But when I looked up to speak to him, he was gone.
Initially, Chief Leopard Frog appeared to be right about the power of the talisman. It directed me between that period when I was deep in sleep and that sudden moment when I was fully awake, not with spoken words, but using silent communication, broadcasting only during the divide between life's two unequal worlds, transmitting extrasensory messages from the fragile, shrouded land of drifting images and distant music, that nocturnal interlude called middle dreams.
Take my picture, the talisman suggested.
After breakfast, I went out to the workshop to search through my father's things. It didn't take me long to find it. It was right there next to his rusty tackle box, a big, box-shaped bag of tan imitation leather, and both containers covered with a layer of gritty dust and dead roly-polys.
Inside were lots of loose parts, extra lenses, a couple of rolls of unspent film, a compact, collapsable tripod, circular metal pieces with a purpose I couldn't discern—some sort of hood, perhaps?
But there it was, floating in the middle of all these accessories, my father's old thirty-five-millimeter single-lens reflex camera.
When I picked it up, it felt like a serious tool, not like the lightweight miniature digital cameras people use these days.
This one had actual moving parts assembled by hand, and its lens, while maybe not as fine a lens as money could buy, was certainly as fine as my father could buy at the time.
It was also a versatile lens. At the flip of a thumb switch, it would convert from a focus of short telephoto range to macro mode. In other words, unlike with most snapshot cameras, with this one I could make photographs both at a distance and in extreme close-up.
Small things, like talismans and spiders and red clover flowers, were within my realm.
Naturally, the battery was dead and the film in the bag had long since expired. And doubtlessly, the camera needed a cleaning.
But it was a start.
As Chief Leopard Frog might have said but, to his credit, didn't, A collection of a thousand bug pictures starts with a single caterpillar.
Our next trip to town was two days away. I used this time to prepare the camera and to read the soiled manual that came with it. Frankly, I found many of the operating instructions confusing. While the camera imitates the physical structure of the human eye, it sees things differently.
Learning these differences and how to manipulate them can become a lifelong obsession.
Like painting, sculpture, dancing, writing, and music, if it takes constant practice and the exclusion of all else to get things right, then it qualifies as art.
And as the life of every great artist proves, once you've finally got it right, you've long since gone crazy.
Fire the First Shot
GOING CRAZY.
Is it something that happens to artists because they are obsessed with a subject that's not "real"? Or is it because while they're pursuing their art, they're alone?
I thought about this while walking through the fields of August, occasionally stopping to pull a bur from my ankle or duck an aggressive grasshopper.
When you do stop to think about it, everybody lives alone, even the people who are jammed together in cities. I think that's why my mother watches TV all afternoon and into the night.
She doesn't want to admit that she's alone.
I found myself becoming somewhat excited about the project that lay ahead. The talisman, or the spirit behind the hand that carved it, had suggested that I begin to notice small things.
This was ironic, I thought, because here I was in a vast, empty place that stretched in every direction like the Milky Way, with rarely a living soul in sight.
One small boy in an entire abandoned town.
One small planet in a solar system.
But not Pluto, of course. They fired Pluto.
What jerks!
(To their credit, though, the astronomers who made the final, fateful decision to downgrade Pluto's former status as the outermost planet in our solar system to that of a wandering dirty iceberg at least had the decency to wait until the Kansan who discovered it had died.)
As I frequently say, our lives hang by a thread, even after death, apparently, and so, too, do the lives of entire towns.
This recurring thought brought to mind one of the more outstanding failures in Kansas, a ghost town called Silkville. It is a true story that I read in one of the books left to me by Mrs. Franks.
Located in Franklin County, Silkville was the brainchild of an unpopular but very rich Frenchman who in 1870 acquired three thousand acres on which he built mansions and factories and planted orchards and grapes and mulberry trees—silkworm food—and to which he persuaded forty families to cross the Atlantic to join him in a vast silk-producing enterprise. For a time his silk business was a major factor in the world market. But bad luck, the bane of all existence, eventually reduced the Frenchman's grand scheme to rubble. Today, all but a few ailanthus trees are gone.
What remains is less than a memory.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
—Percy B. Shelley
Easy come, easy go.
—Chief Leopard Frog
Hey, don't look at me. I didn't do it.
—Spencer Honesty
Today, the world's greatest empire is Wal-Mart, and it was to one of the thousands of emporiums of that grand enterprise that I traveled with my mother to obtain camera batteries and film.
"We're running out of Windex anyway," she said. "And I'm sure I can always find a few other things we need."
No kidding! I thought as I looked around the place, stuffed to the gills with more than forty thousand items.
Every kid in China must be working day and night to keep Wal-Mart filled with "a few other things we need," a few of which, it turns out, we don't really need at all, like the fish-shaped key chain I bought.
When you push a button on its right fin, it tells redneck jokes. This extraordinary item on the clearance shelf was only two dollars, and I saved at least that much on the film, specially packaged in a BUY FOUR, GET THE FIFTH ROLL FREE wrapper. The batteries, on the other hand, seemed pretty expensive by comparison.
