“Souvenirs”

Summer 2008, San Francisco

Breathing has become an expensive habit this year. Inflation, crippled US dollar, and infrequent freelance work made me reluctant to go wandering within or outside of the country.

I went on long walks in the city. My restlessness made me seek out steep hills.

These walks often took me to North Beach.

Many high afternoons were spent inside an antique shop on Grant Avenue.

I hadn’t smoked in months but whenever I came here I would indulge with the shop owner in the cool, damp back stairwell then focus on the peculiarities strewn through the shop.

Time moved at a foreign pace as if the hours belonged to the world of Dr Caligari, Brothers Quay, 4AD, or Dave McKean.

Here, the beauty of something made for the blind caught my eye.

It was around this time that I started thinking about selling my photos.

I decided to apply for a street artist license which would allow me to sell my wares at designated spaces in the city. The daily gathering in the plaza by the ferry building looked most appealing.

I hadn’t spent quality time with the public since working retail decades ago, but this time I would be facing them for/as myself, and for once I wanted to try making a living without answering to someone else.

Next available date for license screening was a couple of months away.

I continued to go on long walks, often on foggy nights and took way more pictures than I normally do of this city so familiar.

By August, I was getting tired of walking in circles and needed time away from San Francisco.

I was offered access to a friend of a friend’s cottage in the small town of Twain (population 82) in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

I took Amtrak to Chico (two buses and one train) then got a ride to the cottage which was 90 more minutes on the road.

There are just a few houses here. A river flows just a stone throw from the cottage and railroad tracks run along it on the other side.

In the stifling August heat, my days were spent shirtless in the woods with cheap American beer and Flaming Hot™ Cheetos®.

One benefit of such punishing weather is that it keeps me preoccupied with accomplishing simple tasks such as moving from shade to shade as the sun arcs and renders me incapable of annoying myself with gangly, introspective thoughts.

I savored the solitude here.

After a week of this I got a ride back to Chico and spent the night there in a motel near the Amtrak station to catch an early morning bus.

And since I was in Chico I figured I should go to a bar and drink Sierra Nevada. When I asked for one, the bartender replied, “Which one? We have 4 Sierras on tap." And they were $2.

I got my street artist license — the screening involved presenting samples of my work to the SF Arts Council and proving that they were indeed of my making — and began taking my humble booth of photos out to Justin Hermann Plaza in mid-September.

In a marketplace of Golden Gate bridge photos, T-shirts, and jewelry and jewelry and more jewelry, it became apparent soon enough that my photos, more esoterica than souvenir, were not going to support my breathing habit... not among tourists and not during this economic depression.

Also, without a big booth and big prints, photos were invisible out here. Homeless guys were making more money than I was.

I was still doing sporadic freelance work (many people at the marketplace did not have other jobs) and I was too resolute in my artistic temperament to supplicate to the tourists by adding photos of the bridge, street signs, or cable cars to my inventory.

After a month of this, I headed out for a little road trip to bring back a new supply for which there was no demand.

I planned on keeping it relatively local to minimize getting robbed at the pump. I chose eastern Oregon because I wasn’t familiar with that part of the state and hoped to see autumn colors along the way.

First I stopped in this little town in the Sierras to stay with a friend and her family for a few days.

Crescent Mills, CA

I have been wanting to photograph autumn for many years but I keep missing it. The weather has been too warm and dry this year and the season wasn’t quite ripe.

Another reason for this stop was to watch the Talent Night at the local tavern. It’s a night of music and whatever else people want to do on stage. It started a few months ago and my friend has been making an appearance every month to subject her fellow mountainfolk to her brand of stand-up comedy. She was surprisingly good but the most entertaining part of the evening was watching drunken married people eyeing others’ spouses after the show.

The rental car this time is a Chrysler Sebring. It’s the kind of car only a rental car company would buy.

I saw too many McCain/Palin posters along the way.

I stocked up at a Whole Foods in Bend then drove northeast toward parts of Oregon I hadn’t seen before. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t come across a market like that for a while.

