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Saltwater State Park, Federal Way, Washington, 1989 or so…
Learning to skate.
We had a family tradition to come to this park on Father’s day, and it was always a nice spot to look for people just having fun.
In this case, I was working for a newspaper in Tacoma, and was shooting what we called “feature” shots, and found myself drawn to that park.
I saw a father teaching his daughter how to roller skate – with these huge hurking skates that just really didn’t do much more than make noise, but by golly, they were skates, and she wanted to try them, so try them they did.
I talked with the dad for a little bit, asking if it was okay if I shoot, and when he said yes, I walked across the parking lot and started shooting with my 300 – that way I wouldn’t interfere with what was happening, and the pictures were more spontaneous.
I knew, just knew she was going to fall – and was just waiting when she did, just like her dad was – and we both caught her at the same time.
The thing that got me about this shot was that there isn’t any evidence of fear in her eyes at all, there is just trust. “Daddy’s going to be there for me, and I’m going to be okay.”
Look again – does she see her father? No – there’s nothing she can see – it’s all trust – believing that he’ll do what he said he would do.
I’ve learned a couple of really important things from that image,
- That trust is a very valuable thing. Knowing that “Daddy’s going to be there…” is an amazing thing – both from our earthly fathers – daddies – to our Heavenly Father. If you know – really know that your Father is going to be there, you will have trust – and therefore, no fear.
- I also learned that daddies taking the time to take their little girls to the park is just way, way past cool.
Knowing Daddy's arms are there makes all the difference.
It was in “Athens-by-God-Ohio” that I met her, the feistiest, orneriest, funniest little old lady (short of my mom) I could ever hope to meet.
Cleo was 88, and I was there in Grad school a number of years ago, getting my master’s degree in photojournalism – and I was there without a car. This limited the stories I could do to pretty much walking or busing distance, and I found that Cleo lived just down the street.
Cleo was as independent as they come, and lived alone, in her own house. She did her own grocery shopping, did her own chores, and spent occasional afternoons at the senior center in town playing cards or just reminiscing with the dwindling group of friends her own age she could relate to.
Her kids thought she was too old to live by herself, so they decided that she needed to be moved into a nursing home.
In Columbus.
68 miles away.
She disagreed, but it seemed that they were pretty insistent, and they moved her there.
Remember “feisty”?
Well, she promptly hopped a Greyhound back to Athens.
They didn’t mess with her anymore after that.
In talking to her, I found that she did her chores on Saturday, and since I was trying to find a story – I thought that it would be interesting to see what kinds of stories could be told in the pictures I could get of her doing that – so I made an appointment with her for Saturday morning around 10:00. After we talked and joked a little, I told her that her job was to ignore me, and to just do what she would normally do.
And she did..
She swept.
She dusted.
…and she mopped.
Now when she mopped, she put on these old floppy galoshes, grabbed a bucket of water and whatever cleaner she used, and sloshed water on the floor and mopped it up. There was no grace to the movements, no pretense. She wasn’t putting on a show for me, in fact, she was in her own little world, and completely ignoring me, which was just perfect.
I took some pictures of the mop and the galoshes, thinking that would make a good detail shot, and then, as I was focusing, she picked up the bucket and started for the back door. I followed, getting a shot of her opening the old, dilapidated screen door, and at that moment, the light came on in my head – she was going to throw the water off the back porch!
I literally jumped past her as she hung the mop onto a string, spinning 180 degrees in mid air so I landed facing her somewhere in the middle of the little back yard. I must have instinctively focused the lens (a 24mm Nikkor) somewhere in mid air because I don’t remember doing it. I hammered down on the shutter release for the motor drive of my Nikon FM-2 just as she did her back swing to lob the water off the porch, and got a series of 5 shots of the water sloshing out of the bucket into the yard.
Number 3 was the best.
1/250th of a second at f/8. It wasn’t an easy print. I printed it as high contrast as I could get – but that meant that the highlights (specifically her right arm, where the sleeve ends and the arm begins) were blasted out pure white and needed to be burned down so you could see detail. I dodged out the galoshes, making sure you could see them, and used a touch of potassium ferricyanide on the wet mop hanging on the string to make it less of a blob. I burned the wall of her house down a little darker (photographically, not in real life) so it would fade into the background a little, bringing the water up a bit in the process.
She was 88 years old back in 1987, so I’m sure she’s gone now, but she was a neat lady. I’m glad to have known her.
Cleo throwing the mop water out. © 1987 Tom Roush
The picture at the end of this story was shot in Grad School – Ohio University, sometime around 1988 or so.
