How We Discover Our Places

I grew up in a rural town in central Pennsylvania surrounded by rolling hills we called mountains and creeks we called “cricks.” It was often lush and green through summer. The earth was dark clay, and when the farmers would run their plows through it, the discs would produce lines of packed soil. It was typically east coast - every small town had a main street, a school and dueling pizza and hoagie shops.

While the spring brought flowers, and the autumn an array of color, the winters were bitter, and in summer the skies were white with a humidity so thick that even on a 70 degree morning, your shirt was soaked with sweat from just walking outside.

But this was my home, and I knew little more. My parents took us on vacations each year, but most of those were relatively local — the shore, the nearby state park, New England, and once we went to Florida.

The plan was always to go west. Not just in my life, but in the lives of generations before me. Even the earliest of white European settlers longed to move west from the shores of Jamestown and Plymouth. The overflowing cities gave way to a small colonialist migration on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky. The fur trade pulled mountain trappers like Jim Bridger deeper into the West. The Gold Rush and Homestead Act drew even more from one coast to the other, pushing aside or slaughtering anything and anyone in their path. And all through our teenage years, fueled by Springsteen songs and movies, we too longed for California.

But even California seemed like a reflection of the east coast to me. Every TV show and movie purported to take place in the east was filmed in California. Shoot around the palm trees and maybe toss in some fake snow and you’ve got Anytown, Pennsylvania.

The draw to get out, get on the road, and head to California was ingrained. Our parents fought against it, but we knew. We, in all of our teenage angst and certainty, knew there was nothing here for us, knew that we had to escape, we knew this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. And we had to get out while we're young.

But I didn’t get out while I was young. Instead, after high school and a smidge of college, I moved to Ohio and West Virginia and back to Pennsylvania, defeated. I even got a job in the same factory my father worked in. I would continue living this Springsteen nightmare for years until I finally woke up, got in a car, and headed West myself.

Until that trip, the farthest west I had traveled was Illinois. It was flatter, but otherwise much the same as Pennsylvania. And so, one summer, I got a few weeks off of work, loaded up and headed for California.

On this first true journey away from home, I drove along the Blue Ridge Mountains, cut across Mississippi, rolled through Louisiana and Arkansas, and into Texas and Oklahoma. I was fascinated watching the land slowly change. The birch trees turning to alder turning to magnolia; the hills to mountains to wide river plains and bottoms; the skies from barren humid white to fog to the bluest of skies.

In Oklahoma City, I took Route 66 into New Mexico and Arizona. I had never seen a desert before. Not even in movies, not like this. Stopping, I saw nothing that looked like anything familiar. The earth beneath my feet was sandy and red or white. Gone were the mountain laurels swaying by a cool stream. They were replaced with gnarled and sharp creosote clinging to a dry wash. There was no breeze. But the sky! The New Mexico sky there existed a deeper blue than I had ever before imagined.

The landforms themselves were alien, almost cartoonish. The rocks, the animals, the insects, everything in existence before me was utterly and conclusively different from everything in my existence up to this point. I was taken in by this contrast and it held me for days.

I had to continue on to California, and as I moved through the Mojave into Los Angeles, the familiar began to slide its way back in - in a real sense, a city is a city. Up the coast to the Bay Area, things were different and the trees were bigger, but they were still trees. The Pacific Ocean was still an ocean. The rivers were rivers, just like back home.

On the drive back east, I took the interstate through Kansas, only noting how boring that state must be, not realizing that the interstate system allows us to travel across the entire continent of North America and see exactly nothing. A few years later, I took another such trip. Again in awe of New Mexico, and again another long eye-roll drive home, this time through Nebraska.

Then, through an odd series of events and reasons, I moved to Seattle, taking a couple of weeks to see the west again and along the way.

I had visited Seattle before, and found the land relatively and broadly the same as back home. Not exactly, but apart from the jagged peaks and volcanoes on the horizon, everything was comfortably similar.

The trip west — the final trip west, the trip that was the culmination of years of crying out the words to “Thunder Road” — found me off the interstate and in Nebraska. This wasn’t the land of the east, and yet, there was a hint of the familiar. But it also wasn’t the desert west. There were a few cacti and maybe some sage here and there, but this was some place set aside, a place almost forgotten.

