ROAD TO NOWHERE

A 1950s Canadian Road Trip

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

Jack Kerouac: On The Road

 In our popular mythology the road trip is a metaphor for the series of life changing events we need to experience. Usually they take place just before adulthood; so some indigenous cultures have initiation rituals where the transition is permanently recorded by way of scars or tattoos, we get into a car and drive. The journey’s distance and duration aren’t fixed; the point is that at the end the protagonist’s life has been changed, for the better. He or she is wiser now. 

  In the 1950s two people took a road trip to Toronto and one of them photographed it. The album was printed in Victoria but it was bought sixty years later in Montreal so we can’t be sure where they left from. Most of the photographs look like they were taken on that ubiquitous road that criss-crosses North America: mountains in the distance, motels and diners lining the sides; for all we know we could be in North Ontario or southern Arizona.

 But the real subject that holds our attention is the woman. Looking to be in her mid to late fifties, she holds  more or less the same pose in each photo, not because she doesn’t have the imagination to think of another but because the photos and her role in them are purely functional. They want photos of the places they visited along the way, and a reminder that they were there but nothing more.

 

The theory is that this was their first trip across Canada, and possibly in their first car. She looks to have been born close to the turn of the century and it’s easy to forget that people from her generation had their youth taken away by two world wars and a depression. It isn’t uncommon to read of people in Britain and Australia who couldn’t afford a car until the economic boom of the 1950s. Even when they had the money, time wasn’t always on their side. Anyone old enough to have people from this generation for grandparents remembers perplexed conversations about leaving lights on, why having a bath every night was normal and explaining that cars these days didn’t have a choke.   

Coming into being at the beginning of the decade that really gave us the contemporary  road saga, his little album is unaware of the stereotype. This is a road trip without any great revelations because of course they only happen in the world of fiction. Real road trips in Canada and Australia involve days of unchanging scenery, pulling into motels around sunset with frazzled nerves and short tempers and falling into conversations with strangers in bars about nothing at all. In films the conversation ends with the protagonist staring into his beer and realizing what he has to do. In real life he yawns and says he must go to bed now, ‘cause it’s a big day tomorrow with another 500 kms of low hills and dry scrub ahead.  

I suspect this is only one from several albums Belchers of Victoria B.C printed from the road trip. Even if it covered a relatively short distance – Ottawa to Toronto for example - there ought to be more photos from the rest of the journey somewhere. Not that we need them.  The story here is enough.

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ROAD TO NOWHERE

LAND OF THE GIANTS

Postcards of the Redwood Highway

 “The nation behaves well if it treats its natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.” 

Theodore Roosevelt

During the 1920s Ansel Adams photographed the Sierra Nevada and the Californian forests, establishing the image of a world that was sublime and pristine. Adams said wilderness was sacred and some influential people believed him. At the same time Charlie and Leslie Payne were running their postcard company Art Ray out of their van on the Redwood Highway, while Alexander ‘Zan’ Stark travelled the same road as well as others across the mountains ad into Nevada. To them the Redwood Highway was a rather more trashy experience, about as reverential as a plastic Jesus winking on the dashboard. It was a world where once great redwoods and Sequoias were turned into road tunnels, houses and even public toilets. But if honesty has anything to do with reflecting public taste, then Art Ray and Zan were much more honest than Adams. Their image of the highway accorded more closely with the official and the popular image. Between the wars, the more people who visited wilderness the more its status was validated.  The notion that wilderness ought to be protected from people never entered anyone’s head.

 

Today we are driving along the Redwood Highway, in the company of Art Ray, Zan Stark and Frank Patterson. It is the late 1920s (or thereabouts) and the towering trees have inspired two responses among Americans. One is to be overcome with awe at the power and majesty of nature and the other is to calculate how much cash could be made from cutting down a single tree. Some Americans can experience both simultaneously and not be aware of any contradiction, not the least Theodore Roosevelt, who died in 1919, before any of these were taken. Notice how Roosevelt chooses his words in the quote above, advocating neither the protection nor destruction of forests but responsible management; two words America has always struggled with when appearing together. These postcards epitomize the schizophrenic attitude to wilderness that infected the American psyche in the first decades of the last century. The Redwood Highway was a place to worship nature, and it was also a theme park. 

