Until my own lungs left me gasping for every breath, for months, I had been ambivalent to the threat of some hypothetical respiratory malady. Been fired upon with a large caliber weapon by maritime thieves and smugglers? Had it not been for a bulletproof windshield on one such an occasion, you would not be reading this article….Carried a neighbor’s dead child from the burning house across the street, administering CPR and mouth-to-mouth after it’s too late, suffering guilt-guilded nightmares for years afterward?.Retrieved the bloated corpse of an infant from the scene of a boating accident?.Broken bones, or suffered some other enduring pain or injury long after such an… event?.Subjected yourself to the jarring experience of a motorcycle accident?.Besides, I didn’t own a camera back then during the BP era (aka “Before (smart) Phones”) I was too busy accumulating trauma to snap pics, and had no access to the police photos. I did… no accidents in the half century since. ![]() It wasn’t until the next day we got the crap kicked out of us! All good! Adventure! It is said of living and cruising in a boat, “Days and weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” That day? Boredom… Now let’s talk about some darker stuff…Īfter thirteen accidents, all before I was eighteen years old, you’d think I’d learn! We’d need to dodge their anchor lines, or I’d be diving on the prop in cold water to clear it.įortunately, the weather cooperated. We were about to enter a dense field of propeller-fouling crab pots that would be in our blind spot from the rear cockpit or from the steering station inside the pilothouse. A cold but calm November crossing the Gulf of Mexico in 2008, I piloted our little ship from her foredeck (near the pointy end!) with our autopilot remote. Have I acquired magical memories that stay with me long after the exhilaration (and sometimes a rare disappointment) of the experience itself? Thankfully. I don’t think they expected my response: “Aw, what the hell, gents.”ĭoes my experience with each endeavor, physically, intellectually, and emotionally, influence how I think of all those experiences after the fact? Obviously. “Yeah, we’re all probably just gonna just auger in.” I grew bored with low altitude (static line) solo jumps and didn’t have the time to quickly qualify for a solo free-fall jump from 15,000 feet, so a tandem jump it was (that’s me farthest left hollering a rebel yell, even though I’m a damn yank).ĭuring the twenty-minute ride up, the other guys tried to convince me the guy who packed our chutes wasn’t feeling well that day and probably screwed up the job. I call this largely imagined composition from reference photos of that property “Victorian Decay.” Yeah, its a very on-the-nose metaphor. ![]() It is said that a heinous murder took place on this property, but the entire body was never found. Somewhere in central Indiana I found an old abandoned Victorian-style country home with several decrepit outbuildings. The strange and the forgotten were macabre crucibles of my creativity. C reative photography earned me some money for a while, but not enough to eat on a regular basis. What can I say? A fine photo is merely a launch point.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |