6) Roads leading nowhere

6) Roads leading nowhere

Chantal and I are dedicated urbanites. We love Amsterdam and its pubs, movie-theaters and museums, but if possible we try to escape the urban hustle. We make long tracks through the countryside, camp illegally in Holland, Belgium, France and later in the US. We travel by train, bus, plane and even hitchhike.

We make both short time lightweight camping tours nearby, and long journeys in remote areas. From Palawan in the Philippines to Kauai in the States, from the Azores to the Tsisikamma-trail in South Africa Chantal makes pictures of mountains, rivers, waterfalls. Travelling and camping is huge fun for us.

‘But what is the fun-part of travelling?’ my girls will ask me. How can you dedicate a whole life to travelling? What are you looking for?

Let me try to explain.

For instance; after hours of walking a steep path with all your gear on your back you reach a mountain-pass. Suddenly another world explodes into view. A vast mountain range in the far distance offers itself. Is that Italy? You feel elated but you cannot stay long here as cold gusts of wind hit you.

So travelling gives you rewards. But can a picture evoke the pain that has slowly taken possession of your knees and hips? The continuous chafing that reminds you of ill adjusted straps? The gasping for air that comes with ascending for hours on end? The silence save for the wind when you look into the next valley? The taste of a fruit-bar after hours of climbing? The relief your toes feel out of their leather prison when you find for a few minutes shelter behind a rock. You cannot stay long here because you still have a long way to go so back on the track again.

Travelling means to sweat it out; headaches, blisters, arms becoming numb, hunger, thirst and in general tiredness. A picture is flat, full of colors maybe but bereft of the smell of unpolluted air, the murmuring sound of a starting river, the buzz of swirling insects and always a picture hides the sadness of leaving a nice spot.

After a days walk you set up your tent. Lightweight and low in the wind. You have seen a small waterfall, there might even be a spring nearby according to the map and you go looking for it to fill your bottles. The cold that bites into your fingers when the water gushes over your hands. The shadows are growing and the tent is barely visible in the distance. Walking back you relish the promise of warm food. The promise of the deep silence that will cover you when you go to sleep.

Nothing in this cloud of experiences that can be convincingly registered.

Along the paths in the mountains of Europe one finds stones with white and red stripes. These balises lead to wooden signposts on which you can see how many miles to go, how many hours. They are an indication of how the mountains in Europe are tamed. Still these mountains are formidable. Especially when it snows or rains or when gale-winds hammer the land. Of course you rarely make a picture when it snows or rains and the wind is invisible.

I take out a color-slide and I see a wooden pole somewhere on a mountain-pass, stones at the bottom. Two route-indicators, but I can’t read where they direct us to. Don’t even know exactly where or when this signpost was shot. Where does the path I see in the distance lead to? Haven’t the faintest.

This experience occurs continually when you pick up an old agenda confusion sets in. Browsing through it you will encounter a bewildering array of names and phone-numbers of people  long blotted out of your memory.

Cryptic in its brevity every name and date confronts you with a benign amnesia. Fortunately these notes refer to work and one is entitled to forget work. Photos on the other hand are a different story. Forgetting why you have made a picture confronts you with dementia.

Why does Chantal shoot a picture of a signpost? Why haven’t we discarded this image on second thoughts as bereft of meaning? It must be a special place otherwise it would not have been immortalized on a color-slide. But why? 

Unable to answer this question I realize that the death of Chantal has amputated our common past.