American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  “What do I see?” I asked in a tone of voice that bespoke not servility, but the disciple’s acceptance of criticism. I was twenty—the age when boys feel themselves licensed to rebel against authority. But I was ready to be chastened. I wanted to follow him into the wilderness.

  “You see the invisible made visible,” he uttered with the solemnity of a Hindu swami. “Moran, you see the bones of the world.”

  I had no idea what he meant—and wouldn’t until I saw Hand mit Ringen, the first X-ray picture, taken by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife’s hand, in an 1897 issue of Scientific American.

  “If you’re interested only in recording the scenery, I don’t have time to waste on you.”

  I felt as though I were picking my way through a field of Confederate “torpedoes.” A misstep would nip my prospects in the bud. Already I sensed that photography could be about something more important than stiffs or scenery, but I couldn’t have put it into words—not then or this morning, so many years later. Once in a great while and mostly by accident, I’d glimpse the quicksilver thing that Jackson sought with his camera; but I never caught on, you see, never really understood the spiritual thing he was after. My instincts were good; my technique was sound. I could capture a subject down to its broken shirt button and the mole in the shadow of the jaw, but for all my virtuosity, the life was no more than a facsimile. The picture wasn’t dead; neither was it alive. It lacked . . . vitality. No, I was never more than a second-rate cameraman. I had sense to know, however, that my future depended on the success of my catechism. I had not the slightest idea why this should be, but I was right. Jackson was waiting for an answer (it was a question he’d left hanging in the air, even if he hadn’t framed it as one), but I had none to give.

  “Some pictures make me restless,” I said after having temporized as long as I dared by fingering an earlobe and snuffling. The air inside the tent was pungent with chemicals.

  “Restless?” His voice seemed to light up.

  “The pictures I like do.”

  “How so?”

  “I can’t say. I feel a sort of anticipation. An eagerness comes over me that isn’t always pleasant. It’s hard to put into words.”

  “Where do you feel it?”

  “In my heart,” I replied, lying.

  He spat contemptuously.

  “I feel it here,” I said, touching myself.

  Evidently, my answer pleased him. “I’ll be getting off the Omaha-bound train in Wyoming. Durant wants pictures of a miners’ camp for a railroad prospectus. At least, I persuaded him he does. It’s all right with him if you go along as my assistant. What do you think of the idea?”

  I thought it glorious and told him as much.

  “We’ll get off at Bear River City and pick up a string of mules for our equipment.”

  I did not know how to thank him—what words to use without their sounding like a hurried grace said over a growling belly. Gratitude, sincerely meant, was foreign to my nature and experience. So I said nothing. I nodded and left him to the “stark forms of existence” that we’d hunt down one hard winter in Ute country. I stepped outside into night’s negative: The rails and the limestone hills and the tents shone silver with moonlight; the sky and the desert nothingness that spread around me were black. A meteor hissed across the darkness, an auspice of the American Empire and also a portent of its end. The meteor was only in my own mind; nonetheless, it made me shiver.

  Bear River, Wyoming Territory, June 1869

  Five mules and two equally taciturn drivers were waiting for us by the railroad grade across Bear River. The town had jumped up to accommodate railway workers, as well as the outgoing tide of emigrants traveling the Oregon and the Mormon trails. Bear River City, as it was called in recognition of a stagecoach hotel, hash house, depot, mining office, drinking, gambling, and whoring palace, and newspaper, came to an abrupt end in the riot of November 19, 1868, sparked by a vigilante lynching. A faction sympathetic to the lynched man hunted down the vigilantes, the jailhouse was stormed, plenty of men—good and bad—were killed, and the town was torched. By the time the army put down the insurrection, the town was dead. It was often that way for would-be towns from the Platte River to the Klondike. There was a violent, lawless strain in those who itched after gold or land or a loose and large manner of living. Doubtless, the germ has been inherited, according to the mysterious workings of genetics, by people who believe in doing as they please.

