Selections from my book Postcards from the Road, published by Chicago University Press/Intellect
[more selections at http://takeonartmagazine.com/article-details/205 see also http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-entertainment/article/1772140/jonathan-day-postcards-road http://www.lumenvisum.org/site/exhibition/postcards-from-the-road-jonathan-day-2/ http://www.artnews.com/2014/06/19/new-photo-books-on-cartier-bresson-robert-frank-and-more/ http://www.aicahk.org/eng/reviews.asp?id=326 ]
1 Cafe Vesuvio, Jack Kerouac Alley, San Francisco
The Vesuvio Café, San Francisco, is old, like the district. During the Gold Rush, when Chinatown was threatened by the authorities, the shop owners shot at the council until they desisted. The ghost of that defiance lingers here still, seeping up through drain covers and pooling in gutters. Stained glass windows canonise bottles of Sierra Nevada: an amber shining amidst Titian blue skies, colouring the howling night, brightening the darkness in Kerouac Alley outside. The air is stained with bleach, vomit and alcohol, all melding like washed out watercolour paint. A mirror in the bathroom is scratched with the names of pilgrims. I drink in the gallery, between a photograph of 1950s women and a Gold Rush era nude. One is a record of real women, who maybe Kerouac and Cassady wooed on these very stools. Certainly they are gift- wrap layered like their lovers: powder, eyeliner, ‘Victory’ red lipstick, corsets, nylons and ‘New Look’ chiffon. The painting is a naked promise, soft as marshmallow, smooth as rose petals, the ancient pigment pert and willing. It is cracked now, as the oils (like skin) have dried, revealing the lie; nonetheless charming, nonetheless comforting for me. I feel I am at sea in a wide, wild ocean, far from home, far from land. Content though, carried on these stormy gusts. It’s a relief, a need I’ve spent a lifetime knowing, hungering deeply within for something, still unsatisfied yet. Something I know is out there, something I know Kerouac found, even if he couldn’t hold it long, even if (in the end) it let him down.
2 Chesepeake Bay, Virginia
How long does it take to fall in love? A minute, an hour, a day? The bright, strange Carolina night is high and brilliant, as I knew it would be on those long miles down from the mountains. Fireflies are dancing with the stars—only the scent of Mimosa stops them flying away for ever. The sound of wind and waves outside my door, sunrise over the water, intense light filling the air and turning it the quietest kind of golden. Tiny seabirds are dancerly, scurrying along the bite marks of the breakers.
I breakfast from a shack selling quesadillas and an old man passionately hawking fruit. South, afterwards, to Hatteras and the North Carolina ferry (toll free) squatting on the ocean like a water boatman bug. The ferry captain weaves between shoals, as the pirates did, sailing to the haunt of Blackbeard. Sitting on the porch of Ocracoke Coffee, heavy with the scent of Carolina Jasmine, I am shaded by lonesome pines as a warm breeze rustles the leaves, brilliant green against the light. It is everything I had almost forgotten about summer. Sunlight on the dusty streets hangs in the air between low wooden buildings hiding in the bushes
Out along the brilliant beach, scattered with more of the darting waders, legs-a-blur as they trot up and down the sand, choreographed by waves and tide. Phalaropes, turnstones and dunlin: they seem happy with their lives. Dead creatures lie on the strand line: their dance is done and their broken remains feed again the land from which their fiery incredible beings were born. Somewhere among the sands and pools I saw an osprey casually fly over with a fish in its talons. Just as if this was everyday and not at all spectacular—which I guess, here, it is. The evening sucked the colour from the russet bill of a cormorant and the brilliant crimson of a blackbird’s wing. Sunrise and sunset over the Atlantic, from this debatable land, lost somewhere in the waves.
3 Railway Station men’s room
Deep in the belly of a railway station, the enormous kind that only cities spawn, I needed a toilet. Signs led me around corner after corner, up and down entirely purposeless seeming steps. Eventually, as if hidden away like a treasure, there was a men’s room, wrapped in a concrete and strip light womb. Stuck with little mosaic tiles, of a dirty terracotta tone—burnt umber perhaps, or something like—designed to complement the colour of piss. The tungsten light stained it yellow on yellow, a place to forget about, to ignore. In the corner, an old man was impish faced in a white overall jacket—standing by a table arranged with toilet paper and a mug for tips. I asked if I could photograph him, here in this netherworld—a kind of purgatory it seemed to me, not hellish, quite, neither at heaven’s door.
My camera decided to mix him up with the street outside on this snowy night, bringing some kind of air and light to the eternal buzz of filaments and the distant rumble of tunnelled diesels. Somehow this image has become a thing for me of beauty, capturing better than anything that frozen winter town. The biting air, the bitter sky and the incalculable masses, marooned there with little option—land of the free, home of the brave.
4 Farm, North Dakota
5 Child, Milan, Minnesota
6 Still life, Art Institute, San Francisco
7 Beaufort, Carolina
8 Flag
9 Wyoming
10 Sangre de Christo mountains
11 Covered Car, Long Beach California
12 Roosevelt Highway
13 Chinatown, San Francsico
14 Bonneville
15 Yellowstone
16 Bayou, Louisiana
17 South Dakota
18 Beach, Michigan
19 Mommoth Springs
20 Wayside Altar, Arcady, Louisiana
21 Gillette, Wyoming
22 Borax storm – Trona, Mojave
24 San Francisco
25 Great Salt Desert, Utah
Sitting in the town of speculator, in the Adirondack Mountains. Winding narrow roads, pristine and spruced holiday cabins next to dilapidated and collapsing mountain homes, yards filled with rusting eight litre pickup trucks. One of these, still drawing breath, had ‘Girls Love Muddy Rubber’ stuck to its door. The fat driver bore testament to his bumper sticker: a svelte blonde was riding alongside.
I’m sitting in a small park, hard by a lake. A little family with a couple of kids are quietly fishing a way off. A wonderful wind is coming from the west; more than a breeze, less than a hurricane, maybe the remnants of the rain storm that plink plunked all night on my truck in Wisconsin, or a balance perhaps to the Beryl storm that pounds the Carolina shores to the south and evacuates the islanders as I write. Fresh and cooling after a hot day, birthing lines of waves broken and uneven but, like all the Universe, with a rightness to the jumble, a reassurance, a sense of home.
It’s a wide country, drawing away from these quiet and civilised mountains—rising in the twirling blarney of the Blue Ridge, banjo picked and stilled in Great Smoky black forests, to the high white Rockies, South Parked and Arapaho. My journey is like a string, a thousand beads strung on it, burned in memory, assimilating evenas I write. Maybe Wordsworth was wrong to lionise “emotion recollected in tranquillity”; maybe all tranquillity does is ameliorate the rawness.