About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (32 page)

I
MISS MAKING
photographs. A short while ago I received a call from a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York named May Castleberry. She had just mounted a show called “Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West” and I had been able to provide some minor assistance with it. She was calling now to pursue a conversation we’d begun at the time about Rockwell Kent, an illustrator, painter, and socialist widely known in the thirties, forties, and fifties. She wanted to hang a selection of his “nocturnes,” prints and drawings Kent had made of people under starlit night skies. She was calling to see what I could suggest about his motivation.

Given Kent’s leanings toward Nordic myth and legend and his espousal of Teddy Roosevelt’s “strenuous life,” it seemed obvious to me that he would want to portray his heroic (mostly male) figures against the vault of the heavens. But there were at least two other things at work here, I believed. First, Kent was strongly drawn to high latitudes, like Greenland, where in winter one can view the deep night sky for weeks on end. It was not really the “night” sky, however, he was drawing; it was the sunless sky of a
winter day. Quotidian life assumes mythic proportions here not because it’s heroic, but because it’s carried out beneath the stars.

Secondly, I conjectured, because Kent was an artist working on flat surfaces, he sought, like every such artist, ways to suggest volume, to make the third dimension apparent. Beyond what clouds provide, the daytime sky has no depth; it’s the night sky that gives an artist volume. While it takes an extraordinary person—the light and space artist James Turrell, say—to make the celestial vault visible in sunshine, many artists have successfully conveyed a sense of the sky’s volume by painting it at night.

T
HE CONCEIT CAN
easily grow up in a photographer that he or she has pretty much seen all the large things—the range of possible emotion to be evoked with light, the contrasts to be made by arranging objects in different scales, problems in the third and fourth dimension. But every serious photographer, I believe, has encountered at some point ideas unanticipated and dumbfounding. The shock causes you to reexamine all you’ve assumed about your own work and the work of others, especially the work of people you’ve never particularly understood. This happened most recently for me in seeing the photography of Linda Connor. While working on a story about international air freight, I became so disoriented, flying every day from one spot on the globe to another thousands of miles away, I did not know what time I was living in. Whatever time it was, it was out of phase with the sun, a time not to be dialed up on a watch, mine or anyone else’s.

At a pause in this international hurtling, during a six-hour layover in Cape Town, I went for a ride with an acquaintance. He drove us out to Clifton Bay on the west side of Table Mountain. I was so dazed by my abuse of time that I was open to thoughts I might otherwise never have had. One of those thoughts was that I could recognize the physicality of time. We can discern the physical nature of space in a picture, grasp the way, for example, Robert Adams is able to photograph the air itself, making it
visible like a plein air painter. In Cape Town that day I saw what I came to call indigenous time. It clung to the flanks of Table Mountain. It resisted being absorbed into my helter-skelter time. It seemed not yet to have been subjugated by Dutch and British colonial expansion, as the physical landscape so clearly had been. It was time apparent to the senses, palpable. What made me believe I was correct in this perception was that, only a month before, I’d examined a collection of Linda Connor’s work, a book called
Luminance
. I realized there at Table Mountain that she’d photographed what I was looking at. She’d photographed indigenous time.

I’d grasped Ms. Connor’s photographs in some fashion after an initial pass, but I hadn’t sensed their depth, their power, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the achieve of the thing.” With this new insight I wrote her an excited note, an attempt to thank her for work that opened the door to a room I’d never explored.

One of the great blessings of our modern age, a kind of redemption for its cruelties and unmitigated greed, is that one can walk down to a corner bookstore and find a copy of Ms. Connor’s book. Or of Robert Adams’s
What We Brought: The New World
, or Frans Lanting’s
Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
, or, say, Mary Peck’s
Chaco Canyon: A Center and Its World
, and then be knocked across the room by a truth one had not, until that moment, clearly discerned.

It is more than illumination, though, more than a confirmation of one’s intuition, aesthetics, or beliefs that comes out of the perusal of such a photographer’s images. It’s regaining the feeling that one is not cut off from the wellsprings of intelligence and goodwill, of sympathy for human plight.