  Miners and hunters continued to camp at the ruined town on their outbound journeys. For some people, outbound is the only direction they know, whether the journey leads across prairie grass, desert sand, polar ice, or seawater. I was the same—never stopping after I’d left Brooklyn till I fetched up in Lincoln, like a rolling stone or a shell beached by the tide. Things have voices to tell their stories; you’ve only to listen to a conch shell, the wind in tall grass, the humming of a telegraph wire in falling snow, or the throbbing of a railroad track. I imagine even stones complain of bad weather, old age, and ill treatment to anything with sense enough to listen. Well, I have the right to speak my piece, the same as any stone!

  Jackson liked the desperate look of the place, though I saw nothing to recommend it but charred timber frames and rocks lying where they’d fallen after having done their work as walls.

  “Tell me what you see, Moran,” he said while he coated a glass plate with collodion outside the darkroom tent.

  I hadn’t begun to see in a landscape what a camera had the power to distill. If I took a good picture—one worth all the trouble of hauling the ponderous apparatus, heavy plates, and chemicals up mountains, across rivers, and through snowdrifts and of spending the better part of an hour to prepare the wet plate, expose the negative, and fix the image—it would be by accident. For a long while, that’s what it would be for me, who lacked the gift of someone like William H. Jackson. But by dint of patient repetition, I would learn, in time, to catch a little of the light that even the most stolid rock formation shed onto particles of silver. While I burned to be like him, I’d have to be satisfied with that “little.” As I said, I’d never be more than second-rate, though I flatter myself I was more able than most to get at the germ of the picture. At the start, however, I had ambition. That surprises you, doesn’t it, Jay? I aspired to be an adept like Jackson. In time, I’d come to realize my limitations.

  “It’s places like this,” said Jackson, “where the eye can see plainly. “Put that one eye of yours to work, Moran, and tell me what you see in front of you.”

  He tossed a dried apricot into his mouth and chewed.

  “I see a pile of rocks, blackened joists and studs, a stand of trees, and, down in the ravine, the river.”

  “Good,” he said, and left me to work out for myself what made them attractive.

  He took three views that afternoon while the mules chewed grass and the skinners sat, unspeaking, on a log, passing a bottle of spirits back and forth. Later, they made up a fire and cooked the cornmeal and bacon mush favored by Johnny Rebs in the recent war, which had laid waste much of the old America. Raw emotions, undignified and unadorned by noble causes, had scorched this earth. Could I have articulated my thoughts, I’d have asked Jackson what he saw through his camera lens of the simmering passions of men, buried still in the ruins of Bear River City.

  Instead, I asked, “What does Durant want with pictures of a wrecked town?”

  “He doesn’t. I’m the one who wants them. Not everything’s for hire, Moran. Maybe what’s best in a man, he gives away.”

  Jackson could be as mystifying as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his riddles annoyed the hell out of someone like me, who thought things were already mysterious enough.

  The next morning, we drove the mules eight miles up Bear River, following a trail along the ravine until it came down to a ramshackle mining camp. A yellow field of goldenrod lay, dazzling, on the narrow river’s opposite shore, as if to mock the lust for gold nuggets that had spurred two dozen or so men to ro
ugh it on the southwestern Wyoming plain. Standing in river water, they brought to mind Whitman, up to his knees in Sheepshead Bay. How many years ago was it? Nine. Nine years since I was a boy who had ventured no farther from his place in the world than Hell Gate or the Battery. In nine years, I’d gone south by steamboat, traipsed through Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and ridden the rails from Washington City to Ogden, Utah. Now here I was, in a hardscrabble miners’ camp in what was called the Great American Desert (a desolation bearing no resemblance to the Sahara), without even the Union Pacific tracks to remind me of civilization.