I suspect that Wal-Mart knows this.
Anyway, it was good to get away from the house for a while, and my mother seemed pleased with her purchases. On the long drive home we talked about some of the families who'd moved away.
"I think the last straw was when they closed the school," my mother observed. "They might as well have ordered every family out of town right then and there. Of course, the handwriting was on the wall the day they closed the factory."
"What did they make at the factory?" I asked.
I was too young to recall Paisley's heyday.
"Plastic novelties," she answered. "You know, what some people call five-and-dime items. Imitation flowers, loaded dice, talking key chains, an eight-ball that tells your fortune when you turn it upside down—things like that. At one time, Paisley Plastics was the biggest plastic novelty manufacturer in the world."
"Things change," I observed.
"Mmm-hmm," my mother responded, switching on the radio, an indication that our conversation was over.
After a couple of false starts, I managed to make a photographic exposure of my talisman. The eyepiece of the camera shows exactly what the lens sees, so while I composed my shot, I was captivated by the object's detail. It was sort of like looking at pond water through a microscope. I saw things that I would never notice otherwise.
This was one fine piece of work.
Quite an achievement for an imaginary friend.
A Mix-Up in the Mail?
THROUGH THE MACRO LENS of my late father's camera, the rabbit talisman was a wonder to behold.
Chief Leopard Frog had carved my name in tiny letters underneath the rabbit's right paw (albeit with a minor typo, "Spender" instead of "Spencer"), and its nose, prev
iously the rounded tip of the burl, was polished smoother than a cat's-eye marble.
Tiny whiskers no bigger than a human eyelash were suggested by a few carefully placed, nearly invisible scrapes.
Honestly, the more I examined my talisman, the more impressed I was with Chief Leopard Frog's talent.
With the ability to see into a fairy world, I had no need to travel far to exhaust a twenty-four-exposure roll of film.
I shot the star-shaped flowers in the pumpkin patch close enough to get their bright yellow powdery pollen on my face.
I took a picture of the marigold growing by itself near the front step. Its tiny overlapping petals filled the frame from edge to edge.
Just for the heck of it, I photographed a gum wrapper that had lain undisturbed on the ground for months, its letters faded, like Paisley itself, but still legible. I planned to title that one "Gum, but Not Forgotten."
Caterpillars had decimated the tomato crop. From a normal perspective, they looked like ugly lime green slugs, but when I saw the first one through the macro lens, I discovered that it had a stumpy red tail, curved like a hornet's stinger, ten suckerlike feet, such as an octopus has, plus half a dozen extra little sucker hands positioned just behind its big cabbage-colored head, pale oval eyes that seemed painted on like cartoon eyes, and sixteen bigger, darker fake eyes along both sides of its body.
If such a creature had stepped from a spacecraft and said, "People of Earth, we come in peace," I could not have been more astonished.
I shot several pictures from many angles.
Soon I began to enjoy the reassuring click-thunk sound that the big camera made each time I took a shot. Through my fingertips, I could feel the lens open and shut. Because it invisibly captured whatever it was aimed at, the camera reminded me of the mechanical ghost-catching device in the movie Ghostbusters. Only later, after it was properly emptied, would I find out what was inside.
Little did I know how prescient was my fleeting choice of metaphor.
My new hobby required patience.
Since Paisley had all but disappeared and Wal-Mart was an hour away—a destination limited to weekly trips—I figured the best way to get my pictures processed was through the mail.
From the recycling bin in my mother's office I chose among dozens of mail-order film-developing companies that routinely solicited business from people who had died or moved away from Paisley. The closest service used a post office box in St. Louis, so it was to the Sparkle Snapshot Company that I sent my first roll of film.
A lot of things change when you live alone.
Time, of course, is among the biggest. Days go by in which nothing worth mentioning happens. It's not that they're all the same. I imagine that if I were floating on a raft across the Pacific Ocean my ship's log might read a lot like my life in Paisley:
Hot today. Caught a fish.
Cloudy but still hot. Saw a seagull.
Another hot day. A truck went down the road, turned around, and went back the way it had come. Must be lost.
Another hot day. No rain expected. After bedtime, heard coyotes howling.
Watched a hawk catch a skink. Not easy.
And so on.
With no other people around, it's easy to let your appearance suffer. Certainly there's no need to dress up. Daily bathing becomes optional, too. You could give yourself a haircut if you wanted to, but what's the rush?
Thus, by degrees, people slip into a barbarous state.
"All the more reason to practice your art," Chief Leopard Frog urged. "Art lifts you up and separates you from the lower species."
The return of my first roll of film after ten days of waiting stimulated a Christmas-like feeling. My hands shook as I held the fat yellow envelope.
What if my pictures were no good?
But I needn't have worried. Except for the first two exposures, which were simply red streaks against a dark gray background, each of the images that followed was crisp, clear, and colorful. Yellow flowers. Green multieyed, multilegged monsters. A sprig of hay that looked like a cactus in the desert. The talisman's shiny nose and laid-back ears. A faded gum wrapper.
