Only Say the Word...

and I'll Be There.

What can I say? I like the phrasing...
Goes without saying too, if you like something, you never speak of it. Too much risk. So if I've been silent, or seemingly concentrating my energies elsewhere, perhaps all is not as it seems?

Have faith in the silences too...

Tonight, on the way home from work, my publisher asked me to shoot a fire scene out in the country that had two local departments responding. Pole-shed fire, but the tractor they bought Friday burned up. You have to walk gingerly up that drive... I left the camera in the car, but a tow-headed boy, 13, was walking in his boots near the smoldering ruins, visible from the road. It was a gravel road, but I drove slow, as I was in the newer car, there was no rush, and you want to keep dings to a minimum, before salt/sand-mixture season.

Still, how do you say, "I'm here to ask permission to photograph one of your worst days?" The boy had told me, "Look at our new tractor" pointing out the skeleton in the cinders. The man explained how he had accidentally started the fire, with his back to it until it was already in flames. (Oh, read the paper if you want the technical details.)

If I have cynics in my reading audience, those of you who think everyone thinks cynically like you, I can't tell you the basic honesty and non-sophistication in these lives out here, away from the traffic and side-by-side daily competition. Here, it's more you're competing against nature, and your neighbors, if anything, are as cooperative as they can afford. Like family, and sometimes literally later, married in.

This man's neighbor was still with him, an hour or so after the tanker trucks from th two departments had left. Firewise, it was pretty minor, all things considered. His eye looked like it was swelling up, and would be puss-y in the morning from the smoke, and he looked like a miner having been in the smoke himself.

Still, after I apologized for meeting him on the worst days he had, and explained I was sent out to take a picture if it was ok, he told me in detail how he started it after I asked if he knew. Owned up to it, you might say. Don't ask, even in sympathy, if the new tractor was insured, in trying to downsize the losses after you express thankfulness upon hearing no one was hurt. "Was going to do that today," he said, ruefully.

The boy wanted to be in the picture, just happened to be picking at the outskirts of the ruins after I retrieved the camera from the car. (Didn't want to seem presumptuous, same reason I didn't pull all the way in the driveway. Too long to walk it from the road though...)

The dad called him out, even though the boy said, but, that he wanted to be in the paper, but was overridden. I asked his age and name, and told him I'd work his name into the story anyway... Nice Scandinavian towhead boy. They're gentle people, at least these ones were. Told the mother, -- who joined us after we were speaking but before I retrieved the camera -- that I'd keep them in my prayers tonight, as a way of sincere wrapup after I'd taken the pictures and got what I'd come for. I meant it too.

She gave me the farms email address, after I'd offered to send on the photos. (Note: check with the publisher to see if it's an ok policy in general, as I'm sure it is here.) Might be needed otherwise for insurance purposes; it was pretty much all I had to offer.

Coming home, full moon, following in reverse the plat book route the boss had mapped me, on the gravel road driving slowly only for the smallest bit, I saw what I think was a coyote, in the road fro en before running off. The camera was bagged in the seat aside me, otherwise that would have been a nice shot.


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In other news,
today I learned that a young man killed in '02 by a young priest at a funeral home where he was interning was originally from Barron. I've had contact with his father, and sister -- twice now, in the course of my stories. Strong strong strong people. Not in a physical sense, but character wise. Something like a murder could either break you, or reinforce your faith, and this young man sounds as solid in that department as could be. In contrast to the murdering priest, not allegedly even, because a judge ruled that way after the priest's suicide a few years later as investigators closed in.

It sounds like a cheap drama, but it's real life. Real life in a small world, where just when you think you know human nature you might be surprised.

So keep the faith, in whatever fashion you choose then, but please take care not to throw out the babe and his bathwater because today maybe, you simply can't see the mystery of life, or the point in all the (seemingly) endless waiting.

Ok, off to get home then, and say my prayers.