This morning, at Stratton State Park, while I sat in my car in the small parking lot, a young woman toting an expensive-looking camera with a long lens walks down to the river without disturbing the gulls who have settled peacefully on the slowly moving Illinois. What an opportune moment for a couple of photos! The river is a deep. dark blue flowing gently while gulls float like tiny white yachts — in the morning sun. But, her camera continues to hang from her right shoulder.
She is not interested in wildlife photos, I’m told. She has a client coming. I thought: Aha! She’s a realtor who is showing a property near the river. However, it turns out that she’s not a realtor. She has been hired to record a marriage proposal. Soon a couple arrives walking together from the small parking lot to the banks of the slowly flowing Illinois.
The photographer is not supposed to communicate with the couple or pose them in any way. So they don’t acknowledge her as they walk to the river. She’s there to snap informal photos of them, so she stays a good hundred feet away. She is not supposed to set-up any scene nor even communicate with the couple. She is an observer not a participant.
He is at least 6’2 and stocky looking, maybe in his mid-twenties. She is much shorter and almost petite, also in her twenties. They are silhouetted with the river behind them, giant oak trees to their left on the river’s bank and some huge, dusky boulders piled at the river’s edge, framing the scene at their right.
They are on an open rise, a stone’s throw from the river, gently hugging each other. No longer silhouetted, in the sunlight now, the man steps back, gets down one one knee, looks up at her and presents his open right palm with what I suppose to be an engagement ring. They exchange the moment. He gets up and they hug. The photographer –still on the fringe of all this–snaps her photos.
They turn slightly away from each other and then I notice something. The woman is cuddling an infant in the crook of her right arm. The couple turns and faces the flowing river. I wonder when they started living together. Who knows if they said, “Let’s have a baby!” Or, maybe, it just happened. And it seems to them that now is the right time to consider marriage.
The idea of the photographer lurking around the periphery of all this seems artificial to me. They know she’s there but they act as if they don’t know. The couple is paying the photographer to record this moment. It’s one one big selfie.
I come down to the river a few mornings each week and wait for God to bring something like this to me. But, today’s happening confounds me. Do people think that every moment of our lives is nothing more than a scene from a movie? Isn’t there intimacy anymore? And me, should I have applauded?
I’m sitting at the river, watching and praying for this couple. They don’t know I’m there and the photographer has already left.
________