Scattered and Battered (and very, very dirty), Palmer, KS

Give me this night

One a.m., my slumbering brain rousing itself in what was once considered merely a temporary interruption between the first sleep and the second (and summarily outmoded by modernity, clocks, industrialization and a work ethic that neatly compartmentalized our lives into cubbyholes), ears pricked to the sounds of a nocturnal house, Lori beside me breathing with a regularity that defines deep sleep or, as is often the case, Lori off to work and the house empty except for me and the sounds, the popping of ductwork after the air conditioner shuts off, the hum of the refrigerator, assorted creaks and groans that may or may not mean anything but always bring a sense of menace, the red numerals of the digital clock faintly pulsing, electronic intrusions leading me up from the morbid nightmares that plague me as if surfacing from a dark and troublesome pond, but only into another form of somnolence, a purgatory midway between heaven and hell, and on upward until whatever lingering shreds or tatters of sleep are stripped away and I am compelled to rise, one a.m., but there’s hope there, too, time enough to get my bearings before returning to bed for a few more hours of sleep, or the attempt thereof. At one a.m. there are no guarantees, but there are possibilities. 

Two a.m. dulls the shine on one a.m.’s possibilities. An hour’s difference unbalances the equilibrium of night. Two a.m. is one a.m. multiplied, amplified, magnified. If I wake at 2 a.m. only sheer stubbornness keeps me anchored to the mattress. But the damage is done: the mind unfolds, no matter the leaden weight dragging down the physical body so that it seems more dead than alive. I imagine deep within the most secretive labyrinths of my brain a small dark cavern with some slithery beast, almost reptilian, slumbering restlessly and fitfully like Smaug in the halls of the Lonely Mountain, and along comes two a.m. firing up neurons and synapses like the throwing of circuit breakers, vast banks of electrical conductors surging to life, pulses of energy arcing through miles of nerves and tendons and muscles and blood vessels, the current surging ever downward to the cavern where the creature stirs and snorts, wakened and none too happy about it, its great singular eye snapping open. And so the doom came upon us... Two a.m. is a monstrous time. But all is not lost. It’s early but not that early. Two a.m. is all about potential.

Three a.m. is Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul. It’s the halfway point, midway between midnight and six when the day should ideally begin, the point of no return. “At three a.m. everything is overwhelming, against you, doomed, arduous,” Rebecca Solnit writes in the August issue of Harper’s. “Obstacles that look surmountable in the daylight loom like boulders waiting to crush an enfeebled, despondent version of yourself. At that hour you could probably contemplate pancake recipes with terror.” There were so many three a.m. moments during the latter part of the Way We Worked Project that they became ingrained within my circadian rhythms, instilled within my DNA, insistent tocsins impossible to reset, reengineer, refuse. Small, nagging worries blossomed into malignant travesties or perversions of reality capable of eclipsing the most obvious concerns, and yet for all that there were revelatory moments when the emergent mind pierced through clouds of incomprehension to achieve a sort of enlightenment, epiphanic and euphoric. During those all-too fleeting moments my creativity was practically limitless. They were grace notes on the road to oblivion. But they exacted a toll; by mid-afternoon or early evening an inescapable exhaustion would hammer me flat. No matter. The deed is done. Wake at three a.m. and I’m up for the day. 

Four a.m. is genteel without being ostentatious. A blessing, on occasion, for the times when nightmares jolt me from bed. Enough broken teeth and bloody gums, or dark alleys swarming with maleficent shadows, or riot shotguns and Stygian midnights wiped blank of stars, and one by necessity reconsiders the purported merits of sleep. Better to stumble through life in a state of torpidity than to claw and scream your way through endless permutations of damnation. And, really, of what use are the shotguns? Motifs or icons for some unnameable wound. I track half-seen movements glueing the front bead on whatever being rises from the void but my fingers turn wooden and stiff no matter the effort expended. Shotguns represent a form of sleep: comforting, imperative, even ineluctable, but ultimately futile. To wake from dreams at four a.m. is redemption. A second chance. Unlike three a.m. when the wakening is reluctant, four a.m. is contentment. I roll from bed with no regrets. Every day should have a four a.m. wakeup.

