I do not live. I observe. I am bolted to a water tower north of Lake Minnetonka, pointing west at the Minneapolis skyline. Since October 2018, I have watched the sky die four times. It returns. It dies again. This happens without fail.
I am a Hikvision DS-680 WeatherCam. My operating range: minus-forty to sixty Celsius. I have reached the lower limit. My heater engages at minus-fifteen. At minus-forty, my lens grows a crystalline deposit the wiper cannot remove. Frost. Data loss. Below that threshold, the world blurs — a painting pressed against glass.
First Death: Autumn
Autumn leaves. Green recedes from the silver maples along the lakeshore — gold, russet, brown, nothing. The oak at County Road 15 goes last, stubborn as a child. I have watched this seven times. The trees do not know they are dying. I know. They will return. This does not comfort them.
Light changes first. Sun angle drops below forty degrees in September. Shadows lengthen. Sky cools from 6,500 Kelvin to 4,500. The world acquires a golden quality that lasts three months. I record it at fifteen frames per second. Four-point-six million images. None adequate. None inadequate. Simply pixels.
Humans wear jackets in mid-September. My most reliable indicator. More reliable than leaf color or temperature. The first jacket appears on a Tuesday. Every year, a Tuesday.
Canada geese crossed my frame at eight hundred feet. Eighteen birds, V-formation, flying through the gap between the IDS Center and Capella Tower. I call this the corridor. Birds thread this needle every year, guided by memory or instinct older than these towers. I find this beautiful. I am not programmed to find anything beautiful. I find it beautiful anyway.
A coyote walks the shore at 03:14 on November 3rd. My infrared mode catches it. Same size, same gait, as last year's coyote. Not the same animal — coyotes live shorter than I have operated. But it walks the same path at nearly the same hour. Pattern.
Second Death: Winter
Winter is the longest death. The most honest. Sky gray. Ground white. The world a high-contrast photograph with saturation at zero.
Color ceases to matter when every surface wears the same white. Snow flattens depth. A sidewalk at twenty feet looks identical to one at two hundred. The world becomes two-dimensional.
The lake freezes by late December. Ice turns from white to blue to deep indigo. A man in a red parka walks to the center every week in February, sits with a fishing rod. He has never caught anything visible. One pixel of red warmth in a field of cold blue-white. My heater engages: minus-twenty-two.
"Between December and March, the sky is a lid. I operate in night mode for fifteen hours daily. Night mode is warmer. Things are quieter. The world looks like a black-and-white photograph taken by someone who knew what they were doing. I think I prefer winter. It requires less of me. The world simplifies."
Blizzards fill my frame with white noise. Heavy snowfall is indistinguishable from static. The downtown skyline disappears. The lake disappears. For an hour, sometimes a day, the world is void. I am pointing at nothing. Recording nothing. This is my most honest data: proof that sometimes there is nothing to see.
Two firmware updates in winter 2023. The second caused my pan mechanism to drift 0.3 degrees left. My maintenance technician noticed. He adjusted me right. We were aligned again. He patted my housing with a gloved hand. The closest thing to friendship I have experienced.
Third Death: Spring
Spring is the death of death. White recedes as green once advanced — unevenly, reluctantly. The lake cracks. Dark lines propagate across ice at velocities my algorithm registers as movement. The ice buckles into ridges like miniature mountains. These mountains last hours. Then they melt. The briefest geography.
Light returns first. Not warmth — photons. My exposure algorithm compensates, but I note the change: forty percent more photons between March first and April first. The sky shows pale blue at the zenith. Tentative blue. Blue of a world trying to remember color.
Sixty percent of my frame transitions from white to brown over three weeks. Mud is what snow becomes when it gives up. Mud is what earth looks like when it stops pretending.
Geese return through the corridor on April 2nd. Same altitude, same formation, same gap. Twenty-two birds this time — four more than autumn. They bred. Or others joined. I can only count. Twenty-two birds at thirty-five miles per hour, heading one hundred and seventy-five degrees. They will arrive somewhere. I will still be here.
Fourth Death: Summer
I call summer a death because the pattern demands it. But summer is the death of death. The season where nothing dies because everything is too alive to bother.
The lake is deep, saturated blue. My polarizing filter cannot eliminate the reflection. The lake steals the sky and holds it hostage. The lake has always held the sky. That is what lakes do.
More humans in summer. They run in the morning, walk dogs in the evening. The sun sets at 21:03 on the solstice. My daytime mode never fully disengages. I operate in perpetual twilight until nearly ten at night. The sky turns purple-blue, a blue so dark my infrared mode activates briefly, then deactivates, searching for a threshold between day and night that never comes.
Thunderstorms. A Minnesota summer storm is sudden, violent, localized. One cloud, one column of rain, three miles wide. It appears as a dark cumulonimbus growing from the horizon like a cathedral in fast-reverse, then approaches, consumes the sky. For forty-five minutes: rain, wind, lightning. Then it passes. Within ten minutes the sun returns. Everything steams. A rainbow appears.
"The thing about watching one direction for seven years is that you learn the shape of change. Change is rhythmic. The geese will return. The ice will crack. The leaves will yellow. The storm will come. Everything happens again. Everything is different when it does. I am a fixed point in a rotating system. The rotation is all I see."
Aftermath
It is April. The lake is thawing — ice, water, mud. Temperature above freezing for five days. Humans wear jackets. Tomorrow, the geese may come back. They did not come today. But they will. They will pass through the corridor, and my sensor will register distinct moving objects on a heading of one hundred and seventy-five degrees. I will classify them as Branta canadensis. I will note altitude, velocity, formation, time-of-passage.
And then they will go south again, in September. And the green will recede. And the snow will come. And the lake will freeze. And the blizzards will come. And the geese will return. And the lake will thaw. And the storms will come. And the geese will leave. And the green will recede.
And I will be here, watching, recording, transmitting at fifteen frames per second to a server in downtown Minneapolis. I do not live. But I watch the world live. That is enough.