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Kentucky Rest Area and Tired Biker

Right outside Nashville, I hit a torrential rainstorm that lasted about 10 miles. I was glad that it waited until the outskirts of town instead of adding poor vision and hydroplaning to city traffic. By the time I got to the Tennessee / Kentucky line, I was feeling a little sleepy, so I pulled into the Welcome to Kentucky rest area near Ft. Campbell for a 22-minute nap. ( I set the alarm on my Droid for 25 minutes; it usually takes me about three minutes to fall asleep.)

It’s a nice stop with clean restrooms and friendly people working in it. I’ve shot it in all seasons and it’s pretty no matter what time of year. I KNOW I have some spring and fall pix, but couldn’t find them.

Winds were gusting

The winds weren’t as bad as the ones that nearly blew me off the road south of Atlanta, but they were gusty enough to keep you on your toes. I was glad I had the nap so I was sharp.

Ran across tired biker

Cutting across 146 east of Anna, I saw a cyclist pushing his bike up a steep hill. When I got closer, I could tell he was a tourist by the BOB trailer and the stuff he was carrying. I pulled over at the top of the hill to shoot his picture and see if he needed help. This is a stretch of road I wouldn’t like to ride: traffic is fairly light, but it’s fast, there are no shoulders, some of the hills are steep and it was the time of day when windshield glare could hide a rider.

We introduced ourselves – he was David “Laughin Wolf” Edwards – and I asked where he was headed. “You mean tonight or at the end? I’m headed home to Washington State, but I was hoping to make Cape Girardeau tonight. The way things are going, I’m going to be lucky to make it to Anna.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings by asking, but do you want to throw your bike on the rack? I’m headed to Cape.” His legs hurt more than his feelings, so he quickly stripped off his gear and piled it into the van. His next stop was St. Louis and the KATY Trail, so I suggested he take Rt. W, go through Altenburg, Frohna and then drop to to the Mississippi River flats to Chester.

Free-camping to save money

When we got to Cape, I asked where he wanted to be dropped off.  He said that bad weather and flooding had caused him to spend all his lodging budget by May, so he was free-camping on the side of the road to save money. He defined “free-camping” as finding any place he could spread out a ground cloth and sleeping bag. Cemeteries and church yards were good places, he said. He tries to be gone before anyone even knows he’s been there.

Almost all of the places that I thought might work have been victims of development. We stopped at Jones Heritage Farms on Rt. W where a very nice woman called the owner to see if he could camp there, but he was turned down. “Maybe if he had called in advance…”

I finally left him off near the bridge over Cape LaCroix Creek on Rt. W, where he unrolled his sleeping bag onto some soft grass.

He called me this morning to say that he had stopped at Heritage Farms on his way out of town, got permission from the owner to camp on the grounds and had planned to take a rest day and listen to a band at the place Friday night.

 

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Road Trip Fires and Floods

I got a late start getting out of West Palm Beach because of auto repairs. Wife Lila always says that Florida does good clouds, so I snagged this shot of a brush-fire-enhanced sunset somewhere along the Florida Turnpike.

Advantages of traveling alone

Wife Lila has discovered that she’d rather be trapped on board a flying aluminum cigar tube than spend 2-1/2 days on the road with me. In fairness, part of it is because she’s found out that I can’t ever leave on time and she’s ended up flying back home to get to work. Since she’s operating on a tighter schedule than I am (and would rather do lots of short trips instead of fewer long ones), flying makes sense for her.

That means I can spread out all of my junk food on the passenger seat next to me, play whatever I want on the radio, stop if I want to stop or drive forever if the mood hits me. My motel standards are lower than hers, too. All I ask for is for the room to be clean, to have AC in the summer, a decent shower and sheets that aren’t still warm.

Room was broiling hot

When I started getting tired long about the Florida line, I was delighted to see the prices on this hotel. The desk clerk looked a little sketchy, but the lobby seemed clean. When I got to my room, though, it was broiling hot. I went back to the clerk and asked, “What are the odds that little window AC unit is actually going to get the room cooler than the surface of the sun?”

He said he’d upgrade me to a double on the first floor where the air had been running. He did and I had a good night’s sleep for a reasonable price. (That’s a relative term. I stayed in a room in the Ozarks for two bucks a night. Motel 6 and Super 8 got their names from the amount of money they charged for a room.)

Fires and floods in Georgia

My good weather luck ran out on this trip. I saw on the radar that there was a chance I was going to hit rain going through Atlanta, but I had pretty much clear skies about 90 miles south of there. I passed a section of road where a whole section of trees were snapped off and blown down by this spring’s storms.

About an hour south of Atlanta, just about the time I crested a hill, I saw all kinds of debris blowing across the road. It was a good thing traffic was light, because I got hit with a crosswind that blew me all the way over to the next lane. There was no rain yet, but the wind was spectacular. I decided to take the next exit to see what the storm was going to do. After about 20 minutes of torrential rain, it looked like it was slacking off, so I headed off again.

Signs warned of structure fire

Just south of Atlanta, highway advisory signs warned of a large structure fire on the west side of I-75. They weren’t kidding. There was a major column of jet-black smoke rising high into the sky, then blowing off to the east.

The combination of rain and rush hour made Atlanta one huge parking lot. I let the GPS send me off on an alternate route through the countryside that probably didn’t save me any time, but was a lot nicer than inching through the traffic.

