He was pretty annoying, gesturing with his hands like he was making a speech at the club or something, but Mick could tell he knew what he was talking about.
“If you want to shoot landscapes you’re going to have to do it early in the morning or late in the afternoon, Mick. Pound this into your head—nothing comes alive without contrast.”
14
* * *
Expectations great and small.
LIKE a lot of men, Mick’s calendar year was divided into only two seasons—baseball and football. He was never into basketball, so there was a hole, a great empty void in his year between the Super Bowl and the beginning of spring training—roughly from early February to late March. Every fourth year the Winter Olympics would come along and plug the hole if he could tolerate the figure skating, but the winter he came home to stay with the kids wasn’t one of those years. Stuck at home with no games to look forward to and no grownups to talk to, the dead of winter was just that—dead as a hammer.
He and Dylan took to riding around looking for pictures in the mornings after they dropped off Ben and Toad at school. After he bought an equipment bag he started keeping the camera in the truck, along with plenty of black-and-white film. Morning light was magic. Evenings were always tied up with dinner and homework, but it didn’t take long to figure out Aubrey was exactly right about the morning light. It was much better for pictures, he’d just been too busy to notice.
One morning, way back down a dirt road alongside the railroad tracks, they found an old abandoned shack covered up by kudzu. The world was winter-bare. No evergreen came near, and the old house was completely consumed with ropy, brown, naked vines, laced all across the windows and doors, climbing over the roof and running back down the other side. The house itself was built low to start with, and now it sat waist-deep in an impossible tangle of vines like a forgotten prisoner, lost and hopeless. The morning sunlight laid across it and made the window and door holes look even blacker and more forbidding through the vines.
“Probably snake infested,” Mick said when he got out of the truck. Dylan pulled the door closed and retreated to the middle of the seat. Mick didn’t tell him snakes weren’t a problem in the winter.
* * *
Even in February the afternoons warmed up enough most of the time so that he and Dylan and Andy could get out and ramble in the woods a little bit. Sometimes they’d cut firewood or dig up a stump, but it was too cold to swim and there really wasn’t that much to do when the yard was hibernating. It was Dylan’s idea to build a tree house.
In the olden days when Mick was young, children would sally forth into the forest by themselves, without any grownups, and making use of whatever scrap lumber they could scrounge around the neighborhood and whatever bent nails they could forage, they would hammer a few short boards up the side of a tree for a ladder, then build a platform. No sides or anything, just a platform, rickety and crooked, and they’d spend ages playing there.
Kids didn’t do stuff like that anymore—mostly, Mick figured, because it was too dangerous. Modern children, set loose with hammer and nails to build their own roost twenty or thirty feet up in a tree, completely unsupervised, would surely kill themselves. They’d saw their arms off, contract all manner of tropical fevers from rusty nails and spider bites, hammer their fingernails off, fall out of the tree and break their necks, and then some social worker would come haul away the survivors. He figured every generation of parents in history was equally horrified by the thought of their children doing the things they did when they were kids, and it never occurred to any of the parents that those were the very things that made them who they were.
They worked on the playhouse mostly after school. He’d pick up Ben and Toad, and the four of them would go out back and work for a couple hours before Mick had to go in and cook supper. He started out with the notion that they’d all build it together, but then there was that safety thing, and he soon discovered that the kids just weren’t capable of doing work that was up to his professional standards. It had to be plumb and level, and strong enough to survive a hurricane or a major earthquake. In the beginning they helped a little, but Mick took the handsaw away from Toad when she gummed it up sawing on pine saplings, and he took the hammer away from Ben because he was using up all the nails driving them into tree trunks for fun. After the chainsaw incident at Hap’s, Mick was pretty finicky about nails in trees. Eventually, the kids got tired of him taking the tools away from them and griping about the quality of their work, so they wandered off to do unproductive things like climbing trees and playing in the mud with Andy. Mick didn’t really notice. He was building the fortress that he wished he could have had when he was a kid.
It started out simple enough, just a little house on four-by-four stilts attached to the side of an oak tree. But when Mick saw how much scrap lumber was left over from Hap’s he decided they needed an annex with a footbridge so he could hang a couple of swings from it. Danny Baez came by one afternoon, and when he saw what Mick was doing he brought a bunch of rope. The safety man on the job had made them dump half a truckload of perfectly good rope just because it was frayed in a couple places. Mick made a cargo net out of it and fashioned rope handrails along both sides of the bridge. One of the guys from church, whose kids had grown up, gave him an old slide. He attached it to the annex to make an emergency exit. He used good stout three-quarter-inch pipe for the ladder, and made the rungs close together so Dylan wouldn’t have any trouble climbing it.
When he was done he stood back and looked at his fortress. There was a hatch in the floor with a pole to slide down, and windows for looking out over their domain and defending themselves from attackers. It was grand. He rounded up the kids and took them up there to show it to them.
“You know, with the bridge and the ropes and everything, I think it looks a little bit like a pirate ship,” he said, and waited for the applause.
“Cool,” Ben said. “Can we go play now?”
