The Mill on Trout Run Road

I was fortunate to grow up on a small farm south of Syracuse, New York, and have chosen to live in places that feel similar to my boyhood home for much of my adult life. The old weathered buildings, pastures and crop fields and land lying fallow, the tangled woodlots, all the secret, quiet places that still offer a sense of gentle separateness from an increasingly over developed comfort me.

Just a couple miles outside of town there's a short road that connects two county roads across a hidden inclusion of farmland and woods, called Trout Run Road. You'd miss it if you weren't looking for it. I found it several years ago while looking for isolated and seldom traveled routes on my bicycle. It led me down a sloping curve to a little valley with a creek running through it, and past a run down brick mill with an oddly proportioned old white plastered stone house with oversized columns holding up a sagging porch roof overlooking it from a small bluff, tucked up against a copse of trees along a low ridge. I returned some time later with a sketchbook in my backpack to draw it for the first time.

September 2007

 I've gone back many times, and taken a drawing pad more than once. I even dragged my wife and children there on a gray winter afternoon when they were still interested in going on such excursions with me.

sketch from our family field trip in January 2008

 This morning I went back, pulled my car off into the weeds, and walked a few hundred feet back up the road to immerse myself again in the magic of the place for a quiet hour, and to try again to transmit some sense of the wonderment of the place onto a sheet of drawing paper.

Trout Run Road, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, Derwent Inktense pencils