Flashes of Light

On a July day in 1877, the Sea of Cortez began to boil. Heat swelling from the sun beating on the water for over a year would begin to drift up and mold and sculpt it into a cloud. This rising, energized water would grow in fury, as the heat increased and so did the population of possessed sea water, the droplets began to bump, and grind and smack against each other. As this rowdy brawl, we refer to as a cloud became more agitated, it grew hotter, not even realizing that it was being blown and directed by the wind. 

All this to say, my fascination with rain, and my career as a mortuary photographer both began on July 9th, 1877.

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The year is 1890, and the Hare family tries awkwardly to arrange themselves organically. This is a feat hard enough to pull off when each member of the photo is moving. It’s considerably harder when you also must position and arrange your recently deceased six-year-old daughter's corpse to seem as if nothing happened.

We’d attempted to use stilts hidden inside her clothes to keep her up, but they’d break just before I could snap the photo. What's worse, all those drops to the floor were starting to give her bruises, which are not what you're looking for when you photograph a family photo for the last time. 

So ultimately, we decided to have her in a chair, with Mr. Hare holding her shoulder against the back of the chair so she wouldn’t slump over. This left the odd task of trying to arrange Mrs. Hare and their second daughter close enough to their father to look natural while giving them enough space from the dead girl for them to be comfortable. At the end of the day, they wound up biting the bullet and scooching up close to her.

It had been over an hour since we started, and it was showing. The other thing beginning to show was the fact that their daughter had been dead 4 days by now. That’s not a great range of time for decay, but it was made worse by the summer, a monsoon bringing humid heat that would steam her. The whole house smelt of death, and the Hare family now had to spend an hour trying to stand casually with the source. You could see how tired they all were in their eyes. I’d say the same for the dead girl, but as of that moment, her eyes were closed. Probably for eternity. Or until the bugs eat them.

I took a look outside before I prepared the camera for what would (hopefully) be the last shot. It was looking like it would rain.

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In 1877, the water droplets had formed from a mob to an army. They’d organized into a giant, dark, and floating fortress of anger. It was not very wide per se, maybe 20 or 30 miles in diameter, but what the storm lacked in span, it made up for in density. 

Trees and bushes began to blow around the valleys of Arizona and California. Everyone who’d lived here in the Sonoran desert understood what it meant. Rain. In a small ranch home nestled in a valley between two small mountain ranges, a mother was cooking dinner for her family when she smelt the familiar smell of desert rain. Creosote wafting in with the bacon and vegetables in her stew. She walked out to the door.

”Ada! Get inside!” She called to her daughter.

Ada was off-wading in the creek by their home, looking for lizards and grabbing bunches of frightened tadpoles from the water. She pretended not to hear her mother.

”Ada! Right now!”

She set the latest of her tadpole victims in the creek and began to walk back to the house. She took one last longing glimpse at the creek as she began walking into the house. But the wind and the scent of creosote called her. She wanted to see the creek when it was full, get up close to it, and see how it flooded the banks. 

Meanwhile, in the grand outpost in the sky; the heated fury-filled condensation began to rise even further, bringing in a metamorphosis to its unruly inhabitants. As the water rose, it began to cool. Slowly the droplets began to freeze, and as they solidified and battled with each other, the blows they inflicted grew mighty.

The water found that as ice, it could wield spells of unearthly and plasmatic nature. Each ice crystal began sending blasting bolts of light and energy at its brethren, ricocheting and leaving great booming blasts of sound, causing glimpses of light to illuminate the clouds and the darkened sky. And as the ice crystals grew tired, weary, and much too heavy to support themselves, they began to fall. They fell like a billion little Icarus’s, full of pride and doom. Slowly melting, they managed to send out the first of their flashes of warning to those in the cloud. Together they mashed and raged until finally their magic manifested and began to shoot towards the ground, bright white and hot as the sun, twisting off like the branches of a tree before slapping into the earth with a mighty-

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WHAPAP!!

The camera cried as it snapped the photo with a massive flash. 

“Are we finally done now?” Mrs. Hare said, barely above a whisper.

”Almost dear,” Mr. Hare replied to his wife, “We can't keep her here all day. She’ll start to smell.”

”She already does,” their living daughter said.

Mr. Hare sighed, “More than she already does.”

“I just don’t know why we have to do this in the first place…” she said.

I couldn’t really blame her for being so annoyed. It’s tough enough on an adult to deal with the death of a family member. The shakiness in Mrs. Hare’s voice was proof enough of this. But for a teen to have to sit with her younger sister’s corpse in a hot humid room for an hour; well it’s enough to be annoyed about.

”I know you’ve probably heard this before,” I said to her, “But you’ll be glad someday to have this.”

