‘They’ve got gator on the menu here,’ said Purdy. ‘You ever eat gator?’
‘Oh, why not?’ she said, and next time the waitress came by with more drinks, Purdy ordered some, with French fries. Which is how you get a belly like that, she thought. So strict and practical! It was like a different language. Why not get a tattoo, if you were going to die young and pretty? But everybody here was too old to die young, and they still had the tattoos, sorry blue faded things.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Purdy said. ‘Your ex.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’d of known. When he went to the liquor store and bought that big bottle, he’d of known. It sounds like he’d been at it long enough.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
His face was swimming in and out of focus, inner and outer, Purdy and Bill.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s not like day and night. You get to a point where it’s going to be today or tomorrow, it’s not a huge difference, you can see the end of the thing. At some point, you know, it’s all about momentum. Give the devil a ride.’
‘You never met him,’ Gertrude said. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, I know what I’m talking about,’ Purdy said. ‘It was no accident.’
No, no, she was about to say. Then remembered: 10,000 undeveloped rolls of film. Something had come undone. It used to be all connected, when they were married, something about the drink and the work and the driving around. He’d go looking for trouble and then take pictures of it. All part of the same thing. But then some gear came loose. A Spaniard in the works.
‘What if,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ she said, and sipped her glass of gin, a glass full of silvery ice and magic. The sun was dipping down toward the horizon and as it did the drinkers rose to their feet and moved out toward the dock in ones and twos. Gertrude and Purdy were almost the last ones to follow. They stood watching as the sun’s disk touched the horizon in a little notch between the trees, as it sank slowly out of this world and into the next. Gertrude thought of strangers awakening with the sunrise in another world, this world their dreamlife. Her and Purdy and all the others on the dock were characters in a dream on the other side of the world, things that needed to be expressed or worked through. The sun slipped lower and lower, a dome of orange light and then a slit and then, almost like a sigh, the sun was gone and the dense Florida night descended all at once. The drinkers on the dock all applauded and the Christmas lights lit up on the railing.
And that was it, pretty much. A few half-remembered moments: some driving, an argument, another bar. Some violent dream that a person on the other side of the world needed to have, some bad brain chemical, a residue of injury or accident. Purdy and Gertrude players on some unconscious stage.
She woke up in a lawn chair at dawn. Adele was shaking her gently awake. They were on the patio, next to the green pool, and the sky was an infinite no-color, no longer night, not yet blue.
Gertrude remembered throwing a shot glass at Purdy but she didn’t remember why.
‘I think I may have hurt myself,’ Gertrude said.
‘It’s just a scratch,’ Adele said, and they both looked at Gertrude’s knee, parallel lines in dried blood, like somebody who had fallen through a rose bush. It didn’t currently hurt, though it must have at some point.
‘It’s a big scratch,’ said Gertrude.
‘Let’s get you tucked in,’ said Adele. ‘Catch your death out here.’
The beads in Adele’s hair clacked and clattered as she led Gertrude across the lawn, which was not even real grass but some kind of sawtoothed weed. The white trucks of the asphalt crew were already gone. Early to rise, she thought. It was just six.
Inside, the one bed lay symmetrical and undisturbed under the coverlet, evidence, she hoped, that they hadn’t slept together. The other bed, where her suitcase lay, was a mass of hurled and piled clothes, the leavings of some giant, crazed rodent, the beginnings of an ugly nest. Gertrude said, ‘I feel stupid.’
‘It’s just a regular fuck-up,’ Adele said. ‘Everybody does sometimes.’
‘I don’t,’ Gertrude said. ‘I mean, really, I don’t.’
‘You’ve had a hard couple of days,’ Adele said. Gertrude sat on the edge of the tidy bed and took her red boots off. Her feet were blistered and torn. When the air hit them, they began to hurt. She lay down on her back on top of the covers, like a funeral decoration, she thought. Feet together, arms crossed.
Adele picked up the yellow Kodak box from the messy bed.
‘Are these his pictures?’
Alarms went off in Gertrude’s head when she thought of the pictures, the naked ones especially. Some violation of trust, something like a lie, that Gertrude had seen Adele naked without her knowing.
‘Can I look at them?’
‘Sure,’ said Gertrude, but she didn’t feel easy. Even though Adele, of all people, would know how she posed. Gertrude sat up to watch the prints shuffle by, upside down. She had a man in Oregon named Tom Robinson develop the rolls of exposed film, a few at a time, and he would make contact sheets and they would go over them with a magnifying glass, circling the promising negatives with a white grease pencil. This was her year in that yellow box: the best of them, the sorting-out.
‘These are, like, pictures of nothing,’ Adele said, pausing at a view of the parking lot from the second-story balcony, just outside of 215. Then a picture of a girl holding an ice-cream cone and laughing.
‘That’s the idea,’ Gertrude said. ‘That’s what he was trying to do.’
‘People pay money for these?’
