Late last week I checked myself out for a couple of days, made my way to a little piece of river that I know in the nearby mountains and went fishing.  It was a much needed break after the last few weeks of back-to-back shoots.  Not that I wanted to stop shooting, rather that part of the method of making pictures is giving yourself time to let your brain settle down so that you can return to the camera with fresh eyes.  In the heat of the day –the time when the trout are flipping you the finger and would sooner eat a shoe than whatever fly you’ve laid down on the river –I took my pickup on a little trip down the banks to a place where the chokecherries put roots right into the water.  About the healthiest trees you’ll find and, after a few hours of wrangling the bitter berries from their stems and a slip-and-fall that put a tear in the ass-end of my new pants (why I wear new clothing to do this stuff is something that puzzles me, too), I found myself with 50 pounds of fruit and a truck-bed full of wild hops.  The hops are always a bonus, something that I never use for anything other than for the experience of driving home in the twilight, sliding the rear window of the truck open so that the crisp smell of the warmed flowers carry through the cab as I turn down the empty two lane road that spills back into the flatland that I call home.  It is the smell of dusk, of the changing of seasons, and each year I hang bunches of the flowers under my eves until the fall wind blows the dried seeds into my yard where they sprout new in the spring.

It was a good wind-down for the weekend, most of which I spent bouncing between cleaning and stemming chokecherries and a couple other events that friends around town put on.  Denver-based Slight Harp played a going-away show for two of their members (Alejandro, pictured above).  My friend Lynne, Ms. Mortuary Science herself, put on a little tennis match which proved to be the only place in town where you could find cigarettes, beer, and tennis rackets simultaneously clutched in the same set of hands.

Tomorrow starts the grind again, two pitches that have to be out the door by wednesday and prepping for another trip back to Wyoming in mid September.  And I’ve gotta find a wholesaler who will sell me 50 pounds of honey for the chokecherry bonanza.  Those bitter little fruits are like the rhubarb of the berry world.  Once they’ve found sugar, the effort is worth it.

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To me, it’s strange how hotels flavor travel.  They’re like department stores in the sense that they want you to feel at home when you’re not.  Everything is familiar, everything is, by design, exactly the same as the last chain you stayed in.  The corner table, the phone on the nightstand, the hotel hangers that you can’t steal, fresh towels, continental breakfast and the deep red and brown wallpapers, the black-out blind and the sheer curtain that rests right under it  –they are the same in every other hotel in the country.  We’re creatures of comfort and, I guess, the biggest irony of travel is that we seek out things that are familiar when we’re somewhere unfamiliar.  It’s a kind of travel that has its place and, at least in the last few weeks, the kind of travel I’ve tried to avoid.

In the last month I’ve lived out of a rental car, slept in the bed of my pickup, seen what morning looks like in the parking lot of K Mart, Wal Mart, truck stops, rest stops, and skipped around security to sleep in a livestock stall at the Wyoming State Fair.  Stall #6, in the old building near the red barn, to be precise.  Guess it’s been an immersion of sorts, the way a place can just wash over you, the way you notice subtle changes, the quality of light, ambient sounds, the way the air feels on your face in the morning.  It’s approaching place as though it were a poem to be lived and not prose to be memorized and, for me anyhow, it puts my mind in the right frame to see the quiet, little things that are common to the greater tenor of our Americana.

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The car doesn’t make a sound as it begins to decelerate.  It’s two in the morning and ‘Interstate’ doesn’t exactly mean much in Wyoming at that hour.  There are no cars on the horizon, no glow from beyond the the hills in either direction.  The digital fuel gauge reads 1/8th of a tank, though the rental is clearly out of gas.  My fingers fumble at the hazard lights.  The conclusion is so foregone that I can’t even summon the energy to curse as the car slows onto the shoulder.  Trekking a half mile to the south, I crest the top of the hill that separates the dead automobile from the great, black expanse of the landscape beyond.  The road is empty enough that I can safely walk up the middle of the highway as I try to find the nearest mile marker.  Post 38.  My ragged road map puts my little life raft some 30 miles from Cheyenne and an almost equal distance from Chugwater, a tiny municipality mired in straits dire enough to compel its management to offer near-free land to anyone who would move there.  For the price of the wrecker and five gallons of gas, I could just buy a lot in the forsaken town and stay there.  Hertz be damned, they can come get their little lying machine if they want it back.

