A couple years ago somebody was talking me into starting an RV travel blog. I had one last objection: buying a digital Brownie camera. I didn't believe in them, and had enjoyed a long career as a full time RVer out West without one.
My prejudice went back even further than that: my first time through red-rock Utah I headed right for Moab, like any naif would, especially one who mountain biked. I noticed a road marked “Abbey Road.” Greenhorn that I was, I thought it was named after a once-famous album by the Beatles.
The civic-minded merchants of Moab soon made it known to me that Edward Abbey, the author, was in fact the Holy Desert Prophet of Moab; they revered him so much that every other store had Edward Abbey-branded books, T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. He did start Moab on its way to glory as the Gatlinburg Tennessee of red-rock Utah.
My prejudice went back even further than that: my first time through red-rock Utah I headed right for Moab, like any naif would, especially one who mountain biked. I noticed a road marked “Abbey Road.” Greenhorn that I was, I thought it was named after a once-famous album by the Beatles.
With the zeal of the newly converted I read everything written by Edward Abbey. In one of his books he screamed (he did a lot of that) at the tourists to ‘throw the f#@&ing camera away!’ if they wanted to get the most satisfaction from the desert experience. Of course film cameras in his day weren't nearly as convenient as modern-day, digital Brownies.
Somewhat later I bumped into a female RVer in Page AZ, next to Edward Abbey’s hated Lake Powell and dam. She was a solo traveler like me, but a decade older. When she persisted in showing me photographs of herself in evening gowns taken ten years earlier, I nervously switched the topic to photographing scenery out West.
She bluntly stated that she had no camera, because it was a lot of trouble and expense just to duplicate what could be gotten more easily from postcards, available anywhere. And why compete against professional photographers? At first her opinion seemed like a cynical wisecrack. But had she hit upon an unpleasant truth? Don't most truths sound rude from someone else's lips?
My prejudice against the digital Brownie hardened after that. And then one day I was in a coffee shop in Las Cruces NM, when I noticed something special on the wall...
(to be continued)
Comments