OPENING SALVO // Girls Gone Wild
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee • photo by Eva Wo
EXCERPT //
There is a photograph I love of a camping trip I took with girlfriends just after we’d graduated high school, in which we hiked and camped together at Ricketts Glen in central Pennsylvania. We are all baggy T-shirts and floppy hats, sneakers and socks and frizzy hair. It’s not exactly the wilds—the deer were tame enough that they would come into our campsites asking for food.
Someone is always absent in these photos from the early ’90s, because someone had to take the photograph. We did our best to capture moments in time so we could remember them, but there was no drumbeat of, “Take another one! I look awful!” because we would have to wait to have them developed, then to be shared with a few people, or whomever it would be in the future, sitting and flipping through our heavy albums. Importantly, there is no misunderstanding about what constitutes reality: The picture is just a picture.
What I like best is the freedom of our smiles. We are taking a picture not of the landscape behind us, but of us, of our friendship, of the years that we’d spent together up until that moment learning and talking and laughing and crying and struggling and succeeding. Those easy smiles are hard won, and that is why they are so precious. That is their beauty to me. We know who we are together, even as we are about to be split apart by the forward motion of our lives; off to college, off to work, off to being adults in the world, some peak we are climbing toward, baby blue jays feeling our wings. In our smiles is the naive easiness of young adults who have not yet fully fledged. Who? Who will we be? There is no whiff of our own death yet in the wind. We’re country kids, and we know that things die so we can live. But our own death is so far in the distance as to be imperceivable, a dot on a far horizon. As we draw closer to it in time, as the decades recede behind us, it will become more and more clearly a circling vulture in the clouds.
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