I do not know, of course, why the photographers I admire, even the ones I know, photograph, but I am acutely aware that without the infusion of their images hope would wither in me. I feel an allegiance to their work more as a writer than as someone who once tried to see in this way, perhaps because I presume we share certain principles related to the effort to imagine or explain.

It is correct, I think, as Robert Adams wrote me that day, to believe in a community of artists stimulated by and respectful of
one another’s work. But it’s also true that without an audience (of which we’re all a part) the work remains unfinished, unfulfilled. A photographer seeks intimacy with the world and then endeavors to share it. Inherent in that desire to share is a love of humanity. In different media, and from time to time, we have succeeded, I believe, in helping one another understand what is going on. We have come to see that, in some way, this is our purpose with each other.

M
Y MOTHER WAS
bitten by a black widow on the train from Birmingham to Mobile when she was a girl. She held a potted geranium in her lap, a gift for her aunt, and the spider crawled from its leaves and bit her on the finger. She flung the pot away in the aisle and lapsed into a sweating fright with troubled breathing, the passengers solicitous around her. A man in a light-colored seersucker suit, she remembered, stamped the spider out on the floor, steadying himself against the rhythmic sway of the car with a hand on her seat.

I saw a black widow in our garage, a one-car garage narrow as a hallway, built for slender cars of the thirties, with a dirt floor. In the kitchen she shouted, Don’t go near it, do you understand me? Don’t go near it. Not until she could get someone to kill it. I didn’t. I hunkered a few feet from its web, a boy with a flashlight
craning his head to see the red hourglass, a chalice of poison it seemed.

I was spanked hysterically when she found me fascinated as a bird over a reflection in water. Another man came and killed the black widow, swatting at it with a board, missing and missing, the spider running away, the man shouting at my mother to get back, get back. I watched through a living-room window shrouded in curtains.

He said he killed it. He showed her and left.

On a shelf at the rear of the garage I found boxes of checks, some filled in with my mother’s cursive. Inside another were checks with no handwriting. We’re rich, Packard, I told my closest friend. You write in whatever you want. I had seen it time and again at the grocery, at the hardware store. I had Packard’s wonder. You can even, I said, write in a hundred dollars. More, a thousand, and go to the bank. They give it to you.

He said yes, his voice carrying an image of the horizon over the ocean.

Yes, I said. We just write in these spaces, copying the words from the other checks.
One Thousand Dollars and No Cents
.

We put the checks back on the shelf. We had to make a plan. We had to pack the bags that we would tie to the seats and handlebars of our freshly oiled bikes.

O
N A
J
ULY AFTERNOON
with a wind riding up the skirts of long-leaved eucalyptus, swirling the leaves and clusters of seed buttons, a sound that by hiding and then revealing the tree, hiding and revealing, made me flush with expectations I could not explain, three men in a convertible ran over my dog. His life ended abruptly, a painting cut open. I rocked his head in my lap and crooned, as if I had the power to give life. Would a bowl of water change it, a bowl of food? And who were these men in the lime green car, a species known to every southern California boy, 1949 Ford, idling now in the middle of the road, top down, brake lights lit up, the three of them looking back over the seats? They
got out and walked back, leaving both doors ajar, walked beneath the towering eucalyptus in their neat khakis and short-sleeved white shirts. Navy boys. Mother had a hand on my shoulder but I couldn’t hear her words, every sound but the wind in the trees shut out. The men closed on us slowly, their eyes on the dog. I pulled more of him across my lap. Another man, a neighbor, floated in. They took the dog from me.

Afterward I sat in the shade underneath the eucalyptus, a space emptied by the absence of the dog, looking at the spot in the road where we had been. I did not find him. No one I asked said. I did not know where the dog was. Ever.