 

During the period when most of these photos were taken, the USA had the best environmental policy in the world. Every other country that had wilderness it wanted preserved adapted the American model. But for something to be the best in the world does not mean it has to be good, merely better than what anywhere else has to offer. The American model, such as it was imposed at Yellowstone, had parcels of wilderness that were not protected from development so much as dependent upon a particular type; tourism. There was nothing inconsistent in having thousands of tourists visiting places like Yellowstone and Yosemite and each individual being asked to imagine they were in some pristine wilderness. Even those two words were dubious. The ecosystems were barely given a moment’s thought: wolves were hunted to extinction in Yellowstone by the mid-1920s and being a national park never gave an area protection from grazing farm animals or logging. As for pristine; it conveniently avoided any idea there had been people living in these areas prior to the arrival of Europeans.

 

The dense fernbrakes are what we expect to find in an ancient forest, but only because we’ve been told to. Most genuinely old growth forests have been subject to thousands of years of human use. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the west coast was the most densely inhabited part of North America. We can be sure that fire was used to control the ground cover and promote particular plants. Thick undergrowth like this would have made hunting and movement difficult and when we look at the historical record, it is more common to read descriptions by Europeans remarking on how open the forests are. This photograph shows us what the forest was like after European intervention, when the Native Americans had been forced out of the redwood forests and the undergrowth was allowed to run amok. Our modern idea of wilderness as untouched and untamed is as much propaganda as the idea that First Nations people were passive caretakers who did nothing but watch plants grow.  

The redwoods of the Pacific coast and the Sequoia of the Sierra Nevada are different species of the cypress family. They owe their exceptional height to two factors. One is the competition in a densely populated forest where each tree was involved in a race to the sunlight that over several thousand years became increasingly distant from the rootstock. This can’t explain everything, otherwise all forests would have enormous trees. The second factor is their locations between the broad Pacific and the high Sierras. We don’t consider this part of the world tropical, it’s in the wrong place and it’s too cold, but if we think in terms of humidity, northern California rivals equatorial jungles. For trees to reach 75 metres or 250 feet tall, they don’t need vast amounts of rain but a steady, relentless damp.

 

Theodore Roosevelt was an early supporter of the conservation of the redwood forests and was instrumental in having the Muir Woods protected. The land put aside for the national park belonged to a lesser-known Republican, William Kent. Like Roosevelt, Kent wasn’t at all opposed to a timber industry but he realized that unless some areas were given protection the likely result would be the total destruction of redwood forest. The first steps were taken in 1908 when Roosevelt had the Muir Woods preserved as a national monument.

I have a theory about Roosevelt. Today he is known for three things: his environmental policies, his pre-presidential years as an adventurer, rough rider, cowboy, and for being the last president of the Gilded Age, when the capitalist class showed off its largesse by building public institutions: universities, museums and art galleries and libraries. Think of the latter two reputes and the first takes on a new tone. Here was a man who was passionate about frontiers, the physical ones he could explore on horseback and in canoes,, and the frontiers of knowledge, and by the turn of the century even France and Britain were looking to America to lead the way there. What is it to such a man then when forests are cut down and office towers built in their place? Cut down the wilderness and you remove the frontier, and the world has no need anymore for a man like Roosevelt. His job is done. Preserve wilderness and he can still believe there is a frontier.

Talking about the sacred and the profane; on the back of this postcard stamped 1946, Anita writes that she, Helen and Jack are ‘having a swell time’. At the Cathedral Tree, ‘we sat and listened to the music and it was just like being in church’. Cathedrals are circles of trees that grew up around a dead one and were named cathedrals because the way the light filtered through from the canopy reminded some people of the effect created in great European cathedrals. Anita is telling us however that she, Helen and Jack could sit in the circle and hear piped music, probably one of Bach’s works for organ. These days we say the way to appreciate the wild is to stand still in silence. In the 1940s the idea was to experience comparisons with the great works of man. What nature proposed, we had done better.

 

 The redwoods are among the oldest trees on the planet, with a few getting close to 4000 years old (still falling short of some nearby bristlecone pines by a millennium). We see that this one’s life came to a premature end in 1930. The lumberjacks who set about cutting it down could probably tell how old it was to within a century so when it fell they sliced off a disc and sent it on to whoever was managing the tourist facilities. Dendrochronology is the art of reading tree rings to understand climatic patterns. To people that can read them, tree rings reveal a precise story of shifting weather conditions. Although they cannot tell us who or what was living in the vicinity 500 years ago they can provide an explanation as to why everyone packed up and moved out.  To the rest of us the best that tree rings offer is a timeline that appears astonishing but tells us nothing. Well, we can see here that this tree was already sturdy and mature when William the Conqueror landed at Hastings, which needless to say is nowhere near northern California. And height-wise it was impressive by the time Columbus landed on an island in another ocean. As history lessons go, it’s a bit non sequitur. Still, there’s an irony at work. You want to impress on tourists how old these trees are but the only way you can do that is by cutting them down.

