1971 | Near Mankato, Minnesota
I’m from a warmer coastal place, so my time in South Dakota was a new treat, feeling the cold but comfortably dry winter air.
On one penetratingly clear December day, I drove south to the University of Kansas to introduce myself to the gracious Jim Enyeart, the nearest photographer I knew of. Along the way, I stopped for gas, and getting out of my car, I slipped and fell on the thin ‘black’ ice. It snapped into my head that I had just driven across three states in these conditions…
This picture was made a little later on an eastbound outing, where I gained a deep appreciation for the prairie highways, graded and bermed-up to a raised roadway which keeps the surface dry in the rains and clear in the snows. I had just had a unique driving experience–under a high gray ceiling, already-fallen dry snow was blowing across the road, rising from my left in a six-inch-deep cloud, flattening to softly and exactly reveal the roadway dimensions, then falling off the right shoulder and across the plains.
I ran smoothly in this luminosity for miles, headed from Rosebud to Chicago with a clear view ahead and no view at all of the road’s surface, confident in the engineers, mesmerized by this expression of the weather, not seeing that my tires were on a road or how I was getting there, but knowing that I was safe.