Stop 1.5...Revelation..

By the time we arrived in Narragansett, I had a much better understanding of why my camera focused on the oceans and kept navigating me to the shores where winter surf was abound.  It was some time after I returned from Montauk that I began to understand why I took pictures of surfers on that day, but it seemed to be a premonition of what was to come.  

I have a little shop on the eastern coast of Connecticut.  I sell home goods and art and found items from old antique fields and far away places.  It is a cool, bohemian shop in the midst of a preppy, yacht club kind of a crowd, so paying the bills was always a bit of a struggle.  I decided to host a bookshop in the back room of the space to help fill the place with wanderers that I hoped to become customers and with money enough to pay the bills.  It was an amazing combination of beautiful things and books-so many books.  

 On one November day, the store was slow and I spent my time roaming around looking at the products, trying on the jewelry and looking through the books. On a round table just in front were a group of books on all things sea-some Gray Main photography books, books on the best Chris Craft boats and a book on the 50 best surf spots in the world.  Something drew me to pick up the surf book-each page boasted a different location, best times to surf and amazing photographs of waves.  

I proceeded to the register and I bought the book.  I had no idea why I bought this book, but I did and I put it inside the camouflaged bag adorned with skull and crossbones on its front.  I brought it home, took it out and left it beside the couch not thinking much of it.  

 Sawyer, my oldest and at that time only son, gravitated to the book as soon as he got home from school.  He would look through the chapters, marvel at the waves and sharks and incredible images that we saw of the biggest waves in the world.  He asked me about geography and climate and the people that would ride these huge waves that we saw from page to page.  It became a daily conversation that transformed into a travel journey of the world right inside of our living room, inside of our minds and in the mind of a 5-year-old boy that shares the same wanderlust as his mommy. 

 After looking at it for a few days, I told him that mommy was going to do it.  

“Do what?” he asked.  

 Mommy is going to travel to all of these 50 surf spots and write a story about the things that I learn. 

 I am going to take pictures and learn about a life I don’t know about.  I am going to travel again, taste different tastes and sip different drinks from the entire world around.  This journey was going to be for me and of course, there will inevitably be trips that can be shared, but together or not, this was something that I had to do for myself-for my soul.  Lessons of lonely plane trips, failed photography moments, exuberant perfect shots and curious conversations are what I hope to see and experience, but whatever lie ahead, I am going to try it and see what roads appear that I never knew were there.   Part of the impetus to propel this journey forward is to ease the loneliness of motherhood and failed career starts, but another part is to do something better-show my son, myself and my partner a better version of myself and the person that I want to be.  

 For the better part of the last fifteen years, my camera has been a tool to pay the bills, which has come with some mild success and quite a lot of failure.  It has been a place to hide and a place to be seen.  And now that I look back on it, my passion for photography was never going to be found in the commercial world.  The pictures that I was meant to take would most likely never make me any money or gain me any sort of recognition, but they would make me feel something and encourage me to find something more.  Coincidentally, these are the very same things that I want to teach my son to see in the world.  

 Teaching Sawyer from the lessons of my life remains one of my most important missions as a parent.  When he asks me a question, even though his questions are endless, I always answer them in the best way that I know how.  When he falls down, I talk about how many more times that I have fallen than times that I have not and how much that has taught me in my life.  When he wants to try something new, I always encourage it and always make sure that he does his best.  There is no quitting until the end of the commitment and then we reassess.  When he listens to really bad music, I always require an infusion of something good-right now, we are really going hard into Eminem and to rap.  So, as I am teaching him the things that I know and don’t know, I am setting out to teach myself thing that I know and things that I don’t, but what we are both learning simultaneously is the art of travel both inside and out in the world. 

 As life would have it, page 1 in our 50 best surf spots in the world that we turn to.. Ditch Plains, Montauk.  So, without even knowing it, , the journey had already been laid out for me and what lies ahead most likely will take me the better part of the next 15 years of my life and just as I teach Sawyer, I only have to try and do my best and see it through to the end of where this takes me.

 And with that, I began to draw a map of the places that would be next stops-Narragansett, Barbados, Montreal, Iceland and then a respite to start making work in order to pay for the next round of trips.  

 So, the surf journey begins…