  I wondered what the sum of so variegated an experience might mean to what lay inside me, bullying like a sergeant major or coaxing like a woman used to getting her own way. Was there a germ, some indissoluble particle of being that could not be misled, tempted, or turned aside from the thing that made me different from a bug? I never thought much about the soul and, like most soldiers, considered virtue a seal put on young girls, destined to be broken by sweet talk or rough ardor. Virtue was a quality as useless in a man as tits on a hog. That’s not to say some of us didn’t believe in goodness. Only we called it “square dealing” or “being on the level.” When we said a man was “true,” we weren’t referring to an abhorrence of lies, but to an alignment with the common purpose or the common good (which is not the same as goodness, a quality possessed, or not, by an individual), as though a man—or a woman—were no more than a machine shaped and operating according to plan.

  The hardest thing in the world to understand is one’s own self. I’m not sure I ever sounded to the bottom of mine. Even now, when I have time to consider what I’ve been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor as a man, for all the difference I’ve made on earth.

  Jackson walked down to the river and spoke to a group of men working a rocker box, a kind of sieve to separate gold dust and the occasional nugget from the “placer,” a shoal of black gravel runoff near the riverbank. Upstream, other knots of dirty, ragged men paid rapt attention to rocker boxes of their own—“cradles,” as they were commonly called, though I never heard a lullaby sung in their vicinity. Whether by pan, sluice, or cradle, placer mining is brutal on the hands and back. For every miner who leaves the goldfield rich, a hundred others give up and go home, with less to show for their toil than an asparagus cutter’s wages. Prospectors are a half-crazed, harum-scarum, mostly unhappy lot, who no longer dream of the things they meant to buy with their dust, but only of its extraction. These men were nothing like Bret Harte’s Stumpy or Kentuck; the Bear River digs, a far cry from Roaring Camp, where a rosewood cradle was hauled eighty miles by mule to comfort the foundling Tommy Luck.

  Jackson returned, and we set up the tent and readied plates to reproduce, with a ray of light on glass, the gruff and crusty miners. We exposed three negatives the first day and five the next: of men at the cradles, sifting black gravel; eating game and turnip stew washed down with black coffee and rum; sitting in their tents, their tired faces reddened by the setting sun. Only four of the plates were “good enough for Durant”—meaning that the miners had sat still long enough to make their likenesses sharp, while their lifelike quality was drained by the rigor mortis of a lengthy exposure.

  “These are for me,” said Jackson, pensively regarding four of the glass negatives, where the faces or some other aspect of the photograph lay in darkness or a hand was caught in motion—a blur of human anatomy caused by a restless subject. Jackson gazed at them as though they were gold and the others—for Durant’s lithographed prospectus—the worthless gravel dumped from a rocker box.

  I confess I didn’t see the beauty of those spoiled views.

  “Sometimes the truth is revealed when taken by surprise,” he said in that infuriating way of his.

  “Your brother would have goddamned them as a waste of chemicals and glass.”

  “Edward confuses art with perfection. Never despise the blemish, Moran,”

  I was tired and had had enough lessons for one day. My outdoor technique was being refined under Jackson’s tutelage; I had skinned the time it took me to coat a glass with collodion and expose it before it began to dry. I’d begun to “read the light,” which is more changeable and elusive under the big sky than inside the studio. I was pleased with myself and in no mood to be nettled by Jackson’s metaphysics. I sometimes wonder if he missed his calling as a philosopher or a theologian—but damn if he didn’t make some of the most gorgeous images of any I would ever see! In my lifetime, I would learn to take respectable photographs. When I began sending them to Whitman, he wrote to say how fine they were and how what I’d learned to see of the West insinuated itself into his poems. That was praise enough.

  Early next morning, I loaded a mule with my camera and darkroom tent and walked upriver about a mile from camp. There, I found George Osler, one of the Bear River miners, originally from Pennsylvania. He was dangling a length of cord from a cut branch into the dark water; on the end of it was a drowned worm threaded on a hook.

  “Morning,” he said as I tied the mule to a cottonwood.

  “Morning,” I said. “Fishing?”

  “There’s an almighty catfish down there, but I’m too lazy to catch him.”

