"I Have Waited All My Life To Be Here," He Said
Stonehenge
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It stands like a Giant Child's discarded play blocks on a hilltop. From a distance they most resemble chunks of styrofoam packing material. The stones are not gray, but green with lichen. I shared the hill with this Thing for about two hours and the longer I was there the more struck I was.
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It was a bright August morning when we got there, hazy, but clearing. I took as much time as I wanted to walk around it, and the photographs I took show a gradual rotation. After I had walked all the way around, I turned my back on it and looked at the surrounding landscape. The horizon is lined with barrows, ancient burial mounds. It crossed my mind then, and haunts me still, how awesome, how utterly, indescribably awesome, it would be to rest in eternity always to behold this Thing. How fortunate these ancient chieftains or princes or whoever they were. Priestesses, most likely, are the ones interred here, perhaps even with their horned consorts...
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Well, here is the "Prove It" shot. Yes, this is me at Stonehenge, just outside of Amesbury in Wiltshire. I was here with Joe and Andrew and Doug (who made the whole thing possible). I was asked, a few moments before this photo was taken, by a gentleman, another American, to take a picture of him and his wife. How could I not? It was his "Prove It" shot. "I've waited all my life to be here," he said.
The English don't understand our fascination with these piles of rocks. I overheard on a train: "I just don't understand what they see in the damned thing!" I don't think we understand it either. We are compelled. That's all. My Dad is the same way about Mesa Verde, Colorado. He gets "that tone" when he talks about visiting ruins left by Ancestral Puebloans. I understand it, I just can't explain it.
Can you?
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