Approach and Capture

“You develop a technique and you lose. That’s just how it is.” 

Was Julia’s response to her friend, Jeremy, the host of the local access show. The well dressed host with the ordinary haircut rebuttled back with a confused look on his face. 

“But you will admit though, that technique equals style, yes?”

Julia shook her head, the straight strands of her black hair wavered.

 “No, no, no, Jeremy the two can be one in the same, but they can also not be. And in my case, they aren’t alike. You see, when you develop a technique, you become open to failure because if you only know how to do something one way, even if it might be the right way, what happens when that one way doesn’t work anymore?”

Even further lost in confusion, the host replied. 

“I apologize Julia, I don’t see where you’re going with this? Do you mean to tell me that by opening a can opener the right way, and doing it the same every time, which has never failed me before, that I am opening myself up to the possibility of it not working one day?” 

Julia nods her head, thinking shes got him on the right path.

“You’ve sort of got it, but what I’m talking about more is the experience of doing things. Life itself. There are many different ways to live your life, but who's to say you have to do it the same every. Single. Day?”

Jeremy is speechless. He leans his head in towards her, anxious to hear what her next sentence will be, or if the following sentence would expound upon it further. After another moment of silence, and of Jeremy leaning in trying to get her to say more, a voice from off-set calls “cut!”

Both Julia and Jeremy sigh upon hearing it. Jeremy rubs his forehead and shakes his head, looking down at the floor, almost as if to express how disappointed he was that he could hardly look at her. 

“Juia, I don’t really see what you were getting at, and the viewers aren’t going to either. So can you try and put, whatever your saying, into layman's terms, please?” 

Now looking her in the face, this time she is the one that looks down. “Please?” he repeats. She nods her head and affirms.

“Alright, we can shoot the segment next week, we don’t have any time left in the studio today to reshoot. I’ll do some sort of monologue to fill in the time.” 

He turns back to Julia, who is still looking down at the ground in self-doubt, and shame. Letting out a sigh he says, “Damn” under his breath, and goes over to her, and gives her a hug. It's a deep hug, but not deep enough for Julia, she was spiraling into a depression again. And she knew that this hug was just a subterfuge to cover his tracks. 

Jeremy lets go of the embrace and holds her shoulders as he tries to look her in the eyes. 

“Hey, Jules, hey, it’s alright.” She adjusts her head a little so her hair’s enclosement wasn’t so encroaching as it had been. Her eyes look to him.

“This was just a spur of the moment thing. Remember? There’s nothing to be upset about, this is supposed to be fun, remember?” 

He pauses, and looks away, eyes widening in disbelief, “Jesus christ, I sound like some child’s soccer coach.” He looks back, “Don’t take this too hard, alright? I support you. And don’t forget that.” 

And Julia knew this as she left the local cable access studio that afternoon. The leaves of fall swirled in the air, as she walked across the center of town to where the woods became the dominant the landscape again. In that forest, amongst the squirrels, insects and chirping birds, lay her spot. 

There was no well-beaten path to get to it. No, the words that she’d said on the talk show weren’t scripted. What Jeremy hadn’t known was how much what she’d said was central to who she was. She didn’t like doing things the same all the time. Every chance she got, she’d try out something different. 

Today wasn’t going to be the same either, she reaffirmed to herself as she began unzipping her FjallRaven backpack and taking out the camera she’d purchased a week ago. As she walked the last couple paces to her spot, she began trying to configure the camera. She was spry on her feet, so if she tripped over something she could recover easily. With the strap over her shoulder, she was just finishing taking the lens cap off, when she reached her spot, and looked up.

Her spot was this big boulder that jutted out of the side of a hill. On the top, where the giant boulder met the hill, it was flattened, almost as if it had been cut to be sat on, or meditated on. Next to the boulder, there was an escarpment that created an enclosure with an overhang. The physics of the overhang didn’t make anysense, as there was nothing holding up this bit of peninsula. It looked like it should’ve collapsed upon the boulder being moved aside, as this is what the enclosure looked like situated next to the boulder.

If her church-going, Christian grandmother had seen this, she would’ve compared it to, that of the boulder Jesus moved aside upon his resurrection. But Julia’s grandmother had never seen this spot, nor had anyone for that matter. She didn’t want anyone knowing about it, for if they did, she feared it would no longer be sacred to her anymore. 