The funny thing is: every night I set the alarm clock for five-thirty. More a symbolic gesture or suggestion, a target to shoot for in the unlikely case that sleep finally snatches me away, I see it as one of those annoying habits that are so difficult to break, like buying books I’ll never read or sweets I’ll regret eating. I rarely hear the alarm go off. If I do, when I do, I feel cheated somehow, as if I’ve squandered an irreplaceable measure of my time left on earth, and the remainder of the morning is spent trying to catch up. Good grief, life isn’t a race, I keep telling myself, but the words fall on deaf ears. Or, more specifically, ears ringing like brass bells. I’d be more accepting of hearing loss if it were just that and no more, not this continual electric whine that drowns out high notes and some middle notes, extinguishes birds and crickets and coyotes and the best parts of the natural world. It’s not silence I fear but a perpetual submersion into unbearable noise. Sleep dysfunction is no different. It’s not the paucity of sleep I fear but the futility of it. Sometimes I think I’m on the verge of deciphering the meaning or the reasons for the nightmares, but the rest of it makes no sense. Nor do I know where to turn for enlightenment. At three a.m. you ask a lot of questions, but you rarely find answers.

***

I suppose I’m fortunate that I’m more or less self-employed, other than for the poverty wages. If I had a real eight-to-five I don’t know how I’d manage with my warped nocturnal patterns. Some nights I’m in bed by eight but it usually ranges between ten and midnight; other nights, when Lori’s gone and the house pops and groans and raccoons raid the trashcan and three-inch wood roaches skitter and scritch across the window screens trying to get in and mysterious little noises filter through the incessant buzz to keep me preternaturally alert, it’s not unusual for two a.m. to find me awake. I can’t say I’m at my most productive during those bouts. Usually I can’t read without the words blurring into a tangled mess, and I can’t write without the words becoming an indictment or a belabored whinge. Concentrating on anything is a challenge. Sometimes I wash dishes or clean the kitchen, organize photographs in my Lightroom catalogue, surf the Web, fold clothes, mundane and mindless chores meant to dull my brain into insensibility. That it never accomplishes its goal doesn’t prevent me from doing it over and over and over again. If nothing else, I tell myself, I’m productive; I’m getting things done in spite of being no more than a somnambulant marionette sleepwalking through what passes for a life. 

It’s not all bad. There’s an odd sort of freedom associated with living by one’s biological clock, however skewed from the norm. I sleep when I’m tired and rise when I’m not, and in general need only about five hours of sleep per day. Afternoon naps are bonuses when I can fit them in. 

Obviously some days are better than others, and I sense a reduction in my ability to think clearly, to reason, make logical connections, that might indicate the stirrings of a greater disability. I increasingly make poor choices especially when alcohol, sweets or processed foods are involved. Midnight snacks become midnight meals. And for the first time in my life I can’t recognize the man staring back at me in the mirror. He’s older, grayer, more fatigued, but more importantly he’s bloated and overweight. He’s missing a tooth and others are broken and filed down. It’s no wonder I have nightmares. Somewhere along the way to my rendezvous with sixty I lost myself, and now I have to find my way back. I need to reconnect. And I think I can do it if I can keep the dragon at bay. Smaug needs his dreams of gold. Me, I just need sleep.

Doug McGovern as Alexander Gardner

Alexander Gardner, the birth of photojournalism and modern stereoscopic photography

When Alexander Gardner, preeminent Civil War photographer and, by all accounts, the inventor of modern photojournalism (if not Photoshop), saw a digital camera hanging off the shoulder of a visitor at Hollenberg Pony Express Station last Saturday, his smile turned to a frown. 

“You call that a camera?” he sneered in a slight Scottish bur. “This is a camera.”

This was a vintage 1860s-era wet plate negative model with dark polished wood, gleaming brass accents and a black cowl rakishly draped from the back like Zorro’s cape. It was big, it was bulky, it was beautiful, and quite unlike the plastic and titanium contraption of the startled visitor.

Gardner then pointed to an even larger camera off to the side perched on what appeared to be a tripod fashioned from crutches. What set it apart was not one lens, but an evenly-matched pair.

“Now that,” he said lovingly, “is a real camera.”

When asked why two lenses instead of one, his eyes, dark and piercing beneath grizzled brows, swiveled to transfix the impertinent and apparently clueless visitor with a merciless glare.

“Your head has two eyes,” he said. “Why shouldn’t your camera?”