Popping the hatchback on the car, I sit down and face toward empty lanes of traffic.  My boots flash on and off, heeled against the asphalt as the tail lights flicker their little jig.  The sky is deep, clear enough to see through to the bottom, those tiny specs of stars that fill the gaps between the brighter, more visible ones that the city is accustomed to.  Every few seconds a slice of light like a scalpel cuts through the dark sky.  A meteor shower is well underway.  I smile at the second edge of the sword; I would have driven right under it or slept right through it or otherwise seen it and promised myself that I’d watch it next year when it came around again.

I call the tow, ask for gas and sit back for the show, full well expecting not to see the wrecker ’til the light of dawn.  It’s a 30 minute drive to Cheyenne, but getting someone out of bed and motivated to make the journey is the kind of convenience that knows its boundaries.

An hour passes.  Then another.  The only people to stop pull up in a Towncar, artists on their way to Denver.  The passenger’s name is latin, though I can’t quite recall.  TIno or Tito or Rodrigo or Esteban.  Dominican, I presume.  But I don’t ask.  He opens the cooler between him and the woman driving, pulling out a beer to compliment the one that he’s holding in his other hand.  He offers it to me through the open window as we collectively come to the conclusion that there’s not much they can do to help me.  I turn down the beer, afraid to undo the truck stop coffee that’s sustained me to this point.  We don’t have a hose to siphon any of their gas and there’s no space in their car to take me into town.  It’s packed to the hilt with boxes and trinkets, a cooler full of beer, and the two gypsy-souled people mad enough to stop.  I tell them there’s a tow headed for me, which, as if summoned by the words, arrives on cue.

The Domincans pull away as an unkept man hops down, standing on the fuel tank under the door of the wrecker.  He’s already flipped the PTO.  The hydraulics angle the flatbed down towards the car.  I yell up to him that I only called for gas.  He quietly curses, thinks it over, and offers to tow me to town for the same price.  There’s no gas can in his truck, the details of my initial call apparently caught up in the cogs of the graveyard shift at the tow company.  Within minutes, he’s got the car up on the flatbed, chained into place and we’re off, jogging through Wyoming’s pre-dawn toward the nearest filling station.  The shape of the mountains to the west come through in purples and blues, the deepest shadows still black as the man tells me about the races in Cheyenne, how the owner of the track is too cheap to do basic upkeep to the place.  It’s costing the track good racers, people won’t pay entrance fees to put their cars on a piece-of-shit track, spectators won’t pay ticket fees to watch those that will.  It’s a spiral that builds its own negative momentum until the nobody cares to come to Wyoming anymore.  There’s another track a couple hours east in Nebraska and, out there, the owner is a man who sees the longview, who knows what it takes to bring in good drivers.  The people will always follow the good ones.

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Just got back from a two-day adventure celebrating the 27th birthday of a Denver friend.  Her party turned out about a dozen people for a camping trip near the Holy Cross Wilderness Area in the White River National Forest, just west of Vail.  Pretty incredible country.  Most of the folks who came up made a day hike that took us on a nine-mile trek across two mountain passes through a series of alpine lakes that sit just at timberline.  For those of you reading this at lower elevations, timberline is this peculiar point on taller mountain where the trees just stop growing.  In Colorado, it’s at about 11,000 feet, a little over two miles above sea-level.

The hike turned out to be a little more of an ass-kicker than I had anticipated.  Turns out that the gallon of water that I drank over the course of the day was about half what I needed.  Spent the last hour of the hike is a bit of a dehydrated haze which took me down for the rest of the evening.   Recovering well today and, after looking through the pictures, I’m glad I did it.

