"My uncle was walking down a lonely dirt road one day. He came upon a man who was also walking down that road. The man looked at my uncle, and my uncle looked at the man. The man was scared of my uncle, and my uncle was scared of that man." --
The Walk, Alvin Schwartz
Tonight the control arm snapped right the hell off my tripod's tilt/pan head. Irreparable, bare, jagged metal. I was lucky it happened as I was composing the last shot of the night, and I was close to home. It could have been worse.
In night shooting, it can always be worse. Your batteries can die. Your camera can malfunction. Your car can breakdown. A figure can stumble out of the shadows and begin jerking its way across the parking lot while you're counting the exposure.
So I'm not complaining. But now I have a very expensive paperweight, and no tripod.
This winter is relentless. Yesterday I left work early, which ended up being a needless concession to fear. I don't make a lot of concessions, as a rule, but with all the crazy chances I've taken on the roads this year--and in general--I'm aware that sometime my luck will run out. West Asheville was, indeed, a winter
wastewonderland. But when I got home, with nothing particularly pressing to do, I got restless pretty fast. Like, within five minutes.
So I went back out, to the fenced-in walkway on the Smokey Park bridge. I parked some ways away and trudged through the snow with my camera bag over my shoulder and my fedora keeping the ice out of my eyes, looking I'm sure like some cross between Indiana Jones and the
Trashcan Man. I was wearing sneakers, because I thought it would be a quick trip. Of course, I was immediately soaked to the knees.
Some of the most disturbing things I've seen in Asheville have occured here, in the walking cage that connects the projects to West Asheville. The entrance on the west end is situated so that you must enter the cage to see down its length. And once you are in the cage, there is no where to run.
That's alright. Like the winter, I am also relentless. And what am I afraid of, anyway? It's broad daylight in a public place, with happy little snowflakes filling up the air like bone confetti.
I enter the tunnel and to my relief, the only figure is a hundred yards from me and moving away. Excellent. At this end of the bridge, ivy has made a nice, creeping canopy over the chain link fencing, and the snow is at a minimum. I put my bag down, unpack my cameras, and start metering the light. I aim the Pentacon straight down the tunnel.
Something is weird. The figure that was walking away is now getting closer. Did I mistake his motion the first time, or did he turn around? I switch to the digital, which has a longer lens. The figure is indeed moving towards me. I won't say that he's walking. Lurching might be a better word. By the way he's gyrating and twitching, you'd think his winter coat is full of centipedes. I am not making this up. The roar of the traffic obscures any sound, but it is not hard to imagine him speaking in tongues and barking at the moon.
I put the camera down and check my meter readings again, telling myself that this just isn't happening. Surely, in a random sample of one, the likelihood of being stuck in the cagewalk with a lunatic is pretty low. It's my paranoia talking. Maybe the guy was adjusting his scarf or something. But nope. I look through the camera again, and damned if he isn't one certified, grade-A crazy Ashevillian.
And he's heading my way at a pretty good clip. So what do I do? I stand my ground, wait till he gets close, engage him in conversation, and start making portraits.
Just kidding. I run like hell.
It wasn't really a random sample. Let's face it: Anyone who uses a caged-in walkway on the side of the "suicide bridge" is either an existentialist photographer or clinically insane. Both of which probably share a Myers-Briggs profile. There should be a sign, like on rollercoasters: "You must be this crazy to use the cagewalk."
The point is, I need a new tripod. I can't do work like this with inferior equipment. If I'm going to get eaten by a gibbering psychopath on the roadside somewhere, I at least want a steady picture.
The issue, of course, is money. Yesterday someone accused me of working only to make a profit. It is very unlikely that person will read this, but I'll say it anyway, if you're out there: Of course I work for profit. Why do you work?
Money is tight. I've just ordered six terrabytes of hard drive space to keep this habit going, and a lens to forge brave new visions out of the frigid winter nights. A lofty goal, but quite an expensive one. Now this.
DarkTopo is about digging deep enough to find things you can't doubt. But this winter, the SnowTopo, is a mass of frozen things that may take different forms when they thaw. Will this tripod be a lifelong investment that I'll be using decades from now, or will I lose it to a mugger next week? Do I
need it, or can I get by on something cheaper? After all, what am I really doing here?
This anxiety, every time. New hard drives, new lens, new tripod. A month's income. So far, I've tried to present the reality rather than complain about it, but I'm going to allow myself one tiny sentence of whining: I'm so tired of walking this line.
Alright. I said it. Let's move on.
When I got back to my car, the snow was piled up on my hat and my cameras were dripping. Not good. So I turned on the heat, and sat there waiting with the transmission in drive in case the crazy guy wanted to talk shop. He was probably a Canon shooter anyway.
I was convinced he wouldn't come out of the tunnel, that I'd seen some kind of later-day Asheville ghost. But sure enough, here he came, focusing in on my car. It would not be the first time I've had to scare off a crazy person by threatening to run them over (flashback: A wild-eyed old man in a denim jacket early one Sunday morning, waving his arms in front of the hood and screaming "I just wanna TALK to you!"), but he veered away and walked down the Interstate.
The thing is, when this guy walked past, he was completely normal. Even nicely dressed. No jerking, no shambling, no staggering gait. A colorful scarf. Intelligent eyes.
Many explanations are possible. It is possible that I am crazy. It is possible my eyes dramatized the scene due to my fear of the place. It is possible the man was indeed acting strangely, and for whatever reason straightened up when he left the walk. It is possible he was just as afraid of me as I was of him.
It is also possible that we were both sane, and it was the place that made us crazy. A sense of place, right? Isn't that what we're looking for?
Maybe we found it.
