On A Preponderance Of Beautiful Scenery, Lost Highway And Not Dying.

I’ve never finished watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but one image of the movie has always stayed with me: Bill Pullman is driving along, well, a highway, and the only source of illumination is his headlights pointed ten degrees down from the horizontal, hitting nothing but the road 40 feet ahead.

Suddenly I’m Bill Pullman. The only thing I can see coming at us at 60 miles per hour are lines painted on the road and the reflector poles – which pass the side windows every 30 or so yards, two reflectors each. The bottom reflector, maybe three feet off the ground, is nothing out of the ordinary. But the extra three-foot extension above that, the guides for snowplows that keep those trucks on the road when snowdrifts reach heights over my head, is what makes it feel like we’re on a desolate highway to nowhere, a sort of roadside stretch of Purgatory. We’re driving to a destination we’ll never reach.

And Purgatory may be the right descriptor for this, because the lines and the diamond reflectors aren’t the only things our lights illuminate. We see the occasional road sign – Trailheads: Cinnamon Creek 1/4 Buffalo Horn 1’ and ‘Gallatin River’ – but the things that get me are the crosses. There are just so many crosses along this road, each marking the spot where someone lost control and plunged off the path of illuminated reflectors and into … god knows what. A ravine? A river? Just a simple thicket of trees that stubbornly refused to yield to a crashing vehicle? The spectres of the dead could be staring at us from just beyond the reach of the headlights, for all I know, imploring us to slow the fuck down.

On Being Downcast, Or, Why Compass Points Suck.

The sun is starting to rise. Suddenly I feel like the anti-Dracula, racing to make it to a grand vista point before the sun has a chance to peek over the mountains to our east.

And in some strange twist, the compass in our car refuses to function, instead displaying ‘CA’ as a big calibrating middle finger to the two of us who are heading vaguely north and who just crossed in to Yellowstone National Park. The gods are against us, and my mood still reflects the bleakness outside.

On The Sexual Innuendoes Of The Grand Tetons And My Photographic-Manhood Insecurity.

We just left the Grand Tetons – which supposedly comes from the French slang ‘tetons,’ or, in layman’s terms, ‘tits’ – and I found out that I don’t have a chance with those boobies.

The pull-off points on the road, up until 8:30 or so in the morning, were completely empty. But once the sun came out in full force, it was a free-for-all photographic orgy. We reached the penultimate stop in the Tetons – where a mirror-smooth lake forms a great foreground for the backdrop of snow-covered peaks – and I pulled out the camera and tripod for some picturesque, well, pictures. Then some Jack Lemmon-looking guy pulls up next to us and unloads his Canon D20 with a 1000 mm telephoto zoom that looked like a damn cannon. As Freud might say, I was hit hard with camera envy.

Suddenly, I was the guy with the littlest gear, all embarrassed by my Rebel XT and its stock 18-55 mm lens. I was being shown up by 70-year-olds.

Like I said, ain’t no way I have a chance with these Tetons. Not when some ten-inch barrel lens is around.

On The Implications Of ‘Laramie,’ Both The Word And The Locale.

Prior to today, my experiences with Wyoming were limited to a vague image of rodeos and an even more vague pop-culture attuning to the word ‘Laramie.’ Now that today has arrived, however, I find myself in Laramie, and I recall why I know this town. It was that hate crime against a gay man that was subsequently made into a play and a movie and a musical and spawned hate-crime legislation … and that’s about all I know.

I do know, however, that my younger brother – who’s all about the musical theater – portrayed Russell Henderson, one of the two killers of Matthew Shepard. So I called him to tell him I was here.

I’m not getting into this topic any further; there’s nothing further to say.

On Poor Planning, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love A Gun-Filled Photo Shoot.

Many of the photo shoots I’ve run thus far on my trip have been along the lines of what I would call ‘creative editorializing,’ wherein we come up with a narrative presentation based on our interviews of groups or individuals, or on research about a given historical happening or marker. Some of these shoots have entailed

• consumption of Scotch in a alcohol-free area in order to create a ‘Masterpiece Theater’-type setting full of 19th century English-manor-isms;
• the climbing on and hanging from a goalpost in a major college football stadium (the subjects, not me);
• and rock jumping for the sake of posing like Lewis and Clark (again, the subjects, not me).

Today’s ‘creativity’ involved a goddamn arsenal. Shotguns, rifles with laser sights, large-bore deer rounds, a .44 pistol, a compound bow, even a K-Bar Army-issue knife used as a bayonet. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to show the men at the University of Montana as outdoorsy, as hunters – as many of them claimed to be big-time shooters.

This rapidly spun out of control, however, as I found myself directing a photo shoot in the middle of a desolate field with more than 20 men, each of whom was holding some sort of deadly weapon. Why I thought this was a good idea, I’ll never know. All I do know is that the picture says it all. I’m not a gun person, per se – I like shooting from time to time, but nothing serious – but the sort of firepower literally staring down the barrel at me was a bit disconcerting.

Tomorrow, I head to Denver, a normal-sized city with a normal-sized idea of a good time, one that doesn’t involve more weapons that Iran-Contra. I can’t wait.