Arctic Solitaire - Paul Souders

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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.

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      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?

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      Flat tire on safari, Masai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya

      CHAPTER 4

      TRANSITIONS

      I left Alaska pretty much the way I’d arrived: barreling along the snow-covered highway with all my worldly possessions piled high inside the car. Bigger car, more stuff, but otherwise . . .

      In my five years there, I had discovered a place where I seemed to belong. I had a job, a community of friends and colleagues, the stirrings of a normal life. And I was throwing it all away to bound off, again, into the unknown.

      This time, I went to San Francisco to try working freelance again. Within seventy-two hours of arriving at my new home, I knew in the very core of my being that, in a lifetime defined by wrong turns and missed opportunities, this was the worst decision yet. I was in a big city with few friends, no clients, little work, and less money. Yet somehow, I stumbled into an assignment contract for Microsoft gazillionaire Bill Gates’s new digital photography archive. It was a new concept at the time, and I believe the term “Digital Alexandria” was bandied about, without irony. Their goal was to collect images of everything in the world, through time. They even invented a new word for the company, Corbis, which I think is Latin for “bottomless money pit.”

      My job description boiled down to “anonymous content provider,” and they sent me off to Canada for four months with a fat per diem and a mission to travel across the country and photograph everything I saw, from Mounties in red serge and funny hats to Ontario steel mill workers. I drove from the lush green British Columbia rainforest more than four thousand miles to the distant Atlantic shores of Newfoundland, and then raced to their Seattle headquarters in time to crash the office Christmas party. My corporate masters, deciding my modest talents were best appreciated from a greater distance, shipped me off to Australia for another three months with only the barest hint of direction.

      Jet lag and anxious uncertainty were cushioned only by a seemingly bottomless expense account and ready access to that night’s hotel mini-bar. I’d call my editor (collect) in a panic, practically begging him for some guidance. I could imagine him sitting serenely cross-legged on some snow-covered mountaintop, ponytail blowing on the wind, imperturbable.

      “What am I supposed to be shooting?”

      Everything.

      “Who are our clients? Who’s going to buy this shit?”

      Everyone.

      Ommmmmmm . . .

      Too soon, the river of cash dried up, but I knew there was no going back to the old newsroom grind. A dream gig shooting for National Geographic always hung in the horizon like some shimmering mirage—there can’t be a photographer out there who hasn’t imagined their pictures displayed on the magazine’s yellow-bordered cover. Yet I never quite mustered the energy to chase down that dream; it seemed there was an impregnable wall barring access to those hallowed pages. I figured I’d die of old age before they would ever pay me to go on the trips I dreamed of. I was impatient and unwilling to devote endless hours to courting editors and pitching ideas. So, I never bothered asking. I cared only about the work, and it was so much easier to go out and spend my own money and just do it. I declared to myself, my folks, and my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend that I was now, officially, a nature photographer.

      These self-financed trips started out simply enough. I bought a well-used VW camper van and disappeared for weeks at a stretch. I started with baby steps, ticking off the photographic hot spots of the American West. I had just moved to Seattle, and Mount Rainier loomed right outside my apartment’s kitchen window. Yosemite or Monument Valley were just a few days’ drive down the interstate.

      Looking back, I recognize that I didn’t make a single picture that hadn’t been done before. I studied the masters of my craft—everyone from Ansel Adams to Art Wolfe, Galen Rowell, and Frans Lanting—and I did everything I could to make my photographs look like theirs. I went to the same places, set up my tripod in the same spots, and shot mile after mile of old 35 mm slide film. For years my trip research, such as it was, consisted of buying the relevant Lonely Planet guide, booking a cheap online ticket, and taking a quick look through my stacks of old National Geographics for any heroic images I might be able to replicate. The very nature of photographing iconic locations is the act of framing and recording scenes that have been shot over and over for decades, and there’s a vanishingly small distance between “inspiration” and plagiarism. I’m ashamed to admit how often my toe

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