Rebecca Solnit Foreward
This is Rebecca's Forward
W I S H B O O K
When I was teetering on the brink of my teens, we had
two Sears catalogues in the house. One was the current
edition, in which I looked at clothes idly since I couldn't
afford to order them. The other Sears catalogue was a re-
print of the book as it had existed in its heyday, around the
end of the nineteenth century, when you could order mule
harnesses and hand drills, bustles, coal scuttles, pianos,
button-up boots, stoves, baseballs, and guitars, to say
nothing of whiskey flavoring extracts, patent medicines,
paper collars, and mandolins. At the turn of the twentieth
century, the Sears mail-order catalogue generally made
it possible for rural people to reap the benefits of the
Industrial Revolution, in the forms of mass-manufactured
harrows, handguns, gramophones, and hats. They could
have choice and access the way city dwellers did, rather
than relying on the limited inventory and sometimes-in-
flated prices of the town supplier. Anyone could use the
Sears catalogue, and did, but the book was particularly
important for people in the remote places that I think of
as the American outback .
It was later that Sears began issuing its famous Wish
Book, as the Christmas catalogue was christened, but all
retail catalogues are essentially wish books, inventories
of the intersection between desire and purchasing power.
The name "wish book" makes clear that the reading was
accompanied by daydreaming, or that daydreaming was
incited by reading. Before they supplied people with
goods, these catalogues supplied them with a particu-
lar kind of reading material. You turned the pages while
imagining your life augmented by the inventory of goods,
inventorying your life as well, for what it lacked and for
what it might become if you had the funds.
The things in Crazy from the Heat can't be bought, and
one of the book's pleasures is how far the world it shows
is from commerce, but in its structure it is also a wish
book, a catalogue. The word catalogue comes straight
from the Greek: The Iliad has a katalogos neon, a cata-
logue of ships, and the word was assembled from earlier
words, from cata- and legein, to say, to count. The word
legein is also where we get legend, as in the legend of
Pecos Bill or Pancho Villa but also the legend that is the
inscription on a tombstone or a coin or a map. There are
legends in both senses, of the West as a dreamspace and
of lists of things that make up that West, in this book that
is a catalogue.
If catalogue carries commercial overtones, it's worth remembering that science also has its catalogues. A star catalogue is a standard reference in astronomy-and there are a lot of photographs here that would qualify this book as a star catalogue—while art history has its catalogues raisonnes, its comprehensive muster roll of an artist's creations. But I think of Crazy from the Heat as particular kind of catalogue, a wish book. If most wish books and catalogues travel from thje center outward, pumping out commodities like some commercial industrial heart, then this is a counter-wish book, a collection of images sent back from the edge of the United States that can fill the viewer up with desires for things that money can't buy. Inventory and invention have the same root in finding.
Maybe for the artist it's an inventory of fulfilled wishes, of things already found, a catalogue of home.
J A C K R A B B I T L I G H T
Packing for the trip to the desert, I remembered the headlamp, the tea, the sunscreen, the rain jacket, and the hats, but I forgot the hiking maps, the phone number for the old friends in June Lake, and the galleys of this book. I found, however, that many of the images and, more than that, the categories of images-insects and reptiles, a hulking arachnid, portraits, environmental portraits, panoramic landscapes, starry nights, clouds, weather-had stayed in my head after the first journey through the big
unbound pages. I riffled through them in memory, playing them against the actual landscape unfolding before me, as familiar as the lyrics of a song, though the drive of 260 miles up over the to the high desert would have to be one of those ballads with a hundred stanzas.
Even the names past Tracy began to be a pleasure, the orchards and farming towns of Manteca, Escalon and Oakdale where the road is lined with cornfields, farm stands, and small houses shaded by big trees, and then the thrilling stretch where the buildings thin out and the countryside opens up, as though the land has shaken itself free of clutter and stripped down to its own skin, ready to move with full power, the way a racehorse opens up its stride. First came pure gold grassland that rolls up to an escarpment, and then oak woodland, and then the temperature dropped a degree or so every half dozen miles and pines began to mix with the oaks and then to dominate. The familiar names rolled by, the saloon whose name I remembered before I read it, Whiskey River, which had added a Cowboy Church on Sundays since l'd last been by, the turnoffs for Copperopolis and Chinese Camp, Soulsbyville, Confidence, Sugar Pine, MiWuk, Long Barn, and as the dusty, humid air got thin and cool and clear, Pine Crest and Spring Gap. Afterward, on
the other side of the mountain pass, the world is different: things are further apart, there are fewer people, and a subtly and not so subtly different set of assumptions prevail. I was west. (Where I come from you get there by going east.)
