Cat Redux

And so it ends.

The cat came down.  

I had no idea that posting an ad on Craigslist would evolve over the course of one day into news reporters doing live stand-ups in front of my tree.  Though, on second thought, I guess that's a little like saying "I had no idea the gun would actually go off."  

I suppose I was expecting a squirt gun and not a canon.

The night after the Post's visit, I stayed up until five in the morning completing work that I had neglected earlier during the neighborhood tree climbing championship.  In my mind I had imagined that the piece the Post put online would get the word to a benevolent bucket truck owner.  They'd roll by in the early afternoon and the cat would come down with little fanfare.  

In reality my doorbell started ringing at eight in the morning, three short hours after I went to bed.  By 8:30, the ringing had become incessant, enough that the idea of privacy or sleeping in seemed like a foregone conclusion.  Through the window in my front door I could see a woman dressed all in white, sunglasses, bright red lipstick with a shiny Prada bag tucked in the crook of her arm.  She's in my yard, pacing around the tree.  

I'm not sure how other people operate, but when I'm tired, I kind of do a little warm-up gymnastics in my head, something like the Haka dance the New Zealand rugby players do to psyche up for their games.  [step 1] Act like you're awake.  [step 2] Act like you're attentive.  [step 3] Act like anything but how you feel.  [step 4] Don't talk too much because you're bound to say something dumb.  Clap twice, turn on your right foot, gyrate, repeat.

The woman in my yard introduces herself as Julia Morgan and tells me that she's bringing a bucket truck to get the cat down.  I thank her for being so thoughtful, take her across the street, point to where the cat is slumped quietly over one of the tallest branches, and tell her that I need a little coffee.  

As I reach my front doorstep, the first news van pulls onto the block.  Sinking feeling.  So much for the squirt gun.

My telephone has nine new messages on it, all since I stepped out into my yard.  I pour a mason jar full of coffee, unheated.  Add ice  Then cream.  The phone rings again.  The number is out-of-state which, lately, has meant work.  I quickly retrace the steps of my mental dance and click Talk.  "Hello, this is Matt."  

It's Noah Rabinowitz.  "You'll never guess where I'm at," he says.  

Oh god.  This calls for something more than a yes or a no.  Mental summersaults while I try to recall the last place Noah interned. Virginia.  D.C.  New Hampshire.  That list seems to grow every few months, and rightfully so.  He's a talented photographer.  "I'm on Newton Street," he continues.  

Newton Street is my street.  Colorado.  

The moment passes kind of like that scene where Luke finds out that Leah is his sister, something so overwhelming to my sleep-deprived mind that the best explanation I can summon is that some east coast paper has found this cat story so compelling that they've airlifted Noah --no doubt in the same black helicopters that fly the secret missions over Idaho --all the way to Colorado.  I expect to see his parachute at any moment.

Before I can explain my wild speculations about the real purpose of his secret mission to Colorado, he fills in the gaps.  He's the Denver Post's new intern.  Which, as nice as that is for him, sure put the lid on the story I had cooked up to explain his sudden presence on my block.  No black helicopters.  No secret missions from the east coast.  He's coming to join the progressively growing circus that is forming on my lawn.  

By the time it is all done, my voicemail has filled several times over; my email inbox is stuffed to overflowing and the steady stream of men with their bucket trucks stop by every few hours for the next three days.  The Xcel Energy trucks come out on their lunch break.  Davey's Tree Service.  Matt's Tree Service.  Names that I don't even remember, small groups of hefty men plodding the walk to my front door, ringing the bell and politely asking if the cat has come down safely.  One of the local television stations returns long after the cat is down to do a live stand-up in front of the tree.  Helen Richardson, the photographer from the Post, is interviewed at the top of the hour on one of the local radio stations.

She explains to me over the telephone later that day the same thing she expressed on the radio: people are interested in this story because it is accessible.  It is something that they feel is within their powers to impact with a positive force.  Hence the overwhelming response to such a trivial event.

This, however, is precisely the razor's edge that ultimately begs the follow-up question: would the support have been the same were it a human and not a cat?  The division between man and beast usually being drawn with a line where man is somehow more responsible for his own predicament in a way that an animal cannot be.  It's the nature vs. nurture dichotomy at its core.  Cat is nature.  Man is nurture.  

