Singing Hymns and Taking Pictures: 550 Miles

     I only do it on the road, and only when no one else is within hearing distance: I turn on one of those gospel channels and sing one song after the other at the top of my lungs! Whether or not I agree with all the words, I know them all from years of playing them in church growing up, and with substantial road noise, I sound pretty good.

     By the time I got to Vicksburg (550 miles from my driveway) (looking forward to watching Masterpiece, only to discover my Best Western doesn't have PBS) I was hoarse and happy.  When Mike called to check on me, I offered to sing one for him, but he declined my offer rather vociferously.

     It's been a beautiful day, driving 35, then Highway 79, to Highway 20. (Interstate 20 is 350 miles from my house.)  When I got here, I asked the clerk at the desk for suggestions of places to eat and she told me Cracker Barrel and a buffet are just one exit up.  "Which do like better?" I asked--to which she answered, "I  ain't never ate at any of them."

     Every hundred miles I stopped--or when I couldn't stop, took note of where I was.  I know this route so well it's a larger version of driving around a hometown.  But I wanted to pay attention this time to mile markers, to get a sense of how far certain places are from others.

     100 miles: Hutto, Texas--a quiet little town with a lot of nice brick buildings, most of which were out of business.  Flat lands, a train that wends its way right along the highway, silos, leafless trees, silver sky.

     200 miles:Marquez, Texas.  

    300 miles: Rusk--just by the sign for Rocking S Ranch.

    400 miles: the 30-mile marker on East 20, just east of Shreveport.

    500 miles: the 130-mile marker on East 20, between Monroe and Vicksburg

    550 miles: Best Western Vicksburg

     Several times, I had to do a U-Turn to photograph something: a field of cows; trees reflected in water; solitary crumbling, peeling, sagging buildings; barns with breezeways framing fields and trees; silos and trains....

The house is gone; only the outbuildings remain.

Just on the other side of the tracks

     I brought along a new journal I'd been saving for my next road trip.  On the cover, there's a quotation by Thoreau: "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

     Every few pages, there's a drawing of a vintage camera and a quotation about photography--most of which apply to writing and drawing:

     "Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second." Mark Reboud

     "You don't make a photograph just with a camera.  You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved." Ansel Adams

     "A good photographer must love life more than he loves photography." Joel Strasser

     "You don't take a photograph.  You ask, quietly, to borrow it."  Unknown

     "Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever....It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything." Aaron Siskind

     "Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow." Imogene Cunningham.