I
THOUGHT IT WAS
a shirt in the water wrapping itself around my legs in the bubbling surf, languid as wash in a bucket, until the punctures began. I lost my balance, fell over shrieking in the wavelets on a flat beach in inches of water. A stinging like nettles closed on my calves and ankles, my hands still moving toward it curiously as I fell, the bursts like a lash of hot pins up one thigh and across my back. I fell into the cool water shrieking, the clouds spinning away and away. I curled up like a shrimp in the wet sand until someone came, shrieking.

Portuguese man-of-war they told my mother, who could not be consoled, who mashed my hair with her stroking. Weeping, cradling, possessing me until the ambulance came. I remember lying down inside, relief in the purity of the refrigerated sheets, crying in the humiliation of my vomit.

P
ACKARD’S PARENTS
were away. We pelted the trunks of peach trees in the orchard with fallen fruit, ground the peaches in each other’s face, smeared each other’s hair with the slime, then kicking and beating each other’s temples with our fists we fought in earnest, wrenching buttons off, one taunting, the other charging the taunter, a flailing outcry at the misshapen stupidity that now made our friendship.

I lay still on my back, redolent of peaches, bruised, not interested now in the pursuit of anger, forgetting what it had been about—a touch in the wrong place, spitting the pulp at each other, so funny at first. I heard
thwack
, a while, then
thwack
again. Then
thwack
. Packard, throwing pitches hard in the driveway. A space opened up, a room to step into, the possibility of an apology. We would be the same again. The misunderstanding, so dumb.

Packard held a kitten by its tail, winding it overhead like a stone in a sling before firing it at the garage door, where it struck the planks above another crawling slowly in a circle.

I
NTO THE BAG
I put one pair of socks, my collection of bird feathers wrapped in toilet paper, two candy bars, and five of the white checks from the box. In my wallet I had only the one check, written out after many tries in imitation of my mother’s hand with her fountain pen, my name and the money. I tied the bag to the handlebars of the bicycle with string and rode away down the street under the eucalyptus trees. Tomorrow, my mother had said, we would get another dog.

I
N
J
UNE OF
1965 I left a friend’s home in Santa Fe at dawn, drove north through Abiquiu, where Georgia O’Keeffe was then living, passed slowly through a lovely valley high in the San Juans that holds the town of Chama, and turned west for Durango. I crossed the Utah border west of Dove Creek, and ate lunch in the Mormon stillness of Monticello.

I was twenty, headed for Wyoming to work the summer on a friend’s ranch, wrangling horses. And I was innocently in love, as perhaps you can only be at that age. The young woman lived in Salt Lake City. Anticipating each encounter—with her, beginning that night in Salt Lake, and the months afterward working with horses in Jackson Hole—made the sense of covering miles quickly in good weather an exquisite pleasure.

The highway north from Monticello runs ribbon-smooth
through bleak, wild country. When I left the cafe I fell back into a rhythm with it. The performance of the car, the torque curves through all four gears and so the right moment to shift, was well-known to me. Flying down U.S. 191 and double-clutching out of the turns eased the irritation that had grown in me in Monticello, under the stares of cafe patrons. “No, sir, we don’t serve any coffee,” the waitress had said. And, “No, sir, we don’t have any ashtrays. We don’t smoke here.”

I rifled over the road course, holding a steady seventy through the turns and rises. The only traffic was a pickup or a car, sometimes a tractor-trailer rig, every six or eight minutes. I had a Ruger Single-Six .22 magnum pistol under the seat. In a leather case in the trunk was a rifle. In those days in that country a young man traveled with guns as a matter of course, with no criminal intent.

The two-lane highway passed clean beneath the hiss of new tires. Wind coming through the windows vibrated softly in the interior of the car. I remember the sight of the chrome tachometer, fitted to the steering column, gleaming in the sunshine, the spotless black nap of the floor carpets. I can recall the feel of the rolled seat covers under my thighs. In the seat opposite me sat my dog, a mongrel coyote I’d caught in the woods of southern Michigan as a pup. We’d driven the country for days at a time together, trips to New York City, to Helena, to Louisiana, the wind roaring at the windows, the tires whispering and thudding over rain-slicked concrete roads, the V-8 engine with its four-barrel carburetor, guttering through straight exhaust pipes.