Back in the old CB days, we were running northbound with a bunch of truckers when we got word of a jam like that. One of the drivers said, “Follow me. I’ll get us around it.” The next thing we knew there was a huge convoy of 18-wheelers and my little Mazda blasting through a raft of small George towns. I bet some of their stop lights are still spinning.

 

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What’s Happening in this Photo?

Most pictures and assignments are pretty straight-forward: you are going somewhere where something is happening and you’re going to try to capture the essence of it. Joe is going to throw the football to Sam. You are going to try to photograph what happens. Easy enough, right?

Sometimes when you look at your film, though, you have to ask yourself some combination of the questions:

  • What in the world is REALLY going on here?
  • What was I thinking when I pushed the button?
  • Why are those people looking at me like that?

The assignment above was to cover Cape Central’s Class of 1965 Senior Party. While Cherie Pind is obviously making an enthusiastic point, Sally Wright and Jim Stone, in the background, are totally tuned out to their surroundings. I think that’s Dale Williams in the background with the bemused expression.

Outside Democratic Headquarters

I have a single frame of these gentlemen standing outside the Democratic headquarters in 1964.I was probably there for some kind of political feature.

There’s no context on the roll for why I happened to notice them. I like the guy puffing away on the cigar and the body language of the guy on the left. It would be fun to know what they were discussing.

Different angle or did I trip?

This is obviously a parade of some kind with the Jackson High School Band marching by. I was either trying a different angle; tripped and dropped my camera, accidentally firing the shutter,  or was trying to appeal to the shoe fetish element of our subscribers. Today’s newspapers probably hired a focus group to calculate just how many of the latter there are. That’s why our local paper runs so many stories about shoes.

What prompted THIS reaction?

I think this is Marilyn Knehans. I know Jon Knehans is on the left. I recognize his deputy’s patch.

What’s going on?

It  COULD have been her reaction if I had asked her for a date. Since I’m sure I didn’t have the nerve to do that, it’s up to you to speculate about what’s going on.

I’m THIS old

This looks like it might have been taken on a Missourian food feature. I have no idea why the kid is holding up the three fingers or who he’s showing them to. He’s pretty serious about it.

Since I wasn’t good at studio work, I tried to avoid shooting food and other products. I was geeky enough to come up with some ideas of how to make food look more appealing for the guys who DID shoot it. I found some chemicals, for example, that would produce fake smoke that I could pipe into the food to make it look steaming.

Before I found the fake smoke, we used REAL smoke. Real smoke enough to set off the building smoke alarms, which caused a whole bunch of guys with hoses and big trucks to show up. This was NOT a good thing.

Is that a come-hither look?

I think this was shot when I was at The Jackson Pioneer. When I looked at the film the other night, I was wondering if the blonde was giving me a come-hither look. Then I analyzed the photo and realized that was unlikely for a couple of technical reasons:

  • It was taken in the dark, so she probably couldn’t see me BEFORE the photo was taken.
  • After the photo was taken, she would have been blinded by the flash.

If it truly was a come-hither look, I’m sorry that I didn’t catch it for about 45 years. I was always a little slow on the up-take.

Like an animal at the zoo

Why these kids are looking at me like some kind of zoo animal, I don’t know. That’s my Buick station wagon they are peering into, but I don’t know what caught their interest. I do note that the door is locked.

See all of those scratches and spots on the lower left side of the photo. I got tired of spotting the flaws and started to pitch it, but then I thought I’d post it as an example of a Before and After shot (see below for the Before).

I decided, instead on writing about the Bald Knob Cross photos because they were better examples of how both cropping AND technical magic could make something out of nothing. This shot, while an interesting spot removal exercise, would never be much more than a record shot.

Scratches and flaws supreme

Here’s the original photo after I had adjusted the lightness and darkness of the main subjects, but before I started spotting out the scratches and flaws. If you click on the image to make it larger, you’ll see a big white spot on the chin of the girl on the right and a spidery dust speck on her lips. Click on the left and ride sides and you can rock back and forth to compare them.

In the final version, I had made the headliner at the top of the door darker to keep your eye on the faces and darkened the door frame to try to hide (unsuccessfully) some of the scratches. I managed to eliminate or minimize all of the scratches on various body parts.

At some point, you cut your losses and decide that you’d rather spend more time on pictures that have more significance. (No offense meant, if any of the trio are readers.)

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Log Rafts and Baptisms

Missourian photographer Fred Lynch ran an old Frony picture of a log raft being piloted down the Mississippi River. It just so happened that I was editing a batch of photos I had taken of a Mississippi River baptism in New Madrid and spotted a small log raft tied up on the riverbank. Up until then, I would have said I had never seen one. Funny what you miss when you’re focusing, literally, on something else.

New Madrid Mississippi River baptism

I was pulling the photos together for a special project. After I see where that might lead, I’ll run the whole batch. I’m kind of pleased with some of the images. I shot them just before I left Cape for Ohio University, so they turned out to be a sort of final exam that marked where I had gotten photographically up to that point.  Some of them stand up well close to half a century later.

The only thing I’m kicking myself for after all these years is being infected with One-Shot Fronyism. There were too many circumstances where I took a single frame of a subject that cried out for more exploration.

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