Things could be worse. An ancient tree, just a sapling when the three wise men were on their way to Bethlehem, could end up being turned into what some Americans inanely refer to as ‘comfort stations’. Is this divine retribution, a credit to man’s ingenuity or is it an indignity? Back then the second would have been the answer. Even passionate advocates for wilderness believed that tourism was going to nurture and ultimately protect national parks, so turning dead or dying trees into toilets would have a harmless compromise. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the damage from 1920s era environmental policies became apparent, that people like Aldo Leopard proposed Washington rethink its environmental strategy while Edward Abbey insisted that everyone from Ansel Adams to Theodore Roosevelt and even the patron saint of the forests, John Muir, had got it wrong. 

 

Well it's been fun. We've witnessed the beauty of nature and the banality of man looking quite comfortable together, seen things that some of our contemporary Americans would rather we hadn't and others that remind us there was a time when the choices facing us were simpler We've saved the best for last. The drive through tree is most iconic image of the Redwood Highway. Even people who can't spell Sequoia know it's the tree you can drive through. During the 1920s and 30s there were several of these trees on the highway. Most, including the Coolidge, have died, which somehow doesn’t sound surprising. At least three are still in operation, and all owned privately so they come with a fee.  Adams photographed plenty of redwoods but it’s doubtful he ever photographed one of these trees – the car, Beaver and Wally Cleaver's faces pressed against the window, would have been anathema to his purist eye – but I can’t help feeling that his view is all the more deceitful for that.  Whether he was suggesting his view was what the Redwood forest looked like now or what it could look like in the future, it was created in the darkroom. He was like a good lawyer in that you had to pay attention to what he was leaving out. Zan Stark and Art Ray weren’t that clever but if you want to know how environmental policy worked in the 1920s and ‘30s, which is the same as wanting to know why some aspects don’t work today, they are the photographers to look at.

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LAND OF THE GIANTS

FRASHER'S FOTOS

Burton Frasher Postcard Photographer 
“I have vision and the rest of the world has bifocals.”

Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Ansel Adams’ photographs are boring. Those heavily burned in dark clouds above mountains in sharp focus tell us as much about the landscape of the American west as a John Wayne film shot on a backlot. I once listened to a talk by someone who argued that Adams was a Pictorialist who discovered the focus ring on his camera. I couldn’t disagree. For all the claims about him being at the forefront of American modernism, he clung to the Pictorialist values of image over content and the print as a surface for manufacturing illusion long after they had outlived their usefulness, except as a faintly nationalistic idea of the west as repository for America’s soul. The real modernists, the people who thought there was a much more elemental way of depicting the landscape, mostly escaped the attention of the museums, the critics and the academies until it was too late.

One of them was Burton Frasher (1888 to 1950) who, between about 1920 and 1950 travelled across the southwest, from California, through Nevada, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, leaving as his legacy thousands of photographs of the landscape. You wouldn’t exactly describe him as unsung: there is a huge online archive of his work available through the Pomona Library and it has a couple of accompanying articles, including an interview with his son, Burton Jnr, that may be the most comprehensive description of a postcard photographer at work. Some of us think the idea of driving across the landscape and taking photographs is the ideal job, but one thing that comes across in the interview is how hard photographers like Frasher worked. The market was cutthroat, they could not afford to slacken their output and they were constantly on the road. When Frasher started out, ‘the road’ was often dirt tracks and the cars weren’t well designed for them. When the Lincoln Highway travel guide was first published in 1915, it advised drivers to carry almost a whole engine’s worth of replacement parts because once the highway entered Utah anything could happen. By the 1920s it could recommend newly built gas stations and roadhouses along the way but spare tyres, fan belts, spark plugs and chains were still essential. This then is Frasher’s world. It can’t have been that rough. Where else were you going to get views like this one?

One reason that Frasher may not have got the attention he deserves was that he was primarily a commercial photographer, and that meant that there were a lot of clichés among the wonderful views: cacti at sunset, cute animals and scenes like this. The rider on the rise gazing across the desert had already been done to death by the time Frasher took this, and that may have been why he chose to. He could be sure it would sell. This is the west of Marlboro ads. It’s the type of image where every element in itself is depicted perfectly but in combination they add to very little. 