I had a friend and classmate, Johnny Crawford, a wonderful shooter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who was truly a lot of fun to be with – but he had this one habit that just got to me after awhile… it was his penchant for saying, “Tom, you ain’t lived till you’ve…” – and then fill in the blank with something that he’d done and he knew I hadn’t.
Understand, he wasn’t gloating, he wasn’t being mean, he was just telling me how cool it was to have been able to do something he had done, and, in his eyes, I hadn’t lived till I’d done one of those things.
Well one day he says, “Tom, you ain’t lived till you’ve shot F-15’s bein’ refueled.” – now of course I knew that he wasn’t talking about F-15’s being refueled on the ground, he was talking about that complicated aerial ballet that means you’ve got two airplanes flying around 250 – 300 mph within about 40 feet of each other, pumping highly refined kerosene from one to another at a rate of about 6,500 pounds a minute. This is enough fuel in one minute to run your average family car for a year.
Uh… Yeah…
Eventually I got a little tired of never having lived – so I needed to figure out where I could find a refueling base, because that’s where I’d need to go to get onto a KC-135 refueling plane to take that shot that was going to ensure that I lived. I went to the library, and checked out a book about the military, and it gave me the location of all the bases in the United States. And funny thing, but there was a base with a KC-135 wing 68 miles away, the 121st Air Refueling Wing of the Ohio Air National Guard.
Hmmm…
Now anyone who knows me knows I am just plain dangerous with a telephone. My wife says I can talk to anyone, and sometime I just end up sweet talking my way into things that even I end up baffled at once everything’s all said and done. She once complained that I could get into a 20 minute conversation with a telephone operator. (She was wrong… it was 45 minutes, and I did, actually, the telephone operator used to be an air traffic controller when Reagan was presi – well, that’s not important right now). So about 3 telephone calls later, I’m on the phone with the PAO (public affairs officer) of Rickenbacker Air National Guard base, in Columbus, Ohio. I explain to him that I’m a grad student in photojournalism at Ohio University and that I’m working on a story on the Air National Guard (partially true, well, I was starting it – and a picture was worth a thousand words, right?) and was wondering if there was any chance of getting up on a refueling mission to take some pictures. So – after talking about that and security and stuff for a bit, he suddenly said, “How’s next Tuesday?”
Next…
What!? –
It had to be harder than this…
It just had to be.
Nope. Tuesday it was…
Plane took off at 10:00. We’d be refueling some Missouri Air National Guard F-4 fighters who were on a training mission. I had to be there 2 hours earlier, which meant I had to leave an hour before that, and so on. I borrowed a car from a friend and found the airbase, talked my way into see the right people, made the right introductions, signed the right paperwork, and out the door I went, still completely baffled… It just had to be harder than this…
One of the things to understand about military planes is that they are generally not built for comfort, so the plane was loud. This being an Air National Guard plane – the same folks had flown this same plane for years, so to them it wasn’t much different than you or I driving down to the store to get a quart of milk. However, they’re going a little faster, they have 4 engines pushing them along, and the store’s a lot further away. At one point, I was up in the cockpit and the navigator did some calculating, and noticed that if we continued at the rate we were going, we would be late to meet the planes we were to refuel, and since we were the only gas station around, us being late could easily mean those flying jet fighters would fly about as well as crowbars, and that’s not good. So he saw we were going 300 mph, and told the pilot to bump it up to 330. The pilot reached up and wrapped his hands around the 4 throttles and – well, ‘bumped’ them up a bit. I had no idea a plane that big, could accelerate that fast at that speed. I was watching the airspeed indicator, and we went from 300 to 330 in a blink. I was very glad I’d been holding onto something when he did it or I would have ended up in the back of the plane.
We got to the refueling zone – and I was told that the way the refueling is done, is that the pilots of the tanker, and the pilots of the planes needing the fuel fly directly at each other, the tanker flying 1000 feet higher. When they get close, they both head in the same direction – so, say the tanker I’m in is flying east. The planes needing the fuel are flying west, toward each other, and at a given point, everyone heads north, so that the F-4’s are below and behind the tanker. Our call sign was Pearl 07. Theirs were Misty 41 and 42.
The weird thing, for lack of a better word, about all this is that it was happening in three dimensions. I mean, if you’re here on the ground, and you point to something, your arm is generally parallel to the ground or close to it, because whatever you’re pointing at is usually on that same ground, or close to it. When I saw these planes – I was in the back of thfe tanker, looking out the back – and they were swooping in from the right, and they were off to the right, and down. Not just ‘over’ but ‘down’. One of the planes was leaving what looked like a white smoke trail, and I heard over the radio, “Pearl 07, Misty 41, I’ve got a fuel leak, returning to base…”
I don’t know about you, but a fuel leak you can see at 300 miles an hour must be a pretty significant fuel leak… He left.
