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.

The return trip to Spokane was relaxing and easy. The sleeper car was really nice, if small. The privacy was much appreciated. The whole day of traveling that these pictures are from was suprisingly quite. Unfortunately the sun set before we had reached the mountains of Montana.

Just arrived home this morning (12.30.02). I worked on photos most of the ride home. It was super relaxing. Brad (Ocala's dad) upgraded our tickets to the sleeper car so we had our own little private "room". Here are the shots from the train ride to Minneapolis. I will post shots from while I was there as well as the train ride back soon.

Ah, figured out how to get images to my server from here. So here are a couple of images showing the contrast between the West and East sides of Montana.

Passing by the scenery at 80 miles an hour is a lesson in camera control. : )

In a few hours we are off to Minnesota for the holidays. I was thinking about it all morning and checked prices again (which dropped) and decided to take the train. I loved it last time I went. It is definitely an experience everyone should have at least once. I kept thinking Ocala would love it. So we switched around the tickets today. : ) A train ride through the Rockies and across the snowy plains of Montana and North Dakota here we come. This is a shot from last year when I went.

I grew up next to a liquor store that sold bait for fishing at the Lake of Egypt. The store even had a couple large tanks out in the back of it where it kept some of the fish along with snapping turtles the owner liked to eat. I used to sit as a kid and look into the dark water and see a school of glowing eyes swarming and looking up at me. It was common to find dead fish along drainage ditches and water holes that fishermen had discarded on their way home from the lake.

The tracks were a source of constant adventure when I was a kid. Fueled by the inspiration of movies like The Goonies I crawled down or in every hole in the ground and through every tunnel. I never found Sloth or any pirate's treasure, but I certainly had adventures all my own and found turtle shells and pretty enough rocks.

p.s.

For some reason I keep thinking about On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Mostly of his character of Dean, the "holy con-man". I first read the book in high school. Dean was the id character of the pre-Homer era. Pickup on a few lines here and there. Found myself wandering into town a few nights later in the middle of the night. I lived miles out in the country. For the majority of the trip, I walked the yellow dividing lines. I wouldn't say I got a lot from the book back then, but one line stuck in my head that night.

"I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out."

I stood in the road for a minute looking in either direction. It was probably around 3 am. The night was blue and dark. I saw fog rising quietly off a pond in the distance. I walked to the side of the road and tried to imagine what "Sal" might have seen. For a split second I let myself see the blistering day that was still hours away. I knew it would be hot, since at 3 am it still felt muggy and warm. The image of Dean stuck in my mind the majority of the walk. I got to the town just at daybreak. I eluded a police car as it went by just on the edge of town.. for fear of the curfew by ducking down in a ditch.

I wandered through town for most of the day. It was an interesting experience. I realized I had never really been in town before, on foot, without anyone else... or some agenda. I followed the tracks for a lot of my wandering, seeing the backsides of everywhere. Eventually I had walked as far as my legs would go. I called my mom to come pick me up from a pay phone outside a restaurant. I sat there on the sidewalk and waited for her. By then the hot day that I had envisioned was well underway.

I read the book when I was in high school, but I got a lot more out of it much later. I was driving back to visit my mom and bought audio cd's of it to keep me awake. It was a twelve hour drive each direction. It reminded me of that night and I drove past and stopped at the restaurant where I had called. It was an abandoned building now. The phone didn't look like it had a receiver. On the way back from that trip I listened to the last part of the book. It talked about the town with the water tower he had been at much earlier in the book and how much at happened in between. I smiled with that thought and my pay phone.

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

Well there is a story for you. ; )