Frasher’s real value to us lies in scenes where he is taking part in the creation of a myth rather than recreating old ones. Back when he took this the desert highway gas station wasn’t yet a cultural icon. Greyhound had pushed a campaign in the 1930s encouraging Americans to take their new streamlined buses cross-country and the scene of someone arriving in a small town by bus was common enough in films but images like this would really belong to the post-war boom. These days we’ve seen so many road movies that we recognize it at once, and there’s no shortage of photos of abandoned and decaying gas stations. This belongs to an era when Chevron was a relative newcomer to Arizona. Note the oil stain leading in. 

What does Frasher mean by “today, along North Virginia St”? Presumably he is measuring North Virginia St of the 1930s against the past, in which case he is asking us to see how it has changed, or hasn’t, since the days of the Comstock Lode silver rush. . The Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection has an image of the Pioneer Drug Store (the shop the man is standing outside of) that could have been taken on the same day and even by Frasher, though it is unaccredited . The building was constructed during the mining era, the actual drugstore may have been. Though the town now has electricity, telephones and cars, Frasher seems to be suggesting that very little has changed in essence. The two really interesting details are the advertisement for postcards on the pole to the man’s left, and the advertisement for Kodak developing films on the window to his right. My guess is that Frasher did business with the owners and that may be one there. I do not understand why our great grandfathers thought a three piece suit was the proper thing to wear in the desert.

I had a post some months back about Frasher’s photos of Native Americans. If his studies of Navajo, Apache, Hopi and Acoma people are not his best work, they constitute the most interesting reading. He swings between frank depictions and the frankly banal, being aware of the poverty and wretched conditions in one scene then playing up the most gratuitous stereotypes in others. This was taken at the Little Colorado Trading Post, now called the Cameron Trading Post. What’s interesting here are the dynamics between the group and those with the photographer. We see hostility, or at the least apprehension, indifference and some willingness. Though the scene is arranged, this was not a world where a white man could turn up with a camera and order people about. Nor were the Navajos likely to do as they were told just because Frasher was a familiar figure. The feeling is that he had some rapport with them, to the extent he probably spoke Navajo, but just because someone was willing to sit for him, that didn’t mean they had to behave as he wanted. There are lots of details to consider in this scene, from the physical structure with the people descending to the background to the detritus, the saddles, pots and bowls lying about. There may have been some arrangement of the people but nothing else in the scene has been touched. That isn’t a small point. In the 1930s and well beyond, National Geographic photographers commonly fitted up scenes to show things the way they thought they should be. In this case, others may have seen the stuff lying about as proof of the Navajos’ social irresponsibility but to Frasher this is the way things are. People leave bowls over the doorway because they do.

The personal Frasher collection is regrettably small. If I had more to show, I would. Some of his best photographs are of industrial scenes in the new west of the 1930s. If you thought Ansel Adams was the eminent modernist of the era, that’s because you haven’t seen Frasher’s views of Boulder Dam or the Californian oil wells. But he was also a good historian. I won’t say ‘great’, because his idea of history is largely directed by the tourist industry. Take the Calico graveyard. In the 1930s, as tourists began crossing the west, old ghost towns like Calico that had been considered little more than rubble a few years earlier suddenly became popular sites. And if you wanted a vivid experience of the old west, what better than a graveyard out in the desert, lined with memorials to prospectors, cowboys and outlaws who had met their maker prematurely? Forget Adams and think for a moment of Walker Evan’s famous image of a grave in (I think) Alabama. It is anonymous; barely a ripple in the gravel, but what has excited many critics is the originality of Evans’s idea: a grave! How surprisingly familiar. Who else would have thought of it? Well, a critic might be someone between proper jobs but anyway, I prefer Frasher to Evans on this one. Because there are several graves there is a more macabre atmosphere, but simultaneously, and more importantly, an awareness that these piles of stones belong to people; something more real. There’s also a sense here of eternity in the peace of the desert. Fully convinced that once I die that’s it, no trumpets welcoming me to the pearly gates, I’d prefer to be placed out here than just about anywhere else I can think of.  

