I keep going back to the journal to recall little details here and there, and it’s just occurred to me that it was exactly twenty years ago from today that I was out there sojourning on the interstate, an artless highway sailor led by a double yellow line and a blue, white, and red Chevron sign. But the journal is nearly worthless in its utter dearth of anecdotal content and simple adjectives, and it hardly passes muster as even a log of events. Every day I write that I am worried about the car breaking down, concerned about not having any money, and grateful for so-and-so who bought me a sandwich. So I turn to the photos.

I climbed up in the attic and dragged out a file box brimming with old photos and negatives. Somewhere in there is a pile of pictures from the trip, I know, and I have to wade through a marsh of a thousand memories from before I was married, before I did anything important, to get to them. All these photographs of me, my old life, my old friends, and all my other adventures, they mean nothing to my wife nor to my children. To them, these are just like pictures in a magazine -advertisements for things you don’t need, with smiling strangers in sometimes extraordinary places. But mostly the photos are just ordinary things, all their meaninglessness in full color.

But not to me. The box is a relic, pre-dating the digital era, when we used to employ elaborate light-catching equipment to capture 1/500th of a second of history and expose it to a special paper which we had kept in complete darkness until the exact moment when its whole use would come to light. Then we’d have a professional service wash it all in unpronounceable chemicals, where the images magically painted themselves on a myriad of tiny translucent canvasses, and then were projected and cropped onto reflective paper. Photographs. Real photographs. Nowadays, it all sounds too crazy to believe.

I find the pile, and the accompanying negatives, and begin to sift through them. I am immediately struck by the fact that I didn’t take a single picture of anyone I stayed with.

No smiling faces of my friends and their friends and their colleges, no shots of us in front of famous sights or statues. No, most of the pictures are of the road or the horizon. Exposure after exposure of various American landscapes bisected by some highway, and, every once in a while, a shot of my beat up old Honda Civic on the shoulder of that highway looking like some old, forgotten, beaten-down Indian, after the last of the territories was declared a state.

I only find four rolls, but it appears that’s all I took. About a hundred pictures over the span of a month or two. Today I would carelessly rattle off a hundred photos of my kids in a matter of a few hours, and then thoughtlessly delete anything even slightly out of focus. But twenty years ago a hundred pictures was a sizable amount, and I remember being careful about each one I took, since I couldn’t afford it otherwise.

The hundred pictures amounts to only a few per state, and some states it seems I skipped entirely (having crossed them at night.) There’s one or two of me, where I set the camera on a self-timer and then posed in the landscape wearing my leather jacket, or Stetson, or both. I’m embarrassed, to see them, and can’t imagine how I got away with any of it. My hair is long and I’m wearing some old faded Levi’s, and I’m usually holding a can of Coke. And I look lonely, but like I’m trying to hide it. Or maybe I’ve just given myself over to it, and I didn’t know or expect anyone to really be interested in accompanying me anyway. In any case, the bulk of the pictures are soulless, empty panoramas of a variety of locations that stretch across the continent. And I imagine these spaces look the same today, this very moment, as they do in these photographs taken exactly twenty years ago.

Going through these pictures I find myself wondering just what it was I was trying to capture. Was I merely recording the place I’d been? Or was there some deeper substance to it all? Was I trying to express something of significance, or define and communicate some feeling, or concept, or belief? Or just... well, where is everyone?

I am older now, and perhaps I am partially jaded, but I admit some weariness at the pretenses of my youth, and anything ostentatious I no longer have time for. These things fade fast, with a business to keep up and a family to provide for, and so looking at these pictures I suspect there is no gist or nuance or metaphor at all. It’s just a view from a young man with a camera, time on his hands, in a pretty place. Satisfied to go it alone.