Crossbow Twilight (Sunset, Tuesday, 26 October 2010)

William Van Doren, CROSSBOW TWILIGHT (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Named for a surprise run-in with a bowhunter while I was chasing the last fragment of light.

Sunset, Monday, 25 January 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Out today after last night’s deluge and the resulting floods, it was easy to see in the untracked mud that no one else had been in the “back thousand acres” of this place where we rent – in fact no one’s been back there since deer hunting ended three weeks ago.

(The Rivanna at flood, by the way, was amazing to see, close-up in the woods.)

The first thing I thought (smug) was, wow, I guess these guys never come back here if they can’t shoot at deer. But then I realized, wait a minute, what if we hadn’t gotten Flint (the foxhound), who needs to run? How often would we come back here – how often did we come here, before we found him (late 2001) at the Fluvanna County SPCA, convinced by the shelter’s benign speculation that he was a mellow half-Lab?

Answer: Almost never.

It’s not just hunters. A lot of us need another reason, or we just don’t seem to get out much anymore.

Sunset, Monday, 7 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The blurred moon rising last night in haze and cloud could be the same gray light inside the woods today, and for that matter almost one and the same with the streaks of cloud and dim sunlight above yesterday’s sunset. The torn-up black track of the jeep trail in the woods was left by deer hunters but reminds me of my late friend Uncle Tony’s tales of escaping, as an Austro-Hungarian officer in World War I, from a prison camp, then making his way across eastern Russia to his home in Hungary – staying for a time with Russian peasant villagers and working alongside them looking for truffles and mushrooms in the rich soil of the vast woods.

(More about the amazing Uncle Tony – as he was known – soon. Anton Lipthay was his name – direct descendant, I believe, of the celebrated general of the same name from the Napoleonic Wars, although I didn’t know enough to inquire about this while he and his relatives here were still living.)

Rising moon, setting sun, diffusing daylight. Trucks, hunters, truffles, mushrooms, escaped aristocrats. The sound of clumps of wet icy snow falling all at once from pine branches off in the middle of the woods comes across as possibly also belonging to the Mercedes station wagon, a hunter’s, I had seen earlier in the field, if it’s leaving on the muddy power line trail, but I can’t tell. Different sounds and lights and times merge, converging on whatever comes next.