‘There’s a museum down in Arizona that wants to buy all of them. Everything. As soon as I’m ready to let go of them.’
Then came the pictures of Adele. She fanned them out across the tidy bed like a deck of cards. Gertrude couldn’t tell if she was supposed to look at them but she was, Adele wasn’t ashamed. As usual, these were his worst pictures: Adele looking wistful with her shirt off, staring out the window with one firm breast silhouetted against the light. Bill always needed to steal the picture. When somebody just gave it to him, the energy went out of it. Nothing excited him like the top of a stocking, a flash of panty under a windblown hem.
‘These, I don’t know,’ Adele said. ‘They’re not bad. Not as bad as I was expecting when he took them.’
‘He liked women,’ Gertrude said.
‘He liked to look at them, anyway,’ Adele said. ‘Can I have one?’
‘As many as you want,’ Gertrude said.
Adele pushed the ratpile of clothes a little off to the side and laid the pictures of herself out on the bedspread. She cracked the curtains to let the dawn light in, soft shadows. Then started to sort, a pile to one side, shuffling the prints around, putting the really difficult ones back in the box. She didn’t like pictures of nothing. And then she didn’t really like the ones of herself. One by one they shuffled back into the yellow Kodak box, until there was just one left, the girl with the smile and the ice-cream cone.
‘It makes me happy just to look at her,’ Adele said.
‘You don’t want one of yourself?’
‘I’ve got a mirror,’ Adele said. ‘Now you get yourself some sleep.’
‘OK.’
‘And thanks for coming. I would have always wondered.’
Adele took her print and quickly darted in and kissed Gertrude on the forehead and left. So that’s what I was doing here, Gertrude thought. She had been wondering. She slipped between the scratchy sheets, thinking that she was done now, she could let go, the museum down in Arizona could have them and she could have her life back. So sleepy! She closed her eyes and felt the weight of sleep pressing down on her. When she woke, at noon or so, she’d leave the Florida Motel, drive her little rental car to the Jacksonville airport and back into her world. But that was later. Now it was time to sleep.
Gertrude sli
pped away. Somewhere on the far side of the world, a dreamer was about to wake up with a faint, fogged memory, a colorful dream that she will try to touch, try to fix in her mind before it dissipates into the waking air.
TRACES II
Ian Teh
THE SOURCE
Ngoring Lake
Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve, Qinghai, China, 2014
In the 1990s, China’s Yellow River began to dry up, and in 1997 it failed to reach the sea for several months. In an effort to address the problem, government officials launched a scheme to protect the river’s source, a region called Sanjiangyuan (Three River Source) in north-west Qinghai Province, also home to the sources of the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. The Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve was established in 2000. Since then, Ngoring Lake, the largest of the lakes in the reserve, has seen its water levels rise and is now larger than its historical average. Local officials claim this is proof that the government’s environmental preservation efforts have been successful, but recent research suggests a more worrying explanation: climate change.
Mountain Range
Anemaqen, Qinghai, China, 2014
Millions of people get their water from the great rivers linked to the Tibetan plateau. This land mass has an average elevation of more than five thousand metres, 80 per cent of which is covered in permafrost. It governs the Asian weather system, with its lakes, glaciers and wetlands acting as a huge water tower. Scientists call it the ‘third pole’ because of its influence on the earth’s climate. Over the past forty years, the plateau has been warming much faster than the rest of the world, at a rate of 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. By some estimates, this has caused up to a fifth of the permafrost to melt.
Grazing Yaks
Gyaring Lake, Qinghai, China, 2014
The Tibetan plateau covers all of the Tibet Autonomous Region, much of Qinghai Province and parts of Sichuan Province, stretching for 965,000 square miles, an area larger than Alaska, Texas and Nevada combined. In the 1970s, the communal system of open pastoral grazing that had existed for centuries on the plateau began to change. Grasslands began to deteriorate. Around the same time, economic reforms led to the privatisation of formerly communal lands. Fencing altered the grazing patterns herders had used to move their livestock over the fragile landscape. Confined to smaller areas, the animals overgrazed, further damaging the grasslands.
New Residential Development
Guide, Qinghai, China, 2014
Approximately three hundred miles north-east of Ngoring Lake, in an as yet uninhabited residential development, Tibetan nomads let their herds graze the small patches. In 2003, the Chinese government implemented the programme tuimu huancao, meaning ‘retire livestock and restore grassland’. Since 2006, as many as two million people have been relocated in an effort to restore grasslands and forests, a process the government calls ‘environmental migration’. Since the introduction of tuimu huancao, studies have shown that the government relocation efforts have more to do with economic policy than restoration or protection of the delicate ecosystem.
Road Construction
Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai, China, 2014
Over the past decades, as China’s cities and economy have grown rapidly, the Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve has been increasingly explored for resource extraction. A single mine, the Muli mine, contains 3.5 billion tons of coal, or 87 per cent of the province’s reserves. The infrastructure necessary to move supplies and resources has further altered the landscape as road-construction projects cut through the plateau and open mining pits abut protected wilderness areas.
