LEARNING TO FLY

Like many of the best things in my life, this story begins with a dog. Except that I never knew this dog and for that matter, he’s been gone 85 years. The dog was a beautifully bred St.Bernard from Nina Dodd’s White Star Kennels in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was sold as a puppy in 1917 for $75, which works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $1400 in today’s figures. Apparently the puppy’s new owner went to the train station to pick up the puppy with his nephew– telling the boy they were going to the train station to meet “Mr. Bernard.”  It took me awhile to piece together this tale of a St. Bernard from the  faded photograph of Orville Wright walking his dog, Scipio.  As it turns out, there are dozens of photographs of Scipio, romping among the hawthorn trees, lounging on the front porch, riding in a canoe on Lake Huron, stretched out across a Persian carpet. When Orville Wright died, decades after his beloved dog, there were pictures of Scipio still tucked in his wallet.

Before Scipio, the Wright Brothers didn’t foster much interest for me. Yes, I knew they invented the airplane, just as I knew Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Important things, sure, but not the stuff that keeps me up at night.  But because we live just a few blocks from the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park (Honestly, the name! It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like “Yellowstone” does it?) we decided to take some visitors there one spring afternoon.  It was engaging, and I did learn how to tell one Wright Brother from another (Orville had a mustache all his adult life, Wilbur never had one) and I was impressed with their sticktoitiveness. We knew about their bicycles, but not the printing business, and we thought the sidebar about Orville’s friend Paul Laurence Dunbar was kind of interesting. Other than feeling a little piqued every time we saw a North Carolina license plate (First in Flight, indeed) we still didn’t give much thought to the Wright Brothers.

When another project brought me to Scipio and I discovered the collection of photos in the Library of Congress, I began to be more curious about these men that were the first to fly. As it turns out, Wilbur  had been dead for five years before Scipio came along, and though he helped his brother design their fine house in Oakwood, he died of typhoid fever before it was completed. Like many of us, the image I have of the Wright Brothers is that of young men in bowler hats and bow ties at the turn of the century, so I was surprised to learn that Orville had lived until 1948.

At the time of his death, we had airplanes “skywriting,” regularly scheduled airmail, planes had flown over the north and south poles and across every ocean and continent. There were crop dusters, paratroopers and aerial traffic reports. You could catch a regularly scheduled flight on PanAm from New York to San Francisco, or a Northwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Asia, and there were in-flight movies, with sound. Even Saudi Arabia had their own airline. The September before Orville died, the United States Air Force separated from the US Army, jet bombers were in regular use and a fighter jet had been clocked at 300 mph. That’s a lot of progress from those windy winter mornings on the dunes of the Outer Banks. If anyone ever asked  him  what his thoughts were about the use of the airplane to annihilate millions of people, I haven’t found the answer.

There have been scores of books written about the Wright Brothers and their quest for flight. Trying to find out something about the nature of the men themselves in those books is often like looking for a pearl in the sand. Mostly the books end with the success at Kitty Hawk (even though they truly did not hammer down the problems of powered flight until they were back in Dayton) or they end with Wilbur’s death in 1912. When the personalities of the brothers are described, it is in the broadest terms: Wilbur was “formal,” or “studious,” Orville was a “prankster” or (conversely) “pathologically shy.”  Wilbur had to be dressed by his sister to be appropriately attired, Orville was a dandy. Wilbur was the brains, Orville was the enthusiasm. Like many generalizations, there may be a kernel of truth there, or it may just be that a yarn repeated often enough takes on a ring of authenticity.

Take for instance, the notion that Orville Wright was “pathologically shy.”  (And yes, that’s the very phrase one sees over and over and over.) Think about this for a minute. Pathologically shy people do not stop to visit with school children on the street. They do not enlist the help of strangers in far off coastal towns to help them with gliders and later, powered aircraft. They do not entertain guests from all over the world. They do not play practical jokes.  Orville Wright eschewed public speaking, but there are documented instances where he did it anyway. He did not suffer journalists very well– and who can blame him? Journalists screw up the simplest things– imagine trying to get them to understand something as complicated as powered flight. These things do not confer on him even genuine shyness, let alone some kind of clinical state of dis-ease.

Continuing to sift through the sand, the dry, dry sand will turn up one little gem after another though, tiny landmarks in an amazing life. For instance, Orville Wright’s march to a different drummer started early– in kindergarten. Every morning, he’d start off — and never get there, preferring to spend the day playing with his friend, Ed Sines. At the appropriate time, he went home.  This continued for several weeks, until Susan Wright stopped in at the school to see how her youngest son was getting along. They’d never seen him.  Orville was then home-schooled by his mother (who turns out to be the source of real mechanical ability and curiosity in the family) until the second grade.

