A Bunny by Our Barn

It was 1973. I was growing up in rural America in Harvard, Illinois, a small farming town whose monument on Main Street was a giant resin Holstein cow with plump, pink, milk-engorged udders that greeted passers-by at eye level. Harmilda, the cow, was there to remind us of the blessings of living and breeding in the breadbasket of America. In contrast to this rural mentality, my parents were city people who transported their lives to the country with the idea of protecting their children from the violence of growing up in inner city Chicago. They bought a farm consisting of two hundred and fifty acres of fertile, black earth. This entailed a lot of hard labor for all of us. My parents commuted to Chicago by train and worked long days in the city. When they came home late, they were exhausted. The result was that my younger brother and I, two years between us, were left alone a lot. One fateful fall afternoon when I was twelve years old we got off the school bus and walked down our very long, skinny driveway. Outside the back door I knelt down and felt for the hidden key. We entered the cold, dark house with some measure of trepidation, fearing that a bogeyman or intruder might be hiding and waiting to attack. I turned up the heat a few degrees.

If I boosted it up too much, I could expect a reprimand from my father about being wasteful when money was scarce. We made a direct line to the kitchen to have our after-school snack, warding off hunger until our parents got home a few hours later for dinner.

As we stood at the counter spreading peanut butter on whole wheat, I became aware of the dread I felt welling up, remembering that I would soon have to head out to the barn to do chores before heavy dusk fell over the farm. I hated going out alone to the ominous barn to haul buckets of water and rip twine from seventy-pound bales of hay for the horses, cows, and donkeys. In order to get out of there as soon as possible, I would race through the lower level of the old, moldy structure--under rafters filled with sparrow’s nests, and then past a herd of crated-up carousel horses layered with dust and cobwebs. Twenty-four antique carved-wood horses with flowing manes stared at me with freakish, wild eyes made of black glass marbles.

That particular day was fateful. As I took the first bite of my sandwich, I looked out the kitchen window in the direction of the barn and saw a most unexpected sight: In the afternoon red glow of dusk, I saw a totally naked woman with wavy, long, blonde hair. Her legs were long and lean and her perfectly shaped abundant breasts swayed as she posed, dancing without music. She looked like an erotic incarnation of one of my Barbie dolls . This creature was a goddess for sure, but what was she doing in front of our barn?

I said, “I’m going to call the cops!”

My brother yelled back, “No--you’re--NOT! I am going to get the binoculars and you are NOT going to call the cops.”

He ran up the stairs with my mother’s bird-watching field glasses to the guest room—a perch from which he would have the best view to gaze upon his apparition of Aphrodite. I indulged his fantasy for about five minutes, but then I began to feel very anxious. I decided to investigate the situation and so ventured out. As I approached the barn, I was surprised to see a figure crouched in the tall grass, behind the stonewall. A very handsome man in his forties squinted into the eyepiece of a camera; it’s motor drive surging forward. The woman panicked, grabbing and covering herself with a long sweater lying on the dirt in front of her.
That moment of confrontation, discovery, and fear was filled with heart-thumping adrenalin. The only adult woman’s body I knew relatively well was my mother’s, and this was NOT my mother. I felt awkward and strange about interrupting the photo shoot. Though embarrassed, I had an unsettling sense of feeling invigorated by both my display of bravery, and the overt sexuality of the scene. The naked woman who seemed to possess the power of a goddess a moment before, now seemed to shrink in shame. The photographer gave me a pat on the head, explaining to me who he was and why he was there.

Shocked but satisfied with his explanation, I retreated to the house and turned on The Andy Griffith Show in a state of absolute numbness. Returning to the kitchen window to once again check on the situation, the nude and photographer had vanished. A strange emptiness settled on the space where she was no longer. Whenever I return to that place, I conjure an image of her form swaying in front of the rusted, corrugated side of the barn.

Why did I feel the need to investigate what was happening, while my brother was content to watch from afar with binoculars? I am still trying to discern the ramifications of that day, and how it shaped my definition of what it means to be a woman.

The mysterious and handsome photographer, it turned out, was a friend of my father’s who worked for Playboy Magazine. He had obtained permission for the shoot. My parents, however, failed to mention anything about this arrangement to me. This type of experience was normal in my family. It may seem an unlikely “early artistic influence,” but events like this one formed my life and created themes that would fuel my creative life later. My parents did not take my brother and me to see the Great Masters because we lived too far from the city. Rather, in rural isolation, I performed careful monthly inspections of the (gratis) editions of Playboy that came sealed in brown paper wrapping each month. True to post-sixties ideals, these “mags” were not hidden away in a drawer, but were left out on the coffee table in the living room, along with The Whole Earth Catalog and tattered copies of Organic Gardening. I do believe that this early experience with “photography” holds the key to one major branch of my work. It represents an incident where a beautiful female body was being used and objectified with the intent of satisfying the male gaze --a subject that has been explored extensively by feminists and film theorists.

As an adolescent girl, I was left alone to make sense of such events. Over time, parallel scenes unfolded. Playboy nudes mucked around in the muddy pond and a large group of bunnies once sky dived into a hay field in the back 40 acres. My earliest vision of Woman, therefore, was a man’s vision. Whether conscious or unconscious, this influence always seems to find its way into my work.

~ Chehalis Hegner.

Chehalis Hegner © 2010 All Rights Reserved.