PICTURES

With the exception of the postcards, these are all stills from video.  WordPress captioning works badly, so they’re not captioned, but many of them correspond to incidents described in my letters.  They’re things that stood out to me; things I remember; pictures from some moments that counted; good things; odd things; some things that are evil; some things that were beautiful.  Above all, they’re fragmentary.  You won’t feel the cold, smell the dust, hear the engines, taste the capsaicin, or pick up any of the physical inner signals – like sadness, awe, anxiety, or dread – that attended some of these impressions with tremendous force.

There aren’t any pictures of the lightning storms at night.

If you’re specifically interested in the contexts of the pictures related to oil and gas work, Bill Crouch’s storefront display, or the Confederacy, see my letters from Austin and New Orleans.  Censors of surprisingly diverse politics have taken offense at pictures I took of what was happening around me on this walk.  Sometimes they had a point, and sometimes they had a gun.  I include the above-mentioned pictures with the rest in case anyone finds what they show unexpected.

These are scenes of the American West, 2013-2014.