81 | Winter

1971 | Near Mankato, Minnesota

1971 | Near Mankato, Minnesota

I’m from a warmer coastal place, so my time in South Dakota was a new treat, feeling the cold but comfortably dry winter air.

On one penetratingly clear December day, I drove south to the University of Kansas to introduce myself to the gracious Jim Enyeart, the nearest photographer I knew of. Along the way, I stopped for gas, and getting out of my car, I slipped and fell on the thin ‘black’ ice. It snapped into my head that I had just driven across three states in these conditions…

This picture was made a little later on an eastbound outing, where I gained a deep appreciation for the prairie highways, graded and bermed-up to a raised roadway which keeps the surface dry in the rains and clear in the snows. I had just had a unique driving experience–under a high gray ceiling, already-fallen dry snow was blowing across the road, rising from my left in a six-inch-deep cloud, flattening to softly and exactly reveal the roadway dimensions, then falling off the right shoulder and across the plains.

I ran smoothly in this luminosity for miles, headed from Rosebud to Chicago with a clear view ahead and no view at all of the road’s surface, confident in the engineers, mesmerized by this expression of the weather, not seeing that my tires were on a road or how I was getting there, but knowing that I was safe.

79 | More Than Meets the Eye

2012 | Chyulu Hills, Kenya

2012 | Chyulu Hills, Kenya

For me, a great pleasure of seeing is contrary discovery – a tree which might obscure what I think I am looking at actually offers a stark version of what it might have taken from of my view.

78 | Orientation

2012 | Maasai Mara, Kenya

2012 | Maasai Mara, Kenya

I never understood giraffes until I met them on their range, seeing six of them completely ‘cloaked’ right in front of me in a thorn-tree thicket. Now, I have photographic evidence of their not being there.

And I had never seen a bird, colorful at a mile, and audible at two miles, until I woke up in the clarity and quiet of the Great Rift Valley. Or learned that If I see a hippopotamus, there are likely twenty others under the water, and I should be very careful, because even on land, they are fast, and they can bite you in half.

I had been wrestling with the problem of what equipment to take on safari, and how much of it. I was not comfortable taking a lot of gear and feeling its weight more than its utility, going into unknown spaces, banging against the hard metal of Land Rovers and Jeeps. But my friend Bernd rescued my thinking, saying, “Just take your normal equipment and use your usual method.”

So this is the kind of picture that I got. I’m very happy with it, and even more important, I know what to do with it.

77 | Normal Vision

2017 | Los Angeles Zoo

2017 | Los Angeles Zoo

Sometimes, I feel that my whole field of vision swarms with a different world. Some people like to step back and gain ‘perspective’ – a familiar frame of reference to explain what they might be seeing.

My own intuition nudges me to take a step forward, where I might sense a membrane parting for more than a moment. Then, I am allowed to spend more time between here and there, my world and another, amazed and apprehending at the same time.

76 | Pure Land

Emily Rose Wing: Crayola on Manila 3-ring binder divider, 1982

Emily Rose Wing: Crayola on Manila 3-ring binder divider, 1982

This is my favorite of Emily’s childhood works, dating to her eighth year. I have found the order of her layers perennially intriguing and mysterious.

But the truth is, her powers of observation are impeccable.

75 | Mapping

Alex Wing: Graphite on ruled paper, c. 1991

Alex Wing: Graphite on ruled paper, c. 1991

My son was around eight years old when he drew this, at about the time we began making our big loops around the Southwest each summer. After we got on the road, a theme would come to us – one year, dinosaurs; another year, Native ruins; another year, caves and peaks; another year, natural bridges and sand dunes.

What strikes me now about this map is the precise detail of Northern California, where Alex learned to swim, floating high in salt water, and to sail, ghosting along a rocky shoreline in light airs. And on the East Coast, the hook of Cape Cod, which he later came to know in his twenties during his time in Boston among its eighteen colleges and universities.

(I am inspired by his handling of the Great Lakes – a free synthesis of art and fact.)

Alex’s map brings to mind my own childhood. When I was around eight, one of our tribe (none of us can recall exactly who) wrote the legend “U-N-T-I-E-D S-T-A-T-E-S” on an elementary school map project. At home, that brought a laugh and became a meme to be recited every time we saw our country labeled on Dad’s huge map of the world on the living-room wall.

When that mis-spelling occurred, I’m sure that the teacher insisted on a correction.

But now, that child’s original labeling seems 100% cartographically accurate.

74 | Disorientation

1977 | La Jolla, California

1977 | La Jolla, California

I have come to understand that we are a divided country, but lately it seems that we are certifiably schizophrenic.

I was deeply moved by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and the contingencies of nation-founding.

And then, going back into Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton brightly illuminated for me the character of our country from its inception – it seems as if every thing we have done as a nation has been won or lost at the last minute by a single cast vote: war, rights, slavery, expansion, displacement, disenfranchisement.

How do we do that?