To Hell tale

PART ONE

On The Road At Last: May 3 to June 16, 1999  

copyright 1999 Steven Hays

What a short, strange trip it's been but at last I am on the road. Sort of. I now reside in Seaside, Oregon where I must find work for the summer to replenish the shrinking money bags. Getting sufficiently free and clear of Denver to allow footloose wandering took too many months of filtering through years of accumulated 'stuff' deciding what to sell, toss, or store, the task being a wrenching one due to the fact that 'stuff' tends to develop a life of its own, making it hard to wrestle out and away.

It was a pleasant journey up to the Northwest to visit family and find work: high winds held me captive in North Platte, Nebraska for a day after trying twice to flee northward through fits of wind threatening to lift my van with its Thule car top cargo 'wing' and carry it off somewhere over the rainbow; rain for two days soaked the land and me; then heading west through North Dakota and Montana, way up north near the Royally Mounted border, snow fell for two days glazing the farmer's fields with white icing.

Except for the fists of wind beating me up and down the highway, I loved every minute of the snow and rain and forged on, stopping frequently to freeze onto film the momentary views of rolling hills and plow- etched graphics in fields reaching out to the horizon, which at times during the storm dissolved at the edge of the world into a deep white void.

The Olympic Peninsula with its cathedral-like rain forests of moss bearded trees looming above the damp green floor of rotting logs, more moss, ferns and elk trails, has inspired my photographic imagination with its dark, mysterious, brooding nature. Unlike previous visits here, I have finally begun to understand how to see the forest, how to isolate the chaotic growth into gestures of its character.

I find myself drawn once again to photograph picnic tables, this time in the Queets River campground on the Peninsula, which here appear as tiny, moss and leaf covered anchors to humanity in this place where the trees tower over with a primeval presence. I feel like I have wandered into an ancient site of stone alters built to appease the forest's spirit but where in actuality, only vacation hunters on pilgrimage to the great outdoors have sacrificed beer and burgers.

Earlier in the trip, my picnic table portfolio began in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in a deserted picnic area that appeared, under an overcast sky, as an idyllic sculpture garden of lush green grass, cedar tables and gray, steel grills esthetically accenting the plush scene while the encroaching wilderness was held at bay by a barrier of twisted oak, benevolently gazing on as I worked my photographic way through the park.

Well, that's a taste of how things have gone so far and in terms of my goal of traveling to build up my portfolio, its been a successful trip - I have taken more photographs in the last month than in the last two years.

(from June 1999)