Misty 42 came closer – into what they call the pre-connect area in the back of the plane, and just stayed there for a bit – I was amazed at how big the thing was, and had the widest lens I had on my camera (a Nikkor 24mm ) – I was framing the shot when Gus (the boom operator) said, “Misty 42, forward 50” – meaning he needed to come forward 50 feet to get into the area where the boom could connect. Now I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting much acceleration out of that plane – I mean the plane can go twice the speed of sound, for crying out loud – but when he came forward that 50 feet, it was like he’d been shot out of a cannon, and then he stopped, parked right where he needed to be. Somewhere in there, just before he hooked up I reflexively squeezed off a shot, and that was the only shot I got that was worth anything – after that he was just too close.
He took 3,000 pounds of fuel, I don’t know why I remember that. He wasn’t there very long, and then, since Misty 41 had already left, Misty 42 peeled off in ways I’ve only seen in movies – and there just isn’t a comparison to seeing it in real life, as opposed to seeing it on a screen, where, no matter how much they try to show the three dimensions of what’s happening up there, it’s still a two dimensional screen. It just doesn’t cut it. It was so, incredibly, cool.
We turned back east and headed back over Illinois, Indiana, bits and pieces of Kentucky, and finally made it down out of the wonderful sunlight, down through the clouds, and into a rainy Ohio afternoon.
We debriefed, I headed back toward Athens in my borrowed car with an exhaust leak, and stopped at a Burger King on the way to get a late lunch while I had the color film developed next door. What I didn’t know is that this particular film developing process didn’t use fresh chemicals for each batch of film. They used them until the film didn’t come out good anymore, and then changed the chemicals.
Guess whose film was the last one through that batch of chemistry? The prints just didn’t look quite right. It turned out that the film, though developed, was simply not printable in color, the three colors (cyan, magenta and yellow) didn’t develop at the same rate – and there just wasn’t a way to color balance all of the colors at the same time. After a lot of thought and frustration (considering what I’d gone through to get this picture) I ended up out of pure frustration printing it in black and white.
This, surprisingly, was a dang good idea…
Of course, by now it had been a long day, lots of driving, lots of flying, and because of the car, lots of carbon monoxide, and now I had to go to the darkroom on campus to print the pictures. Of course, it was always a social event because there were 50 enlargers in the darkroom, and everyone was working on their own images, and every now and then, you’d go out into a finishing area and look at them in white light instead of the orange safelights, to see what the thing really looked like, wash it off, spot correct dust, etc…
…and, if you had a particularly good one, you might find yourself examining it a little longer out there where other people could see it, if you know what I mean…
One of the things in that original image was that there was this huge black area in the bottom right of the picture, part of the inside of the plane that that wide lens caught. I was trying to figure out how to make the picture work without cropping too much, and yet that black area just sucked your eye right down there when one of my classmates walked up and saw the picture.
“Wow! Cool picture! Who take that?” (he was from China, and this is how he talked)
“I did.”
“No, Tom, you not take that picture, don’t joke… Who take that picture?”
“Seriously, I did.”
He could see I wasn’t joking – honestly, by that time, I was too tired to joke.
“Okay, fine… Where you take that picture?”
… but I wasn’t too tired to string him along a little and mess with him…
“Missouri.” (understand, Missouri is three states west of Ohio, easily a day’s drive)
“Missouri? No, Tom… You joking again. Where you take the picture?”
“Okay, I’ll be more specific… 26,000 feet above Fredericktown, Missouri.”
There was a look of consternation on his face, and finally resignation as he realized I wasn’t kidding.
“Okay Tom, you not joking this time… When you take the picture?”
– This one was like feeding a straight line to a comedian, and the only thing I could do was the last thing he’d expect.
I looked at my watch.
His eyes got real big, then he just threw up his hands and gave up. The thing is, at the time he asked the question, I’d taken the picture about 6 hours ago – so the most logical thing to do was to look at my watch and find out how to answer his question.
I was so hoping Johnny would come by so I could tell him I’d lived. He did, later – but the reaction from my classmate was the best.
That said, below is the shot of Misty 42.
Misty 42 – an F-4 flown my the Missouri Air National Guard. Photo by Tom Roush – from an Ohio Air National Guard KC-135.
