Coho Photography

 An update from Lone Pine California- Owens Lake, and the Eastern Sierra.

For photos click here- for epiphanizing- read below.

Seeing a Landscape Through Water
Reflections are scarce in the West, a dry and rugged sort of place, for one simple reason, they require water. A perfect looking glass for body and soul that lies pooled, easily disturbed by any motion, sending ripples out across its surface. Water flows, cascades, glides, and that entire time works as a mirror. It doesn’t need to be clean. In fact sometimes the most toxic pools of sludge in the middle of a cracked and sorrowful environment reveals more than a crystal clear brook flowing through an alpine meadow. Looking into a body of water I see a culmination of everything upstream, the counties, the towns, the people, and their children. I used to think that I was abnormal for seeing this way, looking at a glistening surface in a landscape where it is fluid gold, a simple resource, and trying to read it like a book, but then I started asking people about water, what stories it told, and began to realize that in a landscape as arid as this, every story is defined by water.
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A few months ago in Lone Pine California I walked into the town’s only hardware store to buy a notebook and a pocketknife. The one room store was cluttered; the walls thick with anything you would ever want to buy. From the ceiling hung a variety of ice-axes, hammers, toy sets, and icicle style Christmas lights. A stout balding man greeted me at the door, hearing aids straining the cartilage of his ears, a white t-shirt tucked into clean blue jeans; on his feet were black Velcro shoes. The wrinkles in his brown weathered face folded together like miniature canyons traversing his forehead. I asked him where to find the knives; quickly we picked out a small red Swiss-Army knife called “the packer” from a dusty and cracking display case.
At the checkout counter the man’s sausage sized fingers shook as he rang up my purchase. Looking at the man’s face I guessed that he had lived here for a while, if not for his entire life, and I began to wonder what stories he could tell. How did this local see the water? How did it create the person standing before me? So I asked him.
The man’s eyes lit up once he understood what I was asking. He began to tell me stories about the now dry lakebed and environmental disaster that festers a few minutes drive south of town. His cracked teeth smiled from between brown gums as he animatedly spilled out his life’s story to this stranger; his hands still now on the counter.
He came to Lone Pine from southern California when he was 19; he didn’t care to say where. He’s lived there every year since; he turns 81 in November. When he was 20 the Owens Lake was a different color, an earthy brown rimmed by layers of white, an enormous pot of dirt on the side of a small 2-lane highway. When he was 30 the river was dry, just a cracked white ribbon running through a similarly desolate landscape. He remembered floating in inner tubes down a cement ditch, he couldn’t remember where. In his 40s he worked at a car dealership. They had to wash the cars every other day to keep the dust off, a thick brown dust, heavy enough to scratch the paint. He told me about one time when he just tried wiping down a Buick with a rag and scratched the hood: it cost 30 dollars to fix. In his 60s he worked at a restaurant; the dust had become worse as more water was diverted to Los Angeles. Fine white silt would creep in under the door and blow in fantastical shapes over the linoleum floor tiles. It would settle in the bottom of coffee cups that were left upright on tables, it gave the air a slightly poisonous taste. He claims that sometimes he still coughs up the dust, that it is stuck in his lungs.
In his 70s there was less dust. He thought the entire lake had blown away, right down to rock, and I was in no position to correct him. He worked at the hardware store, selling everything from a garden sprinkler system to the impatient blonde in line behind me, to a blue and white striped engineer’s hat to the boy standing at the end of the counter. He likes working here, and thinks he will keep doing it, at least for a while.
I ask him what will happen to the lake in his 80s. He doesn’t know, only that it will go to LA. He wonders what all the trucks are doing out on the lake, about the big visitors center at the end of town, about the tourists roaring past on the highway on their way to somewhere else, he wishes they would slow down driving through town. He doesn’t seem interested in going out to see the lake, the environmental factor that has defined much of his life.  He would rather stay here and tend his shop, selling hammers to locals and sodas to the people who stop on their drive through.
He looked down at his hands, still steady on the counter, and I could see from the crow’s feet crinkling his cheeks that he is smiling. His gaze shifted again, and he looked me in the face. He asked me two questions. What the hell am I doing in Lone Pine, and what do I think is going to happen to the water in his 80s. I answered the first question quickly, explaining that I’m a college student- he called me a gypsy. The second question I let hang for a minute as he searched through the till for my change, 3$ and 50c.
I told him that I can only hope, I hope that there won’t be dust, that there will be water, the river will run again, that people will slow down when driving through town. In truth I told him that I didn’t know, I was just an outsider.
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Kneeling next to a pond left in the middle of the alkali flats of what was once Owens Lake, I glance out across the desolate plain. The pond encircles a sprinkler, installed to keep the dust down, as much an outsider in this alien landscape as I am. In the shallow pond of red-brown water, framed between the sprinkler and a rusting drainage pipe, rests a perfect reflection, the Inyo Mountains rising out of a sandy gray wasteland. As I kneel there, smelling the slightly sulfuric wind blowing out across the desert, I wish the old man from the hardware store was here, to look down and see the reflection of the mountains in what is left of his lake.
Once again- if you enjoyed the writing, you’ll probably like the pictures, so click here!