Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

in 1727, they found themselves with one-way passage to America’s distant shores. They must have liked what they saw when they stepped off the boat in Philadelphia. For the next two centuries, they never ventured farther than a long day’s buggy ride from the docks. My grandparents, however, were made from different stock.

      Though my grandfather spent his days counting money and shuffling numbers at the local bank, his true love was photography. He also liked to buy my grandmother naughty 1950s-era mail-order lingerie. Decades after he passed, I went through boxes of old family film and discovered that he also had a penchant for combining those two passions—the results of which I cannot unsee no matter how hard I try.

      During the postwar boom years, they joined my grandfather’s Masonic Lodge buddies and began traveling on package tours to Hawaii and Mexico and the Caribbean. My grandfather’s love for faraway places and photography grew, and so did his camera collection. He owned a small Speed Graphic, a Voigtländer, a Rolleiflex, and an early Nikon camera that still sits on a shelf in my office.

      They’d already bought the tickets for their next big trip when doctors found the cancer. He died just before Christmas, a year shy of when he was set to retire, so much of the world left unseen.

      My grandmother could have curled up and died inside, and I’m sure she did a little. But she went back to work at her nursing job, and kept right on traveling, without him, on those same package tours. One of my earliest and strangest memories is arriving at the Harrisburg airport to greet her and watching a look of genuine horror cross the grown-up faces around me as my sixty-something grandmother sashayed across the tarmac in a miniskirt and white go-go boots.

      I’ll say this for Grandma, she didn’t give a shit what other people thought.

      Whether it was up the Nile, down the Amazon, across Europe, or around Africa, she carried that clunky old Nikon camera on all her trips. When she returned, the family gathered in a darkened room to watch the world she’d seen unfold in slide after blurry slide. Elephants in the Serengeti, the Pyramids at Giza, Machu Picchu, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome: my grandmother saw it all. I sat there fidgeting through her slideshows, desperate to get back to watching TV. But even then I asked myself, if my grandma traveled to the far corners of the earth, what could ever stop me?

      Well, money for one. My mother worked as a registered nurse; my father was a union welder. With four kids, extra cash was rare. But I was my parents’ first boy and was named after my grandfather. I always imagined that gave me a special place in my grandmother’s heart, and I wasn’t above wheedling presents from her as a child—or for a long time after. Everything from a ball glove and a new bike to bail money when I landed in the county lockup in the wake of some larcenous college hijinks. When I was eleven years old, she bought me my first camera: a simple plastic Kodak Instamatic that took twelve square pictures on black plastic cartridges of 126-roll film. I ran out into the winter gloom and took a dozen pictures of the skeletal oak trees around our house, then looked around for more film to waste. I was never much for delayed gratification, and it felt like a slow death having to wait a week or more for my masterpieces to come back from the photo lab.

      Mercifully, those early snapshots were long ago consigned to a landfill out past the interstate. But I can still remember that feeling that I could stop time, put a frame around the world, and hold it in my grubby little hands, one image at a time.

      All the same, I never set out to be a nature photographer.

      I grew up between a trailer park and a chicken farm. Where I’m from, nature was mostly poison ivy, junk cars, and broken glass. That Kodak Instamatic led me to a budding journalism career: by day, I took snapshots for the high-school paper and yearbook, then rushed home and turned our sole bathroom into a makeshift darkroom. Under a glowing red light, I developed rolls of black-and-white film, then printed my shaky masterpieces one by one. The camera gave me all the license I needed to jump any fence, cross any line, and push my luck well past its breaking point. I fancied myself the next great war photographer—even if the first day of deer-hunting season was the closest combat I would ever see in rural Pennsylvania. I have always had a rich and varied interior life.

      A hundred miles down the road at the University of Maryland, my career path took a short detour. I signed up for a major in astronomy. It took longer than it should have for me to figure out that astronomy is physics, and physics is math, and math is . . . hard. One fall morning, I emerged dazed and blinking from ninety uncomprehending minutes of freshman calculus, then took the long walk down to Administration and switched majors. The College of Journalism expected little in the way of academic heavy lifting. As long as I could bang out thirty words a minute on the department’s ancient and clattering manual typewriters, I was in.

      But, as my freshman year dragged expensively and unproductively into its fourth semester, I saw that academia and I needed a little time apart. I dropped out, skulked back home, and moved into my parents’ basement. It was time to regroup. I took a summer job working alongside my father in the hometown carpet factory. The place specialized in making miles of carpet for the big American cars that were, at the time, still rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines. In the 1980s, the factory employed nearly two thousand people and was a cornerstone of my small hometown’s manufacturing economy.

      Every workday morning for three decades, my dad walked through those factory gates and into its dank and cavernous halls. He crafted machinery and improvised repairs from the dye pits to the assembly lines to the machine shop. My father was part of that greatest generation of men who fought against pure evil in a global war, then dusted themselves off, put both the horror and the heroics behind them, and started families. Together with their young wives, they built lives and reared a crop of overindulged and ungrateful children. My dad could swim a mile through cold lake water, ride a motorcycle, catch a fish, shoot a deer, fix damn near anything using the tools at hand—and he didn’t take shit off anybody. As far as I could tell, he was universally respected and admired. I still have a picture, taken sometime in the early 1960s, of him shaking the carpet factory owner’s hand. The camera’s glaring flash captured the moment as my father strode up to this third-generation suit. Standing straight backed and square shouldered, my father looks like he’s the one who runs the place and that suit was just around to keep his chair warm.

      I am my father’s son, but I’m afraid the apple fell some distance from that particular tree.

      My arrival at the factory contained all the troubled elements of 1980’s America: industrial decay, adolescent alienation, and generational family drama. It was like living inside a Springsteen song. I was just another college failure with a smart mouth and nothing to contribute in the way of useful skills.

      If a day passed without me causing him some manner of embarrassment or shame, it was only because I’d overslept and called in sick. But each day when the lunch whistle blew, my dad would invite me to join him in the welding shop to eat lunch. I’d sit on the workbench, making a big show of flipping through a day-old copy of the New York Times, admiring photos from Lebanon or Guatemala or Mozambique, and wishing I was there instead.

      I didn’t know much, but I knew I had no future on the factory floor. Settle down with one of the hometown cheerleaders, raise a brood, learn a trade, and make an honest living working with my hands? Fat fucking chance. For starters, even small-town cheerleaders had standards and they’d known me for bad news since seventh grade.

      After a month or two, I started spending my spare time loitering around the newsroom at our hometown newspaper, the Evening Sentinel. All through high school I’d pestered the paper’s long-suffering chief photographer, pedaling my bicycle over to the newsroom to breathlessly offer up rolls of badly exposed and poorly focused pictures from local football games and track meets. Now, I was one more overenthusiastic stringer, speeding through the parking lot amid squealing tires, then charging uninvited into the newsroom to breathlessly present poorly exposed and badly focused images of house fires and overturned cars.

      Still, he must have seen something in me, if only a cheap source of labor and someone eager to take any crap assignment. I would shoot anything: school board meetings, Halloween parades, ribbon cuttings. I took my police scanner everywhere. I even took it to bed. And, in a memory long repressed, to my