…and just recently I found a video that someone else had taken that’s pretty accurate for what it was like.
The above shot would have been taken just before the video starts.
PS – years later – I got back in touch with him and sent him this story.
His response: “Tom, you have Lived!”
🙂
Heh…
MSN had this question on their website awhile back – and I had to answer, “Uh, yeah.”
Years ago, I was working in Tacoma Washington as a photojournalist when I saw smoke coming from the south… Not just a little smoke, but a huge amount of it – forest fire size. I checked with my editor, and they cleared me to go shoot it. I filled up the tank of the company’s Corolla I’d been assigned, and headed south.
Thing is, to get there (Morton) from Tacoma was about an hour and a half or so, so I wasn’t able to go instantly, but I followed my nose and eventually came across a sign spray painted on a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood:
← Forest Fire
– it had an arrow pointing left. I took that road, and drove for miles on a logging road laid through the forest like a broken suspender. Finally came to a clearing with a pond where a helicopter was dipping water – I got a few shots of that with a 50 mm lens because it was quite literally right in front of me, then just as he pulled out – an aerial tanker shot out from behind a hillside in the distance – dumping his load of red fire retardant onto the fire. It was amazing, hillside… smoke… tanker… red stuff… I swung the camera up and got the picture – but because I still had the 50mm lens on, it was a teensy bit of an image – I’d needed a telephoto for that, and that was still in the case in the back seat of the car.
So I did what’s normal for firefighters, ambulance drivers, cops, and journalists, and drove toward the flames.
I kept seeing signs for the tanker trucks, and the trucks themselves, often feeling them before I saw them, rolling earthquakes coming down the mountain to refill themselves with more water from wherever they could get it.
The newspaper I worked for had radios in all the cars, and they worked on a repeater system, a lot like cell towers. You’d grab the mike, push the talk button, and wait for the chirp to tell you the repeater was in range, and then you’d start talking. If you were out of range, you’d get the obnoxious “braaap” instead of the chirp. By this time all I heard was “braaap.” I was on my own. I made it around the edge of this box canyon and was heading up a ridge. The next turn would have put me on the hillside that tanker had hit. It was around this time that the car started handling a little differently… Mushy in the rear end, drifting to the right. (toward the box canyon).
Uh oh…
This was followed by the sound and sparks of the rim of the wheel hitting the sharp rocks on the road that had flattened the tire.
I couldn’t control the car very well, the rim wasn’t giving me anything in the way of traction, so I had to stop – in the middle of a hill, flaming box canyon down to my right, smoldering hillside up to my left. I tried to change the tire – but given where I was, any tanker truck careening around the curve down the hill would see me at the last second, before there was too much time to avoid a collision….
And… That would make the forest fire a bit worse.
This would be bad.
I squeezed the car off to the side as far as I could, and hit the ground with the dedication and intent of an Indy pit crew.
Except, they jack up on level concrete.
I didn’t have that.
They have these pneumatic insta-jacks.
I didn’t.
They have air wrenches.
I had a big bent wire with a socket welded to the end of it.
I was jacking up a company car, on a hill, with a flat, so it was hard to even get the jack under there, and once I got it up, it desperately wanted to fall off. Most of the things that I would have used to brace the car to keep it from rolling were on fire, so that limited my options a bit. Understand, at this point I was feverishly working on getting the car into the air, had my back to the canyon now, so all I saw reflected in the car fender was embers.
Oh good…
The smoke was getting a little thicker, and to say that there was a touch of urgency in my actions might be considered an understatement. My main concern at that time was being hit by an out of control tanker truck – well, the forest fire was a bit of a concern, too. I wasn’t in it, mind you, but any place I could run to avoid a collision with the aforementioned truck was also on fire.
Right…
Oh, the other thing Indy pit crews have is tires with air in them. I’d gotten the spare out of the trunk – and it was then that I discovered that it was low. Not flat, but low enough to keep me from driving the car very fast on this or any road, much less a dirt one with sharp tire eating rocks on it.
At this point, it was quite clear that getting photos of the forest fire was rather secondary to me getting myself out of there.
So if it isn’t clear yet, I’m in the middle of a hill, on a dirt road, smoldering canyon to my right, hill to my left, road up ahead turns left out of sight, and since the road wasn’t wide enough to do a three point turn, the only way I could get out was to back out down the hill on an almost flat tire until I could find a spot to turn around. So I did that, backed up for about ¾ of a mile – then drove far, far slower than I wanted to as I was getting out – leaving the smoldering hillsides in my rear view mirror.