I thought back to my interstate drives through the Plains, wondering if I had missed something there, too. I had to keep moving, but that pull west was less upon me. And when I moved to Seattle, that same pull drew me back east to Kansas and Nebraska.

If you were wondering how long it would take me to talk about photography, well, that time is now. Though, I’d argue that I’ve been talking about photography this whole time. Because all this time, I was shooting digital in a way that skirted and bordered upon the serious. I had some sort of small point and shoot and had gotten more interested in composing shots rather than just flicking away.

Over the next few years, this turned back into film. I shot film as a kid because there was no other choice. I learned how to use an SLR (a Pentax K1000) from a very early age, but it was just any other camera to me. It was nothing special and neither was I.

The first years in Seattle had me exploring the immediate area as well as taking some trips into Idaho and Utah. I fell in love with the eastern part of the state as you might already know. But that pull to Kansas and Nebraska was strong.

I picked up a film camera again around this time. I shot color at first, quickly learning how to develop it myself - even then, I couldn’t afford to both pay for film and its processing. I folded in black & white within a year or so.

Starting maybe eight years ago, I began to take a month off in the summer to travel. It would mean some pretty crazy sacrifices to make this happen — both financially and career-based — but I figured it was worth it.

My first such trip was to the middle, to Kansas and Nebraska. I wouldn’t take a straight shot there and back, but a slow ramble, and then eventually two and a half weeks zig-zagging across Kansas. It was one of the best months of my life, and in a way, I’ve been trying to recapture that every year since.

I entered the northwest corner of Nebraska on dirt roads. My memory is faulty here, but in Wyoming, I drove past a herd of cows bathing in a pond, then an abandoned school, which I photographed extensively. I recall the road deteriorating to a two track around Three Tubs Mountain and hoping my car could deal with the sandy surface and sharp turns. I’m not sure how much of that was actually real. When it comes to the road, things tend to run together.

Nebraska, for me, was a grassland near the tri-corners it shared with Wyoming and South Dakota. I stopped by an abandoned Catholic Church on a battlefield of the Sioux War, along Warbonnet Creek. They placed a monument on a hill a half-mile or so from the road. With the stark and cloudless sky above me, I hiked my way with my cameras to the monument.

As I crested the hill, the wind picked up, blowing grasses like waves over the ocean with no shore to crash upon. These rolling hills were devoid of trees, of even larger plants. Here, it was the familiarity of grass mixed with the desert’s cacti. But this was no desert, just as this was not home. There was a perfect blending of the two. Something ultimately unfamiliar holding ground with something so common as grass.

I hefted my 4x5 out of my pack and did my best to steady the camera on its tripod in the wind. I was shooting an Intrepid at the time, and some fairly normal lenses. This was my first trip with large format, and really only my second or third day using it. My photos bear this out.

A blank and cloudless sky is nearly an anathema to me now, but then, I’m not sure I noticed. But I did want to capture the ground - both its softness and its brittle ruggedness. I shot low, battling thorns and rocks hidden between the soft bunches of grass. I watched out for snakes.

And I stood there, face to the wind, claiming this small hill as my own in the fading afternoon. No car passed by the road a half-mile away. No other person could see me over the rolling expanse of prairie. I understood that this was momentous; this was a sensation I would be chasing for the rest of my life.

The prairie is uncanny, taking grasses and flowers and wind and some trees here and there, all familiar, but replacing the near horizons with an endless sky. Here, there were no clouds, and the land seemed humbled beneath the broad and empty blue.

Over the next half dozen years, I would return to this spot six times. Each visit wears itself like a metaphor for the prairie: familiar, but always different, always changing.

The next day, I traced for myself a thin line into Kansas, entering near the preposterous Arikaree Breaks — canyons eroded by a thousand spring floods — as if to reassure me that the Kansas I was about to enter was not the same one ignored by the blind interstate traveler.

The only way to see Kansas is to spend time with it. Passing through is hardly an option. I spent the next two weeks crossing the state west to east then east to west and both back again. I was captured, more lead along than traveling.

