Photo Safari: 4,360
Miles in Five Days by Troy Paiva
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2)
Troy
Paiva
is a commercial artist
living in the San Francisco Bay Area. For his
entire adult life he has been an abandonment
explorer and back-roads wanderer, especially
at night. Sneaking around in junkyards and dead
roadside towns in the middle of the night, he
was doing urban exploration years before the
term even existed. Troy is the author of the
critically-acclaimed Lost
America which features over 145 color
and black-and-white photographs. On April 27th,
2007, Troy launched a new version of his Lost
America Web site with hundreds of evocative
photos from around the west.
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Day Three
- A Circus of Flying Debris and Carnage
I wake up with the feeling that
I've been spinning my wheels and driving in circles. The
trip odometer reads "1722". As I brush my teeth
while sitting on the rear bumper, I vow to refocus my efforts
and find the abandoned underbelly of Texas.
Around mid-morning I cruise into
Endee, New Mexico, a dead gas station, café, motel
and roadhouse complex. Everything has been stripped out,
leaving only the shells of the cinderblock buildings. The
big "Café-Motel" sign, visible from miles
away, paint weathered off, stands tall, but tired. As I
crunch through the weeds, hundreds of birds roosting in
the shade of the eaves and in the backs of the rooms pour
out of the broken windows and open doorways. When I kneel
to take a picture of a TV set impaled on a fence post, I
fill my leg with spiny thorns, then fill my fingers with
spiny thorns trying to dig them out of my leg.
A hot wind blows north from Mexico,
carrying with it a storm of tumbleweeds, paper cups and
plastic bags. A temporary concrete wall has been laid between
I-40's two eastbound lanes so that the road can serve both
directions while the DOT resurfaces the westbound lanes.
The relentless wind pins all this garbage against it. Cars
and trucks barrel down this stretch very close to the wall,
flinging the junk high into the air. Animals usually able
to sprint across the road find themselves suddenly trapped
against the wall where they are mercilessly run down by
the highballing semis. It's a circus of flying debris and
carnage.
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Cafe-Motel
in Endee, New Mexico |
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I blast back across the Panhandle
on cheap Texas gas. Flat and empty. Amarillo has a giant
grocery-store sized boot outlet. "All they sells is
boots." I manage to make the far side of Amarillo in
about 20 minutes. Groom, Texas is home to the "largest
cross in the western hemisphere". Jesus Christ, that
thing is really big. Cadillac Ranch flies by ignored. That
artistic statement from another time holds little interest
for me. The rusting bodies heavily battered, and vandalized,
barely looked like cars for many years. Now recently moved
and restored, the whole point was lost years ago. It's too
obvious, too stilted. I'm looking for the places no one
else looks for.
The Panhandle continues to be
a photographic washout. My throttle foot itches. Longing
for the familiar environment of the desert, I make a beeline
south. As I roll into Lubbock the sun is nearly set and
the sky begins to cloud up. Again. I begin to feel I won't
find a subject to shoot tonight. As the last slivers of
sun bury themselves in the purple cloudbank, I get lucky:
the overcast sky suddenly splits, bathing the landscape
with a bright monochromatic blue moon-glow. There, on the
shoulder, an abandoned farm, dark and mysterious, like a
real-life horror movie set. The baked desolation of this
lonely place on the Texas-New Mexico border cuts right to
my soul. The atmosphere is timeless and still. The nearest
dot on the map says "Griffith, Texas," but I know
there's nothing there. Not a soul around for miles.
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Abandoned
farm near Griffith, Texas |
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The farmhouse is long abandoned,
but still locked up tight. I confine myself to the yard
filled with broken toys, junk cars, farm equipment, and
even a few boats. The vibe is intoxicating and I get into
a groove, shooting for several hours. When I first started
night shooting abandoned cars, I mainly found big 1950s
and 1960s Detroit iron. Recently it's been plastic 1970s
and 1980s cars- tonight my first minivan. How long before
I find my first abandoned SUV?
Around midnight, the three days
drive and tonight's shooting catch up with me, but the area
is just too flat and exposed to the ceaseless gusting winds
to camp. I hustle north for Clovis, New Mexico and a motel
room. The speedometer touches triple digits as I streak
up Highway 18 through the incongruously named Pep, New Mexico.
Porcupine Tree's arty and surreal CD Stupid Dream pounds
out of the stereo. The cats-eyes run screaming between my
feet as I straddle the centerline. All four windows down,
the blackness swirls around me.
I spend the third night at the
only motel in Clovis with the "Vacancy" light
still lit at 1:30AM. Like so many of the Southwest's small-town
motels, it's right next to the train tracks. All night the
freight trains' wheels make their piercing metallic shriek.
At the nearby siding they pick up and drop cars with a loud
crash every few minutes. They sound like non-stop traffic
accidents right outside my window. No freeway bypass here-
the main street through the center of Clovis is the highway
and semis bomb through town all night, adding to the din.
This motel sits on the edge of town where the speed limit
drops and every trucker downshifts to use compression braking
right outside my window. The big diesels roar and bray like
wild animals as they slow to a crawl, looking for speed-traps.
It seems this cardboard-walled room is at the hub of the
transportation universe, the eye in a storm of wheels. Huddled
on the bed, too wired to sleep, I sit up until 3 a.m. watching
The Weather Channel, trying to find a way to slice through
tomorrow's late-spring showers unscathed. The network's
light jazz is as bland as the institutional particleboard
furniture in my room. I'm stuck in a generic, throw-away
world. Day three has only covered 633 miles, but my body
does another 633 while I sleep, fitfully trapped between
the trains and the trucks.
Day
Four - Texas Hot>
