Saturday, December 24, 2005

But is it Art?

Between unemployment, tales of death, and my whining there seems to be a cloudy winter sky over my blog as of late. That's life though. Instead of trying to lead us back to the land of sunshine and honey I've decided to just roll with it.

With that in mind, I would like to post an image I captured about 3 years ago while my little family was driving to Capitol Reef in central Utah. It has a "ghosty" look to it because grubby 3-yr-old fingers got at the lens. At first, the picture seems flat-out morbid (my wife thought I was crazy for slamming on the brakes and jumping out of the car with the camera). But I believe it has value on several levels.

It tells the story of a desperate struggle and the tragic outcome. One moment, you're eyeing a distant hill to forage for food and bed down for the night, one bad jump later you're bleeding to death. He probably had days to think about it. Maybe the deer was clumsy and will be featured in "The Darwin Awards for Woodland Creatures" or maybe we have environmental issues to discuss. Is some sagebrush more valuable than other sagebrush to the extent that we need to protect it from cows with barbed-wire fences nationwide?

I was trying to come up with a good name for the picture. I thought "A Tragic Twist of a Fence" or possibly "Terms of Endeerment." If you have any suggestions, please comment.

3 comments:

Gordon said...

Aweseome. Very "sometimes your best just isn't good enough."

PsychDoctor said...

I saw a dead deer stuck in a fence in Beaver Utah when I was driving home for Christmas...Unfortunately I didn't get a photo.

Native Minnow said...

I can 'one up' Ryan. I had a friend who got a deer stuck in the fence in their back yard. They called the game warden who told them to go out and just shoot it (it had been there for a while and its insides were poking out), so his older brother went out there with a rifle and came back in with brains and blood all over his shirt. Alas, I did not have a camera at the time to get a picture of that.