If I haven’t any Frasher views of industry here to convince you he deserves more attention that is only because I have always preferred his other scenes, particularly of the Arizona desert. I don’t think it is overheated hype to say that Frasher found his eye in Arizona. There’s a feeling of excitement, of real awe, what the syphilis riddled German philosophers used to call the sublime, in his landscape scenes out here. Because, and only because, he published his photographs as postcards, we tend to brush aside the idea that such a person could feel any spiritual empathy with the land. I think you could only take a photo like this if the scene moved you. I’m prepared to guess that Frasher waited until he thought the sunlight fell just where he wanted. Also, he found the precise position that emphasised the strangeness of these geological wonders. I say that, but it might be worth knowing that Frasher is standing at the edge of Route 160 when he took this. Maybe he was driving past and got lucky, or just as possible, he’d driven down this road so often that fifteen miles away, he glanced up at the sun and realized that if he planted his foot on the pedal he’d get here just in time.

  

This is just the kind of view that Ansel Adams acolytes would dismiss as average, yet for their opponents it proves the very point that Frasher is more interesting. Perfection and feeling are seldom synonymous. One guts the other. How would Mr Adams have dealt with this scene? We know the answer almost immediately. Firstly he would have emphasized the contours in the distant mountains, and then the snow on the even more distant peaks. But what does Frasher draw our attention to? Well, ‘Mushroom Rock’ for a start, but also the road. This is as much a photograph of the experience of driving across Death Valley as it is of an unusual geological feature. What the Adamites don’t get is that the snowy peaks work best subliminally. They don’t matter so much as the two odd squares on road improvement just below the mushroom. This is as much a photo of what it means to drive across Death Valley as Death Valley itself. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience a road trip across the American southwest knows that the true wonders lie in the glimpses, not the studied observations. Of course Frasher stopped to take this photo but it was sold as a reminder to travellers of what they had seen and what they had missed.

Frasher’s postcard of North Virginia St, Reno, bears an uncanny resemblance to several taken by Lawrence Engel of the Nevada Photo Service about the same time. We could say the differences are so slight we ought not bother with them. This is Reno in its heyday. I doubt anyone visiting today would disagree. Interestingly, (I say, having only just realized this) the absence of casino and club signs indicate this was taken either before or just at the time that Nevada legalized gambling. The effect of that upon Reno’s streetscape was dramatic. These days North Virginia St isn’t even a shadow of its glory days; it looks more like a bunch of developers dumped a bloated corpse on the street and walked away. Still, the point here is not to remind ourselves of legitimated criminal behaviour but Burton Frasher. My feeling is that Frasher may be ignored by the standard histories but those of us who suspect there is always something left out or overlooked will discover his work and in the process reinvigorate a tired story. Anybody who believes the story of America’s landscape photography has been told hasn’t looked hard enough.

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FRASHER'S FOTOS

SCENES FROM AN IMAGINARY ROAD MOVIE

Snapshots from the road

Stranger on the highway: I'm from the city... Doesn't matter what city; all cities are alike.

Billy: Well, why'd you mention it then?

Stranger on the highway: 'Cause I'm FROM the city; a long WAY from the city, and that's where I wanna be right now.

Easy Rider (1969)

 You need a few things before you begin a road movie: plot, characters etc, but the choice of car is critical. It represents the journey. These days a Model T means you are making a lame comedy whereas a late model white hatchback immediately tells the audience nothing much is going to happen. There’s a thesis waiting to be written on the effect the OPEC crisis had on American cinema. One was that the motor companies downsized their cars and the enormous tailfinned Chevy passed into oblivion. Too bad. Outside of a Harley Davidson, this is the only vehicle suitable for a road movie; not because of any covert symbolism but because it looks right on any road.

 

When we speak of characters we often mean back story. Some flaw integral to their character has compelled them to set out across the country. The negligent son sets off to be with Dad for the last time or now his marriage has collapsed he needs to understand why. The expression on this man’s face makes him a candidate. He looks like he has just had an epiphany. There’s something he needs to do before he gets into that car with his fiancé. It involves travelling across the country. He promises he won’t be long though we all know that when he returns a profound change will have taken place. 

We need a plot, or more accurately, a destination, which is much the same thing. There is no reason for leaving except to reconcile with whatever lies at the other end. A dying father has always been popular though hackneyed these days, especially when you can just fly across to see him. The point is however that a destination logically requires a starting point, and the first road the travellers set out on. It should be long but still lined with the elements of civilization our protagonist has taken for granted.