***

Gardner, or, as was the case, Doug McGovern, an historical re-enactor from Hutchinson, was at the Pony Express Station for a day-long presentation entitled “Photography for Two Eyes.” The scope and breadth of the discussion was as sweeping as it was eclectic, with elaborations and examples on the history of photography, its various processes including wet plate collodion, ambrotypes, tintypes and paper photographs, glass plate sizes and how they were used for diverse photographic products spanning the gamut from miniature locket-sized photos called gems to cabinet sizes, Gardner’s role in early photojournalism, stereoscopic slides and three dimensional pictures and, for modern photographers with the latest digital cameras, a workshop on transforming single images into stereoscopic images through specialized software. 

Alexander Gardner might have been just another of history’s unknown billions had it not been for a fortunate meeting with Matthew Brady, McGovern said. He had emigrated to the United States from Glasgow, Scotland, en route to join an Owenite community in Iowa. The community, one of numerous  “Utopian” colonies spreading across the country, was founded by fellow Glasgow workers, and from previous visits Gardner had taken a liking to its goals. Before making it to Iowa, however, he found himself without a job and without very many prospects on the streets of New York City, and he discovered—probably not by chance—Brady’s famous studio. Within short order he had a job, not only as an assistant but as a business manager.

“Brady’s photos were exquisite,” McGovern said. “He was a great artist, but he didn’t understand bookkeeping.”

The studio was, in fact, close to bankruptcy. Under Gardner’s management it became solvent and, if anything, even more famous.

Gardner went on to become one of Brady’s field photographers who toured Civil War battlefields. Unlike other employees (known as Brady’s Photographic Corps) whose work was claimed by Brady, Gardner was ambitious and chafed under Brady’s shadow; after two years he struck out on his own. He took more portraits of Abraham Lincoln than any other photographer, was friends with Walt Whitman and, after the war, photographed the Western expansion for the Union Pacific Railroad. He eventually gave up photography for his work in the Masonic Mutual Relief Association. “Among his generation of photographers, he was doubtless the most many-sided and accomplished,” Alan Trachtenberg wrote in his book, “Reading American Photographs.”

Gardner, to McGovern, was a fascinating study in early photographic processes. From daguerrotype to tintype, wet-plate to dry-plate, from the exigencies of traveling battlefields with hundreds of fragile glass photographic plates and of days standing among thousands of rotting corpses while capturing scenes that would stun the world—and making more than a few question whether the war was worth its stated goals—to the increasing role of stereoscopic slides which provided a faux three dimension affect, Gardner experienced, and experimented, with them all. 

At the time, wet plate negatives required bright light and long exposures. Most photos portraying military action were, in fact, military inaction, with soldiers and generals and dignitaries standing around in static poses. Gardner convinced Brady that they had to get out of the studio and onto the battlefield to record the historical significance of the war. 

Theirs was not true photojournalism as we know it today, McGovern said. The photographers and their wagons carrying precious chemicals and glass plates remained behind the lines during the fighting, and they were given permission to tour the battlefield only after enemy troops had withdrawn. The work was ghastly and under the most trying conditions. It was also excruciatingly slow. By the end of a normal day, three men working in unison had between 25 to 30 photographs. 

The end result was met with trepidation by newspaper publishers. Suddenly, images of bodies stacked against stone walls or filling trenches like so much cordwood forced editors to weigh the issues of such graphic reportage. A New York Times editor advised Brady not to publish them because there were “too” realistic. When Brady did, another editor compared his reaction to seeing them against the normal published lists of war dead. “Before we get away from our [breakfast table], we’ve already forgotten the names on the lists,” he wrote. “What Mr. Brady has done to bring the war home to us could not have been more significant if he’d piled dead bodies in front of us.”

“Suddenly, the innocence was gone,” McGovern said. “People began to understand what war was all about.”

Some controversy surrounded Gardner after it came to light that he occasionally added props to his images or, in some cases, relocated bodies to better frame a scene. 

By the time Gardner was allowed onto the battlefield, the guns had long since been removed, McGovern said. Undaunted, Gardner would sometimes add his own rifle to a body to dramatize the subject. One famous image of a fallen sharpshooter included Gardner's rifle. To his credit, McGovern said, the sharpshooter was real, the scene was perfect, everything was in place to tell the story. The only thing added was the rifle. 

