Generations of hands

This one was taken outside Amaranth, Manitoba, on a dark stretch of farmland between two small glows of civilization. You can see them if you look — Winnipeg's light rising softly on the left, Amaranth's on the right. Two little pools of people, and me somewhere in between, standing alone on the edge of a field with a camera.

The rock in the foreground has a story I love.

These fields are full of stones — glacial leftovers, hauled up out of the dirt by generations of farmers who were just trying to plant. Over the years, they piled the stones to get them out of the way. Some piles are small, like this one, sitting quietly at the boundary of a hayfield. Some are the size of small mountains, marking decades — maybe centuries — of somebody's patient, back-breaking work. Every one of them is a monument to how hard the ground fought before it agreed to grow anything.

I love photographing them at night. There's something right about it — these old stones, hauled up out of the earth by generations of hands, sitting quietly under a sky that's about twelve billion years older than any of us. The scale doesn't line up, and that's exactly the point.

I've had to ask a lot of landowners for permission to be out on their property in the middle of the night with a camera. They have all said yes, once they figure out I'm not there to make trouble. Some nights are peaceful. Some nights are not. I've got stories from the not nights that I'll save for another time.

But this one - this was a quiet, beautiful night. No wind. No headlights on the road. Just the stone (in the perfect position to anchor the milky way for this stunning photo), and the sky, and the two small glows of towns off in the distance where people were sleeping.

I love that. I really do.