Ben and Toad slid down the pole and disappeared. Dylan studied the pole for a minute with that dark look on his face, then crossed the bridge and went down the slide. He was afraid of heights, and he didn’t trust his own arms and legs to get him down that pole without falling. The roof was low—kid height—so after they left Mick was standing there sort of hunched over, trying to figure out what had just happened. Andy was sitting in front of him with his big hind feet out to one side, staring at him.
“Where’d I go wrong?” Mick asked the dog.
Andy sighed, then got up and trotted across the bridge, slid down the slide and went to find the kids. It didn’t even occur to him at the time to wonder how the dog got up there in the first place.
It was a little late when Mick came in from the playhouse, so he was just getting things cranked up in the kitchen when Layne came home from work. When he saw the look on her face he thought she was unhappy because he was late getting dinner started.
“I’ve been out back finishing up the playhouse,” he explained. “We’re having pork chops. It won’t take long.”
Her mouth was kind of skewed to one side. “The kids are out in the front yard. Do you know what they’re doing?”
He could tell by her tone it wasn’t good. He went to the window.
“Looks like Dylan and Andy are digging a grave. Ben and Toad are sword fighting. Hey, at least they’re getting exercise, right?”
“And what are they using for swords?” One eyebrow went up sharply.
He turned to the window again. “Ah, it looks like the brass pedal-rods out from under your piano.” Layne was extremely protective of her piano. The ebony six-foot Steinway bequeathed to her by her grandmother was the most valuable thing in the house. “I’ll, uh, I’ll just go out there and get them, okay?”
The kids followed him back in, and with a little prompting apologized meekly for dismantling the piano. Layne still had her travel cup in her hand, and she went to put it in the sink while they were groveling.
“Wha
t’s all this Tupperware doing in the sink?” she asked.
Toad lit up like a Christmas tree. “OH! We were playing Taheckizzat! It’s a awesome game, and I won! I guessed the green beans!”
“Taheckizzat?” Layne said, turning to Mick.
“A game we, uh, you know . . . a game we play when we clean out the refrigerator.”
Now she was glaring.
“I guess you sort of had to be there. It really is kind of fun,” Mick mumbled.
“How often do you clean out the refrigerator?”
“Whenever it needs it,” he lied. “Okay, whenever we run out of Tupperware.” Things were going from bad to worse.
She shook her head, chuckled, and started to walk out without saying anything else. He thought he’d heard the last of it, but when she was almost out of the room she stepped in an old dried juice spill on the tile, and when she lifted her foot it made that ripping sound.
She stopped. Looked over her shoulder at him.
“How often do you mop the floor?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Whenever it pulls my socks off?”
* * *
That evening he left the kids home with Layne and escaped over to Aubrey’s for a while. Standing in the red light of his darkroom he watched while Aubrey prepared to develop the negatives. The darkroom was bigger than Mick’s kitchen, and probably better equipped. There were cabinets and countertops down both sides of the room, which Mick learned were divided into a dry side and a wet side. There were trays and beakers, funnels, measuring cups, canisters of chemicals, an enlarger that looked a lot like a drill press, timers and blowers and drying lights and magnifying glasses—he had every toy known to photography.
The first thing Aubrey did was take out a stainless-steel container the size of a pint jar.
“Developing tank,” he explained, then he showed Mick some little spools. “First we wind the film onto these spirals, then put them in the tank for a few minutes. This part has to be done in the dark.”
He flipped off the light. In total darkness he rolled the negatives onto the spindles, dropped them into the tank, and sealed the lid on the light-tight tank.
He turned on the red overhead light—dim, but better than pitch black. Then he unscrewed a smaller cap in the top of the tank and poured in the developer fluid. Every minute or so he would grab the tank by the ends and shake it to get the bubbles off the film.
“It’s chilly in here,” Mick said, rubbing his arms.
Aubrey nodded. “Sixty-eight degrees. The room is climate controlled. Temperature is important.”
Perfectionist. When the timer dinged Aubrey funneled the developer back into the jug it came from and poured in a different chemical.
“An acid solution,” he said. “It’s called a stop bath because it stops the developing process.”
A couple minutes later he changed the chemical again, to something he called a fixer. Two or three minutes later he dumped that out, pulled the lid off the tank and ran tap water directly into it.
“We have to let it rinse for a half-hour,” he said, flipping on the fluorescent overhead light. “While we’re waiting, let me show you a couple things. What do you want to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of photography are you most interested in? What gets you excited?”
“Oh. Old houses and barns. Landscapes, I guess. That’s mostly what’s on this roll.”
Aubrey pulled two books down from a high shelf and laid them on the counter. Photography books. He spent the entire half-hour going over the essentials of landscape and architecture photography, talking about how to best reveal the “essence” of a place and its atmosphere.
“You’re not just making a recording of what you see,” he said, “you’re trying to capture what you feel when you see it. Like I told you before, you’re telling a story, conveying a mood.”
“Um, Aubrey, this is all a little rich for me, you know? I’m trying to follow you, but—”
“It’s an art, Mick. You have to treat it like an art.”