At least that's how it appears on first blush, but the dots are a little more connectable than they seem.  

It turns out that in Denver alone, there's an estimated 150,000 feral cats.  Enough to fill each seat in Mile High Stadium with a cat three times over.  The difference between the dozens of feral cats that live on the colder side of the six inch wall that separates my two house cats from their outdoor counterparts is best illustrated in terms of life expectancy.  Depending on what figures you consult, the average feral cat can hope for somewhere between three and six years; my indoor cats may make it to 30 --a number that seems to bend the nature line heavily towards nurture pole.

And feel free to stop reading if the comparison goes too far, but the dangers for a street cat are things that are completely unheard of across the threshold of my doorway. Malnutrition, feline HIV, feline leukemia, violence, cars, infection, exposure --all symptoms of an environment where the population exceeds the resources required for sustenance.  It is a cat-eat-cat world and the greatest dividing line between the cats that die at three years and the fat ones that live into their twenties being, largely, a function of access to essentials.  It is, then, more so a question of where a cat is born than anything else.

The analogy, of course, doesn't stop here.  

Oh, television.

Julia Morgan and cat.

My neighbor, Red, listening to the live tree update from inside the news van.

Live standup, part II.  You can't make this stuff up.

You Never See A Dead Cat Under A Tree

There is an idea floating around in the political spheres right now that explains why constituents will vote contrary to their best interests.  It's not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, its root being something that theologists and artists of all walks have known since before written history.  The idea, however, is unique in the sense that it is currently being packaged for politics.  It  goes something like this: a logical point alone is insufficient; one that also allows the possibility for an emotional connection will win every time.  It's something the pundits practice in their daily, caffeine-induced frenzies and advice that Hillary Clinton rejected early in her campaign from a man by the name of Lakoff --the very man who put this idea into shrink wrap for sale on the political market.   

Not very smart to downplay the human heart in favor of the brain.  The heart wins every time.  I'm quite confident on that point.

The thing that is most incredible about the heart is its capacity for empathy and its willingness to see possibilities where the brain would weigh in favor of prudence.  It's the kind of heart that I wasn't expecting when I posted an ad to Craigslist explaining the situation on my block these last four days.

On friday one of the feral cats climbed up the tree in my front yard.  And when I say climbed, I mean took up the sport of climbing like a pointy-eared Petrach and went for the top of the tree some 60 feet above the asphalt.  Nobody knows why he went up there, nobody knows if anyone owns the cat (all signs point to no), and nobody knows how he's coming down.

One thing is for certain, though: he's not coming down on his own accord.  

He's let the entire block know this with his sad siren song, cat wailing that drags on for minutes at a time before he slumps his head back on the branch where he has made his stand.  My inbox fills up with people responding to the Craigslist ad.  Everyone has an idea.  Someone has tipped off the local media and the Denver Post shows up in the late afternoon.

Bob, a man who dismisses the Denver Post photographers by curtly explaining that the media is too opinionated and that he doesn't read the paper anymore for that reason, suggests openly that we could shoot the cat out of the tree.  The photographer running the HD camera stops recording Bob's tirade.  But the thing about the cat wailing for four days is that, secretly, it has obviously reached him on some level.  The photographers move on to interview other neighbors and Bob surreptitiously slides across the street, pounding on my door.  I step onto the porch and he produces a can of mustard packed sardines.  It's all he has to offer the cat, he explains.  

The cameras have brought everyone out.  Jesus, the garbage collector who called the fire department about the cat on friday, leaves his house, taking the corner real slow to have a peek back at the tree.  The fire department, it turns out, has no time for these kind of childish games.  Put a can of food at the bottom of the tree, the dispatcher tells him.  The cat will come down.

That would stand to reason.  

But, like Mr. Lakoff told Hillary, reason alone won't get you results.  And the internet is littered with accounts of people who have lost their cats when fear made it impossible for reason to prevail, for the cat to back itself down the tree.  Dehydration, hunger, exhaustion and, at some point, the cat just falls.  It's a tragic ending that I wouldn't have expected, something dreamed up by a kitty Cormac McCarthy.  The god of cats is not a benevolent one. 

