American Meteor (15 page)

That night, I went to Jackson’s tent to introduce myself. He was absorbed in a negative he’d made that afternoon of the jagged peaks in the distance. I watched him pore over the eight-by-ten-inch plate, one eye squinting through a jeweler’s loupe.

“There’s an advantage to having just the one eye,” he said, making no other overture to the stranger who’d entered his tent without invitation. He hadn’t looked up. He appeared to take no notice of me in the uncertain light of the kerosene lamp, yet he’d seen enough to know I wore an eye patch. My face must have showed my amazement, like that of someone who’s witnessed a parlor trick he can’t explain. “One eye makes it easy to look through the camera or glass,” he said, putting down his loupe on the trestle table. “And you’ll never have to squint to consider some small detail of the picture.”

“How did you know I want to take pictures?” I asked, under the influence of his uncanny performance.

“I saw you watching me during the high jinks this afternoon. You were too intense for someone with only a casual interest in the ‘mysteries’ of the profession. Although the mystery has been debunked by familiarity, and a photographer isn’t the curiosity he used to be in the days of the
daguerreotypist, when a crowd would gather just to see his head vanish behind the black drape. We were considered magicians then. But after a million views, the novelty’s worn off.”

His glance swept the negatives laid on the table and then lifted to take me in. I found his eyes hard to meet. But I did meet them, impudently, as if he were himself a photographic subject about to be pierced by the camera’s all-seeing lens.

“I know who you are.”

“Who?” I said sharply and much annoyed.

Jackson liked to be mystifying, the same as anyone who conjures. But my admiration was enough to satisfy him. I didn’t need to truckle—he’d have hated me for it. From the first, I sensed that his pride was not in himself but in his gifts, which he willingly shared with those who treated them seriously. If he’d tried to lord it over me, I’d have turned on my heel and left—never mind that I needed him. His brother had nothing more to teach me. Already, I knew I wanted to make pictures of real things and real people—not prettifying portraits of flowers or “stiffs,” which was how Edward referred to customers whose rigid poses were as lifelike as the dead men’s he was sometimes asked to photograph.

“Stephen Moran,” he said with a becoming smile. He laughed, and then he admitted that Edward had wired him to expect a visit from me at the summit, if I had the nerve. “My brother’s been writing to me about you. He says you’ve the makings of a first-class photographer.”

Those words gave me more pleasure than anyone else’s had up to that time, not forgetting General Grant’s when he gave me my medal. Just so you know, I only wore it twice
after he sent it back to me. And when I outgrew my Union sack coat, I gave it to an Indian, who used to slink around Omaha buttoned up in it, begging for liquor.

“So tell me, Moran: Why do you want to be a photographer?”

He would ask that question several times during the nearly two years we traveled together. I don’t think my answers ever satisfied him completely.

“You can tell a lot about your subject by studying the negative,” he said, holding it to the light again.

I kept silent, knowing I was about to receive my first master lesson in the photographic—some say “art,” others, “science.” I began by thinking it the former; in time, I came to think of it as a science; lately, I’ve come to consider it a faith. Jackson handed me the glass plate. I held it to the light and studied it with my one good eye.

“Tell me what you see.”

“A mountain range in the distance. In the foreground, a group of white tents. Emptiness in between.”

“Good. But you must learn to look deeper.”

He spoke almost gently. If he’d been sharp, the shell where my raw self resided like an oyster would have broken. You’d have thought the tender organ of someone without a childhood would quickly become hardened. But I possessed the child’s eager and easily wounded heart. In my lifetime, I’d been shown little enough kindness, except by my mother, who died too soon to fortify me against the meanness of the world. It weakened me, but it did not undo me. I could be as cruel as the world is. To use a figure from a later time, I was resistant, like a virus that fire and ice ought to annihilate but can’t in spite of its insignificance.

“What do I see?” I asked in a tone of voice that bespoke
not servility, but the disciple’s acceptance of criticism. I was twenty—the age when boys feel themselves licensed to rebel against authority. But I was ready to be chastened. I wanted to follow him into the wilderness.

