SE Over SW (Sunset, Sunday, 24 October 2010)

William Van Doren, SE OVER SW (S.E. Sky at Sunset, from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

The western horizon was mostly a web of gray contrails, so I turned at sunset to the view nearly opposite, in the southeast and south – almost exactly the same perspective I would use, and have used, for a January sunrise. Just to confuse matters, the small mountains nearby are called by the name Southwest.

The First Day of His New Life (Sunrise, Thursday, 2 September 2010)

William Van Doren, The First Day of His New Life (Sunrise from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

I haven’t been doing (or closely observing) many sunrises, so it was fortunate that when a friend contacted me and said he was interested in the sunrise for September 2nd, I was able to ‘go back’ and paint it.

On that day, my friend, whom I’ve known since high school, had experienced something that for him was pretty close to a miracle. He had been enduring, for a very long time, worsening bouts of facial pain that failed to respond to the most common remedies, all of which he tried. “I was finally diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia (TN), a dandy progressive incurable disease with a few centuries of witchcraft treatments to deal with the pain. I started with the ‘gold standard’ for TN – an anti-seizure medicine that is also a standard treatment for bipolar disorder.”

One of the few unexamined options seemed rather exotic and perhaps too risky to explore. “Eventually,” he writes, “the primary rhythm of life was balancing pain and pain management, timing daily activities around when I took my last pill or how long til I could take the next one. I had heard about a surgical approach that worked in cases where the pain was caused by a misalignment of arteries and nerves in the trigeminal nerve, but there was no way to tell if that was the cause of your TN until they went into the brain and poked around. Seemed like a stretch – as long as the drugs were working.”

My friend is not exactly the type to just sit around and wait. “The Trigeminal Neuralgia Association has a national conference every two years, and this year it was at the Mayo Clinic. I signed up for the weekend conference several months ago. About two months ago I hit the wall with the drugs. More Drug A, more Pill B, more pain. I couldn't talk without pain; eating was excruciating. I started losing weight ... below 125 I stopped looking at the scale. The conference website gave a number to call if you wanted to stop by the Mayo Clinic while at the conference. I made that call.

“The conference was Saturday and Sunday; on Monday morning I saw a neurologist and had an MRI using a new imaging technique. Wednesday the neurosurgeon reviewed the pictures with me and showed me where I had an artery wrapping around one branch of the trigeminal nerve. He said there was a good chance surgery would fix the problem, if I would like to go that route. He said he’d be glad to do the surgery when I felt the time was right.

“I asked him what he was doing the next morning.

“Turned out that was his surgery day and he made me his first case of the day. So when the sun was rising, I was on my way to the operating suite.

“When I woke up ... the pain was gone!”

Even though my friend cautions that there is a (small) possibility of recurrence, he calls September 2nd his ‘rebirthday’. He especially wanted to express his gratitude to the Mayo Clinic.

“I came in broken in body and spirit,” he says, “and four days later was reborn.”

Sunrise, Monday, 18 January 2010

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

Route 20, Stony Point to Barboursville, 9 a.m.

The Southwest Mountains, the low mountains, the Southwest Mountains here more brown than blue without benefit of distance, with the brown-violet woods of winter, the soft rounded summits barely distinguished one from another, a comforting line of friends along my right shoulder, like the song my father used to sing, “There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder” – the Southwest Mountains, a rainbow ’round my shoulder.

Pairs

Painted lines on a vast parking lot, clouds in the blue sky. Dirt on heaps of snow along the road, streaks of gray in the white clouds. Flashing light of the rescue squad coming to someone’s aid, the red sunrise. The snowy blue-gray Southwest Mountains stretched out in a wave pattern, blue-gray-white clouds stretching behind the Southwest Mountains in a wave pattern. I don’t know where metaphor ends and reality begins.

Sunset, Tuesday, 22 December 2009

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

Shipwrecked as I am on a thousand-acre island of snow, my car with the clutch I foolishly burned up now blocking the ‘driveway’ (quarter-mile dirt lane) and inaccessible in the snow to tow trucks, I walked several miles along the side of four-lane U.S. 29 to get to a store. Following my Boy Scout training, I walked facing the traffic, which was rushing just two feet or so to my right. Now and then I hopped up onto a plowed snowbank to give tractor-trailers the respect they so fully deserve. Only a few drivers stayed conspicuously at speed or on message and peppered me with plowed slush.

The scale of life is so different on foot.

U.S. 29 is pretty much an antipedestrian landscape. No sidewalks, of course. Usually if you see anyone along the road it’s the itinerant homeless. But I was one of the few, the proud, the marooned.

I took a cab home (a first in my years in Virginia) – I really didn’t want to be the husband who incinerated the clutch one day and then, impaired by four shopping bags, got plowed into a snowbank by an oncoming SUV the next. More precisely, I had the cab take me to a dropoff point where I met Laura and we only had to carry the bags about a mile, through the fields.

(Critics/observers of this site will have noted that I thought the problem with the clutch last night was ice, but it turned out to be fire. You know how that poem ends.)

The ride back in the taxi gave me a further chance to reflect on this difference in perspective between being stuck here on the ground, as G. Lightfoot wrote, or zipping along in a vehicle. On my right, in the east above the Southwest Mountains, the sky at the horizon was a rare and perhaps indescribable blue that you almost never see except opposite the sun. It’s a sky that seems more illusory than distant – like robin’s egg blue, except not as brilliant and more delicately transparent. In the blue were a few vague shards of gray, their indistinct outlines adding to the impression of something not quite really there.

It struck me how an arresting moment like that would be much the same for a person standing in a field, traveling in a car, taking a train, or looking up out of the kitchen window. It’s a stillpoint. The still image is the hub of the wheel.

Sunset, Tuesday, 3 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Southwest Mountains, from U.S. 29 North, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This is very much a southern view of the sunset, a perspective not very far to the right of the sunrise painting in the previous post. The west was blocked by a rise of big cedars and pines next to the polling place, and election officers are not allowed to go wandering off in search of a better view.