2nd entry – harrow 2009

In July when I was here to visit and play golf with the boys, the area was gold with grain.

Harrow 050I remember just stopping in the middle of a country road and shooting the wheat field. The area is very flat and fields and farms stretch to the horizon. (In Pennsylvania, fields stretch to the next rise.) I had no idea where I was and Rainer literally talked me through getting to his farmhouse. It was only my second visit and I wasn’t paying any attention to directions. All I could see were swatches of color that I wanted to capture. And I was still unsure and reluctant with the camera.

However, I still stopped and just shot. In the image on the left, the line of trees in the distance was nothing more than a demarcation, separating the blue and the gold. It’s now, six months later, that I even know there are trees in this flat terrain of south-western Ontario. And now six months later, the gold and green are gone and what remains is the brown bareness of this prairie landscape. Winter here in the southern most point of Canada is still desolate.

Dec09 041I got to Windsor by 4:00 and pulled over at the Ontario Travel Bureau to call Rainer. I noticed that the office was open, so I decided to go in and get maps of the area. I have a GPS, but I’m not familiar enough with the area to trust myself to driving around. Also, I didn’t want to get caught in some country road after sunset GPS or no GPS.

The woman was very helpful and suggested a wine tour for Saturday. She also gave me a great map of the area that showed all the roads and situated Rainer’s house in the middle of this vast farm area.

When driving in a new area, I’m never sure that I haven’t passed my turn off. It was very hard to drive down Howard Road – a very long north/south corridor – and not worry that I had missed the right turn onto Rainer’s road. I forced myself to keep driving hoping that I would find the turn off and that it would be well marked. It was.

Along the way I shot a Greek Orthodox church, a cemetery and a vineyard with its bare vines. The wind howled as it ripped through the naked grape tendrils and the rust colored vines were a red haze behind the bare tree.