[Note: All of the images in this blog are what I like to call "drive-by" shootings in that they were all taken on the road. Not all were necessarily taken through the car window; in some cases I had time to get out and set up a tripod. Yet, they all indicate how valuable it is to have your camera cocked and at hand at all times.]
A View From the Road (Northeast Kingdom of Vermont)
At the crest of a hill on a rural road somewhere in northwestern Pennsylvania, the sort of road William Least Moon refers to as a “blue highway”, I downshifted my BSA 650 Lightening and carefully rolled off the pavement and into a broad meadow of tall dandelions and timothy. After riding for several hours I was stiff and in need of a stretch. As soon as the bike stopped I noticed how warm it was and so I took off my jacket and laid it across the gas tank. It was a picture postcard spring day. Plump clouds drifted like sheep grazing in a hazy blue sky that appeared to vault over the rolling countryside as though I were looking through a fisheye lens. Off to the north, beyond the low hills quilted in a checkerboard of dark brown and green and bright yellows of newly plowed and fallow fields and fields planted with mustard, Lake Erie shimmered in the mid afternoon heat. About a hundred feet in front of my bike, the meadow sloped gently away and out of sight. A mild gust of air blew up from below the grassy berm of the slope carrying a cloud of dandelion seeds and the faint sound of music and someone singing.
Intrigued and aching for a walk, I locked my saddlebags and threw my jacket over my shoulder. As I descended the slope toward the music I saw a brown river meandering its way north toward the lake. A two-track farm road with a grassy median wound around the bottom of the slope and ended in a broad, freshly mowed field on the bank of the river where there was a large white tent with a throng of people crowded around one side. The rest of the field behind the tent had been turned into a vast parking lot where dozens of cars, trucks, and motorcycles gleamed in the bright sunlight.
Lake Sunrise
When I stepped out of the long grass and into the mowed field the cuffs of my jeans were yellow with dandelion pollen. Apart from a little boy who watched me suspiciously over the shoulder of the man who was holding him, everyone had their backs to me as I approached the crowd. Music blared from loudspeakers on either side of the white, three-sided tent. On a stage, just inside the opening of the shady tent, a musician played an acoustic guitar and sang a familiar country song the title of which I couldn’t recall. Though I wasn’t much of a fan of country music in general, the performer struck me as being exceptionally good, especially for someone entertaining a crowd in a pasture in the middle of a hot summer day more than a hundred miles from the nearest city. There were people seated on folding chairs, lawn chairs, plastic milk crates, lying on blankets, standing with children on their shoulders, there were people singing along and clapping and over to my left, two very lovely, barefoot young women were dancing with each other. Beyond the crowd, over next to the tent, smoke rose from a large BBQ where a brawny, shirtless man with a black beard was apparently selling burgers and hot dogs. That’s when I noticed the barbed wire running alongside the road and a wooden gate on the far side of the tent. Next to the gate there was a man sitting in a high chair under an umbrella. From his position, the tent blocked his view of the hill I had just descended.
Steam on the Fourth Iron
I realized that I had unwittingly managed to crash a concert of sorts by way of the meadow instead of coming through that wooden gate yonder like everyone else and buying a ticket from the man in the high chair. Oh well, I might as well relax and enjoy the show for a while. I walked over and bought a hot dog and a coke from the bearded man and then found a spot not too far from the stage and sat down in the stubble. The musician finished another song and then began announcing the next act. He’d apparently been the opening performer for someone and he took his time getting around to mentioning the name of the main act using superlatives like “father of country gospel”, and “inspiration to legions of folk and country musicians”, etc. Like I said, I didn’t know that much about country music; I preferred the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger, and Paul Simon though there are some so-called country artists who aren’t quite as twangy and who straddle the folk and country realms sufficiently to appeal to me like Emmylou Harris and Kris Kristofferson, for instance. In any case, I was happy to enjoy my hotdog and coke and be on my way. Then I heard the guy on stage say, “…now it’s a great honor to present to you the man in black himself, Johnny Cash, and the darling of traditional folk music, a member of the original Carter family, Ms. June Carter!”
White-tail Buck Waiting to Cross the Road
I stopped chewing my hot dog as the tall, black-clad legend himself stepped into view from behind a small screen in the dark recesses of the tent. With his wife, June Carter, beside him, he strode up to the front of the stage – not more than fifty feet in front of me, and leaned into the microphone. In spite of the heat, I shuddered when the loudspeakers boomed, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
You see, I’ve always been drawn to rebels, people who do their own thing in their own time as we used to say, and I still do. Thoreau, the Beatles, the writings of Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, all informed me that one must transcend convention to find oneself and live a truly genuine life. Which explains why, shortly after that decisive day in the dress shop, I was at John Shaw’s side, along with a gaggle of eager, wannabe nature photographers, trailing behind him and Larry West in the wilds of Michigan’s upper peninsula, hanging on their every word, jotting down all the details of my exposures, soaking up all their hallowed advice like a sprout. John Shaw had reinvented himself; he had walked away from a conventional job as an English teacher and transformed himself into a world-class nature photographer, a job for which there wasn’t even a description at the time, let alone a graduate program or degree!
Autumn and Horsetail Cirrus Clouds at Lake Eden.
Meanwhile, I had just spent three blissful years in graduate school, alternating between summers doing fieldwork in the Florida Keys and analyzing my data and teaching on campus during the academic year. I had a Master’s degree in zoology but no prospects of getting back into that wonderful life of being in nature and somehow expressing myself through nature, academic or otherwise. Disillusioned, I moped around Columbus expecting convention to bail me out. Then, a matter of fact comment John Shaw made over dinner one evening about how to be a productive nature photographer had a profound effect on me. “Go to where there’s a lot of it,” he said. He meant nature but I interpreted his advice to be a personal adjuration to go forth, to find my own environment, and to begin evolving into my particular reality. He might just as well have slapped me.
So now here was, on the road with a few changes of clothes and some toiletries, a Nikon FE2, a Boggen tripod, and a 200mm macro Nikkor in the saddle bags of my bike back up on the hill. A small tent and a sleeping bag were strapped to the sissy bar. In my wallet in my hip pocket I had about $200.00. And just a few feet from me, Johnny Cash was singing “I Walk the Line”.
First Snow on Mt. Washington.
The concert I had stumbled upon was during a time in the eighties when Johnny Cash’s music had temporarily fallen out of favor as it didn’t quite fit the pigeonholes of contemporary country, pop, or folk genres. He wasn’t getting billed in top venues. Defiant and tenacious to say the least, he got by by taking his show on the road and returning to his roots, performing at county fairs, in legion halls, on campuses, and yes, in cow pastures throughout the country, not too proud to appear in the sweltering heat and in downpours on rickety stages under tents and wherever he found admiring audiences. He did whatever he needed to do to keep on doing his own thing. And so would I.
I stretched out in the grass with my head propped on my folded jacket just enough so I could see the stage. I stayed for the entire concert. It was late afternoon when I finally kicked over the engine on my BSA and rolled back onto the highway. As the cool evening wind buffeted my sunburned face, I was as certain about the fact that I was meant to be nowhere else in the universe but right there in that meadow on that very afternoon. What’s more, I was now convinced more than ever that I was on course toward my own unique and creative reality, whatever it may be.
Moose Cow and Calf in Wetland