Perusing the galleys had made me feel a little chagrinedabout my own path, for I might've being going to the country but in the big picture I had stayed in the city. I remembered a dozen times when, for a moment-passing by like this in a car-or for months or years , I had wanted to move to the American outback. I remembered particular places that drew me: Ely and Baker, Nevada: Lone Pine and Cedarville, California; a few places in the high countryof Northern New Mexico, and once, on a trip to Carlsbad Cavernsin 1997, one of the small towns in the center of the state, Vaughn or Duran or Encino maybe. I made annual pilgrimages to Galisteo, New Mexico, and Baker, Nevada, and I remember falling in love at first sight with West Texas, a place that seemed more majestic in scale, the three times I'd passed through than anyplace else I'd ever been.
The lure of each of these places was not just the spectacle of the surrounding landscape, but some faintly heard music, slower and simpler than the turbulent orchestra of urban life , an imitation of the the life that might be lived there, less varied, less hurried, maybe a little less distracted, with the quality of time that sometimes gets called boring and is otherwise known as quiet. I never moved to the country, bit I've been a visitor there the last twenty years, stopping in on cattleranches and small towns and public land, camping in most of the deserts of the West, spending a week here, a month there, driving from San Francisco to Albuquerque or Denver and all the places in between, floating down its two main rivers, the Colorado and the Rio Grande, the former flowing to the Pacific, the latter to the Gulf and the Atlantic, making the rounds of the larger region that feels like home. But that's not the same thing.
As you get older, you leave behind you countless forks in the road, paths that led to lives you decided not to lead, and however wise your choices, there's always a pang for more beautiful or romantic might-have-beens.
James Evans's photographs remind me of all the rural and backwater lives I never lived. A lot of people in these remote places are born into them, the choice made generations before, or washed up in them for some reason or other, but few choose them consciously over anyplace else (except when the remote plsces become art colonies or retirement or resort locations, and thereby become someplace else.) You choose limits, maybe isolation, possibly failure, because you don't get a second chance if you screw up; the supply of people and their tolerance for you is finite. Those small towns and hamlets and outposts that called to me-maybe they're what Odysseus was tied to the mast to resist, all the fishing villages on the way bacck to Ithaca. The sirens who called out their yoo-hoos with the bobby pins still in their spit curls and their engines idling.
A few days later I stopped in a Mexican carneceria in the San Joaquin Valley. I couldn't find any chipotles or enamel spoons and ended up with a big bag of rosa de jamaica for tea and canela, or stick cinnamon. The cashier was a young man with a clear, strady gaze and guileess voice who wanted to talk. What was is it like to live in cities, he wanted to know, with people stacked up on top of each other? And I wanted to ask him what was it like to live in a small town with a finite number of options, but he had known no other life, besides early childhood somewhere in Michoacan, and could not answer. We each had our own normal, though his was modulated by all he had leared from the druggies and other troubled characters who came up to him at the register and revealed the depth of human suffering, the complexity of their ethics and psyches, and the difficulty of judging anyone. So he told me, and he also wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. My heart filled up with hopefor his future, and I wondered would it be fulfilled there or whether he might migrate again, or what might trap him or dim his light.
Here and there on this road trip, I was reading a memoir by a gay poet whose parents were from the kind of rural south that bred country music with all its resourcefulness and vernacular charm. It's easy to romanticize the rural, and most of the English-speaking world does. I sometimes think the reason we don't make many good cities is that we consider them unpleasant necessities and imagine, most of us, that we're in them temporarily, except for those people for whom cities are refuges because their small town or backwater wants to kill them. Eccentrics
are often tolerated, but categorical differences are not necessarily. The poet's parents were also mute about much that counted, miserable, and murderous.
