September 3, 2022
With my proofs arriving and my book finally in the final stretch, I might as well explain why I came up with it. This is a longer-than-normal photo story, so I will put it beneath the fold.
I had a long, stressful 2022. I was a full-time staff writer for The Drive and it was a cool job, but any form of daily newswriting is necessarily high-intensity. I moved to Reno, NV and had so many bad experiences in a row, entirely due to my transness being ill-received, that I developed what I now believe to be PTSD. I was very lonely for six months; people would come visit me here and there, but I never woke up next to anyone, and the solitude and the stress began to break me down. Having to stay constantly plugged-in looking for news leads and reading the ever-more-dire headlines about trans rights in America ground me down to nothing. By June, I could barely write features, I cried most nights, and I was considering hospitalization just to stop the spiral before it killed me.
Then in June, I met my partner. We began living together in July (lesbians, uhauling, things of that nature, I know), and by September, I'd begun to re-evaluate what, exactly, I was putting myself through so much for, and I was coming up empty.
The day I took this photograph is one of the best days I've ever had. My partner made us a picnic and we drove out to a lake in northern California, and we did nothing all day long. We snacked, we cuddled, we napped on the beach, I read two books, they kayaked, I played in the water (feeling safe at last to wear a swimsuit in public with my butch knight in shining armor nearby). I didn't even smoke a cigarette, because my mind was so calm I didn't need to prop myself up with nicotine. It was the most relaxing day of my entire year and probably the most relaxed I've been since I transitioned.
I brought my camera, but I only took a handful of pictures, and most of them were meant to remember the day rather than to Make Art. The photo above is the one exception. I took it as we drove home on a beat-up access road that cut directly through a burn scar. I was so enamored with the entire world that day that I knew it could be beautiful despite the grim nature of it, and I believe I was right - I feel it's one of my stronger photos from last year.
I posted this shot with the caption "Postcards From the End of the World - wish you were here!" because it captured my internal state so well. I was still in a weird place mentally and I had very much reached the limits of my sanity just a few months before, and yet here I was, standing in an annihilated, horror-movie forest with the person I loved and I just felt amazing. I wanted everyone to feel like this. I wished everyone could be here.
Shortly thereafter, a massive wave of fire smoke - AQI in the 600s - came through Reno, and I knew I could build a series of images that felt like this. With the haze of wildfires as my starting point, I took four or five more expeditions to places I needed for the book - a small-plane flight over the Frank Church "River of No Return" Wilderness, a drive to the ocean at Point Reyes National Seashore, stopping for caches of abandoned buildings on US-95 in the heart of the Sierras - and then the rest of the book, which is a love story as much as it's a horror/apocalypse story, all assembled itself.
I have spent my whole life with my foot on the mat, and then the one day I took a breather, divine inspiration struck. The fires are never going to stop, but we can still feel joy.