But then, the last picture in the stack startled me so much that I actually jumped up from my chair.
It was a snapshot of Tim Balderson's sister, Maureen, combing her hair!
What in the world? I thought.
Somehow, Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis had managed to mix in a picture meant for the Baldersons.
Oh, well, I thought. Nobody's perfect.
The Third Mailbox
FOLLOWING A LONG DRY SPELL, a thunderstorm finally passed through Paisley, too late to save the corn crop, but with nearly four inches of welcome precipitation in twenty-four hours, the creeks overflowed and the pastures turned from brown to green overnight. The pumpkin patch, previously a tangle of knotted, brittle vines, suddenly sprang out in every direction like kudzu.
Chipmunks, possums, raccoons, and foxes came out from hiding to get a long, cold drink; birds lined up on the telephone wire to dry their wings; spiders repaired webs; and a turtle poked his head up from the pond to see what all the commotion was about.
I figured this might be a good time to take another set of pictures. I had to ration my film because film and developing are expensive—one roll is a full week's allowance—but after a hard rain the color of the landscape changes, the miniature population explodes, and things bloom as if they've been waiting for this moment all season.
I put on my dad's Columbus Catfish cap, slung my camera over my shoulder, and headed up toward Ma Puttering's place. Hers is the third mailbox I mentioned before. Three in a row at the end of our driveway: the Baldersons', ours, and Ma Puttering's, whose forty acres starts where the gravel county road turns into a private dirt road with a FOR SALE sign wired to a creaky wooden gate. That sign has been there for at least three years, ever since Ma Puttering quietly passed away.
I remember her as a nice lady with a gray streak in her hair who kept a pack of dogs and once in a while made homemade blackberry jam just for me.
Her place has gone to ruin since then, however. Nowadays, it's home to an extended family of quarrelsome raccoons. Nobody's ever going to buy it. Nobody's ever going to buy anybody's house in Paisley.
What would be the point?
From a distance, Ma Puttering's house looks like a quaint, picturesque ivy-covered cottage, but when you get a little closer you can see that the corner of the roof by the chimney has collapsed, a number of windows are cracked or broken out entirely, and the ivy isn't ivy at all but a huge mass of pumpkin vines that just keep on reseeding themselves year after year.
I switched my camera from macro mode to regular and took a portrait of the place. What I saw through the lens looked sort of like a postcard from England: a thatched-roof cottage in a quiet English village, like the birthplace of a famous poet—say, maybe Thompson.
Just as I snapped the shutter, the sun divided into a thousand shafts streaming downward through the clouds, and a cottontail rabbit that had been enjoying a breakfast of red clover stood up on his hind legs and looked straight at me.
Perfect! I thought.
I used the rest of the roll on close-ups of ladybugs, yellow ones and orange ones, plus spiders, butterflies, and paint peeling from an old shed door.
I also tried to get a picture of a deer at the edge of the woods, but I think he was too far away. Still, my artistic confidence was higher, I paid closer attention to the light conditions, and I thought one or two of my shots might turn out to be keepers.
When I placed the roll in the yellow postpaid envelope to send to Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis, I thought about paying two dollars extra to get double prints but finally decided against it because at this time in our lives two dollars is two dollars.
However, something was changing in the way I looked at things. In the days of waiting for my film to get to the lab and for the lab to do whatever it is they do when they get it and for the United States Postal S
ervice to get it back to me, I must have seen a hundred excellent picture opportunities.
Wouldn't it be nice to be rich enough to take a picture of everything that catches your eye?
Wouldn't it be nice to freeze all the beauty that crosses your path?
Man, that would be something!
I'll do that right after I build a library for Paisley.
Chief Leopard Frog says eventually you learn to do it with your mind's eye, but I find that my mind's eye's brain has a tendency to forget. That's when pictures become extraordinarily helpful.
Leaning against a cottonwood tree, the official tree of the state of Kansas, I pondered this thought.
Here's what I came up with:
Just as a hammer is a tool for increasing force against the head of a nail, the camera is a tool for the extension of memory.
I was pretty proud of this insight.
But, of course, there was nobody to share it with. My thoughts are trees falling in silence in an empty forest.
Wildlife Photography
IT WAS ALMOST SEPTEMBER. Most kids in Kansas were going back to school, but my mother surprised me one afternoon after Oprah by saying that due to our geographical circumstances, I would not be among them.
"I've signed you up for homeschool," she announced. "The nearest public school is simply too far away. You'd be riding a bus in darkness over bad roads twice a day. It's too much of a risk, not to mention a hardship. I, for one, do not want to be making bologna sandwiches at four o'clock in the morning."
"But Mom," I said, "how will I ever meet anybody my own age? It's like we're living on an ice shelf near the South Pole. Except we don't even have penguins."
"I'm sorry," she replied. "It's the best we can do right now. Maybe next year our lives will change."
When my pictures came back from St. Louis, I went to my room to open the package.
There was one shot of a spider eating a moth that was extraordinary. The light was perfect. The spider looked terrifying. The moth appeared to be a tiny rag of dust and parts.
Ghost Town Page 2