Outside of town Mr or Ms Protagonist stops at a roadside café. Here he/she looks out the window as a song plays on the jukebox. What song that will be is crucial to the entire film, because, even though we are not even fifteen minutes in, it is the backbone of the soundtrack. Since we haven’t agreed on the purpose for making this journey it is a little hard to be definitive, but let’s say Dad, estranged, is dying, Old Man by Neil Young would be silly but Will to Love might not be. So long as Mr or Ms P has time to smoke a cigarette and reflect. He/She walks out of the café, gets into the car and puts the key in the ignition. Everything up to this point has been a prelude. Finally, we are on our way.  

The first real encounter on the road sets the tone for what unfolds. Think of the farmer in Easy Rider who thought California was far away, even though it was just over the mountains. It is the moment Billy and Wyatt realize the enormity of their journey. Not much has to happen, a chance conversation perhaps, but it softens up our protagonist for what lies ahead. Said protagonist has always known that he or she has been selfish or mistaken but needs someone else to remind them: like an anachronistic looking couple whose car has broken down and have to rely on the kindness of strangers. There are two possibilities here. Either Mr or Ms Protagonist has never really helped a stranger or he/she is scared of ageing members of the John Birch Society and gets the lesson: even reactionaries have feelings. 

The road movie is always a travelogue. Think of Easy Rider again. Billy is too out of it and Wyatt too boring to really engage our sympathies. It is the desert landscape that really sells the movie in its first hour. Of course it could be snowy wastes or dark forests, so long as we wish we were out there with them.

Every road movie must have a person with a gun and a tenuous understanding of how it should be used and who on. A woman is preferable. According to the rules of  cinema, she is harder to predict and, ignoring them altogether, a good deal creepier than the usual dull-eyed men who roam the hinterland.  You’ll notice that in American films it is usually a brief confrontation, which the protagonist escapes from. The Europeans prefer that enigmatic figure who turns up at various road stops until suddenly producing the weapon without provocation. The psychotic with the gun is useful for breaking up those periods where nothing much else is happening.

A meeting out on the desolate plain. There’s scarcely a road movie that hasn’t tried to slip a biblical metaphor in there somewhere and here we could really milk it. An encounter with a revivalist group reminds Mr or Ms P that no matter how misguided faith may be it is vital. 

Ever since Jack Nicholson asked for plain toast in Five Easy Pieces, the diner scene has been considered essential . Usually it comes during a lull in the action and these days involves a rather unnecessary confession from the protagonist. What is it about cherry pie and horrid coffee that makes Americans open up about themselves?

Romance. We imagine the producers reading the script and wondering, 45 minutes into it, where the love angle is. The most perfunctory element of any film – how many very ordinary ones have been ‘saved’ by a glimpse of the lead actress’s breasts? – it seems nevertheless necessary. So, we’ll put it in. A roadside encounter leads to a night where Mr or Ms P exposes his/her vulnerabilities. Ms Love Interest is eccentric, possibly a little cracked but she awakens ideas in Mr/Ms P that have been suffocated until now. The next morning, as Love Interest pulls out of the motel car park, she leans out the window and smiles. Yes, Mr/Ms P says under the breath, this could have been it. It should have been, but the cinema, like nature, abhors symmetry. As Love Interest’s old car with its billowing exhaust disappears down the road, Mr/Ms P can only grimace at the irony before turning back and setting off in the opposite direction. 

Coming in just after halfway through, the visit to the relatives is one of the highlights of the road movie. Usually a brother or sister, he or she has achieved everything our protagonist should have: a happy marriage, beautiful children, the house, the secure job and so forth. There’s a problem though. The family is living in some backwater and in the depths of uncertainty Mr/Ms P still knows that life is too precious to end up there.

Ah yes; the eccentric old lady who implicitly understands our protagonist’s problem. Several encounters have already left him or her vulnerable but our dear old thing will provide a simple phrase that puts everything back in focus. What she says will prove the quality of the film. If it is something banal like ‘everything happens for a reason’, we know we have been duped. If it is more abstruse: ‘You open up the shutters, you see the dogs outside”, we have the key to the whole film. She may even pretend to be a ventriloquist and get her doll to say it. Protagonist will now get back in the car and pause before turning the key in the ignition. 

Whatever it is Mr/Ms P needs to do, the old lady’s advice has made it clear. The toughest part of the journey is over. All that remains is to take its lessons and apply them to the problem at hand. The road stretches out ahead. The soundtrack is quiet and melancholic. What awaits may no longer be so difficult though it still won’t be pleasant.   