Shaniko, Oregon

I considered spending the night here at the historic hotel mentioned in the guidebook. The book is a fairly recent edition but the motel was out of business, as were most shops in town. This was the case in many places I visited.

Although I had done the usual monkey work through most of this summer, I was aware that there could be times when selling photos would be my only income. Frugality was in order.

I rarely dined out during this trip. I ate fruits, vegetables, canned soup, and whatever was available on the vegetarian shelf at Safeway.

309-fall08 Hamms beer.jpg — I did indulge in beer though. Road trips like this get me in the mood for cheap American beer, and my beer of choice this time was Hamm’s. I didn’t know that these were still made.

Desolation ran along every road except for the occasional truck-drivin’ asshole in a hurry who knows every bump in the road.

By the time I reached the small town of Fossil, it was dark and raining. There is only one motel in town but it was pitch black and there were 7 deer in the parking lot. I called from a restaurant down the street and it was open for business despite appearances.

The man behind the counter looked at me then at my ID and asked if I am Korean. When I said yes, he said “My wife is Korean” and brought her out. They moved from California 16 years ago and she is the only non-white person in town. She spends much of her time painting landscapes and was exultant upon hearing that I was a tortured photographer drifting through.

She showed me some photos she had taken in the area as studies for paintings and I was particularly drawn to one of an old abandoned schoolteacher’s house. She said she would drive me out there next afternoon.

I spent the next morning exploring on my own.

On their first trip to Portland, her husband had a hankerin’ for Korean food but did not know where the Korean restaurants were since Portland does not have a Korea Town. So he opened a phone book to a page with Kims and asked her to call one of them and ask. That worked, and they got their fix of Korean food for the night.

In the early afternoon, she drove me to the old building. It is by a remote dirt road and I never would’ve come across it on my own.

These were test shots but I like what the cloud is doing. Looks like something is leaving or entering the house.

This building sits on private land and the motel owners had been coming here for years without a problem but, of course, when I came back alone at sunset I ran into the caretaker. This land belongs to the astronaut Bonnie Dunbar.

Stopped here on my way back to the motel. I’ve seen many smalltown cemeteries but rarely one with a background as open as this.

257-fall08 fossil motel sign.jpg — On my third day in Fossil, I said farewell to the folks at the motel as they left for Bend to spend their wedding anniversary.

I too headed out of Fossil and stopped here before continuing east.

Earlier this year I spent a month traveling through every province in Korea, yet the only Korean person I befriended happens to be across the Pacific in Fossil, Oregon.

John Day, Oregon

In the city of John Day is a house that has been preserved almost exactly the way it was left by its last Chinese inhabitants. There are dried-up oranges on one of the shelves. Now it is a museum open for guided tours. I was the only one who showed up for the last guided tour of the day. I love traveling off-season.

I retired to my motel room for another soup and sandwich dinner.

Sumpter, Oregon

I saw at least 10 deer a day on this trip. It’s a miracle that I made it through without hitting any of them.

Pendleton, Oregon

I went on a tour of the underground.

Back in the mining days, the Chinese lived and ran businesses in these underground passageways.

This place came into existence because Chinese were not allowed on the streets after 10 pm back then. Although there were hundreds of Chinese living in Pendleton, only 4 of them were documented because they went into hiding whenever white men came around for census.

On the top floor above the underground were the brothels. You can read about them in a book titled The Girls Upstairs.

Most of the men who came here to unwind were miners who reeked of months of work without bathing and the girls insisted that they go downstairs to get cleaned up first.

First bath in the morning was 10 cents then it got cheaper as the day went on. Because the bath water was changed only once a day.

When the tour guide shared this info, a chorus of Ewwwwww erupted from the gaggle of high school kids on a field trip from Walla Walla.

I wandered out of my original plan and into Washington.

My wandering continued into Idaho

then Montana.

A swanky place like this would go for $1500/month in San Francisco.

