It's funny how good things sometimes just fall from the sky. Jackie had been wanting to go to the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha at the end of April, and as it turned out, her cousin's son was graduating from high school in Auburn, Nebraska two and a half weeks later, so we found ourselves roaming the back roads of Nebraska with pit stops at Mt. Rushmore, S.D. and Cheyenne, Wyoming, thus seeing more of the state than most Nebraskans or for that matter most other Americans ever do. It was otherworldly, at least to someone from New York. A treeless, flat rolling sea of grass punctuated by literally millions of miles of barbed wire and small ghost towns every twenty miles or so. Small main streets off the highways, mostly abandoned buildings with a name, a post office, a bank, maybe, and sometimes a church or general store, or maybe none of the above, just the remnants of what was, once upon a time in middle America, the center of rural life during those moments off the farm and away from the monotony of the fields. Now they are just the sad, evocative suggestion of what once was. You could stand there in the silence of a warm spring breeze, and imagine the America as it once was. Simple, unadorned, and utilitarian, but full of a life that made the isolation of farm life in this unforgiving place possible.
When I think of ghost towns, I used to think of the broken down mining towns of the southwest, now mostly just piles of rock, tumbled walls that barely suggest what once was. But the back roads of Nebraska, that's where you'll find the motherlode of abandoned and surprisingly intact remains of nineteenth century America. You don't have to look too hard, just head for the sand hills.
The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It allows you to travel all around the United States and never see America. Avoid it when you can and you will be rewarded. Hope my pictures tell at least a small part of the story. But I need to get back, now that I think I know what I am looking for.
For better or worse, although probably a bit of both, this blog entry marks the beginning of a new phase in my career as a photographer. Till now I shot mostly b&w film and the occasional roll of color in a medium format camera. I swore that I would stop shooting when they stopped making film. But I fell in love with digital, occasionally borrowing my wife's point and shoot. Went out and bought an Olympus EP1 and haven't looked back. But what to do with all the photos, though. Some of my techno savvy younger relatives suggested a web page, some said a blog. One niece said dismissively "nobody blogs anymore". "What do they do" I asked. "I don't know"she said, "they text I guess". Well I found blog spot, and this marks my very first blog.
Addendum:
(I have looked back at it now and then and have been tempted to tamper with it, but decided that it is what it is and will the the standard by which to measure future output).
