September 29, 2004

Dear Friends,

I've taken my non-camera on two recent trips and have photos from both on the same roll of imaginary kodachrome.  In June, I went home to my parent's farm in Michigan to sell my father's woodworking tools and the first pictures are from that trip.  The rest are from a backpacking trip through Central America.  Each photo does not exist and is 4x5, glossy.

Michigan:

1.  I wanted pictures of my dad's workshop—a converted chicken coop filled with the equipment and hardware he used to make the furniture that defined his life.  It’s been a year since his death, and dust and cobwebs cover the machines, leaves have blown in through the gaps in the wall.  This photo is a detail of small honey jars filled with nails and bolts but I underestimated the darkness and the photo is completely black.

2.  I never thought about needing a flash, his workshop so familiar to me that I can navigate it easily in the dim light.  This is supposed to be a wall of rusted wood clamps but is another black photo.

3.  Saws, drills.  Black.

4.  His hand tools, with stern wood handles, perfectly arranged as if he assumed he would get up out of his cancer bed and start another piece of furniture the next day.  Black.

5.  His workbench, another black photo except a small square of light in the lower left of the frame.  It’s from a window above the bench, overlooking a field, the detail outside washed out to pure white light.  I wanted photos of my father’s world but I got these pictures back after the shop had been dismantled and it’s too late now.  This little square of light is the only image I have.

6.  A waitress and a fry cook at JS Hamburgs, outside Traverse City.  I borrowed my mother’s car and have driven north and stopped here because ‘hamburgs’ without the ‘er’ made me laugh.  The fry cook looks exactly like an old boyfriend of mine but only has one tooth remaining.  To take this picture, I created an elaborate lie about a rich uncle looking for diner investments when all I really wanted was a photo of my ex with his teeth bashed in.

7.  My aging mother in a lawn chair at the local high school’s Independence day festival.  Behind her, a stock car driver signs autographs.  Above her, a Midwest airshow, out of frame.  Not able to see the planes, the photo is simply of her looking toward heaven, laughing.

8.  This photo is from the curb at the Grandville Fourth of July Parade.  Farm equipment, city service vehicles (a street sweeper covered with flags), homemade floats pass slowly, throwing candy to the children.  A tractor from a local church group rewrites a Budweiser commercial with magic markers on posterboard, “For All You Do, Christ’s Blood’s For You”.  It’s a little blurry but you can still make it out.

9.  The garage sale outside my parent’s chicken coop selling all my father’s woodworking tools.  My mother is inside, hiding in a closet, this last memory of my dad too painful to watch.  The photo shows all the old tools, laid out on folding tables from the church, each with a shred of masking tape.  I don’t know why I took this picture, it was too painful for me too.

10.  My nephew, bathing his newborn son on the bathroom floor.  The kid smiles right as I snap the photo and with the linoleum and harsh lighting, the photo instantly becomes one of those family snapshots emailed to grandmothers.  It’s cliché, but means something more when you love the people.

11.  Frustrated with having no way to leave my mother’s farmhouse, I clean out a shed and find the desk light from my old bedroom.  On the back, I had used a labelmaker to write “Every Chain Is A Leash” when I was 12 years old…the idea that I measure everything that restricts me with how much freedom I can squeeze from it.  I still pull away from everything that wants to hold me.  I place the light in the tall grass behind the barn for this photo on my 46th birthday, the words still eerily true.

Central America:

12.  The jungle rivers steam from the hot mineral springs near Volcano Arenal and I’ve waded out to a giant lily pad made out of poured concrete, the chipped green paint slowly being replaced by moss.  A rancher boy passing on a horse took this photo of me sprawled on it. Laughing, he said, "What an ugly giant frog".

13.  Every farm town I ramble through has its local pollo place and they paint a cartoon chicken on the side to advertise.  I´ve seen cowboy chickens, ballerina chickens, soccer chickens.  This photo was taken next to a rural bus station near the Nicaraguan border.  It’s a chicken in a space suit.

14.  It’s raining so hard in the jungle that the corrugated metal roof of my shack vibrates, so I shot this weird photo of my cabin ceiling.  You can see the vibration, but it just looks like I wiggled the camera.

15.  A sign in broken english on the beach in Nicoya, “Let Your Valuables Into A Safety Place.”  I took the photo and thought, ¨Yeah, let them in.¨

16.  An Italian surfer couple that had a room next to me.  Their sex is torrential, she has no problem screaming, and with only quarter-inch plywood and a screen window separating us, we share our audio worlds openly.  I get revenge by snoring.  They have big toothy grins in this photo.  If you look closely at his shorts you can see why.

17.  A sloth in a bamboo tree near Quepos.  They move in strange slow motion, every action takes minutes.  I wasn´t really this close, by the way, I cheated and used the imaginary zoom.

18.  I've climbed up a rotting, collapsing lifeguard tower to take this photo of a central American sunset.  The tide is high and the beach has completely disappeared, the ocean rises to the trees.  Of the three elements that make my world right now, one hides twice a day.

19.  Mickey Mouse framed in rusted metal.  I’m laying next to Antonio in the bottom of a bunk bed in a metal shack on the edge of the beach.  The foam mattress above us is wrapped in dirty Disney fabric and a dozen Mickey Mouses look down on us through the rusted metal slats like cartoon angels.  Antonio took this picture with the flash and the moment is sweet to me, but I can´t publish the photo due to Disney copyright restrictions.

20.  I´m standing at a muddy crossroads bustop near Quesada.  It´s been raining for three days and the clothes in my backpack are soaked, heavy with the weight of water. I set the timer on my camera but am too slow and exhausted to get back in place in time.  In the photo, you can see my back, hunched and dirty.  By 50 a man has the face that he deserves, and although I´m not there yet, I already have the back and shoulders I deserve.  I think about the phrase "world weary" and here in the mud, filthy, hungry, stooped, waiting for a steamy crowded rural bus, I think maybe I have the heart I deserve as well.

Much love to all you.

Scott