A guy who works in the theater told me that strong winds from the previous night moved the C in “Cusack.”

Feels like months have passed since the talent night at the tavern.

Waking up in a different place every morning has that effect on time. Probably more so for people who don’t live such full lives at home.

Bannack, Montana

When I leave home, I often end up in places like this.

Places that inspire blank stares instead of envy when anyone asks where I spent my time off.

My pursuit of abandoned places is probably an indication that I suck at living in the present.

When I was taking pictures of the building above, some guy pulled his car over and asked “Hey, where’re you from?” “San Francisco,” I replied. Then he asked, “Where’re you from originally?” “San Francisco,” I lied. “Oh….. uh…. well, I like photography too and I just….” he babbled, but at that point I think he could tell by my body language that I had no interest in talking to him.

The place of my birth has no relevance whatsoever to what I was doing. He would not have asked the same question to a white guy taking pictures. I don’t think it was his intention to dehumanize me but that’s exactly what he did by trying to start a conversation with that question.

Stanley, Idaho

The room I checked into here was the nicest one of the trip. It had a full kitchen and a door on the back wall which opened to a balcony overlooking this.

I reluctantly checked out of that room in the morning.

Today I definitely moved west, back toward San Francisco. In great contrast to the room I had in Stanley the previous night, the room I got here was the worst one of the trip. Don’t ever end up having to spend the night in Jordan Valley.

Motel room window. Jordan Valley, Oregon

Next morning, I got on highway 140 west which goes from Northern Nevada to Southern Oregon.

Highway 50 is not the loneliest road in America.

Every mile of the 140 has a if-your-car-breaks-down-here-you-die vibe to it.

I saw this from the highway. Unlike the place back in Fossil, there was no fence around this one. While I was photographing here I saw 3 jets almost directly overhead doing what appeared to be a training flight. There were beams of fire shooting out of the planes.

I shot the barn above before ending the day in Lakeview, Oregon. Then shot it again in the morning.

The main street here was blocked off for Halloween festivities. It looked like all the kids in town were here as were the cops.

The rental car was due back this morning but I did not want to spend Halloween in San Francisco. So I decided to keep it for two more days and headed toward my friend’s house which is where this trip began.

I took over candy duties while the family was out trick-or-treating.

It rained heavily the next day. We stayed in, ordered pizzas, and watched Rosemary’s Baby.

On Sunday I was on the road back to San Francisco.

I went out to the plaza on the morning after the election. Smiles had bloomed overnight. It was springtime for hope under a crisp November sky. I guess after nearly a decade of manure, the psyche of the nation was fertile for change.

Disposable income has become an endangered species and it will likely be a long time before it walks among us again but what happened the previous night was enough of a miracle to at least give people hope.

982-fall08 grandview gaspump.jpg — As a business, my time in the plaza was a failure but it has not made me despondent as a photographer;
it only made me more aware of how few
people see things the way I do.

Still, I don’t regret trying it. I enjoyed the company of some of the other street artists and the few people who bought my photos seemed to be breeds apart from the herds.

I didn’t renew my license when it expired in December because I got freelance work for the whole month and I wasn’t feeling tragically romantic enough to spend the winter months peddling my pictures on the streets like some character in a Hans Christian Andersen tale.

Perhaps I will return to the plaza in Spring.

Epilogue

I did not return to the plaza in Spring or anytime thereafter. The freelance gig turned into a full-time job — my first full-time job. After decades of freelancing, I guess I chose to do what seemed sensible in a time of economic depression. I still traveled but the trips were shorter and less frequent. There were no more travel journals like this one. I thought I would continue to make them but my trips no longer produced good pictures or stories to share. It’s as if the photos and the stories only happened when my life was uncertain. Requesting time off, booking rooms in advance, and Knowing exactly when I would be returning and what I would be returning to made it feel like I didn’t go anywhere at all. My body did but my mind never left.

I didn’t know what these moments were worth as they were happening. Only upon looking back do I realize that they were some of the best moments of my life.