What I didn’t know then – at least until the next day – is that among all the burning stuff was some poison oak. I was wearing contact lenses at the time, and whatever was in the poison oak got into them. The next day – I only had to put the contacts in and I felt like my eyes were on fire. Ended up going to a clinic then to get things taken care of, but enough of the oils in the poison oak had gotten into the soft contacts that they were completely shot.
So: did I get the picture and did it make the paper?
Well, I got pictures. Not the dramatic ones I wanted, but I got something , but the most important bit was that I got out.
Part 2…
I had to drive quite awhile on that tire – remember, it’s not completely full of air – so the car’s lurching about as I have to drive slow so as not to overheat it and blow that one, too.
Eventually I found a gas station in Elbe, and filled up the (by now) very hot tire there. As I left, I saw an absolute herd of emergency vehicles heading the other way.
Knowing I had to get the film back to the paper, I tried to reach them on the radio: “Braaaap” – no go. I found a payphone. No go. Every number I called at the paper was simply unavailable and I couldn’t reach them by radio.
Then I heard on the scanner that this was a fatal accident, and the paper generally wanted images of fatal accidents, so I kept trying to call, and eventually gave up and chased the State Patrol and the aid cars and the various official vehicles. They left the main road and headed down a gravel forest service road at high speed. I stayed glued to them, because otherwise I’d be completely lost. I heard the EMT’s talking to each other on the scanner, “Who’s that in the little brown car? Is he with us?” “Nah, he’s not with us, must be some sort of vulture from the media.”
Oh good… I was a vulture.
We all got to the scene of the accident – and it was striking how innocuous the road looked. It didn’t look like you could kill yourself on this road, but someone drove their last mile here. It swept gently left, then gently right, and as it was gravel, you could see exactly what had happened. The fellow was going too fast, and started sliding on the left turn, then finally caught it, and overcorrected too late when the road swung right. The truck was on its side in the middle of the road and by now it was getting quite dark. I should have been back at the paper hours ago.
I was living at home with my folks at the time, and knew that they’d be worried if I didn’t show up and didn’t call to tell them why. I was trying to figure out how to do that when one of the staters walked up to me and asked if I could take some photos of the accident scene for them. I saw my chance: “Sure – as long as I can talk you into calling my folks and letting them know I’m okay… – just – when you call, don’t immediately identify yourselves as “hi, I’m Sgt. Smith from the Washington State Patrol and I’m calling about your son, who’s at the scene of an accident…” – that would freak them right out…
Call ‘em – let ‘em know I’m okay – and I’ll shoot what you want. Deal?
“Deal.”
So I shot, then headed back to the car, and drove as fast as I could to get back to the paper to process the film of the forest fire and accident. Of course, I didn’t want to drive so fast that I’d see the same Staters again.
I kept hitting the microphone switch, waiting for the little ‘chirp chirp’ that told me I’d hit the repeater, because once I’d hit that, I knew I’d be able to talk to the paper.
It took about 30 minutes of fast driving before I got a chirp, and 10 more before I got it reliably. Once there, I got through to the chief photographer, who told me to call him when I was closer – I’d missed the color deadline, we’d see if I could get there in time to do the black and white deadline.
By the time I got to – let’s call it ‘civilization’ – I’d missed the black and white deadline, too, so what this meant is that the photos I’d taken would never see print.
When he knew where I was, he told me to just head home – which saved me about 40 miles of driving.
I went home, and got there somewhere between 9 and 10 – and took the contacts out and crashed.
Part 3
Next day – when I put the contacts in – all the oils from the burning poison oak were like red hot pokers in my eyes – and it was almost impossible to see – and for a photographer, that’s kind of a bad thing. I went to a clinic where we decided the contacts were a lost cause, and that if I was ever near a forest fire again, I should do what I could to stay upwind of it.
It seemed like a good idea.
Is there a moral to this? I didn’t think of any while writing this – but I feel I need to tie it all together somehow.
Well, I suppose there’s several morals:
- Be prepared. This might sound like a little Boy Scout thing – but there’s a lot of truth to it. Make sure you’ve got air in your spare, make sure you’ve got a jack handle. I know of one person who decided that to get better mileage, he’d dump the spare and the jack, “because he had roadside assistance on his cell phone”. That just wouldn’t have worked out there.
- Make sure the folks who care about you know where you are. It’s just not cool to make people worry unnecessarily.
- When shooting forest fires… Shoot from the upwind side.
…and stay away from the poison oak. It’s nasty…
(c) Tom Roush 2009
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