Abandoned Five-Star Hotel Construction
Guide, Qinghai, China, 2014
One of the benefits of creating the reserve, according to China’s State Council, would be ‘ecological protection and construction’ on the plateau. Development, however, soon extended to mining and real estate. Meanwhile, some of the tourism-related projects have been lost to changing political winds: according to a local security guard, construction of this five-star hotel came to a halt when developers couldn’t secure the necessary permits after a turnover in local government personnel. Scientists have raised concerns that large towns and cities, and the infrastructure that connects them, will inevitably increase the stress on the local ecology.
THE MIDDLE REACHES
Cityscape
Lanzhou, Gansu, China, 2011
Since 1949, Lanzhou, once a Silk Road trading post, has morphed from the capital of a poverty-stricken province into the heart of a major industrial area. The largest and first city on the Yellow River, it is the centre of the country’s petrochemical industry and a key regional transport hub between eastern and western China. Among the country’s 660 cities, more than four hundred lack sufficient water, while more than one hundred suffer from severe shortages. According to recent reports by the Chinese government and international NGOs like the Blacksmith Institute, Lanzhou is China’s most polluted city and one of the thirty most polluted cities in the world.
Desert
Baiyin, Gansu, China, 2011
A man from an illegal mine walks on a dirt track leading out of the mountains. Desertification in the region is a serious problem, consuming an area greater than that taken by farmland. Nearly all of China’s desertification occurs in the west of the country and approximately 30 per cent of the country’s surface area is desert. China’s rapid industrialisation, overgrazing and expansion of agricultural land accelerate the advance of deserts, which are now swallowing up a million acres of grassland each year.
Landfill Construction
Hejin, Shanxi, China, 2011
Workers unroll sheets of plastic to line a new landfill. Just over a generation ago, refuse was rarely a problem because families, then largely poor and rural, used and reused everything. As cities have grown, urban support systems have been unable to keep up with the growing demand for the processing and disposing of waste. Most landfills are poorly managed and have only thin linings of plastic or fibreglass. These sites leach heavy metals, ammonia and bacteria into the groundwater and soil, and the decomposing waste sends out methane and carbon dioxide.
Quarry and Temple
Baiyin, Gansu, China, 2011
Quarries producing limestone, used for construction and as flux for the process of steel-making, are among a number of common features found in industrial towns. Heavy industry in this area has meant a high consumption of coal and water. Based on current figures, it is estimated that the 2015 development of the coal industry in the west will consume up to 10 billion cubic metres of water, approximately a quarter of the annual flow of the Yellow River.
Banks of the Yellow River
Hejin, Shanxi, China, 2011
A couple sits by the only remaining undeveloped section of the river. Although China has roughly the same amount of water as the United States, its population is nearly five times greater, making water a precious and increasingly sought-after resource. The heavily industrialised area around Hejin contains some of the most polluted waters in the river. In 2007, the Yellow River Conservancy Commission stated that one third of the river system had pollution levels that made the water unfit for drinking, aquaculture, agriculture or even industrial use.
TRACES II
From 2006 to 2010, I photographed the coal industry in China and its impact on the western hinterlands of the country. One body of work, Traces I, was a series of landscapes, often devoid of people, that beneath their neutral surfaces harboured highly politicised histories and revealed physical traces of change caused by human intervention. Traces II, which I began in 2011, is an extension of that study, with a particular focus on the Yellow River.
Few rivers have captured the soul of a nation more deeply than the Yellow River. Historically a symbol of enduring glory, a force of nature both feared and revered, it has provided water for life downstream for thousands of years. Its environmental decline underlines the dark side of the country’s economic mir
acle, and is a tragedy whose consequences extend far beyond the 150 million people it directly sustains. There are often appropriate initiatives and legislation to protect the environment and its people, but these are systematically overlooked as the ambitions of the state are prioritised over the rule of law. My photographs offer clues to the incremental everyday changes that we fail to notice in the drive towards advancement and in the hectic minutiae of our daily lives. They attempt to show what happens when an area that was largely rural becomes increasingly urban and industrial, and to reveal the costs of rapid development on the communities beyond the river’s immediate surroundings.
By depicting these landscapes as predominantly beautiful, almost dreamlike, I seek resonance with some of the romantic notions about this once great river. The search is for a gentle beauty, but also for muted signs of a landscape in the throes of transition. I am interested in the dissonance created between the ambivalent images and the historical, economic and scientific narrative that accompanies them. My hope is that together they connect viewers to the front lines of climate change, where the environmental crisis under way, like climate change itself, isn’t always easy to see.
MOTHER’S HOUSE
Raja Shehadeh
One can never be sure whether one is doing the right thing, especially when the patient, like my mother at the end, can only speak with difficulty. But all indications were that she did not care to go on living.
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