Sometimes we learn a lot about ourselves in places that we would least expect. In the shift-shuffle of a homeless man’s walk. In the ear-to-ear grin of a four year old girl who screams “thank you!!” at the top of her lungs at every chance she gets just because she can. Perhaps it comes to us as we watch Mexican laborers laying down new carpet and cleaning the windows of a condemned and vandalized building we visited only a few weeks ago. None the less it comes to us, even if only for a second.
Call it what you want: an act of God, nature’s way of helping out, an inspiring muse, or the culmination of sub-conscious thought that erupts in a moment when our minds are clear and unfocused. However you explain it, one thing cannot be debated: it is clear, direct and powerful.
Today, it came to me in a photograph. I spent the afternoon wandering about the city of Dallas alone. I was looking for abandoned buildings to photograph and therefore was driving around in the dirtiest and most run-down parts of town that I could find. Under the homeless people bridge littered with shopping carts, discarded clothing, newspapers, and cardboard boxes. Past the “Pilgrim’s Pride” factory that always smells of rotting blood, and impending death. Under the freeways and over-passes of the more run-down intersections. I found nothing interesting. Nothing jumped out at me. I decided to give up, and just go for a drive.
Down the highway I went, the needle on my speedometer getting closer and closer to the right-hand edge. I turned up my radio, and sang as loud as I could. Every few minutes, as though I had grown accustomed to the intensity of the previous moment, I would turn the radio up a little louder, and sing a little more off key.
I landed at a convenience store near the freight section of the airport, barely remembering the ride there. I got out, bought a drink, listened to two girls ask their father if he was lost, apparently on some Sunday family trip to the less populated side of town. I left the parking lot, and headed away from the freeway.
Before I even had time to think about where I should go next, I saw something peering at me in the distance. I raced towards it, making several wrong turns in an attempt to get as close as I could. There, settled next to train tracks that were once used to move goods from various parts of the country into the city of Fort Worth was a, seemingly abandoned, building referenced only by, now fading, markings on the side of its tallest towers: “B&D MILLS”.
I parked, got out of the truck, and began to walk the perimeter of the property. Guarded by a fence with spiraling barbs on top, I knew the only way I would get inside would be an unlocked or loose gate, or a broken piece of fence. Unfortunately, I found neither. None the less, I took many photographs, trying my best to capture it’s beauty from such a great distance.
I left dissatisfied and went home. When I got there, I examined what I had: about 13 photographs of a little building and a bunch of sky, many of them littered with chain-link fence, and electrical wires. Just as I was about to give up, something in one of the photographs caught my eye. I immediately cropped the image in my mind: A tractor, with flat tires facing to the left, painted sheet metal in the middle, and a small sliver of a broken window on the right.
It was in that moment that I learned something about myself.