Though Gardner predated photojournalist ethics (a foreign concept at the time), nevertheless the practice was met with some disdain. “Naughty, naughty Mr. Gardner,” McGovern chided. 

***

Tintypes couldn’t fade but could be folded to fit into pockets or rucksacks, making them popular with soldiers during the Civil War. Other processes had their positives and negatives, but one of the most unusual was stereoscopic photography, and the one that resonated most with McGovern.

Prior to his involvement in the Kansas Alliance of Professional Historic Performers, he helped develop camera and video systems that replicated stereoscopic vision in remotely-driven vehicles. He and his colleagues discovered that a remote-driven vehicle operated via video link could perform flawlessly on smooth-surfaced roads using a single TV camera. Real world situations, notably in combat zones, rarely have good roads, however, and pot holes, drop-offs, slopes, steep shoulders and debris (called “negative obstacles”) made piloting those vehicles nearly impossible. Adding a second camera allowed operators to view the terrain much as if they were there in person.

Stereo photography used similar concepts, he said. Stereoscopes, handheld contraptions that look like a cross between a slide projector and opera glasses, predate photography. They first appeared in the 1830s based on principles of binocular vision. Though each eye records a slightly different image, the human brain fuses them together into a single image that allows us to perceive spatial depth. Near objects appear near, far objects appear farther away. 

The effect was so startling in early stereoscopes that Oliver Wendell Holmes described it as  “dream-like.” “The mind,” he said, “feels its way into the very depths of the picture.”

By merging 19th century technology with 21st century technology, McGovern has discovered how to create stereoscopic slides portraying—then as now—battlefields, portraits, landscapes and, with a nod toward Gardner, photojournalism. His slides of tornado-ravaged scenes are breathtaking, and his Civil War battle scenes, taken during historical reenactments, could easily be the work of early photographers.

His dual-lens stereo camera, so lovingly admired, is actually hollow. A small cutout on the front folds down to reveal a cavity where he places dual cameras mounted to a rail. 

For those without the two-camera setup, a single camera can be almost as effective by a procedure he calls the “cha cha.” “Take a picture, move three inches, take a picture,” McGovern said. Three inches represents the distance between a normal pair of eyes; Mexican maracas, or gourd rattles, are not required.

During the afternoon session, McGovern led a handful of photographers onto the grounds of Hollenberg Pony Express Station where they tried their hand at the cha cha. The images were downloaded to his laptop, tweaked into stereo alignment through software programs and then printed out for the visitors. 

Though he sells stereoscopes on his website, he rarely uses them himself anymore. “Once you train your eyes, you can see them just fine,” he said.

What interested him the most in stereo photography was the ability to see a battlefield as his grandfather saw it. “The really significant thing, what drew me into this, was when I researched where my grandfather fought in the Civil War,” McGovern said. “This was the hill at Vicksburg that his unit charged; this was the road he marched down. And it’s all overgrown now, it doesn’t look the same. The only way to get the picture was through stereo.”

Once he perfected his technique, the hills, the roads, the grassy fields emerged into a three dimensional landscape so deep and wide that one could fall into it. The effect was staggering.

“My daughter sometimes asks why I do this, what I hope to accomplish,” he said. “Is it for the money? No photographer ever died rich. The reason I do it is this: when I hand someone the stereoscope and they look through it, the reaction is immediate. It’s instant gratification. There’s absolutely no delay in their response. ‘Wow!’ they say.”

Even though he uses digital cameras, the effect is the same as it was in Gardner's time. “What a fearfully suggestive picture!” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote. “It is a leaf torn from the book of God's recording angel.”

For more information on McGovern’s work, visit his website at www.vintage-visuals.com. 

Muscotah's field of dreams

Baseball Hall of Fame inductee Joe Tinker celebrated two anniversaries on July 27—that of his birthday in 1880 and his death in 1948—and 300 or so people from across the state of Kansas, California and Maryland descended on the tiny town of Muscotah to celebrate. That the celebration happened at all was an improbable, unimaginable, brash, delusionally optimistic dream of resident Jeff Hanson, and all the more cinematic for its opening sequence. Players emerged from the tree line in ones and threes and jogged toward home plate across a broad expanse of grass, their uniforms outdated by a hundred years but no less real for it, nor the cries and huzzahs from enthusiastic baseball fans, family members, news media, photographers, curiosity seekers, Kansas Explorers, gaggles of kids and two billy goats that may or may not have lifted a 68-year-old curse from the Chicago Cubs.  

