The Lonesome, Crowded Blog

20th Century Towers

Because we lived in Montana but our families were still in Idaho, we travelled back and forth on interstate highways almost every other month. The first few times we did this took forever and eight to ten hours in the car traveling through the most remote places in Montana and Idaho were not something I looked forward to. The first autumn that we were in Missoula, Amanda got homesick and decided to travel back to Southern Idaho with family after a visit, while I remained behind to work at my job. This left me completely and utterly alone.

After a week by myself, I was able to get the time off work needed to travel “home” for a few days. I loaded up my slowly-in-the-throws-of-death-but-not-dead-yet Honda Accord with my bicycle, my luggage, an iPod, and starchy snack foods. At the time I did not have a proper digital camera- just a basic 1.3MP point and shoot we had so that we could send snapshots of our newborn back to family in Idaho. But I still had an eye trained to take photographs, and I did my best to make the most out of the lowered resolution.

This particular trip home was without a doubt, the slowest and most boring trip I had taken in a long, long time. The three plus hour is took me to drive to Dillion, MT were fraught with traffic jams, wildfire smoke, and slow moving traffic. To entertain myself, I started documenting the journey with the low-resolution digital, firing off hundreds of shots. The milage signs that signified home, pictures of my face in contorted positions, random sights that I was passing by through “Big Sky Country”. At five hours into my drive, I started approaching the interchange that would start moving me West, placing me closer to home. Evening started falling and I began to get emotional, as if through sheer force of will I could push my little-engine-that-for-some-reason-still-could towards family, familiarity. The sky lit up in the way that only Idaho skies seem to do at sunset, and as my vehicle was racing closer and closer to my destination I look south and started approaching one of Pocatello’s outlying power plants. After firing off several pictures in No-Look fashion I kept driving and eventually found my way home.

Looking back on the images later, I realized that this picture kept jumping out at me. It spoke of the loneliness and longing of travel; Of modern society’s isolation and helplessness; But also speaking to the legacies and histories we are leaving behind. I know it sounds weighted and lofty and far beyond a 1.3MP .jpg image, but I’m an artist. I can’t seem to help this sort of thing. Ben Gibbard and Death Cab For Cutie have an excellent B-side track that shares the title of this piece and has the lyric:

I attempt to talk up the town:
“The answers are in the arches
Of the 20th Century towers
And in comfortable cars in motion”.
And yet it still remains, this incessant refrain
“You’re just like the rest, your restlessness makes you lazy”

I never actually made it home that day. Oh, I arrived in town alright. And I saw my family. But “home” was never meant the same thing after that trip. It was farther away than I realized. It was never quite fixed down. Home became a moving target and I started chasing something that never quite settled down… but that’s another story. The answers lie in the arches..

Let Me, Let Me Know

Amanda is the love of my life. Let’s get that straight. She saved me from a miserable existence in ways that are innumerable and unknowable. So let’s fast forward a bit. We had been married for almost two years, been together for three, and had known each other almost six. We were done with our “two year” Associate degrees and needed to further our education, so we did what everybody else we know was doing: we decided we needed to move away from Twin Falls. Somewhere that nobody else we knew was going. Someplace exotic and enticing! Somewhere like… Missoula, Montana. I should really point out here that that was our first mistake. Within a month of making our decision to move, we found out we were pregnant with our first child. That wasn’t a mistake, but the timing (as we realized much, much later) could have been so much better. Montana had an insanely cold winter that year and we moved in January. I’m not talking single digits here. I’m talking NEGATIVE double-digit temperatures that I swear to God I didn’t think were real because I had only ever read about them. It was terrible. Snow and cold and movie rentals a car that only sort-of worked.

And then spring hit. And it was wonderful. Amanda was in her second-almost-third trimester with our first-born child and we felt utterly alive. The truth about this photo is that her Ladybug Red Chacos barely fit her swollen feet. I was shooting slide film for the first time for an assignment for class and this shot just jumped out at me. Sixpence None the Richer had a song they wrote long before Kiss Me was a hit that always stuck with me called Field of Flowers. The song has the lines “Let me, let me know/ Just how you love me / And I’ll do it over and over again / Let me, let me know / Just how you love me / And we’ll spin around again in this field of flowers we’re in”. Emotionally, I cannot separate that song, my wife, dandilions, or this image. To me, they’re all the same thing…