She nodded apathetically, a look of exasperation still on her face. She would understand someday.

I turned to Mr. And Mrs. Hare. “I can help out with all this, she doesn’t need to stay if she doesn’t want to.”

”Are you sure?” Mr. Hare asked.

”Of course, it’s only right. I understand it’s a lot.”

Their daughter thanked me and rushed off to another part of the house. I walked with Mr. And Mrs. Hare to the kitchen where they’d kept the casket, and I helped them lug it up the stairs to the room where we’d shot the photos.

We picked her up from the chair and gently laid her into her casket. Mr. Hare hesitated before closing the lid on her, taking one last chance to touch the face of his daughter. I could see the tears well up in his eyes. I looked at Mrs. Hare, who’s eyes were closed, evidently unable to look at her daughter in this state. 

Mr. Hare closed the lid, and wiped the tears from his face, “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” 

Mrs. Hare nodded, opened her eyes and kneeled down by the casket.

Mr. Hare turned to me as he opened the door, “I’ll have a coach chartered for you, thanks again for your help.”

I thanked him and went to sit by Mrs. Hare

“How do you do this?” Mrs. Hare asked me in a tired voice, “Day in and day out spending your time with the dead and grieving. I don’t know how you don’t do it without becoming numb to it.”

”That’s a good question ma’am. I think most people in my profession do. They must look at it clinically and scientifically. I approach it much differently. You see, I’m already numb, every minute of every hour of every day. But it’s this that snaps me out of it, forces me to mourn, to ache, to recover, and to find closure. Every finished photo is enough for me to feel as if the ashes have gone back to the dust, and I can help send the dead off to their final rest. Doing this allows me to feel, it’s something spiritual. The only thing that’s as important to me as this, is the rain,” I looked out the window at the coming storm, “Beautiful day for both, I suppose.”

Mrs. Hare looked at me like she didn’t know quite whether to pity me, be disgusted by me, or respect me. I think she did a little of all three. 

“Thank you for your help. I wish you all the best.” she said, composing herself and seemingly ushering me off.

I packed up the last of my supplies and carefully put them into my bag. I had to be sure no water would get in from the rain and ruin the photo. Once I had triple-secured everything, I said my goodbyes to the Hares along with an estimate of how long it would be before the photos would be developed. I grabbed my hat and my coat, and walked into the stagecoach they had chartered for me to be brought home.

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The cloud could truly be called a storm now. It poured out in the gallons full, wailing and moaning rain and hail. It blotted out the sky, wind-whipped, and slashed in every direction. The rain soon followed, spraying water down, up, sideways, and backward.

The storm charged like a chariot over the desert. It passed over mountains and valleys, flooding rivers and creeks 10 times past their capacity. The water raced with the storms. It took down trees and ripped boulders from their ancient resting places. It came in solid walls of water, staggered only slightly due to the twists and turns of the terrain slowing it down. 

And it all was racing towards one macabre finish line, a small little creek by a ranch house in a valley. Where a little girl who’d snuck out from her mother's watch was sitting by the stream, waiting (far too close to the water) to catch a glimpse of the spectacle. 

Lightning bolts twisted and burnt the ground, flaying trees and sending loud shots of thunder through the land. Trees and bushes too cracked and blew over, as the water overran its banks and slammed into the riparian corridors that once caged it. 

Ada heard the wall of water that would kill her before she could see it. It ripped her off her perch and flung her like a toy downstream. Her mother realized she was missing and ran outside just in time to see her get swept away. She sprinted to the deadly river and threw herself in after her daughter. She should have known it was too late. Ada had been mangled and slashed to death far before she could drown. All the trees and rocks stole her last breaths as they too were swept out of control downriver. Her mother soon found a similar fate.

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I left the stagecoach just as the rain began to sprinkle. I tipped the driver and lugged my camera bag into my little ranch house in a valley by a creek. I put the bag into the room to develop the photos later. And then walked back into the main room of the house. On the opposite wall of the furnace, was the wall of every photo I’d taken. You could tell which one was dead in each one by how well captured they were. The more still someone is, the higher quality you get photographed. And you can’t get much more still than the dead. 

In the center of the wall of the dead, was a little window facing the creek. And in front of the creek, you could see two gravestones. They have no bodies under them, those were lost to the river. Only something to remember them by. That and the photos. That’s why it’s so spiritual. It’s why I find such catharsis in it. Every photo puts them a little more at rest. And in each family, I see a little bit of both of them. The two most beautiful stones lost to the river, sit just in my backyard.

I walked out to the rain and looked out as the storm began to whip. The water so fierce it slashed my face. I open my arms wide and embrace the sky. I’m always so happy to see you visit my loves. I say to them in my mind. So kind of the storm to return what it took from me.