Mnemonic Journey

In the morning I took a bike ride around Lakeport and I realized that I'd had a dream about this very place several years ago. In the dream I was walking around the lakeside village and I'd come upon a front lawn covered in a large sheet of roll-out grass turf. I then saw that tucked beneath the edge of the turf right next to the sidewalk was a stack of freshly minted 100 dollar bills. I can't remember what I did next, but it felt like a good omen.

I had to turn down this one.

It turned out to be a pretty pastoral road with a dead end and fences on either side, complete with a Beware of Dog sign.




I stopped in Willits in Mendocino County, the hometown of my friend Ryan Pierce, to do laundry and revisit some places I'd photographed a couple of years before. Not much about the town had changed but I was unable to find this hole in the fence, which I could have sworn was right off the 101 on South Main St. Perhaps it had gotten completely overgrown by weeds or somebody patched it or put in a new fence. I would have thought I'd imagined the whole thing, if I didn't have the photograph as proof of its former existence.


I stopped and photographed a field that I'd previously photographed on a January morning in 2007 after sleeping in my Ford Escort (how far I've come!) in the Safeway parking lot. I didn't have the latter photo in front of me as reference, but I ended up shooting it from almost the same exact vantage point based on my memory of the picture. Or perhaps if we were given the chance to do things all over again, we'd end up doing things the same way anyway.



I was getting prepared to spend the night in Willits, but was suddenly overcome with this strong feeling that I should move on, that repeating the past, retreading the same paths to the same spots, was not what this trip was about. It is tempting to repeat the things that you know will work, to get in a groove, but what I was looking for could not be written on top of any previous stories, even if they were my own.