Mick scratched his head, winced. “Right. Maybe . . . Listen, when you were at my house on Christmas Day you were telling me about a picture you took. You said it inspired you, made you want to take up a career in photography, but you never told me what it was. Maybe that would be a good place to start.”
Aubrey leaned back against the counter and eyed him for a long moment, biting his lip. He didn’t say anything, yet there was a wariness in his eyes and Mick sensed it was a question of trust. Then he pulled an album down from a shelf and opened it. From the first sleeve he pulled an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy photograph and handed it to Mick.
“I shot this in college. I’d just gotten my first Nikon,” Aubrey said. “The one I gave you. I was downtown with a couple friends on a Saturday afternoon and happened to have my camera in the car. We ran into a traffic snarl—police cars all over the place, yellow tape, crime scene. So I pulled over, grabbed the camera and ran up to the second floor of an abandoned warehouse across the street to see what I could get.”
Mick was drawn into the photograph. A ring of uniformed police held a crowd back from a man lying on the sidewalk, face down, his arms out in front of him and a handgun just beyond his reach. There was a little nook where the façade of one building stuck out farther than the other one, and a kid stood with his back in the corner, staring down at the man on the sidewalk. The camera zoomed in at a perfect angle, just over the heads of the police, drawing Mick’s eye straight to the face of the boy backed into the corner. He was maybe ten years old, wiry, a little too streetwise for his age, and the look on his face was not one of sadness. He was angry. There was a sense of loss in his eyes, but it was an angry loss. A loss of betrayal. His eyes said, “How dare you get killed.”
Aubrey waited, silent.
Mick looked up, met his solemn gaze. “It was his father, wasn’t it.”
Aubrey nodded slowly. “I don’t know, maybe it was dumb luck, but that picture captured whole lifetimes in an instant. Generations. Eternity. It’s all there.”
Mick studied the picture, the boy’s face, the rigid posture. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Twenty years later it’ll happen again.”
“One way or another. There’s power in story, Mick. In being able to capture a truth like that in one quick snap. That’s what I’m talking about.”
The picture explained a lot, not only about the power of photography, but why it meant so much to Aubrey.
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t follow up on it,” Mick said. “It’s clear from this”—he raised the photograph—“that you care, a lot, about photography. Why didn’t you stay with it, do it for a living?”
The merest flash of pain came into Aubrey’s eyes then, and he turned his back to shake the tank one more time. His shoulders shrugged and he said quietly, “I guess it was because there weren’t any guarantees. I have to have order, Mick. I have to know things are in their places and tomorrow is all planned and paid for, that’s all. I admire the art, but I could never live the life.”
* * *
When the negatives were ready Aubrey unrolled them and hung the strip up in a long cabinet in the corner, clipping a clothespin to the bottom to keep the strip from curling as it dried. Then he took some kind of scissor-like squeegee from a drawer and wiped it down to take off the excess water. When the negatives were dry enough to suit him he fitted them into the top of the enlarger and fastened a sheet of print paper into the flat bottom.
Mick had never seen it done before, so the whole process was like magic to him. Aubrey kept up a steady lecture while he developed a stack of prints and fed them into a drum dryer that looked for the world like an old mimeograph machine. He said there were all sorts of tricks, things he could do during the developing process to change the way a finished print would look. He held his hands in the way of the projector beam on one print just to show Mick how the light could be altered.
The prints
came out of the dryer curled up, so he laid them out on the counters to flatten. Then he started going down the line examining them with a magnifying glass. He went over them pretty quickly until he got to the ones of the kudzu house.
“Where did you find this place?” he asked.
“Down that little access road off of Highway 3, close to Tara Boulevard. By the tracks.”
“Amazing. I’ve been through there a hundred times and never noticed this. You have an uncanny eye.”
“So, you like the pictures?”
“No, I like the subject. The pictures are overexposed. Have you ever heard of the Sunny 16 Rule?”
“No.”
“Okay, back to basics. Basic daylight. If you’re shooting a front-lit subject in full sun, set the shutter speed to 1/100, assuming you’re using 100 speed film, and F–16. Got it?”
Mick had spent hours fiddling with the camera and knew the knobs and switches pretty well by then. “There is no 100 on the shutter speed dial of the F3,” he said.
Aubrey frowned. “That’s true, but get as close as you can. Set it to 125. If you’ll make a habit of switching to manual exposure mode and locking in those settings, you’ll do fine in direct sunlight. What happens to a lot of amateurs when they use automatic settings is the camera’s internal light meter gets fooled. If you go to manual you bypass the meter.” His eyebrows went up and he raised a finger, just like a schoolteacher. “But! If the subject is lit from the side, like this one here, you want to increase exposure one stop. That’s why this one’s not quite as overexposed. Do you know how to bracket a shot?”
He pulled his new camera from the shelf and showed Mick how to do it. He told him where to start from, and how to compensate for a dozen different variables, all depending on angles and intensity of light—way more information than Mick was capable of absorbing in one sitting. But it helped. Mick didn’t understand half of what Aubrey told him about light and exposure, but he did get the Sunny 16 Rule and how to bracket a shot. He figured he could work out the rest. Eventually.
Summer of Light Page 13
