So, it’s been an eventful couple weeks.
I won’t bore you with the details, but essentially it involves a sharply unfavorable turn in our financial outlook going forward, followed by a slow-motion family emergency. Oh, and I am also now (once again) a retiree. (No, I didn’t get fired. Good guess, though.)
Anyway, all this led somehow to last week’s road trip from our home on the Central Coast of California to my ancestral home on the opposite coast, in Virginia. Yeah, we could have just taken a plane; but for various reasons it was just more compelling to drive.
In terms of the iconic American road trip experience, I would locate this latest sojourn somewhere between Kerouac’s On the Road and National Lampoon Vacation, with maybe a little Grapes of Wrath thrown in for gravitas.
Or maybe not. Actually, aside from outside temps in the heartland that reached 111 degrees, the trip was pretty smooth and uneventful. Which is absolutely the kind of behavior I want from a road trip, especially after my AAA membership lapsed.
Being the person I am, of course, I tried to stay alert for camera-worthy tableaux along the way, and had reasonably decent luck in that regard. I’ll be culling through those photos for months, and working to refine some of them into decent images; but in the meantime, here are the results of some early playing around.
The middle of the country offered up lots of big grain elevators and other agricultural monoliths set against open skies, so I’ve been trying to cultivate sort of a WPA-era vibe from some of those:
I’ve really just stuck a toe into this pool so far. I need to go simpler, cleaner, and a bit more poster-ish with these images, I think. But this is a start. Since about Kansas, I’ve also been trying poor Carol’s patience by hunting around for the perfectly photogenic individual family farm — complete with farmhouse, truck, blue and silver grain silos, etc. — to really work this WPA-vibe aesthetic. No luck so far.
One of the highlights of our trip was stopping in Colorado to check in with my older son and hang out there for a couple days. While there, we visited Denver’s art museum, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Turns out they have some very cool indigenous art from around the world. Inspired by some of the stuff that really knocked me out there, I’ve been experimenting with images of masks, like so:
Yes, I am aware that that’s an African mask set against a backdrop of Aboriginal Dreamtime painting. The operative word here is experimental; I’m just playing with the format for now. This one’s a bit muddy, as it stands, but I like the possibilities of the overall design.
Finally, Carol and I made sure to include Dayton on our trip map. I know what you’re thinking: “Dayton Ohio? That mecca of natural beauty and tourist excitement?” Okay, just settle down. Dayton happens to be the home of the US Air Force Museum, the “oldest and biggest” museum of combat aviation in the world. And if you’re an aviation geek like me, that makes it the biggest field of catnip imaginable.
I probably got over a hundred photos from the Air Force museum, including a few of my very favorite airplane of all time, the B-58 Hustler. Ironically, the incredible wealth of meticulously restored aircraft in the place, crowding the walkways and overlapping one another, made it frequently difficult to step back far enough to get a decent photo of any of them. I still managed to get a fair bit of usable material, though — including the Russian MiG-21 “Fishbed” that I turned into a poster, shown at the top of this article.
Anyway, now we are here on the right-hand coast in rural Virginia, where there is not a particular wealth of photographic subjects. (Crops. Lots of crops and solar farms. Not a lot of blue silos, though.) So I guess that gives me lots of time to work back through this big backlog of road photos.
Next time I’ll have more for you.
Ronald Crittenden 