The stark contrast between snow and spruce and the gentle contrast between earth and sky play havoc with your perception. Things take on a ghostly, spectral appearance, as if you were in Tir-na-nog, or Alfheim.
At night, the contrast becomes even more pronounced and the snow reflects the city lights reflected off the cloud cover. At midnight on a dark night on the edge of town, everything takes on a violet tinge. The horizon takes on a razor sharpness and the line between the heavens and the earth become as night and day.
While the green of summer and the gold of autumn are beautiful to behold, it's the white and black of winter that makes the minute amount of color present shine like jewels against velvet.
Either black or white.
3 comments:
Very well said. Thank you. I've often thought much the same, but never put to words. - Lyle
One grey day, after a couple weeks of short grey days, I was driving past the windsock on Merrill on my way home. I had to stop, because the first thought that crossed my mind was "Photoshopped!" The orange cone was so brilliant that my mind could not handle an object that bright, moving restlessly against the tarnished silver sky.
The thing I remember most when I see a photo like that is the resonant crunch of hardpack snow on the street as I walked down it at night. I don't know if you get that same thing in Anchorage. I seem to remember hearing it when it was -20F or colder.
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