In the second grade, he was given opportunity to advance directly to the third grade, provided he could pass a reading test. The teacher chose a passage in the primer for Orville to read, and read it Orville did, holding the book upside down.  More in the realm of the prankster, he once dumped a packet of red pepper into the heating registers to see if that wouldn’t result in school closing for the day. This one kind of backfired, though. For three days, nothing happened. On the fourth day, the pepper was suddenly activated, making all the students sneeze.  But the teacher just apologized, opened the windows and went on teaching to her roomful of students, their eyes streaming from the red pepper in the atmosphere.

By the time he was at Central High School, at Fourth and Wilkinson Streets in Dayton, Orville had abandoned a regular course of study to take instead advanced academic classes in subjects that interested him, particularly Latin. (There is a photo here. Orville stands in the middle of the doorway in the top row. His friend Paul Laurence Dunbar is all the way to the left.) When he realized that his self-designed program made him ineligible for graduation he quit.

Interested in printing, Orville designed a press and his older brother, Wilbur helped him build it. By March of 1889, at the age of 17, he was printing a weekly newspaper, The West Side News. On the masthead, he is listed as publisher and Wilbur as editor. The paper is an amusing amalgam of “news.” For instance “Mrs. Harrison is sick and is obliged to refuse visitors. She will probably be out again in a few days” runs alongside an account of former president Grover Cleveland visiting St. Augustine, Florida en route to Cuba.  There are many “one-liner” stories, like “L.M. Brown wore the first straw hat of the season,” or “Miller’s slaughterhouse on South Williams Street was consumed by fire Friday morning.” (Yes, that’s the whole story.) However five column inches was devoted to “The Sand Blast,” a rhapsodic piece about, well, sand-blasting.

In April 1890, the West Side News became an evening daily, but the boys couldn’t sustain the pace, and in August, the paper closed. They did go on running the presses though, producing handbills, tickets, broadsheets, and booklets as a commercial press, including Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Tattler, beginning in 1892. In December 1892, they opened the bicycle shop, and in the fall of 1893 attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where Octave Chanute’s aeronautical exhibit rekindled their childhood interest in machines that fly.

I’m not going to talk about the flying. The innumerable accounts of the Wrights’ efforts to make possible powered flight have ground that topic into dust. We know they did it. Let’s move on. Well, there’s one thing to consider though. In 1901, Wilbur Wright quit. He decided that man would never fly in his lifetime and he refused to waste anymore time on the endeavor. Orville, the clown, the tinkerer, the dreamer would not let go. He gave his brother reasonable arguments to continue. He wheedled. He cajoled. He stormed. Though it’s not recorded, he probably stamped his feet and slammed the door. Whatever he did, Wilbur reconsidered and the experiments in flying continued.

In 1900, Orville had taken up the mandolin. His sister Katharine wrote “Orv has begun lessons on his mandolin and we are getting even with the neighborhood for all the noise they have made on pianos. He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house.”  Orville’s  1900 Washburn mandolin is in the Smithsonian, along with report cards of both Wright brothers, the stopwatch they used at Kitty Hawk and scraps of fabric and wood from the 1903 Flyer than went with the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969.

It horrifies me to read of the September 1908 accident in which Orville Wright crashed during a demonstration for the U.S. Army. The right propeller broke, catching on a guy wire that braced the rear vertical rudder. The wire in turn tore out the rudder and the plane nose-dived.

“Our course for 50 feet,” Orville wrote to his brother, “was within a very few degrees from the perpendicular . Lt. Selfridge to this point had not uttered a word, though he took a hasty glance behind when the propeller broke and turned once or twice to look into my face, evidently to see what I thought of the situation. But when the machine turned for the ground, he exclaimed ‘Oh! Oh!’ in an almost inaudible voice.”

Orville and the Lieutenant were thrown against the ground, and Lieutenant Selfridge hit his head on a wooden upright that supported the framework of the wing, fracturing his skull. He underwent surgery, but died during the night without regaining consciousness. Orville suffered a broken femur, broken hip, and several broken ribs and was hospitalized for seven weeks in traction. He never quite recovered from the effects of the accident. It left him with ongoing back pain and sciatica for the rest of his life, as well as a lingering sense of guilt and sadness over the first passenger death in aviation history.

