The following riffs are from an email conversation with old friend Mike Hamer (a musician and writer from NC, who grew up on a farm in Newport VT). I had originally sent him two photos from this same perspective, one with two guys looking at the truck, and one without. A third photo from closer in (“What Guys Do”) can be seen directly above this one.
AR: “Here are a couple of variations on that Vermont Country Store scene. If it inspires you to write an paragraph/essay/tome, please do so and I will publish it. Which works better for you – with or without the guys?”
MH: “.. I prefer the shot with the guys. I have 2 ideas for anecdotes from growing up days — one a story of boom year of apples, and so we went up to the Percy farm and made 20 gallons of cider. Then we had to lower the jugs with baling twine into the well that was in the cellar below the garage. The last gallons to come up had a bit of fizz, and so I let a couple of the older guys on the school bus have a little nip on our way to school. My thermos would pop when we opened it. The other idea was a fantasy of hooking up the big John Deere A to the manure spreader, full, and taking it down to Newport Center and letting it go through the middle of town.”
AR: “..funny where we went with that photo – I was struck with how much of a set, or “installation” it was, with the sun stage left as a big old floodlight, and then went on to figuring out the meta message: simplicity, the old days, connection with the past, the perennial and bountiful harvests ??? All with a wonderful allure, for sure.. you know, I initially put the one with the gents up on the site, but it was too busy for me, so shifted it to the other one ..”
MH: “Well, one thing you learn from farming is that there is no perennial bounty; it’s more like a rhythmic cycle of lean and bountiful. I could expound on that a bit in telling the cider story…? I can tell that the writer and the guy behind the camera see things in different ways- -one looking for a story, and one looking at the story.”
MH: “..I can even hear the conversation by the pickup, ‘Guess I ought to tell Ms. Smith that I borrowed a few of her pumpkins; maybe she’ll take an ounce of my medical weed for her arthritis as payment.'”
AR: “..yep it’s a whole new world out there..”
AR: “..the manure spreader in downtown Newport could be a very funny short story..”
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