Giovanni and her sister, Delia, have come out with their kids.  The Pentacostals from Chihuahua, the ones who blather in tongues into the early morning hours once a month when their congregation gathers next door, have come out.  Juan, a quiet, young man from Zacatecas who has suddenly been crowned "Chacarron" has joined them.  The hood rats with their boom car --the loudest one on the block, the one that I have made a game of cat-and-mouse with asking them almost daily to shut it the eff off --have all come out.  They want to know who's dog is in the tree and then post themselves at the corner to watch the show.  The Paletero stops pushing his ice cream cart to watch and Shaquille, Delia's oldest boy, yells at him: "Una paleta por el show."  A popsicle for the show.  

Giovanni ignores her sister's advice not to climb the tree and takes her first steps up the wooden ladder I have propped up to reach the first split in the elm that holds the cat.  "I can do anything I want to," she yells down, setting off a back-and-forth exchange of Spanglish that won't let up for the next two hours.  

Chacarron follows and the Norteños from the corner bring an extension ladder over to help.  "Para el gatito o para la chica?" the round one jokes.  For the cat or the girl.  Giovanni yells something back at him, but she's already too far up the tree.  She conducts herself like a surgeon talking to her assistant.  Martillo.  Hammer.  Clavos.  Nails.  Escalera.  Ladder.  She is creating a path along the trunk that takes her to the fifty foot mark before it becomes to difficult for her to continue.  The cat, the unreasonable and emotional creature that it is, won't budge, just barely out of reach.  

Tomorrow starts day five.  

The fantastic Lyn Alweis and Helen Richardson of the Denver Post.

Take Two.

Shaquille and the climbing rope.

Giovanni

Just in case the cat falls.  Nevermind Giovanni.

And the very nice piece that the Denver Post put on their website, featuring yours truly as the puffy-faced guy who appears like he just had all four wisdom teeth wrenched from his jaw and sounds like he may be high on Percocet.  Go figure.  Click Here.

Percocet Blues

This whole thing hasn't been nearly as bad as everyone told me it would be.  All the horror stories covering everything from losing feeling in your neck to being down for two weeks really scared the hell out of me.  In the end I drove myself home, waited for the lidocaine to wear off, and then spent the rest of the day filing a stock request and working in my yard.  No swelling, no bleeding, no bloody pillow, no loss of sensation, no significant lost time, no pain, and I finished the day off with a plate of Salmon and fried shrimp.  If someone had told me just to go to an oral surgeon --not a dentist --and that would be the outcome I could have expected, I'd have done this 13 years ago when I was supposed to.  I even had the procedure with a local and it was just fine.  No crappy sounds, no prying, no cracking.  

That said, the one lesson that I will take away from this is that it's best to take Percocet on a full stomach.  Otherwise you start having hot flashes, your blood pressure takes a little nose dive, you feel nauseous, and the associated dysphoria is a far cry from pleasant.  Had to take a breather yesterday from hanging out with friends and shot some pictures while I sat outside trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  

Wisdom Teeth God Damn

No doubt my surgeon thinks I'm a drug seeker.  I lost the prescription she wrote for Percocet several weeks ago after completing the x-rays and consultation to have my four wisdom teeth yanked.  I lost the prescription and then, faced with the sterile, silver tray of torture instruments that she had neatly displayed next to the dental chair I'm sitting in, I find myself explaining that the last several times I've had Percocet, it didn't work for me anyhow.

"Well, what was it prescribed for?" she asks.  

I am not sure how to answer that, and my pause implies that whatever I'm dreaming up is untrue.  I can read that much in her eyes and hesitate before stumbling through a bad answer.  "Um, hell, I don't remember."