As soon as Orville was well enough to travel, he and his sister Katharine sailed to Europe to join Wilbur there in promoting the aircraft, training pilots in Italy and demonstrating flight in Germany. When they returned home in May 1909, they were greeted by a crowd of 10,000 people at the Dayton train station. Their father and their brother, Lorin and Lorin’s family were there to greet them, and a special livery of eleven carriages had been arranged to carry the Wright party home. The crowds followed them on foot and when they crossed the bridge to the West Side they found the streets festooned with paper lanterns and flags. Across the street from their home, a bandstand had been set up and the  band began playing “Home Sweet Home” as they arrived.

I love that when the brothers Wright were finally (and very belatedly) officially honored by the City of Dayton (okay, boys, we’ll claim you now) a month later  in June, 1909 that they rode in carriage with lifetime friends Ed Sines (remember him, from kindergarten) and Edward Ellis, and that the two Eds spent as much time leaning out of the carriage shaking hands as Orville and Wilbur did.

It wasn’t all wine and roses though. With success came issues with patents, and vigorously defending those patents in a court of law. In 1912, Wilbur died from Typhoid fever. Orville believed that the stress of the patent issues had weakened his brother and made his susceptible to the typhus, and he vowed to finish out the patent fights to honor Wilbur’s memory. The house that Orville and Wilbur and Katharine designed together on Hawthorn Hill, across the river in Oakwood, is completed, and they move their with their father.

When I read Milton Wright’s diary entry in 1913 that his son Orville had narrowly escaped arrest for “rapid driving”– I wrote it down mistakenly as “rabid driving” and I smile when I think of Orville careening down Harman Avenue and rounding the corner onto Far Hills in front of the high school, people scattering in all directions and the Oakwood Police turning a blind eye, because they don’t really want to arrest their most prominent citizen.

No doubt he could be insufferable too. His sister’s nickname for him was “His Criticalness.”  As Orville didn’t like the taste of refrigerated food, the Wrights went on with an ice box long after their neighbors had moved on to electric refrigerators. He did design a special door in the pantry so that the ice could be delivered without water being tracked across the kitchen floor. Workmen could not get the reddish color stain that Orville wanted  right on the woodwork of the Hawthorn Hill house, so he re-did it all himself. (Did he roll over in his grave when NCR  -who bought the house after his death- painted all the woodwork white? It’s all right, Bubbo, the white looks good.) He was working on developing an automatic record changer, with a mechanical arm that reached for records, ordered in specific slots, and placed them on the turntable. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as expected, instead breaking most of Orville’s records by flinging them on the floor. In need of more records, he went to visit all of his relatives asking for their records in order to fine tune the machine.

One of Orville’s nephews was inordinately fond of mashed potatoes, and in family memoirs,  ”Uncle Orv” was remembered to have fastened a thread to the bottom of his nephew’s plate. He noted at the dinner table that the boy’s plate just seemed to gravitate towards the potatoes, while surreptitiously pulling the thread to make the plate move across the table. The same method was employed at Thanksgiving to simulate a tin “cockroach” racing across the dining room table which caused the housekeeper to drop the turkey.

Ivonette Wright Miller, the daughter of Orville’s older brother Lorin, recalled for reporters the Christmas dinner of 1919, when her new husband  Harold was the butt of one of her uncle’s jokes.  The place cards that year were a card from  Orville with a $20 bill tucked inside. ($20 in those days was the equivalent of about $250.) Except at Harold Miller’s spot, where instead of a card there was a small box of candy. Harold thanked Orville for the candy and set it aside. Others at the table encouraged  him to open the candy, saying that the $20 must be inside the box. Orville chuckled away at the head of the table. The box was opened, but there was no money inside. Harold set the box aside, quite embarrassed now. But the family urged him forward , and he removed all of the chocolates to see if the money was hidden underneath. No. Again, he tried to stop, and again he was encouraged to continue to search. Finally, when he unfolded the lid of the box, there was the $20 bill peeking out. Fiendish, in its own way.

As I sift through these dusty books and snippets of  information, trying to winnow fact from fiction, I realize what is happening here and I can no more stop it than I could hold out my hand and stop a train from coming down the tracks. A simple essay takes days because it’s like falling down a rabbit hole. I wander down this path, and then that one. I stop to drive out to Huffman Prairie and let the wind blow across my face. I check and cross-check, and check again. I drag my relatives to look at the 1905 Wright  Flyer III here in Dayton at Carillon Park. I suggest to the docents there that the pronunciation of the dog’s name is “Skipio” like the Roman general, rather than “Sipio” like the town in Ohio. I search for a Washburn bowlback Cremonatone Mandolin on eBay.

