Green cotton balls glued to a giant card

I took Highway 169 from Mankato to St. Peter the other day.

 

I had left plenty of time for my drive and felt no pressure to speed, but that didn’t seem true of the drivers around me. Even though I was traveling at the speed limit, other cars zipped past me as though I was an impediment and an irritation. That was when I realized my intended 8 a.m. arrival at my destination had me on the same road as commuters hurrying to arrive on time. 

 

If I could have had my way, I would have been a passenger rather than a driver, and we would have driven more slowly.

 

You see, all around me the hillsides glowed a hundred different shades of green in the morning sun–as though each tree had been given exclusive rights to its own color. I looked at the cars speeding past me and wondered how they could be racing around that way, apparently passive to the beauty and peace the green hillsides represented to me.

 

Later, on the way back from St. Peter, I pulled off on side roads a couple of times, trying to capture a photo of those hills. I had to wait a long time between each frame because there was so much traffic, and I was hoping for a picture without any cars.

 

Even my best shots, acquired with what felt like considerable patience, have at least a few vehicles in them.

 

Photos, of course, cannot be perfect representations of what we see. I knew as I took them that my pictures would not capture what had captivated me–that the hills looked almost fuzzy with green–as though if a giant hand reached out and brushed them, they would softly give way under the weight and then bounce back upright as the hand moved on. Green cotton balls glued to a giant card.

 

All the differentiated colors forced me to ignore the forest and consider the trees–how many thousands of them were working together to make what looked like one giant blanket. Their trunks dark, rigid and several yards apart down below, while up above the greening branches tickled each others’ fingertips, as though shyly introducing themselves in secret.

 

Probably the effect would not have been so profound on a cloudy day, but with the sun shining, I wanted to be the giant who could brush her hand across the treetops.

 

As my various attempts at taking a photo without cars in it turned out to be disappointments, I couldn’t help thinking about how selective our attention can be. I had no trouble appreciating the hillsides despite feeling, at times, surrounded by cars. Like AI editing a photo, my perception focused on what I wanted to look at and simply “deleted” the traffic. 

 

My frustrations also led me to think perhaps I could wait until a point later in my drive homeward and find another bank of trees away from all the hubbub. After all, I would be driving past other rivers and other hills.

 

I did stop in more isolated places and snap a few pictures of wooded hillsides, but they did not have the vibrancy that had emanated from the much higher, steeper hills along the road to St. Peter. The smaller hills did not dominate the view in front of me and rise to the skyline like those along the Minnesota River. They also did not seem as thickly wooded, sending no impression of puffy cotton balls.

 

The result is that, even with a few vehicles showing in the frame, the photos I took along the road to St. Peter have the strongest hope of representing the grandeur, variety and heartlifting glow I felt on my morning drive. I have seen enough of wooded hills to know that, next time I go to St. Peter, the view will likely still be grand, but it won’t be the same.