What is fear, anyway?
The most interesting thing about fear, in my opinion, is that it’s an emotion that has no opposite number. Every word I can think of that comes close to the opposite of fear – contentment, boredom, lassitude and so forth – they come close, but not nearly close enough. I think it’s because how we deal with fear, and perhaps more importantly, how we think about it once it’s in the rearview mirror, does so much to define whatever we do next, after those particular marker buoys in our lives.
None of those fear inducing events are what you expect. I can tell you from firsthand experience what fear is like from the perspective of every sense you care to mention. When you’re on top of a grain elevator taking pictures of a levee holding back the floodwaters of the Missouri River and the levee breaks, fear is the feel the tips of your shoes make as you hurry down the metal ladder alongside the tower. You’re sliding down the side like it’s an inflatable chute at the Bounce House and you’re wearing the work gloves you would otherwise reserve for handling the klieg lights because in this case, you don’t want to rip your hands to shreds as you slide down the ladder and only your toes are knocking against the rungs. The zipper rush of the water across the levee is getting closer and after having seen those same waters rip a house off its foundation, you’re pretty sure that the grain elevator you’re on won’t be standing for much longer. The feel of the tips of your shoes as they lightly touch the rungs while you slide down the ladder, and the thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk sound they make… that’s what fear physically feels like.
Fear is the dry taste in the back of your mouth when you watch one tornado drop out of the sky outside of Limon, Colorado while you’re driving back to the station, and a second tornado drops down alongside it. The sound of fear is sometimes the absence of sound… like when you’re third riding on a rig, and it’s your job to administer CPR while the paramedic drives to the emergency room and you stop hearing a heartbeat. Fear smells like ethyl alcohol and formaldehyde when you walk through the halls of a hospital. You woke up in San Francisco but you’ll be going to sleep in Birmingham because six hours ago you got The Call. The one from home that said if you don’t get here as quickly as possible, you’re probably never going to see or talk to your father again.
The easy one, it would seem… the gimmee of the bunch is what fear looks like, but that’s not true. There isn’t a monster under the bed, nothing is waiting in the closet and there aren’t any ghosts in the attic. When we try to visualize fear, the vast majority of us have the great luxury of letting our imaginations do the heavy lifting. What we fear might happen is a visual mental exercise. What actually frightened us, when we recall those moments… I think we often remember those times with our other senses.
Me? I am, of course, afraid of the dark.
Is there anyone losing their sight who isn’t? Of course, it’s really more representational than literal. The dark represents a giant stop sign, a force field that materializes wherever you go. It gets plunked down at the end of the sidewalk where there isn’t a good curb cut so you don’t get a good feel for where to cross. It blocks my way to every website where the designer decided it wasn’t worth the time or effort to make the Open Table, Kayak or Uber sites a place where I can’t do in an hour and half what would take a signed person five minutes or less to polish off on their way to something else. It lands with a thud on a restaurant table when the check comes at the end of a date. If you ever want to know what emasculation feels like, just so you know, it’s the point when you have to ask your date what the total is and then for help writing the tip… and your signature… in the right place. What does the dark look like? It’s the look of all romance leaving the table when your date has to tell you how much the meal costs. Darkness has nothing to do with the absence of light. It has everything to do with every reminder that you’re not quite as independent as you thought you were.
Or at least not yet.
I’ve been back and forth over the working title for the expedition over the past few weeks. I was torn between two ways of describing it… this effort to explore the world through the richness of color. Of exploring the world one color at a time. At first, it seemed thinking about this journey would be most meaningful in terms of a prism… the explosion of color that emerges from something as simple as a clear block of glass. That idea of clarity producing such unexpected vibrancy seemed like the way to go.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was just not an idea that was working. The whole idea of a prism is to take something that is unified and break it up into its component parts. What I’m trying to do is take those different colors and put them together – to see what we come up with at the end.
So that’s why this expedition is called the Palette Project. We’re starting with separate colors and putting them together. I’m trying to create something here. It’s a bit of a puzzle, but that is, in fact, what I like about it. As with any good documentary, if you know what you’re going to end up with before you begin, you’re not doing it right. What I do know is the palette of colors is varied and rich, but the reason my team and I are going to be diligent in creating a trail is so that we can know when it’s a good idea to stray from it.
If you happen to have stumbled on The Travelogue, you have a general idea of where we’re heading. Our first stop is going to be Australia. The plan is to fly to Sydney and shoot there for a few days. There’s a story there that both the reporter and the storyteller in me has to check out. Here’s something to wet your whistle:
From there, it’s on to Alice Springs. This will be our base camp for exploring the Red Centre, and that’s where the last several months of learning… and relearning… my way around a trail will pay off. Uluru, King’s Canyon, the bush and the outback at the tail end of the southern hemisphere’s summer. It’s all on the agenda.
This first leg of the trip is all about being a table setter. I’ve written about this before, and I mean what I’ve said… that if the trip were only about me, then I’m going about it the wrong way. My chief photographer in Sioux Falls had it absolutely right when he told me how I should conduct myself. “You’re the storyteller, not the story.” I think that holds true today. There are things I want to do, and a part of me feels like I have something to prove, but many people have done much more with much less. That basic truth always humbles me… as it should. If the trip isn’t about outreach and awareness as much as it is about urgency and action, then we’re never going to be able to join the two together in order to produce results.