Falling in love changes everything. No, no, not that I’ve fallen in love with a man dead 14 years before I was even born. (And even if not dead then, he would have been, let’s see, 91 years my senior.) Well, maybe a little bit in love with Orville, but more so in love with Orville’s story, with discovering the real stuff of the men who gave us wings. (And in the parlor game of who would you invite to dinner, living or dead, if it could be anyone– he’s zoomed right to the top of my list, way ahead of George Washington or T.S. Eliot or Jesus Christ.)

Tom Crouch, the author of The Bishop’s Boys, to date one of the few books that stops to actually look at the Wright brothers, rather than just the race to powered flight, describes them as “warm, interesting, witty and articulate.”  Yes, well, all that and so much more.  The thing is, it’s difficult to write about a group of people– whether it’s Little Women, or the Barn Gang, or Poets in Their Youth, there’s so little focus on the individual that they are not much more than cardboard cut-outs to the reader; two-dimensional and flat. Combine that with the highly technical aspects of the invention of flight and you have something dry, dry as the sand blowing across the hills at Kitty Hawk.

Driving home alone one evening in the Saab, nimbly moving along the curves of Far Hills Boulevard, coming down out of Oakwood into Dayton, I have a kind of epiphany. It is momentous enough for me that the hair rises on the back of my neck. I realize  in that instant that I know what I have to do, and how I’m going to do it. There are many more stories to tell.

The next morning I am browsing online through something entirely unrelated, and I run across a little tiny article, written by Leonard K. Henry, someone I’ve never heard of.  As part of the Federal Writers Project, he had interviewed Orville Wright on the third floor of Wright’s laboratory.  They are leaving together and Orville asks Leonard Henry if would be so kind as to look down the elevator shaft and see where the elevator is. “It always makes me dizzy and nervous to look down from any place higher than the second floor,” the aviator explains. Orville Wright was afraid of heights.  He explains that while learning to fly he was too busy thinking to feel afraid. “It had all the exhilaration of a great adventure,”  he said.

There are literally thousands of documents online and in special collections having to do with Orville Wright, and his family. There are diaries and letters and photographs and interviews and ledgers and blueprints and patent applications. I could spend the rest of my natural life reading about Orville Wright and not only not know everything there is to know about him, but not know everything that’s documented about him. I know now what I have to do to really begin to understand, and I am going to learn to fly.

I can get on an airplane as a passenger and I can fly.  I don’t like it much. For nearly a decade, I couldn’t even do that, and would drive or take trains or simply stay home. Then I realized that I needed to overcome that fear to prevent my life from becoming circumscribed by distance. So I worked out a means to stop being afraid, and those first few flights, beating back that fear– I was giddy with euphoria afterwards. Now it’s dull and ordinary again, and a tablet of Valium makes the anxiety manageable. That’s commercial travel, and that’s not the kind of flying I mean.

I am going to go out to the airport and take lessons in a little tiny plane and learn how to race up the runway into the wild blue skies. I am going to learn how to soar and bank and climb. My family is absolutely speechless every time I mention this. That matters not. I know I will be afraid, but I’m going to do it anyway. Maybe I will be too busy thinking to be afraid. I hope to find there all the exhilaration of a great adventure, and in the exhilaration of learning to fly, I’ll be looking for Orville.

AMBIENT LIGHT

A Writer Talks About Photography

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126. It was under the Christmas tree for me when I was six years old. The first photo I took with it was of a pen full of hound dogs, neatly foreshadowing the hundreds, nay, thousands of pictures I’ve taken of hound dogs since.  It made little square pictures, all of them fuzzy because while Kodak was making these dandy little cameras for middle America, they were outfitting them with the cheapest little plastic lenses ever. It was like making a photograph through the bottom of a plastic wine glass.  Did we even realize how awful they were?  Looking at these snapshots now really is like looking at your own hazy memories, everyone is no more than a suggestion.

Eight years later the Christmas tree once again bore photographic fruit. This time it was a much nicer camera, a Rollei B35, at the time the smallest 35 mm camera made. The “B” is for “Belichtungsmesser”– a lightmeter, which was built into the front of the camera. (You can see a B35 in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Melinda Dillon used one to take photos of the landing of the spaceship.) I didn’t have the opportunity to take a picture of any spaceships, but I did photograph chocolate shops in Brussels, friends eating herring outside the Hague, and a shot that showed early promise– I turned around and got a photograph of the hordes of tourists all taking snapshots of the Notre Dame.

