Spring Evening

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For anyone in the rural U.S., power outages are a way of life, so one of the most surprising things about the pandemic so far is that the lights have stayed on. I stand on the ridgetop as darkness falls, gazing at a very bright Venus high in the sky; below that, a sliver of moon, the black bulk of the Allegheny Front, and then the usual display of interstate exit lights, street lights and house lights. And in a town of 5000, however Appalachian, there must be at least a few Muslim families breaking their Ramadan fast.

spring evening
scent
of a backyard grill

8:30 and already most traffic has stopped. Way off down the ridge I hear the first whip-poor-will.

night forest
a glowworm’s
slow blink

***

Process notes

Written three or four nights ago (time is a blur these days). I thought I could use other, more oblique footage, but ultimately it just didn’t work, so I went back to the same ridgetop spot tonight to shoot what I could of the valley (the iPhone video camera is not great in low light) as well as to grab some audio with my trusty Zoom H2 microphone. I was worried about it resembling too closely my earlier haibun in this series, Quarantine Walk, which also used a single, slow panning shot at dusk, but oh well. I take a lot of night-time walks; what can I say?

If you’ve missed any of the other haibun in this on-going series, there’s now an archive page for them here under the ad hoc name Pandemic Time: Haibun, as well as a showcase on Vimeo.