Photo Safari: 4,360
Miles in Five Days by Troy Paiva
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1)
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 Two
- Don't Mess with Texas
The next day grinds on across
New Mexico. Interstate 40's shoulder is littered with bloated,
dead dogs and twisted carcasses of recapped tires. Bypassed
Route 66 towns lay sleepy and arthritic alongside the freeway
with its endless convoys of semis throbbing past. The legendary
old highway is reduced to a butchered afterthought of a
frontage road. Running from nowhere to nowhere else, its
blind crests and tight curves impossible for today's high-speed
tractor-trailers. Weeds grow in the expansion joints and
the centerline peels off in chunks.
Petro, Pilot, Flying J, Loves-
these are the truck stops of the Southwest. Actually no
longer called truck stops, they are now "Travel Centers."
They are your friends. At night they glow like gritty space
stations inviting you in from the black void. They are a
refuge for drivers, a place to cool your jets, get a cup
of 100-mile mud, and maybe buy a CB radio. I gas up anonymously,
sticking my credit card in the slot, pushing a couple of
buttons. I never have to communicate with a soul. Thanks
to post-modern technology, the road gets a little bit lonelier.
I shuffle stiffly into the garish building to have a stretch
and pick up a snack. The trucker's lounge TV is on The Weather
Channel. Dazed long-haul drivers with the "1,000-mile
stare", sprawl in overstuffed waiting-room chairs.
On the wall, a big map of the US with lit pins shows each
location of this chain's travel centers. I marvel at how
many I've been to, but also at how many more I haven't.
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Gas
station in Santa Rosa, New Mexico |
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The front of the Subaru is crusted
with thousands of insects. Metallic with them. The windshield
is peppered with every flavor, size and shape, creating
a strangely beautiful backlit patina. I even have to scrub
the headlights. Windshield squeegee buckets out here smell
like death and decay. They are never drained, only refreshed
occasionally. I'm sure some of them have had this slurry
of gore in them for years.
There's no "Welcome to Texas"
sign on Interstate 40, just one that reads "Don't Mess
with Texas. 10- to 1000-Dollar Fine for Littering".
What do you have to throw out to only get tagged for 10
bucks? At Vega, I turn north looking for photo ops making
a lazy loop through Dahlhart, Stratford, Dumas and back
to Amarillo as the glowing red sun sinks into the monsoon
clouds. This area is billiard table-smooth farmland with
hundreds of abandoned silos and grain elevators banging
and creaking in the endless plains wind, but nothing that
I feel like shooting. I head west, back toward New Mexico
and melting adobe homes in Cuervo and a rotting gas station/motel
complex in Newkirk that caught my eye six hours earlier.
I spend the night a few miles down a dirt road off I40.
The winds blast through the red rock canyons as I toss and
turn, crammed into the back of the Subaru.
Day
Three - A Circus of Flying Debris and Carnage>
