Hello friends,
The light right now is at an angle I don't understand. It could be the altitude: 3,200 feet in Rapid City, a mile high in Denver, 2,100 feet even in Kearney, Nebraska. There is nothing on the horizon to diffuse the bright autumn light of the high plains.
As I approach the Wyoming state line in my car, I snap a photo of dawn breaking, from the camera cradled in my lap. In Rapid City, it's so bright I fear all of my footage at Mount Rushmore is overexposed.
Something is off—my sleep, the road food, the project’s progress, the record-breaking September heat, the political mood in the weeks before the election. In Nebraska, even the political signs reveal a light and a darkness, sometimes on the same street. My photos, too, feel sharply divided between shadow and direct sunlight. There are no clouds at all to soften the light.
In Denver, the brightness feels inescapable. I embrace being a mile closer to the sun; I try to stay hydrated. The light is fading quickly when I arrive, but I photograph two pieces by the artist Alexander Phimister Proctor, the sculptor at the heart of my project. I’ve come across interviews from the 1920s where Proctor says that a statue shows to its best advantage when it faces south “and should never face any other way unless it is impossible to have it in that position." And yet so much of his work faces anywhere but south, including this pair in Denver, facing north.
Across the Nebraska plains, all I see are washed-out prairie grass and corn fields bleached tan by summer. I venture four miles off the highway down gravel roads to photograph a marker where you can stand with one foot in Colorado and the other in Nebraska. I have read My Ántonia, of course, and so I keep an eye out for rattlesnakes in the grass.
In Kearney, I stop at the Archway, a monument to westward expansion spanning Interstate 80. It's exactly what I hoped it would be. Over the top, literally. I take the escalator up to the archway itself, following the covered wagons into the exhibits. I walk into the darkness of a multi-story diorama. "People before you sacrificed everything they had to get where you're going today," the interpretive guide intones. I walk through the story of westward expansion along the Great Platte River Road into the automobile age, forgetting I'm atop a highway. Not until the end do I remember, when exterior light shines through two windows looking to the east. Traffic flows below. The metaphor is obvious: Oregon Trail wagon trains to modern trucking conveys, all right here.
I emerge from the Archway, once again in daylight. My eyes adjust to the sun. I do what I can to make sense of the light.
Yours,
Erika
P.S. Follow along in more daily detail in my Instagram stories.
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