I was already cast in bronze as a writer. Of course, I planned to be an actress and took to my high school stage as the Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof, and Mrs. Smith in The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t sing well enough for the big roles in the musicals (the Fiddler, you might remember, is not Tevye, but a mute) and when I was cast as one of a dozen nuns in the Sound of Music I hotly told the theatre teacher, Don Oickle, that I couldn’t waste my time with such things. Which was probably the truest thing I ever said in that room. I was already editor of the school paper, after all, and for the first time ever I had an English teacher who both recognized my talent and raised the bar so high for me, that for the first time in my life I was having to work at writing.

I liked my camera, but I didn’t  think of it as anything other a means of recording memorable events, and always on slides. My stepfather had a very nice camera, a Leica IIIf from the 1950s and he shot (exclusively) Agfa slide film, so I shot Agfa too. We had a lovely Rollei projector and a good slide projected across the room can make a breath-taking image. They’re just a little inconvenient to casually leaf through. In time I started experimenting with different films, taking “artsy” photographs with an array of strange film from Ilford. I remember well a series of “eggs on a table top” that all came out cyan. My first year in college I stretched myself with the camera, shooting in the rain, at the beach, and all kinds of scandalous images that I’m surprised the local photo place deigned to print.

These were, however, good enough to get me into art school. On a trip to New York before I went off to MassArt, I “borrowed” the  Leica, and shot several rolls of the Chelsea Hotel, including a wonderful portrait of the famous hotel’s famous manager Stanley Bard. The Chelsea (in those days anyway) was very plain. Radiator pipes that banged all night long, narrow beds with thin blankets. But the wrought iron staircases were extraordinary, and the lobby was resplendent with boys in leather and raccoon-eyed girls, the celebrated and the notorious, cheek by cheek. I think that week is probably when I first started to use the camera as a different way to see. When I (ahem) “returned” the Leica, I left a roll of film in it, about half the exposures gone. I understand that when my stepfather went to pick up “his” roll of photos that he was quite bewildered by half of what he got back from Eckerd’s.

At Mass Art, I studied with Nick Nixon, who must be one of the most patient people alive.  My little Rollei had long since packed up (salt water and whatnot is hell on cameras) and with the first installment of my student loan, I bought an Olympus OM10 with a motor drive and two lenses.  Nick’s work is unflinching, capturing the beauty in the faces of people with AIDS,  people in nursing homes, the blind, the sick . . . and thank God, school children and city scapes. I wanted to take photographs like that, but I was shy about approaching people, so I shot almost exclusively with the telephoto lens. Yeah, it was a cop-out.

Even worse, I couldn’t get a grasp on exposure– I struggled with the light meter and most of the time just ignored it. I still can’t tell you exactly what “bracketing” or “matrix metering” is.  I understood why it was difficult to shoot a photograph of a black horse in the snow, and what to do about it, but I couldn’t explain it to you.  I suppose that’s like a writer who never bothered to learn to spell. It’s not that I meant to be disrespectful and careless. I was just in a rush to get the photograph. Somewhere I read a statistic that professional photographers believed that about five percent of the shots they took were successful. Five percent! That was one in twenty. I could produce a reasonable photograph one time out of twenty, well, most of the time.

I started in filmmaking at MassArt, drifted to photography and then upstairs to the Studio for Interrelated Media– “Performance Art.” There I built installations, made tape loops, shot film, and piled them all together to tell a story. Even though I was using various visual arts techniques to produce the finished piece, at the core all of my installations was the essence of it all: writing. I might have been running from words, but they were chasing me down.

The Olympus with telephoto lens and motor drive weighed in at nearly three pounds– which is a lot to carry on your shoulder day after day. Though I kind of hated to give it up, years later I finally packed it away in a box on the shelf for a much lighter Nikon SLR.  I was a long hold out for film. I’d see film stock from different companies disappear forever and each time would die a little  inside. Every time I had film developed, there was grousing about the expense. I understood the transient nature of a computer file though. Formats change, things disappear, they can’t be read down the line.

Daguerreotypes from the 1830s are still very much with us. Henry Fox Talbots “calotypes” of prints made with a silver solution fixed with salt still exist. You can make new prints from very old glass negatives. I love old photographs, particularly those of dogs, but also of family. My grandfather was an avid photographer and chronicled his family’s life with a medium format Speed Graphic, which belongs to me now. I have a photograph of Grampa, when he was just two years old, sitting on the lap of his grandmother, Elizabeth Tressler, who was born in 1837. So here’s a photograph taken in 1910 that is of someone I knew very well, well into my adult life,9 in the company of a woman who was born 125 years before me. I look at this image and I am connected to her. I can see that connection– he’s sitting on her lap!