There's something in the remote places that's almost a texture, a proximity to weather, animals, space, silence, and physical work. If you wanted to shorten the list, you could sum up most of the arid West as dirt and light. I arrived in my remote place as the light was going down and raking across the lake and the dirt before the stars came out. There are different kinds of poverty and different kinds of wealth in the far reaches of this country, and the Milky Way is one major form of the latter. So is
the company of animals. The next morning I wrote to a friend, "Possibly there is something lovelier than early morning sunlight through the ears of a jackrabbit, but the pink glow is lovely enough." I wouldn't argue that rustic life is simpler or better-only different, very different. The very textures in James Evans's pictures speak: the cases of soda and th e old hot wate r tank boiler on the back veranda with the boys on the trampoline, the way skin ages in the dry broil of the air as though people over time become closer to reptiles, the ubiquitous dust, and the spectacular space.
G R O U P P O R T R A I T
The photographs in this book are as varied as a close up of a king snake and a mountain range in the distance, and the range of subjects constitutes two things. One is a wish book. The other is a portrait. In fact there'sv a dearth of human artifacts here: some petroglyphs, some roads and railroad tracks, a few interiors behind the people that tell us something about them - the stained glass and heavy wooden chair with Ritchey Lorette, the Rangra Theatre with the attyendant in her pearl choker looking in one direction, John Travolta in an ancient poster gazing in the other. Mostly the people are out-of-doors, or the out-of-doors is shown without people, or the portraits are of animals. You could itemize what's not here, all the pictures a Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans might've taken of houses, interiors, workplaces, ways of life, and economic reality that isn't on display here-the reality of making a living,
making a home, making the world, the world of labor. History isn't here, either: the old unfinished war with Mexico; the Odyssean migrations on foot north; the border that, when you actually get to the Rio Grande in Big Bend, turns out to be just a fictitious line down the middle of a real river, which even cows and cactus wrens ignore daily; the old economy of cows that's been dying out for at least six decades; the new economies that passed by places like this; the wars and politics far away; and the
peculiar identities that are Texan. Some of the people are Latino notably an intense young man with bracelets and ear studs—but the book isn't a disquisition on whose land it is; it just accepts everyone here. The land itself tells us we are looking at a particular place, the West, but there's no emphasis on ranchers and cattle and the open range; there's just arid spaciousness, and luscious skies that seem to exist in some sort of inverse ratio to the dryness of the land. Most of what is here was not made by man, if some of it was born of woman; there are living creatures and the spaces they inhabit, and the spaces beyond them. Zoology and biology, geology and meteorology, with some astronomy mixed in. The book as a whole is a portrait of a world, and it tends toward a more aesthetic and affectionate apprehension than the social-economic comprehension of documentary. It understands the world in other ways.
One mode is affinity, and so we have pretty female bodies in a swimming hole and then, a few pages later, a dead deer or other animal afloat in that hole. We have the line of boys on the roof above the trampoline, and then the line of goats looking through a wire fence—as cheerful, if not as self-conscious. More formally, there's the dark rock with a hole opening onto pale sky that echoes the pale bottom of another swimmer. There's a more mystical sense of affinity, sometimes directly, between people and
animals, such as the man with the collar of iguanas and the nude standing with her horse. The fried pie glistens yellow; the woman on the flowered couch in front of the peeling wall laughs; the flash flood rushes through the wash. The man with the collar of iguanas is just across from the cemetery with the newly dug grave, as though life faces death, is folded in on it when the book is closed.
The photographer describes himself as a portraitist, and all the pictures in the book constitue a single portrait a place, not apprehended objectively , but inventoried in a wishes and discoveries and affections, a list of what matters. This is a portrait of home, the home that one longs for, idiosyncratic and affectionate. On my long drive away from the city and up over the mountains to where the West Coast ends and the arid West begins, I thought first of the landscape passing as a song, then of particular songs, and then of a long poem like one of those songs, Nazim Hikmet's "Things I Didn't Know I Loved." It was written on a train, in
exile. The poet provides a long list of things-"night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain," rivers, the sky, roads, the stars, flowers, rain, each prompting a reverie. He writes, "I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty" to find it out. It's also a catalogue, one that makes clear what kind of catalogue this is.
