We got up early, so we could arrive in Cut Creek, MT at a reasonable hour. Where is Cut Creek? I had no idea, off Route 2 somewhere close to Glacier National Park. Sometime in the middle of the night I had a back spasm, so sleep was illusive after 2:30 AM. I was anxious to get up, so I would not have to try and find a comfortable position lying down. There were none. We left by 7:15 only to be escorted out of town by hot air balloons rising in the morning light.

As I got out of the van in great pain, to take pictures along the way, I reflected on aging. I have trouble accepting my 76 years. I still think I should be in my 40’s, the same age as my kids. I don’t know where the years went, but I know that I have done some hard living on this body. I seriously do not think there is a part that has not been operated on, except my head. My bones creek, my muscles spasm, and I look in the mirror and wonder what happened to me. I don’t think I am old. but my body tells me otherwise.

After one day into the trip, I find out a friend has died, then two weeks into the trip, another. Both had health issues. We are getting to that age where we are losing old friends. My Dad told me when many of my friends died in their 50’s, this was to be expected and then a lull until I got into my 70’s. It is frightening to think that in 14 years I will be 90, yet I hope to be.

These thoughts do not depress me. although I miss my friends that have died. They give me pause to think what I want to be doing for the time I have left. And that propels me to today, and tomorrow and the next. So, I climb out of the van and take pictures of old dilapidated houses decaying in the prairie because they stand there with dignity, giving a sense of place in the middle of acres of wheat fields.

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The sun creates a wave of light yellow across the fields, illuminating the side of an abandon house, while the clouds form voluptuous puffs against a azure color sky. Grain silos stand tall in the middle of these fields, while birds circle in large flocks, swooping round and round, then just as quickly fly away.  

And onward we go, watching trains with their heavy cargo chug along beside us. Passing through towns which look like movie sets from the 1940’s, abandoned Main Street storefronts, now an afterthought of a town long ago. Sometimes I feel like I am in a Larry McMurty novel, a cowboy riding through towns left behind. Or at other times, I can imagine Lewis and Clark making their way up the Missouri River, or Teddy Roosevelt riding through the Badlands.

The pictures I take will become a record of America, they will find their way in my art, but the pictures I imagine in my head are the ones created by novelists, photographers, and historians. They have been preserved through the passing of time from one generation to the next. We are the story tellers of our own lives, and I hope I tell my story well.

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