The truth is that my regular doctor, an old ER resident formerly of east coast domicile, sends me away with bottles of "worst case scenario" narcotics every time I travel.  In case I break my leg, lose an eye, land in a third-world operating room with appendicitis --the list goes on.  I'd love to tell my surgeon about my doctor but don't think she'd be as receptive to his story as I was.  The stories he's shared about working as a deck-hand on smuggling boats that moved hashish from north Africa into Italy and France are a little un-doctorly.  Somewhere before his decision to go to med school, the good doctor had another life.  He's never shared the full details with me and I'm sure the medical board knows even less, but his traveling days sound like something from a movie.  And every time I've left the country, he's lit up with stories from a life he left behind 30 years ago, the romance of travel, the adventure inherent to anything where you don't know what comes next.  

The last time I took one of the doctor's Percocets I was stateside, wandering around a college town with a couple of friends when some kids from a fraternity started throwing snowballs at us as we passed on the street below.  Two of us had the sense to keep walking.  The third, one of my closest and most life-by-his-own-rules kind of friends, took the snowball a little harsh and stopped to pick up a handful of rocks from the garden in front of the frat house.  Then, like an eager outfielder, he plunked them one at a time back at the snowballers.  

All I can say is that if this were a choose-your-own-adventure book, that choice is the one that lands you in the wide world of Percocet.  Trying to break up my buddy with the rocks from the spillage of white ball caps and popped collars that poured out the front door of the frat house like an Abercrombie & Fitch-filled flood of testosterone cost me the ability to chew food for a week.  Percocet didn't touch the pain.

In the end the frat kids didn't get to take any of my teeth, though they gave it a pretty good shot.  Seven years passed before my surgeon-so-gentle, the good Dr. Lesnick, finished their work and took a few for herself.

Mint 'n Mulberries

I've been in this house for four summers now, long enough that you'd think I'd know there was a mulberry tree in my yard.  It's not that I hadn't been put on notice; one of my neighbors pointed it out the first summer I was here.  

And then, with the seamless grace of a practiced comic,  he transitioned from mulberries to a story about the Air Force landing a fighter jet on the highway to medivac him from a bad car wreck.  His hand --the one he is using to make the gesture of a plane landing -- was torn almost completely off.  Fortunately for him, he tells me, the Air Force commanders wouldn't have him sit on the interstate and just die when they had skilled pilots that could race him to the hospital and sew his hand right back on.  So the jets were scrambled, the finest surgeons assembled, and the hand was salvaged.  Good as new.  

Needless to say, I figured the mulberries were part of the same tall tale and, each season, the blossoms seemed to fade directly into dried husks.  No mul.  No berries.  

A few weeks ago I put out a half-dozen bird feeders for the sparrows and a pair of mourning doves that camp in my lawn.  Little, winged hippies, they crash on my grass, eat my food, and leave their shit all over the place without so much as a thank you.  

This afternoon I came out to find the the birds perched in their usual spots, taunting the cats behind the windows using nothing but the power of crass indifference to rile their feline counterparts.  The birds, unlike the cats, seemed to understand the concept of glass, the smooth, clear pane that served to separate predator from prey.  Perhaps something like a zoo for birds.  

"Look, darling, in the display --a cat," one dove says to the other.

"Yes," she sneers her best Gsa Gsa, "I've seen them in the Audubon.  We simply must have one."  And, with that, the dove drains the last of her ice tea, slurping her straw momentarily before pushing her sunglasses up into her feathers, waving one wing over her head like a half-inflated windsock.  Pouting her beak, she snaps her fingers.  "Garçon? Garçon!"  She snaps again.

The dove, I gather, is trying to attract my attention.  I look at her and, before I can say anything, she waves her glass over her head, signaling for a refill with her index feather.  I pretend not to notice, turning and walking towards the other side of the yard.  My feet, both bare, step through something sticky.  Something that pushes through the webbing between my toes like meat through a sausage maker.  It is warm, the kind of warm that makes you wish you had shoes on.  I look down at my feet and discover, to my surprise, that I am not standing in a pile of dog shit, rather on a pad of fallen mulberries.

Peering up into the tree I see, at each bifurcation between the branches, long, raspberry-like fruits dangling improbably like some kind of mythical, deciduous unicorn.  The birds, apparently kept at bay by their new feeders, have spared the fresh berries for the first time since I moved in.  I suddenly have a change of heart about the dove's ice tea, wondering to myself how, exactly, a fighter jet would look landing on the interstate.