There are only two endings to the road movie. In the first, it is the ultimate in existential solutions: hillbillies shoot protagonist for no reason, protagonists drive off cliff, protagonist faces police barricade and realizing game is up, plants foot on pedal. The second sees our P leaving the scene having come to some resolution. By leaving we can mean walking towards the camera, so in the generally underrated This Must be the Place, Sean Penn walks down the street towards the camera, no longer looking like the Cure’s Robert Smith but more like, well, Sean Penn. Alternatively, he or she walks away, becoming a small figure in the landscape, reminding us that the greatness in a man’s gesture underscores his insignificance. Cue bittersweet music that suddenly breaks out into upbeat mariachi, because, let’s face it, life is a wonderful thing and should be the opposite of an English kitchen sink drama, where things start off bleak and end up back there.

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ROAD MOVIES

HIGHWAY STAR 3

Real photo postcards from Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota

"Leave me alone and let me go to hell by my own route."

Calamity Jane, 1903

In America a village of 200 people can be called a city and a dirt track a highway. For years Pikes Peak Highway was just that, a stretch of gravel winding to the summit, 4300 metres above sea level. Like a lot of US highways in the first part of last century it was a privately built toll road. Why mining magnate Spencer Penrose thought in 1915 that Pikes Peak needed a highway to the top is unclear. Weather conditions could close it down for a lot of the year and when you got to the end there wasn’t much else to do except turn back and go down again. Maybe that was why he set up the Race to the Clouds the next year. It became one of the premier vehicle endurance races in the country and a testing ground for automobile companies. Bottomless Pit is near the top, just after the Devil’s Playground and before Bighorn Sheep Pullout.

The photographers who specialized in real photo views were tougher and more ruthless than we give them credit for. They marked out their territories, bought concessions and didn’t appreciate intruders. Harold Sanborn’s turf was Colorado and parts of Wyoming and Montana, hence with one exception, every postcard from these states that we’ll see came from his company. In 1995 Colorado businessman Derick Wangaard bought the Sanborn Postcard publishing Co and discovered some 40 000 of Harold Sanborn’s negatives and his journals wherein he had annotated every photo he had taken. Wangaard offered the archive to the Colorado Historical Society, which agreed it had extraordinary value but doubted they could raise the $500 000 he was asking. We’re not sure what happened after that. The usual story is that the archive gets broken up and scattered about then a few years later someone in the government realizes they lost an invaluable record of the state’s history.

A camera and a car were useful but what every itinerant photographer needed was the willingness to travel. That might sound banal but in the 1930s and 40s it meant putting up with car breakdowns, awful weather and hours of solitude behind the wheel. Often as not the photographer knew exactly what he was after and the best time to get it but there were times he chanced across a scene. This postcard was mailed in 1949 from Oakland California to Hingham in Massachusetts by ‘Meg’. She had just driven across the country and somewhere in Wyoming, probably Fort Bridger, she saw this in a rack and it reminded her of the miles of open road she had just experienced.

When the Lincoln highway system was proposed in the 1900s the planners were possessed with the notion that the route needed to be scenic. A straight route might be cheaper  but if it missed a scenic wonder the added expense in rerouting was of little concern. What was the point of driving across America if you missed all it had to offer? To cross Wyoming without passing by Tollgate Rock was like visiting Paris and skipping the Louvre. In the 1970s and 80s a new breed of planner came along. Cut costs and forget what the world looked like outside the windscreen, they said. Since government had handed responsibility to private corporations it could hardly complain.

Another view of Tollgate Rock, this one not by Harold Sanborn. Notice the highway and the speck of a car between the Rock and the cliff face in the foreground. It would have been easy to photograph Tollgate Rock from both vantage points and not include the road but this was an era of massive engineering projects and Detroit was building cars for the world. Scenic views we as much about America’s power as they were about its timeless landscape.

By 1925 the first age of the Wild West was dead and buried but the second was just climbing into the saddle. An industry built on cowboy nostalgia was hitting its strides and ranchers in Wyoming realized there was good money to be made if they diversified from sheep and cattle into tourism. For a weekend guests at dude ranches could don Stetsons, strap a lasso to their saddle and ride out along a mountain trail. At night they sat around campfires singing Big Rock Candy Mountain and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and maybe listened to a grizzled old timer talk of Sitting Bull. Sounds unmissable, but it wasn’t. The ranches were so popular that there was soon a demand for a place of worship the guests could head to on a Sunday and so the Chapel of the Transfiguration was built. It was constructed in the Western Craftsman style, which was as authentic as a Boston accountant in woollen chaps, but never mind. It fitted with the setting. Anything else would have been either ugly or absurd.