R O U N D U P
People talk about landscape as place, but in photography it's also always about time: about the various cycles of geology and meteorology, the million years it took to make this mountain range and the few seconds during which the light broke through the clouds that way. The rural runs on these other clockss of weather and seasons, and the rocks always remind you that you're just a tiny fragment of time, you with your hopes, your prime, your marriages, your decline, your offspring, your secret
failures, your slow erosion, all the things that seem interminable, expressible as some tiny fraction of what the indifferent rocks endure. And the seasons serve to remind you that time is cyclical-that the sense in which you're not alone is due less to the people around you than to the countless iterations of the small dramas, the flash floods, the brief bloomings, the calvings and the cold and the snow on the peaks and tax day. On my way back from Mono Lake, I saw some action in the rodeo ring in Bridgeport, made a U-turn on Highway 395, and pulled in to watch the locals do some Sunday calf-cutting. Full-size 4 x 4 pickup trucks and horse trailers surrounded the arena on three sides, and the contestants
were lined up on the fourth on their shining work animals, going in four riders at a time to cut herd. Imagine playing billiards with three partners, only instead of a cue you have a stock horse who reads your every wish and turns on a dime, which is the good news, and the bad news is that instead of billiard balls you have nine yearling steers with numbers on them, wheeling, balking, frisking, dodging, and making a run for it, which you have to move in numerical order from one side of the ring to the other, through the barrels and not around them. The black calf
with the zero on his back acted a lot like an eight ball. Even so, one team actually did it. There was desultory applause from the small, scattered audience. I suspect that the whole scene would have seemed deeply anach-
- curls and their engines idlingo t h e r ? A n d I w a n t e d to a s k h i m w h a t it w a s like to live
in a small town with a finite number of options, but he
had known no other life, besides early childhood some-
where in Michoacán, and could not answer. We each had
our own normal, though his was modulated by all he had
learned from the druggies and other troubled charac-
ters who came up to him at the register and revealed the
depth of human suffering, the complexity of their ethics
and psyches, and the difficulty of judging anyone. So he
told me, and he also told m e he w a n t e d to be an aero-
nautical engineer. My heart filled up with hope for his
future, and I wondered whether it would be fulfilled there
or whether he'd need to migrate again, and what might
trap him or dim his light.
Here and there on this road trip, I was reading a memoir
by a gay poet whose parents were from the kind of rural
south that bred country music with all its resourcefulness
and vernacular charm. It's easy to romanticize the rural,
and most of the English-speaking world does. I some-
times think the reason we don't make many good cities is
that we consider them unpleasant necessities and imag-
ine, most of us, that we're in them temporarily, except for
those people for whom cities are refuges because their
small town or backwater wants to kill them. Eccentrics
are often tolerated, but categorical differences are not,
necessarily. The poet's parents were also mute about
much that counted, miserable, and murderous.
There's something in the remote places that's almost a
texture, a proximity to weather, animals, space, silence,
and physical work. If you wanted to shorten the list, you
could sum up most of the arid West as dirt and light. I
arrived in my remote place as the light was going down
and raking across the lake and the dirt before the stars
came out. There are different kinds of poverty and dif-
ferent kinds of wealth in the far reaches of this country,
and the Milky Way is one major form of the latter. So is
the company of animals. The next morning I wrote to a
friend, "Possibly there is something lovelier than early
morning sunlight through the ears of a jackrabbit, but the
pink glow is lovely enough." I wouldn't argue that rustic
life is simpler or better-only different, very different.
The very textures in James Evans's pictures speak: the
c a s e s of s o d a and t h e old h o t - w a t e r - t a n k boiler on the
back veranda with the boys on the trampoline, the way
skin ages in the dry broil of the air as though people over
time become closer to reptiles, the ubiquitous dust, and
the spectacular space.
