Photo Safari: 4,360
Miles in Five Days by Troy Paiva
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.
|
|
Day One
- Motel Kalifornia
At last, the mega road-trip I've
been waiting for. The run begins southbound from my suburban
San Francisco Bay Area home on a warm Saturday morning then
due east at Bakersfield. Alone, I am chasing the ghosts
of the American road, wandering the western highways for
as long as I can, covering as many miles as I can. Before
I know it, I've driven 975 miles in 14 hours. I don't remember
being passed by many cars, but one sticks in my mind. While
crossing the straight, flat stretches of eastern Arizona,
I see a big white American sedan closing in my mirror, out
of the setting sun. It passes at a slow walk, its cruise
control on 88 and I see that it's an official New Mexico
State vehicle of some sort. The driver wrestles with an
unruly newspaper, folding and refolding it, pinching the
creases meticulously like he's sitting at the breakfast
table. Eventually setting the sports on the steering wheel,
he picks up speed and motors away. I press play on Booker
T. and the M.G.'s "Melting Pot" again, and the
psychedelic organ soul pulses me rhythmically along into
the dusk.
 |
|
 |
|
Roy's
Cafe in Amboy, California |
|
 |
|
 |
|
At least three times a year, I
make an epic road trip. Two thousand miles in three days
is not at all unusual. When I was a teenager my friends
and I would take off in our beater junk cars, storming across
the Southwest deserts. Just exploring for the fun of it.
Driving in shifts, round the clock, we'd cover thousands
of miles in a couple of high-speed days, the vast expanses
of desert compressed into scale models. I gladly volunteered
for the late-night driving shifts and watched with fascination
as countless abandoned buildings and towns unreeled in the
windshield. To my friends, it was just an off-the-wall thing
to do, but for me, the lure of the desert night began to
take on mythical proportions. Once I picked up night photography
in the late 1980s, these surreal safaris blossomed into
new meaning and purpose. I started to document the decaying
American roadside with long time exposures lit by the full
moon. It wasn't long before I added colored lighting during
the exposure, sculpting the shadows like a stage set (none
of this work is digitally manipulated, it's all done "in
camera" at the scene). Now I do the trips alone, tossing
the sleeping bag and tripods in the back of my crusty Subaru.
The day is a blur of concrete,
sage and green Interstate signs with only one short meal
stop and a series of quick gas and pee breaks. A long day,
but it's a familiar and satisfying pace. I ramble into Gallup
long after dark, eyes watering and neck stiff. Both my head
and the sky are too cloudy to shoot- so I randomly pick
a cheap motel room and pack my gear in for the night. Ironically,
tonights' cable movie is Kalifornia. A strange portent for
the drive ahead? I fall asleep as Brad Pitt murders the
proprietor of Roy's Cafe in Amboy. A few years ago, the
current owner of Roy's chased me off with a shotgun as I
finished my first exposure of the famous sign.
Day
Two - Don't Mess with Texas>