“You see the invisible made visible,” he uttered with the solemnity of a Hindu swami. “Moran, you see the bones of the world.”

I had no idea what he meant—and wouldn’t until I saw
Hand mit Ringen
, the first X-ray picture, taken by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife’s hand, in an 1897 issue of
Scientific American
.

“If you’re interested only in recording the scenery, I don’t have time to waste on you.”

I felt as though I were picking my way through a field of Confederate “torpedoes.” A misstep would nip my prospects in the bud. Already I sensed that photography could be about something more important than stiffs or scenery, but I couldn’t have put it into words—not then or this morning, so many years later. Once in a great while and mostly by accident, I’d glimpse the quicksilver thing that Jackson sought with his camera; but I never caught on, you see, never really understood the spiritual thing he was after. My instincts were good; my technique was sound. I could capture a subject down to its broken shirt button and the mole in the shadow of the jaw, but for all my virtuosity, the life was no more than a facsimile. The picture wasn’t dead; neither was it alive. It lacked . . . vitality. No, I was never more than a second-rate cameraman. I had sense to know, however, that my future depended on the success of my catechism. I had not the slightest idea why this should be, but I was right. Jackson was waiting for an answer (it
was a question he’d left hanging in the air, even if he hadn’t framed it as one), but I had none to give.

“Some pictures make me restless,” I said after having temporized as long as I dared by fingering an earlobe and snuffling. The air inside the tent was pungent with chemicals.

“Restless?” His voice seemed to light up.

“The pictures I like do.”

“How so?”

“I can’t say. I feel a sort of anticipation. An eagerness comes over me that isn’t always pleasant. It’s hard to put into words.”

“Where do you feel it?”

“In my heart,” I replied, lying.

He spat contemptuously.

“I feel it here,” I said, touching myself.

Evidently, my answer pleased him. “I’ll be getting off the Omaha-bound train in Wyoming. Durant wants pictures of a miners’ camp for a railroad prospectus. At least, I persuaded him he does. It’s all right with him if you go along as my assistant. What do you think of the idea?”

I thought it glorious and told him as much.

“We’ll get off at Bear River City and pick up a string of mules for our equipment.”

I did not know how to thank him—what words to use without their sounding like a hurried grace said over a growling belly. Gratitude, sincerely meant, was foreign to my nature and experience. So I said nothing. I nodded and left him to the “stark forms of existence” that we’d hunt down one hard winter in Ute country. I stepped outside into night’s negative: The rails and the limestone hills and the tents shone silver with moonlight; the sky and the desert
nothingness that spread around me were black. A meteor hissed across the darkness, an auspice of the American Empire and also a portent of its end. The meteor was only in my own mind; nonetheless, it made me shiver.

Bear River, Wyoming Territory, June 1869

Five mules and two equally taciturn drivers were waiting for us by the railroad grade across Bear River. The town had jumped up to accommodate railway workers, as well as the outgoing tide of emigrants traveling the Oregon and the Mormon trails. Bear River City, as it was called in recognition of a stagecoach hotel, hash house, depot, mining office, drinking, gambling, and whoring palace, and newspaper, came to an abrupt end in the riot of November 19, 1868, sparked by a vigilante lynching. A faction sympathetic to the lynched man hunted down the vigilantes, the jailhouse was stormed, plenty of men—good and bad—were killed, and the town was torched. By the time the army put down the insurrection, the town was dead. It was often that way for would-be towns from the Platte River to the Klondike. There was a violent, lawless strain in those who itched after gold or land or a loose and large manner of living. Doubtless, the germ has been inherited, according to the mysterious workings of genetics, by people who believe in doing as they please.

Miners and hunters continued to camp at the ruined town on their outbound journeys. For some people, outbound is the only direction they know, whether the journey leads across prairie grass, desert sand, polar ice, or seawater. I was the same—never stopping after I’d left Brooklyn till I fetched up in Lincoln, like a rolling stone or a shell beached
by the tide. Things have voices to tell their stories; you’ve only to listen to a conch shell, the wind in tall grass, the humming of a telegraph wire in falling snow, or the throbbing of a railroad track. I imagine even stones complain of bad weather, old age, and ill treatment to anything with sense enough to listen. Well, I have the right to speak my piece, the same as any stone!

