He drove, on past Holstein cows among stunted aspens, brilliant foliage on this crisp late September afternoon through the Plateau. The man then encountered a dilapidated homestead, always a depressing sight, slumping ridge lines, broken windows, fencing laying down along the roadside, blackberry canes ensnarling it all.
He was aging, past his prime, but still an artist with a camera in demand. He was traveling the West for a coffee table book on ranch gates, a commission. It was his Travels With Charley, for he was journaling and shooting the journey for the content of the book, and for a possible, but unlikely, memoir. He traveled with his pet Labradoodle, Cassady, in honor of the manic characters modeled on Neal Cassady who drove with brilliant finesse in Kerouac and Woolfe books. Each road trip for the photographer was a rediscovery of our glorious country, full of discoveries both dark and bright.
Words were beginning to elude him. “Was it Gambel oak and Gambrel roof?” Nouns played mind games with him. “Cassady, what did you call that pin you used on a three-point hitch? What’s the green that looks like beet tops? What was the Great Bambino’s real name? Pump the prime or prime the pump? Thank God for dictionaries and ah — ahhh — thesauri!”
In Warhaven he had an appointment with Bertie Chapman to shoot and to learn more about the gate leading into the Old Stone Barn up the Craggies. When she’d read in the Ruralite that this fella was seeking out grand ranch gates, she emailed him immediately. Gus would have been so proud. The Chapman gate dazzled in the sun, tapered, squared columns of black and white granite eight feet high. Protruding vertically from them were gnarled twisted juniper posts, a foot in diameter. They rose to a height of 15 feet. The cross beam was lodgepole pine, oiled. Atop where the posts met beam were pronghorn skulls, bleach white.
At the side of the Mt. Rushing Highway he pulls over and jots down in his journal verse that crosses his mind:
I am the tired mule who plods on.
Clip clop, clip clop.
My burdens fairly balanced,
Past and future, teetering.
My fulcrum the present.
I plod on, like the clock.
Time is my preoccupation.
Tick tock, tick, tock.
So he found himself steering up the highway, enjoying the colors. He passed a farm stand. A kid sat off the right side, shucking corn, grabbing ears from one metal garbage can, plopping the clean ears in another and the husks in a third. The man slowed in passing. It was maize, beautiful blues and reds and yellows. He waved, then laughed. “The kid has his hands full!”
The corn took him back to his youth. He had been raised outsider of Des Moines, Iowa, where the urban and the suburban and the rural met. Very near the small frame house in which his family lived were corn fields, which were his playground, his jungle, his battlefield, his hiding places. He and his friends could be reckless, heartless. They would make forts in the corn, destroying rows to make a square room. One of their more dangerous endeavors was pulling stalks out, breaking them off about three feet and then with the roots clumped with moist earth, use these as weapons as one might engage in a duel, hurling, the hammer throw against your foe. While he remembered no trips to the emergency room, he recalled one tooth knocked out, a concussion, and once little Tommy Pomponio took one in the temple and was knocked temporarily unconscious.
He laughed, thinking, “We were hellions, Cassady, and the worst were the two preacher’s kids. They would risk everything for a laugh or a thrill.”
This photographer had documented scores of gates, many of these ranch entrances stunning works of art or craft. The book would go on to sell well in the West and in Europe.
In Wyoming he encountered a masterpiece from a welder, a whimsical structure of farm animals, angels, gnomes, and elves. It was a pair of steel totem poles that rose twenty feet into space, tapering, like Jack’s bean stalk might have done. There was no cross beam, but when he first viewed the gate, it was at night. Italian Christmas lights were strung from post to post, which only added to the magic of the whimsy.
In Utah an arched stained and varnished juniper log graced the gravel drive as the gate’s beam. It set in holes atop two columns of concrete, made to look like black columnar basalt. Inset in the posts were chips of mica, which was a sight to behold when the sun hit them. Above each post was a beehive, also of cement resembling the sculpture at the Utah State Capitol. Routed out on the juniper beam was the word, industry.
In Oregon two Douglas fir posts, three feet in diameter, rose twenty feet above ground. Three beams a foot in diameter cross the expanse, two feet apart. The top was red, the middle white, and the bottom blue. At the base of the posts stood pieces of chain saw art. On the left was Groucho Marx and on the right Babe Ruth. These were quite well rendered and painted not garishly but realistically. Both men were smiling impishly for the camera.
Commented