Читать книгу Arctic Solitaire - Paul Souders - Страница 12

At the time, thankfully, Washington, DC, offered an abundance of freelance photography work, so only briefly did I have to subsist on unemployment checks, cheap beer, and self-pity.

I read about presidential elections scheduled in Haiti after dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s abrupt retirement to the French Riviera. Along with the promise of political mayhem and potential bloodshed, all within a cheap two-hour plane ride of Miami, there was a firm date for the events. Of course, I had no business in Haiti: no assignment, no prospective client, not even a valid press pass. I was just one more self-styled, self-appointed photojournalist with the zealous conviction that the world needed to see events through my eyes, my lens. I had a little room left on my credit cards, so I headed to the airport with a bag stuffed with forty rolls of Kodachrome, some cameras and lenses, and, looking back, a black hole where my soul was supposed to be.

Church bells rang as the sun rose on election day, November 29, 1987. Hundreds of men and women had lined up before dawn to cast their ballots in Haiti’s first free elections in thirty years. The mood seemed determined and solemn. For a fleeting moment, I imagined I could capture the bravery and dignity of these people, who’d shrugged off a brutal dictatorship and now clung to hopes and dreams of a less blighted future.

But what the hell did I know? Before the sun had cleared the central cathedral’s towers, gunfire echoed through the city. I was riding in some reporter’s rented Toyota, crammed into the middle back seat between a couple other photographers. We were looking for the source of the shooting when an identical Toyota with government plates sped toward us. Just as it passed, four loud shots rang out and the three of us instinctively cowered, trying to duck into the same tiny space. The gunmen either had truly awful aim or, more likely, simply wanted to scare the hell out of a carload of blancs. The car sped down a side street and emerged a few blocks up the hill. We saw the shadow of a machine gun appear out the car window as they closed in on the line of voters outside a polling station. We watched as people scattered and bodies fell in the seconds before the sound of shots reached us.

We drove up and shot them, too, photographing the wounded and the terrified as they huddled behind church walls. We heard sustained gunfire not far away, and set off to follow that sirens’ call. We sped all the way to Ecole Nationale Argentine Bellegarde, a small school that for this one day served as a polling station. It was more than three decades ago, but I can still see soldiers milling around the small courtyard, and the scattered fire trucks and ambulances. A man lay crumpled in the dust, blood running freely from a machete wound slashed deep into his skull. Did he turn over and reach up, or am I just imagining that now? I can still hear myself yelling—in English, of course—for someone to get a fucking ambulance.

There were bodies everywhere. I tried to keep track of how many, but I kept losing count. A young girl was curled up in a corner, head resting in her arms over a basket, almost like she was sleeping. A soldier walked past with a machine gun in one hand, and with the other picked her up by her hair. Her face was missing, shot away. In a large, open-air classroom, the dead lay scattered across the floor. There was so much blood.

This was everything I’d come for: the real deal. But my hands were shaky and my head buzzed with static. The ambulances drove off, and soon the policemen and troops began to drift away. A strange quiet settled over the school. My crew was ready to head back, and maybe I had seen enough for one day, too. We left minutes before another wave of gunmen arrived to spray the courtyard with small arms fire, killing one cameraman and wounding several others.

For a day or two, we stood at the center of the world’s attention. I was still young enough and dumb enough to believe we were going to shove this barbarism, this unreasoning violence, right in the world’s face. The world looked up from breakfast, blinked, and had another slice of toast.

And that was that.

I made what little hay I could out of the trip, humble-bragging about “that time I got shot at,” and showing my gruesome snaps to colleagues. A few days after returning home, I woke up before dawn in my dismal apartment. For a half-waking moment, the furniture was draped not with scattered luggage and dirty laundry but with the bodies of dead Haitian children, dozens of them. I stared numbly at the carnage, closed my eyes, and blinked slowly . . . once . . . twice . . . until they were gone.

I kept at it for the next year or so. I would shoot leftover assignments for the big DC newspaper bureaus until I saved enough to buy another plane ticket. Panama, back when that seemed like news. Israel, during one of its regular spasms of unrest. I maintained a smug exterior, but in truth I was circling the bowl, swirling toward both moral and financial bankruptcy, though only Citibank seemed to much notice or care.

In desperation, I started looking for another day job and I cast a wide net. I was willing to try just about any place that offered me a steady paycheck and a change of scene. A photo editor in far-off Alaska, in a move he grew to regret in the years to come, threw me a lifeline. The day after New Year’s, I packed everything I owned into my Honda two-seater, cracked the windows to dissipate my hangover’s fumes into one last slate-gray Baltimore dawn, and left behind everything and everyone I knew.

After six long days of driving, Anchorage, Alaska, greeted me with a record cold snap, toe-numbing even by local standards. It was twenty-seven degrees below zero, and my editor, a man of sly humor, thought it good sport to pack me off to Fairbanks, where temperatures had plummeted to minus sixty. I wandered around town bundled up like the Michelin Man, wearing a brand-new, bright-red Eddie Bauer parka and military bunny boots. I felt like I’d been exiled to Neptune.

Northbound on Alaska Highway

In the years I spent in Alaska, I had to photograph my share of the happy staples of any news photographer’s day. On top of that, the Last Frontier offered its own endlessly inventive methods of self-harm to admire and record: snowmobile crashes, bush plane tragedies, and an endless array of firearms-related stupidity. But I could also wake up and find a moose on the front porch, and I watched bald eagles on my morning drive to work.

I still saw myself as a hard-news man, but over the span of a couple years I began to spend less time obsessively tracking the police scanner and more days out hiking in the Chugach Mountains that began at the city’s edge. The silence I found there drowned out some of the noise in my head. In the wilderness, I saw light and form in different ways, and thought about other stories I might be able to tell. There was still pain and death and no small measure of cruelty in the natural world. But unlike all I’d witnessed in Haiti and elsewhere, I could see it wasn’t for sport, and it wasn’t for some man’s profit or power or simple stupid meanness.

It dawned on me that, rather than tying my wagon to the sordid business of exposing the endless depths of human cruelty, I’d live longer and sleep better if I worked to record some of the beauty, wonder, and drama of the wild lands that surround us.

And on those rare occasions, nearly a quarter century later, when I need to quiet the journalistic demons from my past, I ask myself: what’s the biggest story of our time? Isn’t it man’s ongoing and ever-quickening war upon nature? What if I photographed that battlefield? What if I shared the stories of those victims?

Flat tire on safari, Masai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya