Like an eagle

In “Fly Like an Eagle,” Steve Miller sang the line, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin, slippin’ into the future.” I’m not sure if that qualifies as poetry, necessarily, since one “slippin’” would probably have sufficed. But let’s give him a pass, seeing as he was probably loaded with more pharmaceuticals than a Rite Aid.

It’s not quite an accurate statement either, since the future slips toward us, becoming the present for one fleeting moment before receding into history. Still, one gets his point. It’s slippery and slithery and doesn’t stay in our hands when we try to grasp it -- like a wet snake, only not as gross.

That’s why photography has always been so fascinating to me. In a photograph, “now” is always “now.”

Most people think of time in concrete, practical terms: It’s two o’clock, squash is next Thursday, Lindsay’s birthday is in April. We’ve taken an intangible aspect of physics and everyday existence and given it size and shape, our meager little means of exactifying the vagaries of sunrise and sunset. Time’s not as intimidating when it’s divided up into segments. It makes more intuitive sense. Meanwhile, it gives us a means by which we can file and sort and contextualize our individual histories, so when we capture a moment in a photograph, we can can stick it in a folder on our computers labeled “June 1997” and establish a reference point -- sort of a yardstick by which we measure progress and change. Photographs reveal the truth of a moment: That each is one of many in a long, long procession, all of them unique and unrepeatable. Here and then gone. Forever lost, but forever ours.

Not to get all “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy” on y’all.

It was a long time before I thought of photos in that way. As a kid, I just liked taking pictures. My first camera was an old film job geared toward children; in the bottom-right corner of every image was a cartoon imprint of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, so if you weren’t careful with your framing, your cousin’s face would be partially obscured by a vein-laced bicep and a set of nunchucks. The picture quality was horrible, made all the worse by my subject matter, which at that time tended toward piles of plastic video game cartridges and unflattering butt-shots of slumbering cats. Those old images aren’t what you’d call “art,” but they revealed what was important to me at the time, and so they work as a kind of archaeology exhibit. “World Through the Eyes of an Obsessive-Compulsive Introvert.” I can see the lines forming.

In college I got my first digital. Giddy up.

Young whippersnappers might take it for granted, but what a digital camera allows you to do is essentially curate your own history. A crappy shot instantaneously announces itself as crappy, so you hit a button and poof, into the ether. Folded into in time’s great expanse like most other moments. It’s the proverbial double-edged sword -- you end up with a better collection of photos, but you lose little imperfect moments that comprise the discordant music of a life. Maybe self-editing isn’t the best way to get at the truth of time. Maybe it’s all about volume.

Were you to glimpse the contents of my hard drive, you’d think two things: Wow, this guy listens to way too much heavy metal; and wow, this guy’s got a lot of photos. Folders organized first by year, then by month, stretching back to the days when I had hair and an extra chin. As soon as that first digital was in my hands, every microscopic happenstance, every parking lot conversation and board game melee, became camera fodder. Over the years, it became the record of a life, more revealing than any honey-tongued diary confessional. Time compressed into bits and bytes. Heady stuff.

And what it illustrates is that, whether we’re recording it or not, the human experience of time boils down to nothing more than the assemblage of experiences. Comprise enough of them -- slam your hand in a car door, attend your daughter’s high school graduation, see Motley Crue’s farewell tour -- and brothers and sisters, you’ve got a life.

Friends and me, 2004.  I'm the dude in the Metallica shirt.

At my good friend Rick's wedding.  I'm on the far right.

I was a Journal Tribune photographer at one time. In September 2011, I drove down to McDougal Orchards in Springvale to grab images for a feature story on apple picking season. That kind of stuff is always a crapshoot; sometimes you come across someone doing something interesting, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes they don’t mind being photographed, sometimes they do. Sometimes you feel like a nut … well, you know.

Luck was plentiful that day. Bounding through fields of late-summer green was a boy no older than four, decked out in a red Spider-Man shirt and toting a cloth sack filled to overflowing with Cortlands, the apples of his eye. I submitted myself to the necessary awkward moment with his parents -- “Gee, can I photograph your son? Thanks a bundle!” -- and set myself up at the base of a tree, where fresh fruit awaited his eager, sticky fingers.

It only took one shot, That’s all it ever takes. He reached out for an apple, I hit the shutter, and voila, there’s your front page. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best shot I’ve ever taken, but there’s something about the composition, the splash of primary colors, and the look of unmitigated joy on the boy’s face that make it a favorite of mine.

Forever four.

Strange to think of that boy now. In the intervening years he’s more than doubled his lifespan, growing and changing and no doubt morphing into an altogether different person, miles from the diminutive bundle whose scant body weight was balanced by a sackful of fruit. He’s in the second or third grade, perhaps. He’s starting to identify his strengths and weaknesses, the things that define him. Possibly he has a crush on a girl.

None of that will ever be known to me. All I have from him is that one moment, innocent and seemingly inconsequential, preserved for eternity in the lens of a battered Nikon. He’ll be four years old until the earth is dust, when everyone who’s ever lived has returned to a cold and impartial cosmos.

A speck of time to remind us of its unrelenting nature -- slippin’, slippin, slippin’ into the future.