Megan

Meet Megan.  Model.  Hunter. Gun Owner.  Skunk Slayer.

I've updated the Gun Culture work on my website to include some new photographs from one of the NRA's top-ranked shooters --a woman who started shooting at the age of 54 --and the beginnings of a visual exploration of the gun and its iconic role in American pop culture.  Have a fresh look.

Dad Turns 64

I started blogging with the intention of pairing images with writing --something that is, for me, an exercise that takes a lot of time and thought before I really feel like the final piece is suitable to be plunked out into the ether.  Over the last month I've been toying with a follow-up gun piece, something about gunslingers and the wild west, the arc of history that seems to shave the rough edges from those long-dead and awkward-living men into the modern incarnations that play on the silver screen.  History, it turns out, is a lot like an old man who refuses to wear his hearing aids.  He only hears part of the truth, picking and choosing aspects of the story that are convenient, discarding the bits that are unhelpful to his line of thinking.  

But that's another story for another time.

Speaking of old men who don't wear their hearing aids, my dad turns 64 on the 22nd.  My mom threw a surprise party for him in their new warehouse, a building that my dad spent over a year building himself.  And by himself, I mean exactly that: himself.  They've grown their construction business over the last decade, filling in the costly gaps by footing the labor themselves.  Their new warehouse is no exception and pretty much par for the course as far as my dad goes.  He built the house I grew up in --twice.  Once before the tornado.  Then again after, landing spots in the local and national news, sounding much more upbeat than he looked, framed in the wreckage of his smashed work.  He built the barn with the lumber salvaged from the first house.  The scrap that was too small to use cut into firewood and burned in their stove for more than twenty years now.

Anyhow, with the next installment of the gun project stuck somewhere in that limbo between first and final draft, I'll post some pictures from the big surprise 64th.  That's what you're expecting from a photographer anyway, right?

My mom reminding me that it's a long fall.

Photocopied pictures of a younger dad (ahem, cough) --four decades younger.

Food.

Laughing as people line up to tell stories and jokes about my dad.

The man himself.

My mom in green, probably looking for me.  I bet she'll never see me hiding behind this pink lady.

This place looks quiet.  I know she won't find me over here.

Dancing.

More dancing.

Fin

Bob

The towns spring up and then fall behind, pulses of orange light followed again by the darkness of the county road. Wheat country. Pancake flat. Some 200 miles away, the city lights of Denver glow on the horizon. The rick-rack of tire tread on old road soothes my sunburnt face. It's nearly midnight when I call Bolton. I know he'll be interested. Maybe even awake. He's from north-central Arizona in a small strip of forest land surrounded on all sides by desert. Drop down towards Phoenix and it's cactus; head north towards Navajo and it's rock. Either way, it's a desert sandwich. Some ten years ago I remember him driving into work, arriving fifteen minutes early each day. Fifteen minutes so that in the event he saw a coyote, he'd have time to shoot it without making himself late. Not the kind of thing that people talk about around office water coolers, but for the Forest Service it was, more-or-less, par for the course. Ten years later and I have a voicemail box that is half full of Bolton's mostly offensive messages. I save them. Not sure why, though, no-doubt that when he reads this, he'll probably have some suggestions. Even after getting blasted by an IED with his National Guard unit in Afghanistan the first word I received read just like one of his voicemails. I have the email saved, something he sent from Germany while being treated for his injuries. The first line reads: "BItch ASS, first off im fine, I got med evac'd to germany on jun 1, we hit an IED."

I press send. Bolton picks up the phone. "What?!" Surprisingly polite today, he has decided not to call me a bitch, fat-ass, or piece of shit, to spare the more colorful variations. I rattle off the story, everything there is to say about the machine gun shoot that has consumed my day. I make it through most of the high points before he cuts me off. "Send me some pictures, bitch."