  He nodded toward the river, whose bed lay below what the slant of early-morning light through the cottonwoods could illuminate. It occurred to me that a fish unseen on the bottom, dragged up into sunlight, was like a truth surprised into revelation; but the warm June morning was too fine to bother with extravagant notions. I gave myself up to the pleasure of watching an angler enjoying his idleness, without any real ambition to complicate it by extricating the hook from the mouth or throat of a catfish, whose fins can cut a finger to ribbons and inject a dose of venom as painful as a water moccasin bite. He was one of those people who enjoy their pastimes in the abstract. Something stirred in the roots of a willow dug into the muddy bank. I turned in time to see a muskrat jump and disappear beneath the water. When I looked back at Osler, he was raising a monstrous fish, apparently unconcerned by either my opinion of his zeal or the danger of catfish even at their last gasp.

  “It’s a humdinger!” he said, admiring the fish juddering in the grass. “It’s almost worth the effort to have caught him.”

  He put his boot on the creature’s flank and worked out the hook. Seeing the worm none the worse for its ordeal, I felt the poor fish had been cheated. By rights, it ought to have enjoyed the temptation that proved to be its undoing. I supposed there was a moral lesson to be learned from this small tragedy, a fable of some kind, but the sun made me too lazy to decipher it. Osler’s purpose was far from didactic, however. He brained the fish, slit it from gills to anus, pulled out its entrails, and rinsed it in the river.

  “Had your breakfast yet?” he asked.

  I had, but I was curious about the taste of a catfish flavored by Bear River.

  “No, and I can feel my belly rubbing up against my backbone.”

  He made up a fire and spitted the heavy fish on a barked stick. In short order, the skin was bubbling with its own hot juices. We sat down on the grass and ate—the white flesh tasting of river. I enjoyed that breakfast out on the Wyoming scrubland more than any fancy meal I’d eaten on the train. When it was finished, I cursed myself aloud for having forgotten to take a picture of the occasion. It would have been worth showing Jackson: the morning light picking out every reddish whisker of the miner’s stubble, the coals of the fire, the fish, its mouth gaping open on the spit, the river behind, and, behind it, a stand of ponderosa pines stuck up, stiff and sharp, against the wide-open sky.

  “I’ll show you a sight for picture taking,” said Osler, wiping grease from his lips onto the back of his hand. His hand was interesting: scarred and bulging with blue veins, the nails black and broken.

  We walked about three hours, across prairies and over low hills. I lead the mule packed with my equipment. I think we cro
ssed into Utah, but I can’t swear to it. I was dazed by the big sky, which had lost its awful clarity now that the wind was herding clouds from west to east, casting woolly shadows on the leaning grass. Like most of his kind, Osler was not given to idle conversation. I don’t know what silences such men. They’re not contemplative: They don’t look into themselves. Maybe they’re struck dumb by the spectacle of untrammeled nature. Maybe they exist on a level of consciousness where speech is neither habitual nor desirable. He said little until we came through a defile and out onto a wide prairie.

  “There,” he said tersely, nodding toward a complicated lathwork of bones that sprawled into the bluish distance like a street of houses going up.

  “What the hell?” I nearly shouted with the shock of what I’d come upon in the grass.

  “Go and see.”

  “You coming?”

  “I already saw. I’ll wait here.” He sat on the grass and busied himself with his pipe and tobacco.

  I got up onto the mule and nudged its flanks. It didn’t budge. I kicked at the recalcitrant animal, and it started forward, its back hooves clattering nervously against fieldstone. The wind pushed a lumbering cloud across the face of the sun, and the bones, which an instant before had been slashes of fierce light, darkened. The mule shied, whinnied, and heehawed. I whipped it, with an anger I didn’t understand. I suppose what provoked me and agitated the poor beast was fear. The soughing of the tall grass couldn’t be heard for the flies, as loud and insolent as they’d been four years earlier in the Armory Square Hospital’s bedpans. I held down my rising gorge, unwilling to let the older man see me unnerved.