G R O U P P O R T R A I T
The photographs in this book are as varied as a close-o t h e r ? A n d I w a n t e d to a s k h i m w h a t it w a s like to live
in a small town with a finite number of options, but he
had known no other life, besides early childhood some-
where in Michoacán, and could not answer. We each had
our own normal, though his was modulated by all he had
learned from the druggies and other troubled charac-
ters who came up to him at the register and revealed the
depth of human suffering, the complexity of their ethics
and psyches, and the difficulty of judging anyone. So he
told me, and he also told m e he w a n t e d to be an aero-
nautical engineer. My heart filled up with hope for his
future, and I wondered whether it would be fulfilled there
or whether he'd need to migrate again, and what might
trap him or dim his light.
Here and there on this road trip, I was reading a memoir
by a gay poet whose parents were from the kind of rural
south that bred country music with all its resourcefulness
and vernacular charm. It's easy to romanticize the rural,
and most of the English-speaking world does. I some-
times think the reason we don't make many good cities is
that we consider them unpleasant necessities and imag-
ine, most of us, that we're in them temporarily, except for
those people for whom cities are refuges because their
small town or backwater wants to kill them. Eccentrics
are often tolerated, but categorical differences are not,
necessarily. The poet's parents were also mute about
much that counted, miserable, and murderous.
There's something in the remote places that's almost a
texture, a proximity to weather, animals, space, silence,
and physical work. If you wanted to shorten the list, you
could sum up most of the arid West as dirt and light. I
arrived in my remote place as the light was going down
and raking across the lake and the dirt before the stars
came out. There are different kinds of poverty and dif-
ferent kinds of wealth in the far reaches of this country,
and the Milky Way is one major form of the latter. So is
the company of animals. The next morning I wrote to a
friend, "Possibly there is something lovelier than early
morning sunlight through the ears of a jackrabbit, but the
pink glow is lovely enough." I wouldn't argue that rustic
life is simpler or better-only different, very different.
The very textures in James Evans's pictures speak: the
c a s e s of s o d a and t h e old h o t - w a t e r - t a n k boiler on the
back veranda with the boys on the trampoline, the way
skin ages in the dry broil of the air as though people over
time become closer to reptiles, the ubiquitous dust, and
the spectacular space.
G R O U P P O R T R A I T
The photographs in this book are as varied as a close-o t h e r ? A n d I w a n t e d to a s k h i m w h a t it w a s like to live
in a small town with a finite number of options, but he
had known no other life, besides early childhood some-
where in Michoacán, and could not answer. We each had
our own normal, though his was modulated by all he had
learned from the druggies and other troubled charac-
ters who came up to him at the register and revealed the
depth of human suffering, the complexity of their ethics
and psyches, and the difficulty of judging anyone. So he
told me, and he also told m e he w a n t e d to be an aero-
nautical engineer. My heart filled up with hope for his
future, and I wondered whether it would be fulfilled there
or whether he'd need to migrate again, and what might
trap him or dim his light.
Here and there on this road trip, I was reading a memoir
by a gay poet whose parents were from the kind of rural
south that bred country music with all its resourcefulness
and vernacular charm. It's easy to romanticize the rural,
and most of the English-speaking world does. I some-
times think the reason we don't make many good cities is
that we consider them unpleasant necessities and imag-
ine, most of us, that we're in them temporarily, except for
those people for whom cities are refuges because their
small town or backwater wants to kill them. Eccentrics
are often tolerated, but categorical differences are not,
necessarily. The poet's parents were also mute about
much that counted, miserable, and murderous.
There's something in the remote places that's almost a
texture, a proximity to weather, animals, space, silence,
and physical work. If you wanted to shorten the list, you
could sum up most of the arid West as dirt and light. I
arrived in my remote place as the light was going down
and raking across the lake and the dirt before the stars
came out. There are different kinds of poverty and dif-
ferent kinds of wealth in the far reaches of this country,
and the Milky Way is one major form of the latter. So is
the company of animals. The next morning I wrote to a
friend, "Possibly there is something lovelier than early
morning sunlight through the ears of a jackrabbit, but the
pink glow is lovely enough." I wouldn't argue that rustic
life is simpler or better-only different, very different.