Since we were speaking of engineering marvels and scenic wonders, a detour to the Spiral Highway in Idaho is essential. Built in 1917 to connect Lewiston with Moscow, the problem to contend with was the 2000 foot incline out of Lewiston and though it could have been solved by avoiding the hills altogether, why pass up a challenge like that? The Spiral Highway wasn’t quite a folly - the point to so many curves was to slow traffic down to a manageable 30 mph – but try to imagine the detail involved in the surveying and engineering. It did inspire at least one song; Hot Rod Lincoln by Charlie Ryan, a 1955 answer song to Hot Rod Race. The basic premise was that Californian hot rodders were all talk until they’d taken on the Spiral Highway.

Gardiner, Montana, population about 850 and entrance to Yellowstone National Park, which officially begins once you have passed through the Roosevelt Arch to the left of the photo. Sanborn took this photo in the 1940s and though the neon signage has gone, the cars have long since turned to rust and we can assume the dog passed away some time back, most of what you see still survives. But for how long? Some scientists claim the next time the subterranean volcano bubbling away under Yellowstone blows its stack it will wipe out Montana, Colorado and most of Nevada. Since the last eruption was 640 000 years ago, another is due, maybe tomorrow.

Assuming Yellowstone’s volcano doesn’t blow its stack, by the time you read this, the Two Medicine River Bridge in Montana will have been dismantled anyway, its structural flaws making restoration a waste of time and money. It was only built in 1940 so arguments about its heritage value are a little thin and the plans for the replacement suggest that won’t completely ruin the view. Two Medicine River has its place in American history as the only site where the Lewis and Clark expedition had a violent conflict with Native Americans. Guess who started it. Lewis, the one with the flaky sounding first name, told a group of Piegan people he intended to sell guns to the Shoshone, their long time enemies. (Arms trade was already big business in America; the Piegan controlled the region’s gun market so Lewis was effectively threatening to break their monopoly.) Two casualties, both Piegan, and another omen of what was to come.

Into South Dakota, and if the number of postcards floating about the internet is any indication the Badlands were the most photographed area in the USA between 1930 and 1960. Why that should be is only speculation though geographically they were the entrance to the West for the north-eastern cities and a relatively short drive from Chicago and Minneapolis. Rise Studio was run by optometrist Carl H. Rise until his death in 1939 though it remained in operation until ‘fairly recently’, whenever that may mean. 

On some of Rise’s postcards this stretch is labelled ‘Satan’s Speedway’, which is much better than ‘road scene’. Once again we have a magnificent landscape serving as a mere backdrop to a photo of a highway, but who is to complain? Remove the road and you would think something was missing from this image. Rise was born in South Dakota in 1887, ten years after the Battle of Little Bighorn and the death of Crazy Horse. Deadwood’s heyday had passed but Calamity Jane was very much alive. It’s unlikely anyone thought they had lived through an era that would become mythical. They probably welcomed progress, whether that was a railway, running water or a dirt road. The point is, when he took his photos, Rise could remember a time when cars let alone highways were unimaginable in the back parts of Dakota. 

In 1937 21 year old amateur herpetologist Earl Brockelsby figured he could make money from his hobby by opening a roadside attraction. Back then, not long before this photo was taken, the idea was that travellers would pull in off the highway, buy a soda and look at the rattlers slithering about in their cages, which was more fun than finding one in your sleeping bag. These days the Black Hills Reptile Garden claims to have the largest collection of venomous reptile species of any zoo in the world and to be internationally recognized for its work in protecting species. 

 Which is the better prospect for getting you to pull off the road, a hissing snake showing off its fangs or a fake tree? Another of Brocklesby’s ventures was the nearby Skyline Petrified Forest, which didn’t have quite the same success as the Reptile Garden. This giant log, which stood at the entrance to the park, was basically a timber frame with a concrete and wire façade. It burned down in 1965 and wasn’t replaced. Had it survived, doubtlessly it would now be venerated along with the concrete dinosaurs, cowboy towns and giant portraits of four presidents and one Lakota warrior that, depending on your point of view, enhance or disfigure South Dakota’s landscape. It is time to leave the American West, to head south to the flyover states.

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HIGHWAY STAR 3