Friday, March 20th, 2020. It's a Friday at around 5PM. Usually there are a lot of commuters on their way home. Being Friday in Wisconsin means it's also the weekly Fish fry at the local eateries. Main Street is usually parked full from shoppers and folks trying to get an early start on their crunchy, tasty meals. Not on this particular evening due to the beginning Pandemic. At this point there is still a tremendous amount of uncertainty as to what the future holds. While we know the virus is spreading at an incredible rate, there is no way of know where it's at until you have it. Catching seems to be a certainty. Hopefully we can slow down the infections. I hope I have prepared myself and my family enough to survive. I worry a lot about the vulnerable all over the world. It's so frustrating not having any real personal means to "fight back." We can only take care of those immediately around us. Maybe this will teach us to be kinder to those closest to us?
It was Thursday March 12th that I took this photo. I'd wander through the nearby countryside trying to sooth my angry soul. Set against the backdrop of the emerging Pandemic my immediate family had begun to undergo unusually intense stress. Personal events unfolded in such a way as to make me furious. Only it wasn't the passionate, quick to burn off, flash of letting it all release and then finding solutions. Sometimes in life there is no easily presented and deserving target for ones wrath. So I grabbed my gear and went for a spin in my jeep. I picked the same roads and hills that I'd roved earlier in the year. What an amazingly different perspective I saw than I ones I took when I was roaming earlier. Then it was after sitting at the foot of a Buddha as decompressor of the experience. Then it was working with another creative soul in producing an art gallery show at the local museum. This day, it was letting the darkness find solace in the icy prairie with found within the Driftless. Then of course the next day the entire world shut down and we turtled up in our home.
Duck Egg County Forest Irish Ridge Rd, Viroqua, WI 54665