The very textures in James Evans's pictures speak: the
c a s e s of s o d a and t h e old h o t - w a t e r - t a n k boiler on the
back veranda with the boys on the trampoline, the way
skin ages in the dry broil of the air as though people over
time become closer to reptiles, the ubiquitous dust, and
the spectacular space.
G R O U P P O R T R A I T
The photographs in this book are as varied as a close-up of a king snake and a mountain range in the distance and the range of subjects constitutes two things. One is a wish book. The other is a portrait. In fact there’s a dearth of human artifacts heresome petroglyphs,some roads and railroad tracks, a few interiors behind the people that tell us something about them-the stained glass and heavy wooden chair with Ritchey Lorette,the Rangra Theatre with the attendant in her pearl choker looking in one direction, John Travolta in an ancient poster gazing in the other. Mostly the people are out-
of-doors, or the out-of-doors is shown without people,
or the portraits are of animals.
You could itemize what's not here, all the pictures a Dor-
othea Lange or Walker Evans might've taken of houses,
interiors, workplaces, ways of life, an economic reality
that isn't on display here-the reality of making a living,
making a home, making the world, the world of labor. His-
tory isn't here, either: the old unfinished war with Mexico;
the Odyssean migrations on foot north; the border that,
when you actually get to the Rio Grande in Big Bend,
turns out to be just a fictitious line down the middle of
of a real river, which even cows and cactus wrens ignore
daily; the old economy of cows that's been dying out for
at least six decades; the new economies that passed by
places like this; the wars and politics far away; and the
peculiar identities that are Texan. Some of the people
are Latino—notably an intense young man with brace-
lets and ear studs—but the book isn't a disquisition on
whose land it is; it just accepts everyone here.
The land itself tells us we are looking at a particular place,
the West, but there's no emphasis on ranchers and cattle
and the open range; there's just arid spaciousness, and
luscious skies that seem to exist in some sort of inverse
ratio to the dryness of the land. Most of what is here was
not made by man, if some of it was born of woman; there
are living creatures and the spaces they inhabit, and the
spaces beyond them. Zoology and biology, geology and
meteorology, with some astronomy mixed in. The book
as a whole is a portrait of a world, and it tends toward a
more aesthetic and affectionate apprehension than the
social-economic comprehension of documentary. It un-
derstands the world in other ways.
One mode is affinity, and so we have pretty female bodies
in a swimming hole and then, a few pages later, a dead
deer or other animal afloat in that hole. We have the line
of boys on the roof above the trampoline, and then the
line of goats looking through a wire fence—as cheerful,
if not as self-conscious. More formally, there's the dark
rock with a hole opening onto pale sky that echoes the
pale bottom of another swimmer. There's a more mystical
sense of affinity, sometimes directly, between people and
animals, such as the man with the collar of iguanas and
the nude standing with her horse. The fried pie glistens
yellow; the woman on the flowered couch in front of the
peeling wall laughs; the flash flood rushes through the
wash. The man with the collar of iguanas is just across
from the cemetery with the newly dug grave, as though life faces death is folded in on it when the book is closed.
The photographer describes himself as a portraitist, and all the pictures in the book constitue a single portrait of a place, not apprehended objectively, but inventoried in wishes and discoveries and affections, a list of what matters. This is portrait of a home, the home that one longs for, idiosyncratic and affectionate. On my long drive away from the city and up over the mountains to where the West Coast
ends and the arid West begins, I thought first of the land-
scape passing as a song, then of particular songs, and then
of a long poem like one of those songs, Nazim Hikmet's
"Things I Didn't Know I Loved." It was written on a train, in
exile. The poet provides a long list of things-"night de-
scending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain," rivers, the
sky, roads, the stars, flowers, rain, each prompting a reverie.
He writes, "I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to
wait until sixty" to find it out. It's also a catalogue, one that
makes clear what kind of catalogue this is.