___

Several days earlier I am on the phone with one of the organizers of the Rocky Mountain Fifty Caliber Shooting Association's twice annual machine gun shoot. He greets me with a heaping dose of suspicion, concerned that the shoot will be portrayed as a gathering of gun nuts. For me, these are the hurdles that are the toughest, something that is always difficult to take. I don't tend to photograph things that are not interesting to me and the simple fact that people would come from as far away as Australia to shoot machine guns is, to say the least, something that piques my interest. I arrive two days later on just a couple hours of sleep. I half expect that I will be turned away or put before a square-jawed inquisitor who will pick apart my political makeup with hot tongs before breaking me on the rack.

Instead, I sign a liability release and I am handed a self-adhesive tag that reads in large-font red letters: Media.

I sit on the cargo rack of the organizer's four-wheeler as he drives me to the end of the quarter-mile long firing line, bumping past an assortment of exotic looking guns and their happy shooters. This one from Connecticut, that one from Australia, a doctor who has brought with him a motorized mini gun that spins six barrels and puts out bullets so fast that it sounds more like a loud whistle than a gun. He tells me it is his six-shooter and looks at me like I've suddenly dropped my pants when I flinch at the concussion of a large, fifty caliber sniper rifle being fired directly behind me. At the south end, a farmer named Lester and his sons are shooting bowling balls from a homemade canon. He is as warm and jolly a man as ever and graciously offers to let me shoot his Tommy Gun. It's heavy and feels like it was built to last, something that seems rare in the era of plastic. A long magazine of .45 caliber bullets, a standard size for many handguns, hangs below the steel barrel. I pull the knob on the right side of the gun clicking a bullet into the chamber, flip the safety forward with my left thumb, put the carbine to my shoulder and pull the trigger.

Nothing.

Lester taps the slide and the problem is fixed. This time it shoots. I finish the clip, aiming at one of the stumps that have been set out on the range before turning back to watch as Lester takes aim on a model airplane being flown along the firing line. It's a target and all 150 shooting positions fire at it as it passes. Like the crowd doing the wave at a football match, the report of gunfire grows louder and then dims as the plane passes down the line. The remote craft's controller makes it roll and turn flips in the air, taunting the shooters. Lester pulls the cord attached to his canon, loosing a bowling ball up into the air with a huffy explosion. He's smiling like a boy; the bowling ball passed within feet of the plane --pretty good for something so unconventional.

The thing that surprises me about the unconventional nature of a machine gun shoot is just how conventional it actually feels. The mostly male shooters are chummy, warm, friendly, a little competitive, and all into their respective machines. Boys with their toys. My media tag attracts the attention of a somewhat apprehensive man named Derek. He is shooting a sniper rifle. The .50 caliber gun shoots a cartridge that is as big as the open palm of your hand. At the end of the barrel of his gun is an arrowhead shaped contraption that vents on both sides so that when the bullet exits the rifle the discharged gas is directed backwards along the steel baffles, exerting force that pushes the rifle in a forward direction so that the full force of the discharged bullet is not brought to bear on the shoulder of whoever is shooting the gun.

These guns are forceful, loud, and hefty. Accurate at well over a mile, the discharge sends a concussive wave that resonates the air in your lungs. Derek invites me to shoot his. He asks me if I've shot a gun before; I have, though I sense that he doesn't believe me. I think he's pegged me as anti-gun as he nervously explains how to use his rifle. He wants me to understand exactly what it is that I'll be writing about and the opportunity is a welcome one. He hands me a .50 caliber shell which I place in the chamber, sliding the bolt forward before resting my cheek on the stock of the gun. It is intimidating and, no doubt, he senses my nerves. I keep my eye back from the scope of the gun, having learned the hard way several years ago that the recoil of the shot will punch you in the eye like a round, plastic fist.

As I swing the rifle around to face towards the empty, white propane tank off in the distance there is a certain familiarity to the act. I look through glass, bring the subject into the viewfinder, and carefully shoot. A bullet, a frame, the piece of my brain that makes photos is lighting up with a sense of having been there before, like knowing a piece of land so well that you can walk it even without moonlight. It's habit, instinct, a map drawn across the landscape of the mind. It is precise, decisive, careful, and, frankly, fun.