I hated to change over to a format as tenuous as a computer file, and if the risks of losing the image weren’t bad enough, there was the trouble with capturing the image. I’d used friends’ digital cameras, snapping a picture for them at school functions and the like. There was no mistaking that lag between pushing the button and the shutter opening.  That  might be fine for taking pictures of a house or a tractor or an African violet, but what about shooting dogs, horses, children? You’d never be able to capture anything. They’d be long gone before the camera even cooperated.

Well, you know what comes next right? Nikon made a digital version of my beloved SLR, and it had no shutter lag. So I capitulated and agreed that the camera should be under the Christmas tree for me, 39 years after my first Instamatic. It’s been wonderful. Given that I never did master the technical aspects of photography, the digital format allows me shoot dozens of images to get the one I want.  This year, as part of a fundraiser, I used it to take pictures of pets with Santa Claus. I know, having had my owndog’s picture made with Santa Claus, that it’s usually one shot and you’re done. Not for me. I photographed each dog, as many times as necessary, until each owner had an image that made them smile. We would have gone broke trying to be that accommodating with Polaroid film.

None of my photographs has ever stopped anyone in their tracks.  Well, one maybe. In 1998, a friend and I spent 9 days crossing Wyoming on US 20. One evening, I took some photographs of an old fire truck parked under a sodium vapor lamp at the aptly named “Hell’s Half Acre.”  They were slides, and some of them were pretty fantastic. I chose the best one and entered, for fun really, in the Gallatin County, Montana Winter Fair. I should have had copies made, but I didn’t. Imagine how surprised and delighted I was to find that the photo had been named “Best Overall Photo” at the fair and “Grand Champion.”  When the fair was ending and I went to pick up the slide, and some other prints, my ribbons and prize money, none of it was there. Someone else had picked it up. At first I thought it must be a mistake, but as no one came back with them it was pretty clear they’d been stolen. You had to wonder about the man who usually won the photo contest at the fair, if he could be that small?  They reissued the prize money  and rosettes but the picture was lost forever and now Hell’s Half Acre itself is gone.

I take lots of pictures of the place I live, my family, some of the food that we conjure up in the kitchen, and of course, the dogs. One schmuck, an acquaintance, posted online a series of photographs he’d taken of Dayton. They could not have been less flattering. They weren’t even honest, just bad snapshots of parking lots and vacant houses and the quality was horrible– they might have been taken with my old Instamatic. When I shared my own photographs of Dayton with him he said they were the “typical yuppie bullshit” and called me a name. Another person looked at some photos I’d taken along the river  in Mississippi and saw in them a condemnation, when really that was not what I meant at all. So I think I’m not very successful in using photographs to communicate.

What I am good at is that I can make a great snap shot, an informal portrait. I can take a picture of a building or a harness horse or a carnival ride and make you go “Hm, that’s interesting.” No one’s ever going to want to buy them and put them on the wall and that’s fine with me. They work for me as illustrations, something to make the stories bigger. Photography for me was always about seeing, and writing is about feeling. Each photograph may indeed be worth a thousand words, but when I look at a compelling image, the journalist’s old maxim rises up in me: who, what, where, when and why. I see the photograph and I hunger for the details.

The noted photographer Shelby Lee Adams was a close friend of my late father’s. He is best known for his images of Appalachian family life, and those images are stories just begging to be told.  There has been an ongoing controversy about his work and whether or not it is exploitive of its subjects.  These people are poor, to some they might even seem grotesque– but surely no more (and perhaps less) than the homeless on the streets of L.A. or New York, or the babies with AIDS that Nick Nixon photographed. Or the children made famous  by Diane Arbus’ work. If we look at a photograph of another human being and it makes us uncomfortable, do we then deem it exploitive? Utter nonsense. When I see Adams’ photographs, I don’t feel pity or compassion or contempt– I feel curiosity. I want to know more about what’s going on in the picture, how these people are related to each other, what the circumstances are. It’s not up to me to judge their lot in life, but I greatly appreciate the glimpse into their world. When Dad was alive we used to look at these images together and he would explain to me what he knew about them. He and his wife were invited to go to Kentucky for a “Dinner on the Ground” with Shelby and came back with more great stories to go with these faces.

I like to take photographs, but I am not a photographer. I’m a writer, so I want to use words to tell these stories, but a single image catapults that person into our lives front and center, if only for as long as it takes to turn the page.  Over my desk hangs a large print of “Chester and His Hounds,” which Shelby Lee Adams made in 1992, and when I glance  up to really look it, it always makes me grin. But then I always had a thing for pictures of hound dogs.

