul every time it’s experienced. That was the key though. It was an experience one could only have alone.
I told him that I wanted to capture that feeling, that essence, and bottle it up to keep as my own. I didn’t know why, and I still don’t, but it almost felt like an answer of some sort. I want(ed) to figure out what that feeling meant to me. Why I find myself at peace within it.
I thought about that when I stood outside, the cold starting to nip at my bare fingers as I held my camera in my hands. I was in a large barren, dead corn field off of County Road 31, brown husks picked clean by birds beneath my feet and bare leaved trees at my back. The corn for the season was harvested by now and the field was empty, stretching endlessly until it became a single line across the horizon. No buildings, no vehicles. Fog was swallowing the entire landscape around me, so much so that I couldn’t see more than 100 feet in front of me. An incredible silence laid over the air around me, and it felt more comforting than any moment I had felt in a long, long time. The shape of the road began to disappear, the trees I’d come to photograph slipping away too the more I walked, the only thing around me being a quiet, comforting gray, and a silence that I didn’t think I needed. I stopped once I’d found a place I thought was good enough and I looked around me, considering my shot. Whatever way I turned, it would all look the same however I edited it, whatever angle I took the photos in. The dirt, the snow, the fog, it was all the same. A uniform quietness.
And in that moment I felt the question return, my professor’s words coming again. Why was I so attracted to this? What was it about this void, this limbo-esque environment that draws me in so close? Why is it that I find a passion in writing about North Dakota’s landscape?
I raised my camera and snapped several photos. I heard an airplane fly overhead, close enough that it may only have been taking off from the nearby airport. But there was nothing. No blinking red lights, no shadow of the plane even. Just the sound, before the silence returned.
I paused my music, and stood, listening. I wanted to stay here. I wanted to pause the world and traverse it in this condition, this empty fog world for me to explore and photograph. What I can describe in the moment following was a great sigh of relief and a weight easing off my shoulders. Weight and stress from the term I was holding in that I didn’t even know I had.
I was thankful, too. Thankful for the moment that I knew would dissipate if I ventured back to the car. Like it was a friend I would have to depart for the last time.
The fog welcomed me home, in some unearthly way.