I spend much of the remainder of the day watching the long-distance shooters in their calculated dance. Bolt open, bolt closed, pause, breathe, exhale, stop, squeeze. It's a rhythm, a zone, something that draws a distinct contrast from the other machine gun shooters, people who's rapid-fire reminds me of the bad photographers who never bother to look at what they're shooting, just pointing and squeezing the motor drive on the camera, hoping for something that will work. Spray and pray as it's called in the world of photography just as it is in the world of shooting. Reliance on quantity rather than quality.

Not to bad-mouth the good ol' boys having fun with their machines, just that I find something strangely familiar in the precision gunners and their patient routine. I meet Bob, a man who served as Marine shooter in Vietnam. He is a quiet, soft-spoken man of average stature with a face carved of clean lines, the slope of his eyelids heavy and pulling downward at the edges. A competition sniper shooter, he is one of the most practiced riflemen on the line, unhurried and spot-on accurate, beating many of the machine gunners to the prized targets --cars and fuel tanks that are rigged to explode when they are hit. One bullet carefully aimed is worth more than thousands haphazardly flung in imprecise volleys --a lesson equally valuable to any photographer. We talk about trajectories and crosswinds, the factors that push a bullet off course as it hurtles along its path. Bob talks about these things in terms of instinct, something that you learn by doing. Tactile learning, quiet and repetitive until it becomes second nature.

Sometimes I feel like the most difficult exercise that our daily interactions presents to us is the task of separating the person from the thing that defines them. The person behind the broom, behind the wheel, behind the tie, behind the camera, and behind the gun is not the broom, the car, the tie, the camera, or the gun. It is what they do with those things, the degree to which their character is impressed on their work that counts. As I pose Bob, staring through my lens down his rifle's muzzle, the words "Death From Afar," come into focus, engraved in a circle around the bore where the bullet exits the barrel. For some reason, I am not afraid.

More Photos at MattSlaby.Com

New Website

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Ivan

Not sure what possessed me to do it, but I ended up going to the Arby's drive-through for a milkshake. I haven't been to a fast food place in years. Ordered a medium chocolate to be moderate. Got two blocks away and realized that what I really wanted was a large. Moderate schmoderate. A half-mile later I found myself making a tight turn to get around the poorly designed entrance to Burger King. Another medium shake. Chocolate. I don't exactly know why anyone would order anything but chocolate. By the time I got home both shakes were gone and remorse was no where to be found. Unloaded some lumber from my truck into my back yard where I found Ivan wandering around in my tomatoes. He's showing his brother the plants, proud as can be. Ivan and I have been sharing the burden of the garden for three seasons now. The first time I caught him back there, I protested. "You don't have to do that, buddy--"

"Aw hell, that's what neighbors are for," he retorted, popping his head up from a jungle of nearly fifty tomato plants. Everything sprouted that year. Everything grew. I'm still eating my first season from mason jars.

Fast forward two years, I've put raised beds into the garden, done away with rows, and added lattice for the beans, cucumbers, and squash to climb on. I plant extra of the stuff that Ivan likes and catch him with his arms full about twice a week. I'm glad I don't have to coax him to take vegetables because there's more than I could ever eat back there. Ivan's pointing to the basil, explaining to his brother how you put it with tomato just like in Italy. He's stuttering and smiling, something that makes my mom call Ivan one of her kids. She's a special education teacher by training. To be 'one of her kids' always meant that whoever she was talking about would have likely been in a special education class when she was teaching. I still don't know about that.

"Y-y-y-a goin' to school tomorra, Matt?"

"Nah. I got two weeks off."

"'Bout time."

"Uh huh."

"L-l-listen, I might have to ask you a favor."

"Ok."

"Ya know where Flagler is?"

"Nope."

"W-w-well I'm waiting for a phone call, but I think I gotta be out there tomorra."

"What for?"

"Rye harvest."

"You gonna work with that guy again?"

"Yeah."

Ivan's been out of work for almost three years, doing odd jobs when they come up and living in his brother's basement. Like his brother, he worked as a long-haul truck driver for decades before his health began to fail. His job dumped him immediately. No need to pay for surgery. Healthcare until you need it, that's what I always say. He's been looking for work ever since he recovered, but nobody wants to hire a 65 year-old man to do anything if it means giving benefits.

