I motorcycled many tens of thousands of miles of blue highway country that took me through, over and by mountains, fields, forests, prairies,lake shores, river valleys and ocean beaches. Fences of all types now and then marked these landscapes. During the early years we would stop infrequently if not haphazardly to contemplate the unexpected beauty of what we were passing through. We drifted like clouds across venerable lands of unfathomable distances and bounty. Each of us had an endless scroll of desired experiences for these wanderer souls to conquer.

Each day, sooner or later, a road sign would float into view and announce one of the places that was on our bucket lists. We scenic hunters were about to add another taxidermist pelt to our personal collections. These sites, parks, villages or attractions were often announced repeatedly until it was time to take an exit. When we finally got there, we’d park, get off our bikes and join others who had journeyed there in their cars or on tour buses.

We’d march along marked paths to the site. Much chatter always ensued during these treks about the attraction or the trips to get here. Almost all of the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits and other paraphernalia. Oftentimes there was a place nearby that sold picture postcards of the site. We would all search for a place to observe and take our memento photos. The hubbub would always die down to a murmur, when it was picture taking time.

During these visits I would lapse into a prolonged silences, occasionally scrawling some notes on scraps of paper. Some decade plus into my travels one note said “No(ne of these) visitors (actually) see the site. Once we see the signs about the site, it’s impossible to see it.”

After much clicking and whirring, people with their cameras would leave to be replaced by others. It was as if “we are here not to capture an image but to maintain one. All (our) photographs reinforce the (site’s) essence or aura. Are the photos accumulations of unnamed energy?”

Only in reviewing my pictures many years later did I finally realize that visiting those places was a kind of spiritual surrender to a collective perception. I was purposefully seeing and documenting only what others for decades, if not centuries, had come to see or photograph. My two wheeled tourism was just a modern version of religious pilgrimage experience and a search for personal grace.

It seems now that we were talking pictures of taking pictures. Over the years I noticed something else happening to my pictures. Photos of people’s faces, rooms, buildings, places and landscapes became less prominent. The subjects shifted to the unfamiliar and the unknown. Unless I wrote a note of where I was at the time, the photos’ loci were also unknown until I got my first of series of digital cameras. Many no longer depicted bucket list places or of what I was seeing. Their focus shifted unconsciously to what I was feeling or thinking at the time of the photo.

Here are a few from a November 2017 trip to the west coast during a side trip to Lake Tahoe.

Histories and memoirs consist of memories and stitched together words that are fabricated according to certain formulas that are favorable to the author and intended audience. The underlying facts in their telling are supposed to inform and establish truth that abolishes myth. Photographs are helpful in this endeavor but are fleeting testimonials, since they contain practically no information. I think they tell us more about the taker and the viewers than of the moments, things, people or places they capture.

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