She marveled at her spot, how perfect it was. An image can say a thousand words. She brought the camera to her eye, and framed it so that she could capture it all, then snapped a picture. The polaroid picture printed, she took it out and waved it. She held it up to her face, holding it in front of the sun so it was visible without any glare. 

It was her spot alright, definitely her spot. Everything from the impossible hanging dirt above the little enclosure, to the...and that’s when she really began to scrutinize the picture. She had wanted to capture everything about her spot, including the flat part at the top of the rock. But what she saw in the photo wasn’t getting that. Instead, the bulge of the rock facing her covered where the flat spot was. 

Frustrated with her failed attempt, she returned the camera to her eye and tried to get it to capture all of it. She crouched down, thinking that potentially she could get the flatness of the top, by getting it from below. She didn’t need to capture the texture of the top, just that it was oddly flat. The texture didn’t matter, because she never saw it anyways, it was always beneath her when she sat. In this new angle, the sun shined right into the lense. It overtook the top of the rock more than she had wanted it to. 

“Shit.”

She got back up, and took a step backwards, unslung her bag and tossed it off to the side. Aggressively returning the camera up to her eye and she peered through once more. Now the frame was too wide and seemed not as professional as the first one. She returned to her original position.  

She rose the camera above her head and held her breath as she pressed the button. She brought it back down to see what she’d gotten. She took the polaroid out, whipped it, then looked. 

Now it definitely caught the flat part at the top, even caught a little bit of the light green moss on the side, but it didn’t capture just how deep the enclosure before the escarpment was. 

Julia understood the concept of photography, she knew that photographs told tales, told life stories, dramatic conflict, expressed personality, and captured moments. But she didn’t understand anything other than the meanings, philosophies and concepts of it. She’d never taken a class, didn’t read anything, all she knew was that she wanted to do something different, and her “technique” was to do things naturally. 

Naturally, that’s how nature is. That’s how nature was before Man started making techniques to succeed. The minute something begins to be repeated is the moment that it dies. It stops being authentic when it is copied. These were Julia’s thoughts, and they were true, this she knew. But to explain it to anybody else, as had been plainly displayed with Jeremy, was futile. Such a simple thing that only she could understand, her and probably Thoreau, but she’d never read his book on how he lived in the woods for two years.  But she assumed all the same.

And then something occurred to her, as she looked down at the second failure in frustration. Was photography just the mere process of capturing things by technique? Well, yes, but only if she followed those rules. She could do these things on her own without any books help. She didn’t need a “self-help” book to teach her how to use a damn camera. Cameras captured things as they naturally were, and there was no technique to that. Just a simple click and it was in her hands. 

She put the two polaroids she’d been holding in her fingers and placed them in a little pouch on her backpack, and returned to her ready-to-shoot position. 

“I don’t need technique to capture your beauty, Mr. Rock.” As if it had spoken back to her, “I apologize sir, Mr. Boulder. Silly me, I’d forgotten that you’d divorced Mrs. Cave.”

With these silly exchanges out there, she went to capturing her spot on all sides. One after another, she took the photos as she pleased, she hardly waited for one to be finished printing before she was onto the next one. And then another awesome thought occurred to her, what if she created a collage of these pictures in her room to mirror her spot? 

“Yeah, that’s an awesome idea! Isn’t it Mrs. Cave?” She trotted over to the overhang and tapped the side of it lightly with a big giddy smile on her face. It didn’t occur to her, however, that the weather wasn’t cold enough yet to solidify the soil where it was. She had found this place earlier in the summer, so she had never seen it in the winter. And whether or not it would last through the snow that was to come, wasn’t even on her radar. Julia lived in the moment, and she tried to be very strict about that. To look into the past was something she forbidded herself from doing, and only on occasion did she allow herself to picture a future that was realistic. 

But realism and Julia just didn’t go together. Much like how her and technique didn’t, Julia knew what was her, and what wasn’t. 

Satisfied with what she’d taken she gathered up the pile of photos, filed them neatly into the small pouch, and headed home. Her home was an apartment complex on the other side of the woods from town, it was a newer development compared to the rest of the town, where Jeremy shot his show in. She’d gone to school in this town, she’d grown up in this town, and she felt that her time to leave was approaching. 

She exited the woods and tromped dirt onto the concrete sidewalks of the complex. Growing up is hard to do, no one ever said it was going to be easy, but when your parents both die a month after you graduated from high school, what was “not easy” becomes inconceivable. A car accident coming home from date-night. The incoming money that her parents had planned to pay for her college with, where she was planning to major in Theatre (nonetheless), went into trying to save their lives. And to add insult to injury, despite funneling everything into their recovery something went wrong, and they never recovered. 

