When I was thirteen, I had
a strange bout of anxiety. I realized—and it hit me
suddenly, like a sharp rock under a bare foot—that I didn't know
how to use a camera. A terrible “What If” darkened my world, and
I had to take a long walk to work it out. I left the house and headed
down our rural blacktop road. What
if someone asked me to take their picture, and I was...discovered?
What if I was the only person who didn't...didn't...know?
I was alone and inadequate in a potentially
pitiless world. None of the neighbors driving into town for
groceries that day could have guessed that the lone girl walking on
the edge of the ditch was undergoing a terrible crisis.
I now have many friends who were former teenagers and have learned
that I wasn't unique in being tortured by something so benign. Who
knows what roads my peers were walking that same day? As far as I can
tell, most of us made it home. I've even caught us laughing at our
old deficiencies. Some we have conquered, some we haven't, but the
old disdain for ourselves has been replaced by compassion for the
children we once were.
I don't have much to do with cameras now. People are using their
phones, and I can't see into them without my reading glasses. My
daughter and her friends sometimes ask me to take their picture, and
they twitter (in the old sense) and arrange themselves, and I say
“one-two-three!” and then have to ask “Which button do I push?”
Then it's “Just touch the screen.” Nothing could be easier, which
is why it's so hard for me.
But in 1979, when I turned seventeen, I got pretty good at taking
pictures. I went to Norway as an exchange student, and my parents
bought me a camera. I took some really lovely photographs of seagulls
drifting over the north Atlantic. Possibly no Norwegian ever took
photos of those same scavengers, but I came from an Illinois farm and
had never seen a gull or an ocean, which just goes to show that you
never know where a road might take you.