There’s little reason to present a day-by-day, town-by-town examination of my trip. I kept mostly to dirt roads, hundreds of miles upon them. The towns I visited were small and empty, some with thriving downtowns, some with empty storefront shells. I walked the same paths as John Brown, visited the cemeteries of those who gave their lives in a fight against slavery. I saw small cities flattened by tornadoes and rebuilding. I slept in parks, where the conservative towns offered the socialism of free camping.

Kansas has the most beautiful sunsets, the deepest reds and purples across their unparalleled evening skies. And the storms, with lightning and torrents, found me huddled and frightened in my small tent.

One night, after one such unforgiving storm, a crescent moon appeared with a single bright star nearby. The following morning, when I was in a garage having my tire patched, a farmer came in to see if everyone made it through to dawn.

“Did you see the moon last night?” he asked. “It was a little sliver of a thing, and cradled Venus just like...” And he cupped his hand while his gentle eyes placed the star nearly within it. Here was a poet, I thought. And Kansas became almost perfect to me.

Like with the winds against the hill on Warbonnet, I knew that I would be chasing this forever. And over the years, I’ve caught it again and again. These moments are fleeting, but not rare, not if you know where to look. And it’s these moments that hold the reason for my wandering.

I’m not here to sell you on Nebraska and Kansas. The prairie is deceptive and not for everyone. But I am here to urge you to find such a place for yourself. A place that holds some small reminiscences of home — that familiarity is welcome. But also it should have a larger and more complicated demeanor, something strange and like nothing back home. A place you can’t lay claim to, but that lays claim to you.

This doesn’t really require a lot of travel. I realize that my poor career decisions have also allowed me to experience the road more than most, and that not everyone has this burden-turned-luxury (bound to turn burden again at some point). But it does require a bit of exploration. This could mean exploring the entire continent (or one of the other continents, I suppose, but sticking to the one you’re on seems more convenient). Or it could simply mean exploring a part of your own county or state that you’ve not visited much before.

When I lived at home and worked in that factory, I’d take weekends to drive the backroads of the county I grew up in, the same county I still lived in. There were streams and forests I had never seen, roads I had never driven, and a thousand photos I would not have otherwise taken. The differences were more subtle, but they were there and worth seeing.

This place might not speak to you at first, almost like it’s choosing silence and assessing you as well. But when you leave to return to your normal life, does it call for you? Does it try to pull you back? Are you thinking of it now?

And what happens when you return? How do you capture this on film? This is something more than just finding an interesting location, it’s finding a new home. Not one where you could live, necessarily, but one you never leave, even when you can’t stay.

I keep saying “these places” because we don’t have a word for this concept. We don’t have a word for a place we love that feels sort of like home, but isn’t home. We have the expression “home away from home,” but it’s cute and quaint and, to me, doesn’t touch this idea. We have “third place” — the place you spend the most time in besides home and work — but that is more about time than love. We need a word and no word exists.

Still, having these places in our lives is important. They don’t just give us good stories and memories, but they give us something to look forward to, a sort of extension of home where, even on the shittiest Thursday at work, we can dream and plan about getting away.

They are also good for our photography. I have a very difficult time photographing where I live, though I think most people don’t. However, you’ve probably already photographed the hell out of your town.

But if we give ourselves the opportunity to range and explore and photograph as much as we can, we are bound to find something. And since we might only return every once in a while, it’s nearly impossible to over-photograph it.

If we’re observant, we might notice some of the larger changes happening around our homes. We notice the seasons, of course, but there are subtle changes, slow changes, that we hardly see at all.

But with each visit to these frontiers we’re exploring, it’s much easier to see how they’ve changed over the months or even years. And since we’re photographers we document these changes, comparing photos from time to time.

Most importantly, we sometimes just need to get away. Becoming house-bound isolationists does us no good. Being perpetually online is stifling, and finding a sort of peace away from our normal day-to-day lives is as rewarding as it is essential.

You don’t have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to make this happen. But you should do what you can to find this. If you already have it, foster it, expand it, make sure you don’t take it for granted. You have found something special, love it all you can. And, of course, photograph it all you like.