She had to grow up fast, and without a therapist to help her process what she had lost. There wasn’t enough money, insurance could only cover so much. So now she worked to overcome this tragedy. But she chose not to think about these things, where would it get her anyways?

  Light brown tinted walls lined the small apartment, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, whose small balcony looked out onto the woods. And this small balcony was where she sometimes sat, in the small space that was only big enough for a chair (which she didn’t have), she’d look out at the woods, then up at the moon. 

Not tonight though, tonight she had an agenda. It was her day off, and she wanted to fit as much into it as possible. She took the photos out of her bag and began configuring them on her bed in a way that would mimic how she’d put it up on the wall across from it. As she went to, she wondered to herself if this collage of her spot was too much. Was it going to far? And then she stopped, what would a girl or guy she was dating say if they saw this in her room? 

Of course they’d ask, but what would she tell them? Should she stay abstinent until she left town? Well, for starters she wasn’t really rambunctious when it came to dating, she seldom dated. It was a small town, she didn’t have a car, and any guy or girl who’d drive to see her might be crazy anyways. 

Then she thought better of it all, and decided to leave that predicament to when it came up, if it ever came up, which Julia decided it probably wouldn’t. But what if it did though?

She stopped what she was doing, opened her laptop, and put on some music to drown out her lingering and wandering thoughts. To Spotify, she put on Alternative playlist. Avril Lavigne’s Sk8ter Boy began playing. 

“Nope.”

She changed it to 80’s mix. Simple Minds’s, Don’t you forget about me starts playing, she presses skip. Then some upbeat 80’s sounding song she hadn’t heard before begins. 

“Aaaand I’m not the kind that likes to tell you, just what I want to do”

A content smile spreads across her face as she starts bobbing her head, and returns to her project. With each post allignment, she batted away any hesitant thought she’d had previously about this being a bad idea. Though some of the photos weren’t exact replicas in order of what she’d wanted her wall to look like, it wasn’t too shabby. 

And just as dusk turned to dark, night turned to dawn. Julia was up first thing the next morning to visit her spot again before work. She’d taken another polaroid of the new collage she’d put up on the wall, and wanted to see how much of her spot it captured. 

As she got ready for the long day ahead, she had the urge to listen to piano music, and so she did. As she prepared her lunch, the quick keystrokes of Phillip Glass and Max Richter filled her ears and the small apartment. Though the piano notes didn’t necessarily reflect the same level of excitement she was feeling, the pace at which they were being hit mimicked her exhilaration to see her spot again. As the water in the shower made smooth lines of blur over her face, her feet tapped to the rhythm of the piano strokes. Not always on key, as she wasn’t familiar with these songs, but on the occasional spur, she’d ace it. And when she did, she’d congratulate herself. 

The front door of her apartment building flung open and she strutted towards the woods in a different direction then she’d entered and exited the day before. She found a playlist of piano music on her phone and began playing it aloud, but not too loud. Swinging her arms as she walked, she had been anticipating this moment. Her pace gained speed as the keystrokes picked up, but then, just as they had picked up, they slowed. 

This irritated her, she looked down at her phone and skipped to the next song, only to find that the next song was the same. She hadn’t been looking at the song names as she had played them before, so she didn’t know what she was looking for. The only thing she knew was that she was looking for the fast keystrokes. She growled as she looked down at the phone in her hand and shook it. Continuing to walk, she kept pressing skip, but was only finding the slow piano songs. Even when she looked up “fast piano songs” in the search bar, no such thing came up. 

“Come on!”

Just then the ground underneath her gave way, she suddenly found herself sliding down an incline. The suddenness of being off-balance made her heart race. Not knowing what was going on, she sat down in confusion, as her slide came to a halt. What had happened? She knew these woods by heart, where had she miscalculated?

She looked up and realized to her dismay where she was. 

“Whoa, hey are you okay?”

Came a voice that seemed to be miles away. But in her stupor, the voice didn’t register as real. She hadn’t gone this way before, she realized as tears began to well up in her eyes, but they didn’t break the surface.    

The backpacking couple looked at each other in surprise, as they rushed over to where Julia sat in the crumbled mound of dirt. 

“We didn’t hear you coming. If we had, we would’ve warned you. There was this weird hanging peninsula that just dropped off. It collapsed under our feet. Sarah and I nearly hurt ourselves, We didn’t see it either.”