The Delight of Gray Days

There is something utterly fascinating about the gray light of impending rain. Something motivating. Something inspiring.

Usually, the inspiration is of an artistic nature. What colors would be best to convey the sense of mist, rain and colors that are both muted and saturated at the same time?

When I walked to walk one recent morning and saw the gray light of incoming rain, those artistic thoughts were accompanied by some literary ones, too.

The two images shown here are the railroad tracks I cross every day to get to the gallery and back. At the place they cross Main Street, there are three lines. They are Burlington-Northern Santa Fe’s main east-west corridor and until recently, fifteen to twenty trains a day passed this point. What a delight for a rail fan like me!

The photo above is looking east, past the city buildings and the wheat mill on the left and rail car storage spurs on the right. From left to right, the tracks are Main 1, Main 2 and Main 3.

In this photo, I’m looking back to the west and the depot is on the right. Fred Harvey (after whom Harvey County is named) used to have a restaurant at this location and when I moved to Newton in 2002, one of the original Harvey girls was still alive. Her name was Clara.

Clara passed away at over 100 years of age a few years ago and the restaurant is long gone. But the depot is still in use and Amtrak still makes two stops a day here, one eastbound and one westbound. Newton is so close to the center of the Los Angeles – Chicago run that quite often both trains are at the station at the same time.

If I’m awake at 3 a.m., when Amtrak rolls into town (if it’s on time), I listen to that whistle and wonder where people are headed. What are they leaving behind? Is it more important for them to get some place or to get away from some place?

I also wonder what a trip by Amtrak is like. What possible story lines might be taking place on every passenger train that comes through town? I have taken excursion trips behind steam locomotives before and am still trying to fit those experiences into a story line. But I’ve never Amtraked anywhere and look forward to some day being able to do so.

Combine those sometime musings with a day like the day in these photographs and all of those possibilities are emphasized by a cold drizzle or the promise of rain in the middle of a hot, dry summer or whatever else happens to stimulate my imagination at the time. It’s easy to see how a gray day can provoke any number of creative ideas.

I suppose that’s why days like this one so stimulate all my creative senses. No matter where I encounter them or when, there’s something especially delightful about the mystery and ambiguity of that wonderful, gray light.