A PORTRAIT OF A LANDSCAPE

The recent purchase of a two thousand gigabyte external hard drive for photo archiving purposes has lead me down the tedious road of making back ups of my back ups. A small pleasure I’ve found in this process has been the rediscovery of old images, some of which I shot while on a cross country road trip nearly a decade ago.

I found a handful of black and white film scans, ranging from Yellowstone to Yosemite, from the Badlands to Canyonlands. It is possible that these images, heavy on film grain and contrast, may have been tinted by the distorting lens of nostalgia- but coming across them again after a few years has allowed me to see them with as objective an eye as possible.

I’ve crisscrossed the country by auto and aero a number of times since (even once by train), but this inaugural expedition remains the most memorable: setting out with not much more than a paper map, a full tank of gas, and many rolls of film, intent on coaxing the ghosts of Lewis and Clark from their roadside tombs, rolling down the interstate in an old jeep like a four-ton Sacagawea with a manual transmission.

Camping out in national parks, eating at gas stations, getting rooms in cheap motels every once in a while just to take a shower; inspired equally by Jack Kerouac and John Muir.

I returned with a widened world view, or at least with wide opened eyes, amazed by the country’s sprawling geography and varied topography.

Maybe something can be said for the act of getting lost to find one’s self, of searching for a place to belong and realizing that you belong everywhere, and no where; that your place is the space in between. And that old standby about it not being the destination but the journey that holds true significance? It is tempered by more truth than I knew at the time, and still rings true to myself to this day.

Westward expansion began, in earnest, with the California Gold Rush of 1849. The first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line in 1914, one year after the first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway, was formally dedicated.

In the near-century since the age of the automobile unofficially began, the idea of the open road has become firmly entrenched in our collective pop culture subconscious- a romanticized symbol of the American Dream, synonymous with the notion of freedom and adventure, and roads leading west have held the promise of challenge and discovery, of a new life, of a second chance.

In song and cinema, in literature and legend, our highways become hallowed, the west remains wild. And upon returning east, if we do return, we realize that the true westward expansion is an expansion of the self.