The Hightail ranch
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The Hightail ranch
There’s a personal, intimate bond with the nature of a place—with its light, its trails, its animals, its smells, its sights. A connection that takes on a life of its own, enclosed in an impenetrable bubble, like lovers in wartime.
A second life
Living in a place so different from where you were born and raised is like being born a second time, but with memories of your previous life. Learning everything all over again, without unlearning everything. Speaking a second language that goes along with the old one. Picking up new skills as well as nourishing the skills you already have. Discovering different mechanisms that rule the same kinds of relationships. Fitting into new social structures, barely able to cherish the effort it took to fit into past ones. Interacting through values and feelings lost in sloppy translation—now empty containers. Dealing with slow thoughts selected for a slow world that now have to adapt to run much faster. Living in a time zone asynchronous to lives that are still part of your own. Struggling with a measuring system you can use but never fully own, its logic clashing with the one you knew before.
The brain constantly bounces between two worlds without resting. It compares, labels, ranks, fills in tables, you this way, you that way. It’s stunned.
But then eventually your eyes catch something that the brain overlaps with an image picked from the past. It’s not a fragment of real life, but a frame of a dreamed one. It may happen following a trail, spotting a bear, passing a wooden cabin or even now, standing in my bedroom, furnished with bison fur and cardboard boxes. It tells you there it is, that’s it, do you remember that fantasy? You were that age when you believed that if you could dream it you could live it.
It was true. Breathe. Keep going.
All the pictures I never took
Among the many books I’ll never write, there’s one that regularly comes up again as the best candidate. “All the Pictures I Never Took.” A collection of images that could have been but were not, the tale of moments I regret not having captured. Sometimes out of laziness, more often out of discomfort.
All the times I haven’t aimed my lens fearing the reactions of those who feel violated, those who are afraid of being frozen in an image, those who want to have control over the gaze of others, those who feel uncomfortable about being chosen, those who believe that reflected light should be regulated, those who fear that a story is THE story, that a point of view is THE point of view. Every time a picture has confronted me with the discomfort of having to deal with rejection, every time I have lacked courage.
It never happens with animals.
Death
Death is a daily occurrence. Can be a deer tangled in the temporary fence or a pheasant run over by a car
The value of a place
Contrary to what I’ve always thought, some places hold a value that transcends the people who live there. There’s a personal, intimate bond with the nature of the place—with its light, its trails, its animals, its smells, its sights. A connection that takes on a life of its own, enclosed in an impenetrable bubble, like lovers in wartime.
