Defying Gravity

During my travels through the Palouse late last Spring, the entire journey was blessed with serendipity.  For example, one of the images I very much wanted to get was the Skeen School, pictured above.  It no longer serves as a school, and hasn’t for decades.  It’s currently used to store farm equipment, but perhaps not for much longer, because judging by the extreme lean of the structure, if the coming winter is a harsh one, it may spell the end of this cool old building.

In my search for the school, all I had to go on was an old photography book that stated that it was “…near “X” Road.”  It didn’t state the name of the road that the building was actually on!  And the image in the book, almost thirty years old, showed a very different looking building than what exists today.  Standing much straighter, and with its bell tower intact, the contrast of the book’s images and mine is a testament to how time and the elements can change the appearance of an unmaintained building in this unforgiving climate.

So imagine my delight when I was randomly meandering through the backroads of the Palouse and came upon this building.  I thought I recognized it immediately, but I pulled out the book to make sure.  The photo in the book showed two round holes in the wall to the left, almost even with the top of the window, near the front of the building.  This building had the same holes in the same locations.  To me this was as good as matching fingerprints…I had found it!

In the image above, you can see the patch in the roof where there once was a bell tower.  If you google “Skeen School images” you can see how the building looked with the bell tower intact.  Without the bell tower, it’s a lot less recognizable as an old schoolhouse.

It would’ve been easy to drive past this building and not recognize it for what it is.  There is farming paraphernalia–what some people would call “junk”–piled around all sides of this building.  In fact, because the building is on a rise above the road, a trick some photographers use is to cut off about the lower third of the building in order to hide all the stuff piled around it. That’s actually what the photographer in the book I had had done.  But to me, the surroundings of the building tell as story as much as the building itself.

This image above is how some photographers attempt to “improve” the appearance of this building:  hide some junk behind the road cut in the foreground, and crop out most of the rest of it.  The dry grass and dark clouds in this image combine to give it a very different feel than the one at the beginning of this post, where I was able to capture a rare few minutes of sunlight and blue sky during my mostly overcast and rainy journey.  Another bit of serendipity that blessed this shoot.

And yet, as you can see in the image below, it’s actually the “junk” around the building that’s kept it from collapsing years ago.  I can’t help but wonder how many more winters this building can endure.

I’ll be heading back to the Palouse this Fall, and will try to get a few more images of the Skeen School (now that I know where it is!) just in case it doesn’t make it through the winter of ’12-’13….