Jackson liked the desperate look of the place, though I saw nothing to recommend it but charred timber frames and rocks lying where they’d fallen after having done their work as walls.

“Tell me what you see, Moran,” he said while he coated a glass plate with collodion outside the darkroom tent.

I hadn’t begun to see in a landscape what a camera had the power to distill. If I took a good picture—one worth all the trouble of hauling the ponderous apparatus, heavy plates, and chemicals up mountains, across rivers, and through snowdrifts and of spending the better part of an hour to prepare the wet plate, expose the negative, and fix the image—it would be by accident. For a long while, that’s what it would be for me, who lacked the gift of someone like William H. Jackson. But by dint of patient repetition, I would learn, in time, to catch a little of the light that even the most stolid rock formation shed onto particles of silver. While I burned to be like him, I’d have to be satisfied with that “little.” As I said, I’d never be more than second-rate, though I flatter myself I was more able than most to get at the germ of the picture. At the start, however, I had ambition. That surprises you, doesn’t it, Jay? I aspired to be an adept like Jackson. In time, I’d come to realize my limitations.

“It’s places like this,” said Jackson, “where the eye can see plainly. “Put that one eye of yours to work, Moran, and tell me what you see in front of you.”

He tossed a dried apricot into his mouth and chewed.

“I see a pile of rocks, blackened joists and studs, a stand of trees, and, down in the ravine, the river.”

“Good,” he said, and left me to work out for myself what made them attractive.

He took three views that afternoon while the mules chewed grass and the skinners sat, unspeaking, on a log, passing a bottle of spirits back and forth. Later, they made up a fire and cooked the cornmeal and bacon mush favored by Johnny Rebs in the recent war, which had laid waste much of the old America. Raw emotions, undignified and unadorned by noble causes, had scorched
this
earth. Could I have articulated my thoughts, I’d have asked Jackson what he saw through his camera lens of the simmering passions of men, buried still in the ruins of Bear River City.

Instead, I asked, “What does Durant want with pictures of a wrecked town?”

“He doesn’t. I’m the one who wants them. Not everything’s for hire, Moran. Maybe what’s best in a man, he gives away.”

Jackson could be as mystifying as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his riddles annoyed the hell out of someone like me, who thought things were already mysterious enough.

The next morning, we drove the mules eight miles up Bear River, following a trail along the ravine until it came down to a ramshackle mining camp. A yellow field of goldenrod lay, dazzling, on the narrow river’s opposite shore, as if to mock the lust for gold nuggets that had spurred two
dozen or so men to rough it on the southwestern Wyoming plain. Standing in river water, they brought to mind Whitman, up to his knees in Sheepshead Bay. How many years ago was it? Nine. Nine years since I was a boy who had ventured no farther from his place in the world than Hell Gate or the Battery. In nine years, I’d gone south by steamboat, traipsed through Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and ridden the rails from Washington City to Ogden, Utah. Now here I was, in a hardscrabble miners’ camp in what was called the Great American Desert (a desolation bearing no resemblance to the Sahara), without even the Union Pacific tracks to remind me of civilization.

I wondered what the sum of so variegated an experience might mean to what lay inside me, bullying like a sergeant major or coaxing like a woman used to getting her own way. Was there a germ, some indissoluble particle of being that could not be misled, tempted, or turned aside from the thing that made me different from a bug? I never thought much about the soul and, like most soldiers, considered virtue a seal put on young girls, destined to be broken by sweet talk or rough ardor. Virtue was a quality as useless in a man as tits on a hog. That’s not to say some of us didn’t believe in goodness. Only we called it “square dealing” or “being on the level.” When we said a man was “true,” we weren’t referring to an abhorrence of lies, but to an alignment with the common purpose or the common good (which is not the same as goodness, a quality possessed, or not, by an individual), as though a man—or a woman—were no more than a machine shaped and operating according to plan.