R O U N D U P
People talk about landscape as place, but in photography it's also always about time: about the various cycles of geology and meteorology, the million years it took to make this mountain range and the few seconds during which the light broke through the clouds that way. The rural runs on these other clocks of weather and seasons, and the rocks always remind you that you're just a tiny fragment of time, you with your hopes, your prime, your marriages, your decline, your offspring, your secret
failures, your slow erosion, all the things that seem interminable, expressible as some tiny fraction of what the indifferent rocks endure. And the seasons serve to remind you that time is cyclical-that the sense in which you're not alone is due less to the people around you than to the countless iterations of the small dramas, the flash floods, the brief bloomings, the calvings and the cold and the snow on the peaks and tax day. On my way back from Mono Lake, I saw some action in the rodeo ring in Bridgeport, made a U-turn on Highway 395, and pulled in to watch the locals do some Sunday calf-cutting. Full-size 4 x 4 pickup trucks and horse trailers surrounded the arena on three sides, and the contestants
were lined up on the fourth on their shining work animals, going in four riders at a time to cut herd. Imagine playing billiards with three partners, only instead of a cue you have a stock horse who reads your every wish and turns on a dime, which is the good news, and the bad news is that instead of billiard balls you have nine yearling steers with numbers on them, wheeling, balking, frisking, dodging, and making a run for it, which you have to move in numerical order from one side of the ring to the other, through the barrels and not around them. The black calf
with the zero on his back acted a lot like an eight ball. Even so, one team actually did it. There was desultory applause from the small, scattered audience. I suspect that the whole scene would have seemed deeply anachronistic to some city dwellers; country people, in politics and everyday practices, often hang fiercely onto the past. But it wasn't the past; and horses are still a good way to manage cows on the open range, maybe the only way; and time itself is different in different places; information, styles, beliefs, technologies, and commodities move outward from their usually central, usually urban places of development like ripples from a rock thrown into water, sometimes not reaching the rural regions until much later, if at all. "I've been everywhere, man," opens Johnny Cash's great catalogue of place-names that begins with Winnemucca. I've been to New Orleans a lot the last five years, and
there I learned about the idea that musicians belong to their neighborhood, that they should stay where they started, keep playing for parties and funerals, teach the next generation, and not move away even if they get rich or famous. We say "belong to" to mean both property and orientation: these musicians belong to the neighborhood, which raises the question of where most artists belong, what place or community could claim them. For most writers and artists, the answer is large
and vague-Alaska, or the Sonoran Desert, or the West; they serve ideas of place, but not particular communities. There are writers who belong to their cities; earlier there were regionalists, like Steinbeck and Faulkner; there are photographers who take on a region, like the
South for William Eggleston or the Arctic for Subhankar Banerjee, or a subject, like the border for David Taylor or water for Robert Dawson; there are city photographers from Atget to Weegee to Helen Levitt; and there are other photographers who take on a person or group,
like Harry Callahan photographing his stately wife for decades, or Nicholas Nixon documenting his wife and her sisters; but artists overall tend to be kind of like migrant workers.
Not all of us, though. Part of the reason why I never moved to the country is that I came to belong to San Francisco and San Franciscans; what l'd acquired meant more here than anywhere else. Similarly, James
Evans belongs to this place that he used to get by in by photographing weddings and selling gift cards of Big Bend. In those actions there's a sense of local service, as well as the scurrying for survival. There's a way in which children sometimes like to address letters—or did back when children addressed envelopes at all: with their street and then their town and their state and their nation and then the e a r t h and the cosmos.
There's a way of establishing location, under a desert sky with its stars wheeling at night and its clouds and colors at work by day, in proximity to those ancient shoulders of the e a r t h that are the various mountain
ranges, and then the swimming holes and the fragments of town and then, closest in, the creatures, particularly the small ones, the snakes anc the tarantula and the vinegaroon.
At the not-quite-rodeo, in the foreground were these tough young women with a few tots asleep in strollers and their powerful thighs sheathed in denim, teasing each other in some laid-back small-town version of hard-boiled. In the middle ground was the epic struggle
of the control of nature, done as recreation in the ring. In the distance behind the corral and the announcer's booth and more parked pickups was the sublime, first a great swath of grassland and then the high jagged
peaks of the Sierra with a little of last season's snow still on them. Comedy, drama, sublimity. It was a nice set of layers. You have it here, too, in this book.