Under Open Skies
In the high country chill of a Wyoming morning I pulled on my scuffed boots and buckled on my worn jeans. Still half asleep, I stumbled out of the bunkhouse to the corral. Cathy, the top hand, was saddling her favorite horse, Spinnaker. At twenty-three, she was seven years my senior, and I was more than a little in awe of her. In the darkness I felt the soft, wet velvet of old Roman's nose nuzzling my hand. Stroking his bay withers, I could see the savage white streaks where a grizzly bear had laid the old mustang's back wide open.
We swam the horses across Sunlight Creek, the same stream Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce followed out of Yellowstone on their heroic flight from the U.S. Army a hundred years earlier, and then we climbed through the lodgepole pines up to an open meadow under the rimrock. First light tinged the high Absaroka. Frost tinkled under the horse's hooves, and they blew cold smoke with every breath. In the meadow we startled a bull moose with a massive rack who vanished like mist into the cover of the pines. Sometime later we watched a coyote lope home from the evening's hunt.
The herd was up Panther Creek, not far from an abandoned Indian camp we had found one day while riding after strays. Though the lodgeskins had rotted in the intervening century, the lodgepoles were still in place, and that day we rode in silent wonder among a dozen skeletal teepees. Whose lodges were they? Why were they left in place, as if the owners were fleeing some dreaded terror?
Those days on horseback were filled with magic and mystery, sweat and toil. My wages reflected my status --$100 a month plus bunk and board-- but my real pay was spending time under open skies deep in the North American outback, learning timeless skills from proud mentors, and listening to the stories they told.
My boss, Doc, told me the tale of Liver-Eatin' Johnston, a mountain man who waged a personal war against the entire Crow Indian nation. Firelight flickered over rifles and saddle blankets on the cabin's log walls, on scalp locks dangling from the wooden beams, as Doc told how Johnston --upon whose life the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson was based-- had set his traps right here in these Absaroka mountain streams. One night Fred Garlow, Buffalo Bill Cody's grandson, kept me spellbound with stories about the old days in the northern Rockies. On another occasion an elderly woman who had been born in a covered wagon and raised in a sod hut told me about pioneer life on the western Nebraska frontier.
Listening to these stories, I felt the power of the enduring relationships that connected the people to the land and to each other, and I experienced a deep sense of well being, even exhilaration, as I absorbed the narratives. These stories were my stories too, I realized, they were my inheritance, and they instilled in me a powerful sense of identity and purpose.
Somewhere along the way I picked up a camera and a pen and began recording these epic American stories and celebrating these powerful moments, people, and places. I wanted to share them with others, and I wanted to inspire others to learn about and protect our precious natural inheritance and the distinctly North American rural cultures that it nurtures.
Over the years I've traveled from Davis Strait to the Chukchi Sea, from the Everglades to the Mojave, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska. Along the way I've had the honor of working and traveling and sharing stories and unforgettable experiences with men and women who embody the qualities that as a nation we profess to admire most: courage, self-reliance, wisdom, strength, compassion, and spiritual depth.
In my experience, the North American landscape is the cradle of these virtues, the repository of our epic national narratives, and the great stage upon which we are privileged, as I have been, to relive our national experiences. In the words of Wallace Stegner, the North American landscape is "the geography of hope."
But what began as a tribute to the North American land and people is in real danger of becoming an elegy. I feel an acute sense of urgency to not only record what is disappearing before our eyes, but also to honor it and to elevate it to its rightful stature, before it vanishes forever.
We are destroying our cherished homeland and our natural and cultural heritage at a terrifying rate. We treat our natural landscapes and our human communities as disposable items, as valueless rubbish, as junk. As a photographer I am racing against time; I am a mere half step in front of the bulldozer.
The America of wide-open spaces for people and wildlife, the America of close-knit towns and villages, the America of relationships based upon personal knowledge and mutual respect, is fast fading away.
Rather than elegies, I hope these photographs inspire you just as those stories in Wyoming inspired me, and that they move you to reflect upon what we value as a nation, and how we can pass on those values unimpaired to successive generations.
The North American landscape enriches us spiritually, culturally, physically, and aesthetically. It is an enduring resource that gives meaning and definition to our lives, nurtures our character, and sustains our beliefs. May it always be a place of magic and mystery, of sweat and toil.