Photographer Shane Rocheleau contemplates his surroundings in Lakeside, Virginia, following the 2016 election, revealing the dissonance between the American Dream and harsh realities. He discusses the local wildlife, particularly the Red-bellied Woodpeckers and encroaching European Starlings, using them as metaphors for the struggles faced by inhabitants. Rocheleau views Lakeside as an emblem of a typical American community, characterized by both beauty and harshness, while grappling with the disillusionment of what the American Dream promises versus the reality experienced by many.
Under the patchy lawns of Lakeside, there lies a pre-colonial "Oughnum", or "good hunting land" in the indigenous Algonquian dialect. In early Spring one year, my family and I watched a pair of Red-bellied Woodpeckers bore a nest for their clutch at the rotting end of a shorn bow. They did their work several paces from where we sat each afternoon. Eventually, the excavating stopped and the female settled in. We joyfully awaited little chirps. One morning, we found two eggs broken beneath the nest and another unbroken at the center of the yard. In an Orwellian nod to Manifest Destiny, European Starlings had raided the nest and made it their own.
Lakeside is representative of countless spaces built to feign American exceptionalism - a place with 11,000 human beings doing the best they can, ugly and beautiful things alike, while drowning in the reality that dreaming yields far less than its promise.
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