I took this while wandering around St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis over the Christmas holiday. I have taken this
same shot several times, as
it is an old haunt of mine. It has always said something about Minneapolis and my life there to me. Even though
this one is in color, I
consider it a sister image to the one I took of
Lake Road in Southern
Illinois.
When I first came to Minneapolis, I spent the two weeks before school started, wandering the city, not by car, but
on foot. I wander through
downtown, to St. Anthony Main and through the neighborhoods back there (I walked right by Ocala's house on the
sidewalk in fact). It had
always been in my nature to do this. People that knew me well, knew this about me. I was prone to spending my
free time wandering places,
exploring.
As school started, I soon got completely absorbed in it and the rat race that it was. I began to see that as
what "city life" was. It wore
on me. The city seemed dirt ridden and sick. One of my teachers at MCAD noticed my condition one day and after
class asked me how I was.
He paraphrased Virginia Wolfe by stating that all a writer needed to write was enough money to get by and "a room
of one's own". He
thought this applied very much to artists as well and encouraged me to find that kind of thing. I thought of the
major change in my life in that
I didn't "hike" anymore. That had always been my comfort and my grounding.
I took it up again the following Saturday with a new friend I had met only days before with the curious name
of Ocala. Thus began a
long friendship which eventually turned into more. I developed a way of looking at things at that time. It had
always been a strong influence
on me, but it gained a lot of validity then. It was that there was a wilderness that existed everywhere. The woods
that I grew up in never
really ended. In some shape and form they extended all the way to Minneapolis. Following the tracks in Minneapolis
lead me to all kinds of
interesting places and showed me a side of the city teeming with the wild that I needed. And so I see the two
photos as sister images, two
kinds of wilderness and two adventures on the verge of happening.
