When I Was Twenty-Two

When I was twenty-two, I got my first real job. I was hired as an assistant to a photographer. He shot magazine stories, annual reports, books, and corporate headshots—pretty much anything to pay the bills—so he could work on choice personal projects. The first nine months of my tenure were spent traversing the back roads and small towns of America, getting shots for a book that would carry the same name.

We drove around for days on end … just looking for what he called a “good situation.” There was no clear definition of what exactly a “good situation” was, but we would know it when we saw it. Or, rather, he would know it when he saw it. I was still in the learning phase of my career.

One day we were following a wooded road in the Ozark Mountains. The name of the town was Jasper and it had one store/restaurant/motel—I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold live bait there, too. It was a little creepy. Just past the store, the road bent further into the woods and changed to a dusty, dirt path. At the end of a long drive, there was an old house with a crooked porch and chickens in the front yard.

“Jesus, this is like Deliverance.” I just nodded and pretended that I knew what he was talking about. (I later learned that Deliverance was a film made in 1972 about a backwater canoe trip gone awry.) “Keep the engine running,” he said as he popped on his National Geographic baseball cap and hopped out of the truck.

He crossed the yard and approached the man in camouflage overalls. I saw their heads bobbing and mouths moving, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. My boss turned toward to me and gestured that I come over. Deep breath. I pulled the key out of the ignition and jumped out of the truck. (I was acutely aware that I was not in Kansas anymore.) Apparently, this was “a good situation.”

The remainder of the week was spent with Nick and his wife (who he called, simply, Ma) and their three kids: Cody, Beth, and Jessie. They welcomed us into their lives and let us photograph them while they fed their chickens and pigs, fetched water from the nearby creek, and bathed their kids in a trashcan. They were not embarrassed at all. They had chosen to move from Montana to the Ozarks to live a simpler life, closer to nature. And simple it was: they had no running water (yes, this means they used an outhouse) and their walls were papered with copies of the Saturday Evening Post dating back to 1935.