Coho Photography

For photos from the last few weeks of Utah and the Navajo nation- click HERE.

If you want another take, read on-

10.10.08
The man at the Bluff convenience store held the door for me. His black leather vest snug over a Harley-Davidson shirt, shimmering with recently dried sweat. His head was balding, with slight indents from sunglasses across his veiny temples. On his feet were big practical leather boots, boots that you wouldn’t want to be stepped on with. He gave me, an outsider, a wide berth entering the store, as if he didn’t want to risk touching me.
The inside of the Bluff convenience store was well lit, the cans and jars and bottles perfectly aligned on the shelves. The big man who held the door for me stopped at the checkout counter. He talked to the checker, a short young Indian woman- her name might have been Teresa. He greeted her as a friend, a warm “hi, how are the kids”. They appeared out of different worlds, the Harley man and the much younger Indian woman. As I perused the aisles in search ice-cream and snickers bars I heard them talking. Small town gossip about a guy named Dave, from Blanding, a neighboring rural town. It sounded like he had a run in with the law; I couldn’t hear what it was for.
As I searched through aisles, not finding normal snickers, only king size, eat me and you will have a heart attack, snickers, I wondered about this town. What brings the Harley man, why doesn’t the Indian woman up and leave for some more prosperous place? The aisles of Bluff’s convenience store blur with those of a familiar market it rural western Oregon. Thousands of miles, ecosystems, and mindsets apart, these two towns draw me, a sort of intrigue with the uninteresting. What is it about small, poor, rural towns that captivates me and pins down my curiosity, a stalemate at the end of a match?
Roaming the Bluff store I began to explore my absurd sense of attraction to something, somewhere, that most people would pass by on their way to somewhere else. The size, simplicity, and straightforwardness, that I began to find, presents a sense of place unparalleled in our transient and bustling culture; a sense of place in a bite size serving. A sense of place that I’m worried I might not find. I worry, childishly, about how I can care about the world if I don’t have some concrete version of it welded onto my brain. I need a microcosm for our bigger problems, a place that I can comprehend.
My attraction to small towns may be just the key that I’m searching for, A way to make it easier to love a place. I’d rather fall for a small main street, maybe just a gas station and post office, than tie myself to an alley in some bustling metropolis. Perhaps choosing this easier, more palatable route is cheating, but I’d rather succeed and stay than burn out and move on, have to find a new place, lose any faith I may have built.
When I checked out the man with the heavy boots had left, the Indian woman looked out the window, into the glaring southern Utah sun, maybe dreaming about somewhere else. I wondered if she liked living here, what her sense of this town tasted like, but didn’t have the courage to ask. Instead I gave her my 4 dollars and told her that I didn’t need a bag.
In the bluff store I found not only snickers bars and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s, but some borderline clue of why I like small towns. Right between the gas station and an abandoned church parking lot is where you’ll find me, searching for a bite size sense of place.

Again- click here for pictures.