Twelve hours later I'm sitting in the passenger seat of Ivan's pickup. We're going to Flagler where he will meet a man who runs two combines during harvest season, rotating rye to wheat to corn to milo, following the grains as they dry through the midwest. Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, maybe Iowa and Nebraska if people get behind. Sitting in the bed of the pickup is a single duffle bag that Ivan will live out of for the next three months. He'll drive the truck that the combine loads. "Might even drive the combine," he explains," but the last time I drove one of them was when they had 16-foot heads. T-t-they're 35 now." He's talking about the size of the swath cut by the monstrous machines.

I'm supposed to drop Ivan off at a little garage outside of Flagler owned by the man he will work for. It's about 300 miles round trip so I settle into my seat. I'm supposed to drive his pickup back home. He'll be driving company trucks for the next few months so there's no need to have his around. "I-a-a-a-I know you got the same transmission in your truck. You'll be a-a-awlright with this on the way home, right?"

"Yep. Second gear all the way."

"Aw, shit," he laughs. We stop at the Flying J for breakfast and I'm treated to Ivan talking big rigs with some big boys sitting next to us. Then a joke about the three-legged dog who walked into the bar looking for the man who shot his paw. Get it? Pa, paw, dad, father. I remember my dad telling that one when I was five years-old and thinking that it was the dumbest joke ever. I'm 28 now and Ivan has greatly improved the delivery. Much better 23 years later. I'm given a tour over coffee and eggs of all the broken bridges in America. The truck drivers wane long, triggered by the CNN ticker talking about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The George Washington bridge in New York. The potholes open up to the river below. Some bridge over a giant pit in Chicago. Another one in Denver. A couple overloaded semis and a camel's hair and they're all going down into the deep waters that they span. Bridge apocalypse is nigh, so says Ivan.

As we leave the J, I get my first lesson from the 'All-I-Need-to-Learn-About-Driving-Semis' school with Ivan Holloway as my professor. On the tail of the bridge lecture, I ask him if he ever took the back roads to avoid the scales. I know the lingo from a bluegrass standard and hope it impresses my teacher.

"Shit yeah." He gives me the rundown on weight classes, axles, pre-pass scales that weigh your truck as it hurtles down the interstate without ever having to stop, and the deus ex machina powers the DOT wields when you get caught. He tells me the backroads between Pennsylvania and Kentucky, the ones etched on the tablet of his mind that kept him from the scales and inspection checkpoints when his boss would send him cross-country with an overloaded trailer. He gets bored with giving directions at about Kentucky and switches to transmissions. I learn the evolution of the big diesel trannies, the double sticked four by fours, the four by fives, the old ten speeds, split gears, twelve and thirteen speeds. He laughs when I try my lingo out again and ask him if you double clutch these transmissions. I was impressed with my knowledge for a moment after learning how to drive a few split axles in the Forest Service.

"Nah, nah, nah. Only clutch it to start out, then just listen to the engine." I feel dumb, but he continues, "They make automatics now. T-t-too many people who don't know how to drive getting hired anymore." An automatic transmission on a semi. The idea being that if the truck can drive itself, a company just needs to hire someone to steer it. Cut the human right out of it, let the machine handle the dirty work. Someone like me could drive one of "those" trucks, he explains.

A couple minutes about jake brakes, burning brakes, mountain passes, and the cardinal rule of going up the hill at the same speed you come down and I'm ready to drive a big rig. The conversation detours for a minute into something about greyhound racetracks and we arrive at our destination. I dump Ivan off with a tall cowboy replacing seals on the rear axle of his pickup and snap a few photos before shaking hands and driving back towards Denver in Ivan's truck. Two exits down, I see the blue and white Travel America sign and pull into the truckstop. I'm looking for C.W. McCall but settle for Merle Haggard. As I drive home, I wonder what it must have been like for Haggard as a prisoner in San Quentin, sitting in the audience watching Johnny Cash play, all those songs in his heart and nowhere to put them. Hell, I think. Thank god he got out. As Denver approaches, I flip over to Spanish-language radio, listening to Daddy Yankee's new hit. Cool. It oozes cool. For a moment, I debate flying to Puerto Rico to study cool before returning to my senses.

It's right next door.