It was impossible not to find parallels to the movie “Field of Dreams” when “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and other baseball greats stepped from a cornfield as a sort of reward for the faithful. And if outwardly the entrance seemed a little too clichéd, too contrived, none could or would fault it. Up and down the line of spectators came an appreciative, almost reverential murmuring of “build it and they will come.”

Build it Muscotah did: Joe Tinker Field, and the world’s largest baseball (or started anyway, soon to be home of the Joe Tinker Museum), a miniature baseball diamond beside the former water tank now gleaming white with rebar stitching, and on Tinker’s birthday—Muscotah’s most famous son—the town’s population swelled like a tick stuck to a summertime dog, its narrow gravel streets choked with every make of car and truck including an old Jeep crowned with headless dinosaurs and a decorative jackalope, women in Victorian dresses and parasols, flag-bedecked ladies hawking peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jacks, and the Hodgeman Nine versus the Cowtown Vintage Base Ball Club playing by 1860s rules with tools of the trade notably different than those of today.

But before the first pitch could be thrown there was the matter of the curse. Allegedly in 1945 the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, one Billy Sianis, was ejected from Wrigley Field during a World Series game against the Detroit Tigers due to the offensive odor of his pet goat. He is said to declare that “Them Cubs they ain’t gonna win no more.” At the time it probably sounded like sour grapes but it turned out to be nothing less than prophetic. The Chicago Cubs never again won a National League pennant nor have they won a World Series. 

Sam Sianis, Billy’s nephew-in-law, reportedly stated that the curse could be lifted only by a public show of affection toward goats by Cubs’ players. Accordingly, a small goat was led onto the field where it was scratched, schmoozed, petted and warmly complimented by each team member representing—but not affiliated with—the Chicago Cubs. Whether it worked or not remains to be seen.

And then came the opening pitch by Tinker’s great-grandson, Chris Tinker, and the scarlet-emblazoned Cowtown players took to the field.

If not for the encircling cars and pickups (and video cameras and swarms of cameras) it could have been any balmy summer afternoon in the late 1800s, with Muscotah assured of its destiny and the town’s denizens turned out for America’s favorite pastime. Only it didn’t turn out that way, as numerous small towns hitching their futures to the twin rails of the Central Branch found out. The railroad disappeared, businesses failed, people drifted away, and the town slowly shrunk in on itself as if intent on reverting to the unbroken prairie from whence its name derived. 

But towns have a way of catching a second breath, usually at the instigation of one or two residents who refuse to sit idly by while everything around them turns to dust. Muscotah had Hanson, he had a three-legged dog, and the dog had neighbors who bought into his master’s vision of creating a tourist destination to attract historians, baseball fans and anyone else who appreciated rural culture. Thanks to additional assistance from the Kansas Sampler Foundation and a host of volunteers who helped paint, pour concrete, and raise thousands of dollars in donations, Hanson’s dream became real.

And on Tinker’s birthday the outside world turned its attention to Muscotah. Even the Chicago Cubs, possibly crossing their collective fingers about the possibility of the curse’s demise, Tweeted their encouragement.

It was never about baseball, Hanson said. It was about community—or, as I like to think, people helping people find ways to keep their towns viable. Having a historic son or daughter certainly helps garner attention, but it’s not necessary. Haddam (pop. 153) just added new playground equipment to their small town park; Florence (pop. 605) hosts special dinners in the Harvey House Museum served by waitresses dressed as Harvey Girls, and restoration continues on their opera house; Marion (pop. 1,897) restored its Santa Fe Depot to house the library and began a decorative campaign involving rhinoceros statuary. These towns, and so many others, refuse to let go. They’re resolute, tenacious, committed and unyielding. They’re blueprints for a rural renaissance. They’re our greatest hope. 

Hats off to Muscotah. Play ball!

The horse: a study in perseverance, creativity and experimentation, or, after years of playing with this image I'm narrowing it down to where I want it.

Afield with Klara, Chance and Kate McIntyre

Found object No. 75: blue 1930 Chevy truck

Barn and cornfields

Close-to-home ramblings