BIG COUNTRY

It was a birthday gift.

Andrew and I loaded up two small backpacks and our standby tickets for Bozeman, MT.  It was supposed to be a trip to Paris for a week and the flight was cancelled.  I was relieved.  We've spent so much time in Paris in our lives -- months on end -- sometimes only a long Thanksgiving weekend spent drinking wine and smoking cigarettes [French version of the American holiday] -- but my heart has changed.  I need nature and landscape.  So when the pilots timed out and we were all sent scurrying for new flights, we went the other way.  Straight into the belly of the big skies.

We hiked through rain to photograph moose and elk, bison and long stretches of endless land.  Golden fields after the harvest, abandoned mines and leftover ruins from the gold rush.  And of course, cemetaries atop hills where the whistling winds emulate the soundtracks of old western movies.  Land once conquered, now lost to time.  We stayed on the small roads, sometimes ending up nowhere at all but a crag of beautiful rock or the tributary of a small river.  There it was quiet.  The kind of silence you wish you could put in your pocket to keep.

It was a birthday gift, and a very fine one at that.

Big Sky, Montana.

WE HAD A FARM ON 62ND STREET

A random day, a random search, a random discovery of two photos from my past: the last Schermerhorn farm house on Manhattan. Somewhere around or north of 62nd Street and on the East River.  Abandoned years earlier, these shots were taken in the late 1800s by an unknown photographer when the farmlands had been sold off and only the house remained.  It was demolished in 1914.

It stood there when my grandmother was a young girl, living on a Schermerhorn farm upstate where I'd like to imagine Jacob Janse Schermerhorn's sons started their gun running [as all the knickerbocker families began with some kind of criminal activity, mine no differently.]  Frances surely visited her cousins in Manhattan, though gone too long now for my questions and days of stories, now lost.  How small the world was back then... Just to know the Schermerhorn farm stood here once - a  Randall farm not far but a river away - both testament to those who want to know what's on the other side of the hill.  Neither stayed put.  The Randalls sailed from England, the Schermerhorns from the Netherlands, and somewhere along the way I inherited their wanderlust.  

No tumbleweed is ever truly alone.

TOPANGA RANCH MOTEL, MAY 2014

NOBODY HOME

WALKING ON THE MOON

I've been spending a lot of time lately walking on surfaces*.  

*Flat, pale, seemingly lifeless but endless surfaces.

There is no difference between the hard snow of new york in mid-winter and the rocky soil of the southwest in the middle of summer.  They both make me feel like I'm walking on the moon.

THE MANY DOORS OF SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE

I have a thing about doorways. There are thousands of images taken all over the world sitting in binders of negatives and backup drives of digitized and ordered pix by place and time. 

They are always shot from outside. Does that mean I want to see what is inside or that I'm waiting to see who will come out?  And maybe I'm not waiting at all.