Well. Here goes nothing. Or we'll see about that.
Driving through from Charlottesville to Scottsville this afternoon was nothing out of the ordinary. The a.c. in the Pontiac is shot, which is not a good thing, as the temperature is up to 95˚ and it's humid as hell. I was going down Route 20 at a fair clip, in order to keep the hot, humid air swirling around me, doing nothing so much as tickling the sweat rolling off my brow.
I make this drive every day, to and from work, and this new blogging effort of mine is sort of an outgrowth of that drive. It's a lovely drive, irregardless of the dangerous idiots who feel it necessary to hurl their vehicles down the road like half assed thunderbolts tossed by drunken gods after a bender on Mount Olympus.
The landscapes are the rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont; rich farmland and pasture, woods and creeks. Every now and then, along the way, there is a melancholy punctuation in the form of a roadside shrine; those small (and not so small) and personal memorials marking the loss of a life in an accident. These shrines dot the the sides of roads and highways all over the Commonwealth, testaments to the immediacy of grief and sorrow.
For the past year, I've bounced this thought around in my head: What if I started stopping and looking at these shrines and photographing them. Today, as I passed the Cross in Keene, I decided that it was time to begin. The plan would be to scout out these shrines, note their locations and particulars, research the circumstances of the accidents and shoot them both in 35mm and digital formats and posting the digitals to this blog as part of a journal for what I'm going to call The Roadside Project.
Tomorrow, for the first time, I'm going to stop, look and, in a way, listen.
Comments