By Katie Stobbart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 8, 2015
One of the most time-consuming and important parts of publishing The Cascade each week is its cover. The cover, which usually offers an artistic representation of an article in the paper, is the first thing you see. It’s supposed to be something that draws you in, either because it’s visually striking, evocative of a particular well-known topic, representative of what you might be thinking about, or a combination of these.
I guess that means we do a lot of thinking on what you might find relevant. Because we’re also students, our starting point is usually what we find relevant. This week, we didn’t give you much to go on — the image has no headline — so if you took the bait and opened the paper, here is the answer.
Whether or not you plan to graduate this year or some time in the future, most of us can think of a time when our sentences begin or end with “for the last time.” It’s that moment, that feeling of imminent change from one phase of our lives to another, that we hope to convey.
Consider the knight on the cover: perhaps battle-weary, perhaps feeling somewhat out of place in a desert landscape with the sun setting before him, he makes his last ride. In his wake, tiny cacti flower fruitlessly — an indication, maybe, of something beautiful still to be found, long after verdant fields have been left behind.
“Graduating feels a little like dying,” Tony, our production and design editor, half-joked as he created another layer in Photoshop to blur dark violet streaks onscreen: the clouds’ shadows. In a sense, I have to agree with him; you tie up loose ends, and you prepare for something you haven’t experienced and can’t predict, a place you know will be somehow fundamentally different.
I tried not to think too much about the cliff apparently ending — as the piece progressed, it seemed the knight has only a little further to go before the ground gives way to that unknown. The parts of the future you do know don’t necessarily bode well — debt threatens like mounds of dark earth, meted out by the shovelful.
Yet in the distance, there is a suggestion — perhaps a little out of place in a desert landscape — of green hills: a promise of growth and life. There’s also the possibility the sun is not setting at all, but is in the early stages of dawn; the knight is maybe not so battle-worn but ready to set out on a new journey, his armour gilded as the mountains are in light. As the background took shape, it became clear there’s no cliff after all. The ground is solid before us. We can move forward with a little less trepidation.
It’s also important to recognize that although the knight is alone, he was chosen and placed within this particular context to represent more than one individual. In a sense, he is an everyman or everywoman — while he or she may feel alone, there is some comfort in the notion that the image represents a community. As Tony placed the finishing touches on perhaps his last cover after four years at the paper, I was having a short but pleasant exchange with a couple of classmates, commiserating good-naturedly about the unknown future and how we’re handling it. The experience, which can be isolating (what am I going to do), becomes unifying.
We cannot see the knight’s expression, but in a way we know him as we know ourselves. At some point we will all be in such a position, looking to the sun as if it can tell us what lies beyond. But there is only one thing that can reveal what comes next: riding on.