WHY I AM CROSS WITH APPLE

And Why You Should Be Too.

I am a long time Apple fan. I have fond memories of the Apple Performa. I wrote some of my best work on a 1991 Apple laptop, a Powerbook 140 with an 80MB hard drive. I’ve put together whole newspapers on a G4. And yes, I wept when Steve Jobs died.

But I am cross with Apple, and you should be too.

We bought an iMac in 2007. I understand for the “Geniuses” at the “Genius Bar” that four year represents a fifth of their lives, half their adult tenure. It represents the whole span from trembling freshman to cocksure graduate. Yeah, I get it. But wait ’till you get to be edging up on the wrong side of fifty and four years will seem like no time at all.

Little did I know in 2007 that I was buying one of the notorious Shanghai  Factory W8 computers. Though it serves us well, it did develop a hiccup with the hard drive– but we lost only the email and little else. You kind of take that in stride, like having to replace a water pump in your car. It’s just one of those things.

Then the vertical lines came. First just one, off to the far left of the monitor, a single line of violet. Over the next weeks, it was two and then twelve and then twenty. It turns out that iMacs manufactured the winter of 2006 at Apple Factory W8 in Shanghai will all over time develop this problem of creeping vertical lines until eventually the entire display is obscured.  Eighteen months ago, Apple had a service memo on this problem, but since they now consider this not-quite-five year old computer obsolete, that memo has expired.

I went to the Apple Store with the computer in my arms and bellied up to the Genius bar. They agreed to see what they could do. A few days went by, a week. They were having a problem getting the part. On the tenth day, I got the call that the Mac was ready to be picked up. In the interim my husband had bought a Toshiba laptop. While I was grateful to have some kind of computer access, using that clunky little machine made me long even more for the gracefulness of the Apple interface.

We had the iMac at home for five days before the display started to wobble. Then roll, like the televisions of my childhood. Sadly, unlike those televisions, a smack to the side of the box did not fix the problem. So we went back to the Apple Store, this time tearful with frustration. The “Genius” is sympathetic. He’s one of the managers and he gives me his card. Give him a week, he says, and they will have it back to me good as new, including the foot that some unfeeling lout had left pen marks on the last time it was in.

When the iMac came home, it was indeed, good as new. This is not why I’m cross with Apple. This, too, is like one of those automotive mishaps that happens to your car and not to your buddy’s. Machines break. Just one of those things. No, the reason I am quite fed up with the Wonderful World of Steve Jobs is that they are intentionally selling us something with an artificially short shelf-life.  It used to be that when you bought a Macintosh it would still be functioning long after you’d outgrown it.  No  more.  If my computer were a food product, it would be fresh sashimi-grade tuna, excellent for 15 minutes.

Listen, dear reader, to my melancholy tale, for if  you have a Macintosh, this sad song is yours to sing as well.

My old iPod had developed quirks; it no longer saved playlists, it wouldn’t charge sometimes, then it would.  So last month I bought a new iPod. Just went into a store, chose the color (graphite) and the size (8 gig) and walked out. Went home and plugged it in. Up popped a message that this new iPod could not sync to my music library because it needed iTunes 10. So I went to download iTunes 10 and I got a message that iTunes 10 required an operating system of at least OS 10.5. Dammit. The iMac came with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4.11) installed, with only 512 MB of random access memory.

I was not a happy camper. But I had work-related things I had to produce on the computer, so I set the iPod aside for a few weeks. There were other hints that I was going to have to upgrade. The system was crashing more often. Mozilla Firefox wouldn’t download the newest browser. I couldn’t even have more than one application open at a time. I grew to hate that spinning beach ball, and its implied message:  ”Please continue to hold.”

It’s the number of generations out of date that becomes the sticky wicket. Since Tiger had leapt on the scene, it had been outpaced by Leopard, and then Snow Leopard and finally Lion. Panther? Who remembers Panther? Once you are three generations out, my friend, you are toast.

I couldn’t upgrade to Leopard because Leopard too is regarded as obsolete. So I bought the upgrade to Snow Leopard 10.6.8.  Of course I couldn’t install Snow Leopard because the computer didn’t have enough memory. So I bought 2 gig memory sticks and installed them.  Now I’ve spent an extra hundred dollars to make the iPod work, but I was still feeling philosophical about it, and quite pleased with myself for having mastered the installation of memory and software upgrade.

