Erasure

The land taken away by fog and snow, until almost nothing is left, and whether almost nothing is enough.

Some winters the mountain is not there. The fog comes up from the valleys and the snow comes down to meet it, and between them the land is taken away one shape at a time: first the far ridges, then the forest, then the slope under your boots.

The sun becomes a coin held up behind paper. What is left is small, and it is all there is. One fold in the snow. A line of rock running uphill into nothing. Three shrubs keeping each other company. The handwriting of moss where the wind has cleared it.

These photographs were made in that state, when there was almost nothing in front of me and I had to decide whether almost nothing was enough. Every time, it was. The less the weather left, the more carefully I looked, and the mountain I could not see is in every one of them.