Tweets Illustrated: Table Rock Formation

William Van Doren, pencil, 9 x 12.

Sunset, Wednesday, 7 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I happen to be very fond of vacant lots. Today I walked across this county’s mother of all vacant lot regions, the semi-developed territories on the perimeter of the so-called Hollymead Town Center, an interesting name for a shopping center where there is neither a town nor anything resembling a center. The sprawling mess, in the inimitable signature style of its developer, appears to have been not so much designed as randomly bulldozed.

So maybe I should clarify by saying that while I hate the process that creates vacant lots, I love the places themselves. At the center's northern limit, as I was about to enter this unnatural park, I stopped to sketch a beautiful old pear tree (real pear, not a decorative barren Bradford). Then I was amazed, as many times as I’ve driven into the place, to scale the eroded gravel banks along the northern entrance and find, largely hidden from the view of cars, acres of unfinished foundations and cement walls, gravel, weeds, straw strewn (a bit late) to slow the growth of gullies, overgrown backhoe attachments, lonely turquoise-painted utility connection pipes, a fuel tank, a dumpster, that lovely webbed orange plastic fencing and, scattered everywhere like enemy bunkers dislodged out of the ground by heavy bombardment, storm drains ready to be installed RIGHT NOW in front of YOUR store or office. Or maybe you have some heavy equipment capable of hoisting them into your half-ton pickup (might fit) and plopping them into your front yard, where you could enjoy having your very own storm drain complete with iron manhole cover. No hurry, they’ve got plenty.

Anyway, as negative as I may sound about these landscapes, in a strange way I love them all. As long as a vacant lot remains a vacant lot, to me it’s a wild place. It almost seems wilder than a preserve, because of the sense that it’s holding off a process of loss – it’s winning, for the moment. There’s a sense of intermission, of remission, of stillness and calm made greater by the agitation that presses against it. Anything can happen. And because of the way we live, and the way we drive around, and almost never go on foot in certain places, when you walk in some of these lands you may legitimately feel as though you’re its true discoverer and explorer. For me, I think this tends to fulfill the naive notion I had as a child that I was the first person ever to see a certain wonderful tree in the woods, or beautiful cascade on the local stream – certainly I wasn’t, but I might be the first person crazy enough to walk along the top of a certain ridge of excavated dirt.

The pear tree stands at the corner of a field of wild brown grasses and weeds, bordered by a strip mall, a ‘self-storage’ facility, a bank, an auto repair shop, and a quasi-colonial brick building that was once an independent grocery, then a Salvation Army Thrift Store, and is now for sale. The tree, the field, and some woods beyond, are probably all doomed. But as long as they live, they live forever.