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Been so busy with other work lately that I’ve found myself with quite a backlog of material to share from recent weeks.  The easiest pieces to check off are the bits that have been published, including this shoot of a young Colorado girl who is one of tens of thousands of immigrant-children who stand to be positively impacted by the passage of the federal DREAM Act this fall.  The Act comes before both chambers of Congress and essentially affords children of ‘good moral character’ who have been in the United States for more than five years and who have graduated from an American high school a path towards permanent residency.  Their residency hinges on completion of either college education or military service.

For immigrants with the academic credentials to attend college, the DREAM Act affords them the opportunity for in-state tuition as well as federal student loans (two things currently unavailable under federal law).  The biggest tragedy of the status quo is that an estimated 65,000 immigrant-students graduate high school each year and are unable to attend college.  In a twist of unintended consequences, these intelligent, assimilated young men and women remain in the United States as part of a hidden underclass of English-speaking, Americanized, undocumented immigrants.

The thing that is particularly challenging about the Act is how contentious this issue is.  Of all proposed immigration legislation, this is a no-brainer.  As opponents to immigration reform are keen to remind us, many undocumented immigrants have made the journey to the United States of their own volition, knowingly broaching the laws of the United States in doing so; their children, however, have not.  The Act, in its essence, gives a no-fault waiver to children who had no say in how they entered the United States and offers society the ability to harness the talent and enthusiasm that would otherwise go wasted.

The Act was also part of the focus of Luceo’s recent group project, Still Hoping, available here: www.stillhoping.com

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Trying to catch up on old work this evening.  I’ve been shooting a near-booked schedule for the last couple weeks.  Found myself in three different states, spent a night sleeping in an empty horse stall at the Wyoming State Fair, pulled an all-nighter in Kansas chasing nocturnal creatures for the Audubon Society’s magazine, picked up a rental car that ran out of gas 30 miles from anywhere at 2 am in Wyoming, realized that the particular car I rented showed 1/8th of a tank of gas when it was really on E, spent the night on the side of the interstate photographing the stars while I waited for the tow service to bring me some gas –all the while making a list in my head of all the things waiting for me to catch up on when I got home.

Blogging a couple recent assignments chalks up as one of the easier things on that list (blogging the bigger projects I’ve been shooting is another story).

This is Connie Paeglow an advocate of the Five Wishes advanced directive form.  The Five Wishes program is designed to facilitate end-of-life decisions for  people facing issues related to death and dying.  Paeglow became engaged with the program during the death of her late husband in 2003.  She credits the program with helping her through the process of discussing difficult issues with her husband and his family.

Looks like it’ll be a quick turnaround.  I’m heading to Wyoming tomorrow morning at 5 am.  Planning to be back to Colorado on Saturday night just in time to turn back around and head out to another assignment in Scott City, Kansas.  Editors, only 300 miles to Tulsa –and don’t act like you’ve never wanted to send a photographer to Tulsa.

Round 2, the second lucha that I’ve been to in the last month.  This time, the capstone to almost 48 hours of back-to-back shooting.  Hard to believe that that morning I woke up under an open sky, way up in the mountains inside a sleeping bag that was just a little too light for the late summer nights.  Curled up, I was cold for the first part of the darkness, caught in that semi-sleep that you get when your body is not quite comfortable enough to fall off into a deep sleep.  I stayed that way until a lucid vision stole away the frigid air.  Someone walked in out of the darkness, quietly covering me in a blanket.  I could feel the weight of the heavy fabric wrap me tight against the ground.  Wool.  Thick and heavy with the smell of my grandmother’s basement, the way that linens feel after decades of sitting neatly folded in a chest or on a closet shelf.  And then there was a warmth that started in my lungs, spreading out through my limbs, steam moving through pipes.  The night was no longer cold and the dream gave way to sleep until the purple hues of morning and the chill of the dew that had settled on my face woke me to a new day. 

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