Until I went to use Photoshop. No dice– and okay, it was Photoshop Elements 2 (from 2002!) and I can see that it might be time for an update there. Lucky me, the newest Photoshop Elements 10 is on sale for fifty bucks. Then I had to scan a document to send in an email to someone. The printer would not function. Okay, maybe I didn’t plug it in. Nope, it’s plugged in, and I try printing something– that works just fine.

Hours go by as I search out an upgrade for the HP driver to restore the functionality of scanning, copying and faxing. Finally, in one line of text, buried deep in a document, after downloading several installers, I read that the Officejet 6110 is not compatible with Mac OS 10.6 and above. I’m not feeling so philosophical anymore. But I put on my coat and go out into the rain and buy a new printer. Now we are up to $220 out-of-pocket, just to sync the damn iPod.

The worst is still to come.

Years ago, when I produced a weekly newspaper in a little town in Montana (on a Macintosh G4, remember?) I used the graphic design program, Quark Express 2.  It wasn’t cheap, but it was intuitive and I grew to love it. I can make anything with Quark! I can make you something that looks like a dictionary page, or a wedding invitation or any kind of printed matter (or web page) you can think of. I have a thousand beautiful fonts. It is exquisite. In 2007, I bought Quark 7 for the new iMac, thinking rightly that the one designed for the Linux-based operating system was not going to be happy in the new Intel based system.

Beloved Quark. I know Quark like the road map home. I can run Quark in my sleep. It is familiar and comfortable, second nature now. On Wednesday, I designed an announcement that needed to be mailed the next day. The program seemed to run a little slow, but nothing indicated that there could be a problem lurking. I even downloaded a new font to use. When I went to export the file to be printed, it crashed. And crashed again. And crashed a third time.

So I start reading. Various forums indicate a problem with a certain kind of fonts. Quark themselves say that running Quark 7 with Mac OS 10.6.8 is not supported. There are no free or low-cost upgrades. I have a very long “chat” with a Quark customer service representative who recommends downloading the free 30-day trial of Quark 9.  I download it, copy the document and it crashes again. It’s not even finding the Helvetica font for Pete’s sake! I wade through Apple support documents and download both “upgrades” or patches for Snow Leopard. I make an appointment for a phone call with Apple support. It is after three in the morning when I go to bed, defeated. I have spent five freaking hours just trying to make Quark run. If I have to actually upgrade the program (and it looks that way) it will cost $300.

In the  morning, while waiting for the Apple “Genius” to call me, I re-design the announcement in Word. God, it’s ugly. Are they called “Geniuses” on the phone too? Whatever. The boy on the phone is very sweet and assures me that I’ve done all the right things and that it should work. He listens, a little bemused at my complaints that the computer is “not that old!” and offers as a platitude that his parents are still using a Mac “even older than yours, but mostly just for word-processing.”  Sigh.

He gives me a case number and suggests that I reinstall Snow Leopard. I haven’t done it yet. I don’t hold out much hope that it will work– and if it doesn’t, then I have more decisions to make, and probably more money to spend. Maybe I can move iTunes and Snow Leopard to an external hard drive and go back to my nice quiet life with the Tigers.

There’s one more insult.  Snow Leopard isn’t the most recent Mac operating system, that’s Lion. And guess what? My computer won’t hold enough memory to run Lion, so when Snow Leopard is completely obsolete (two years? three if I’m lucky) I will have to buy a new computer. So whatever upgrades and improvements I invest in now, I can be certain that they won’t work in no time at all.

Would you buy a dishwasher with that kind of shelf-life? Even if you only spent a few thousand dollars on a car, you’d expect it to go on for several years. If I spent that  much money on a painting or a sculpture or a desk, I’d expect to have it for the rest of my life.  Even a purebred puppy lasts ten to twelve years. Yet Apple blithely expects that we will shell out another two grand every five or six years just to be able to update our iPods and check our email.

God forbid you actually use the iMac (or Macbook or what-have-you) in a professional capacity as a writer or designer or photographer. Not only do you have to pay a lot more for that software, you can be certain that Apple will make sure that it is useless in the time it takes a reasonable wine to mature.

I never thought it would be Apple that would have me crying for consumer protection, but that’s where we are.  Though it’s Apple that has made my life topsy-turvy this week, all the computer companies are equally malevolent in this aspect. All of them should be required by law to insure the functionality of their software for a minimum of ten years. Ten years would be acceptable. Go on making huge strides in development, make more wondrous machines, but make sure you don’t abandon your earlier creations in the dust.  And Geniuses, you’ll get old too, and you’ll see in time that four years is no time at all.