I guess that I should make this story with only one picture short and sweet. To be sure, I took a great many pictures on this date, but, since I do not yet own a film scanner prior to the composition of this essay, this image, which was one of an assortment of slides that I brought to a photo place to have scanned, is the only image from this day that I have yet digitized.
Prior to shortly before the 20-year anniversary of this picture being made, this was a not-all-that-significant image that was made coincidental with the beginning of a very significant friendship. As reported in the 2024 September 30 blog article, however, I learned earlier that month that one of my best friends from a decade and more before, one with whom I had lost touch a decade before but with whom I had been reconnecting since early 2022 but just had not yet re-met in person, had taken steps to limit my ability to contact him, and I was, for a day, shocked and hurt, blaming myself for it; then, after some searching, I figured out what he had been hiding from me, and I was shocked and dismayed – but also relieved, in a weird way, because I don’t want to actually be friends with that guy.
He hadn’t been part of my life since 2012, no later than 2014, really, as we had drifted apart, each with our own lives far apart from each other, but, beginning in 2022, with us living relatively near each other again, nearer than we’ve ever lived to each other before, and having endured so much individually, the prospect of reuniting made me happy.
I learned in September 2024 why, despite what he had said before, he wasn’t eager to reunite, because I learned what he had been hiding from me.
Anyway, the friendship had roots, I guess that you could say, prior to this fateful October 2004 day, but this is when it essentially started.
Here we are in Heavener, Oklahoma, at about 09:30 on the morning of Saturday 30 October 2004, as we see Kansas City Southern Railway train H-SHKC, with KCS 717, KCS 754, and KCS 665 as power, switching at the northern end of the KCS yard.
Then, an I-KCSH arrived and got fueled, and many of us chased it up the mountain.
Also that weekend, I seem to have acquired – but have no recollection of acquiring – some film from a photographer who had gone digital, something that I wouldn’t do until the following summer when a failing film camera forced my hand. I just wish that I had done it sooner!
The national election of 2004 was on the minds at the time. Being out of the bayous and swamps of the Franco-Germanic-Italian-Irish Catholic Bourbon southern parts of Louisiana, I was exposed, as I tuned the radio dial in my truck as I drove around Rich Mountain that weekend, to hate radio of the white-Christian-nationalist variety, which definitely was not Christlike. You have to understand that even though extreme-southern Louisiana is part of Louisiana and, as such, part of “The South”, it’s not part of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant South.
So, what I do remember from that weekend about the photographer from whom I acquired the film is something that his girlfriend who was with him said, I think when the three of us had a meal together at some fast-food place, which was that she was eager, after the election, that the Bush administration would feel free to use “B-52s” on Iraqis.
The totality of that experience spooked me, and I had a new friend with whom to gripe about these people and this way of thinking, even though, at the time, I still considered this other photographer to be quite cool. I was so young!
The next night, the 31st, I arrived home at 21:50, quite tired. The trip was interesting and memorable, and I had a brutal week ahead!
I remember October 2004. I remember that, in southern Louisiana, temperatures were warm and humid for the entire month, that the only outdoor relief that I got during the month was during the trip to Rich Mountain, that the weather finally cooled off at the beginning of November, either on the 1st, right at the beginning, or the next day, Election Day, when I remember taking a picture of a train, I think a westbound BNSF Railway train, at Schriever in the afternoon.
I think of all of that when I look at this picture, when I recall the last few months of 2004, with my then-recent Mexico experience on my mind, but, now, all of it is tinged by the sad awkwardness of what happened to what had been one of the best friendships that I ever had, one who seemed to be a sign of reason in an unreasonable world.
Such is life, I guess.
Jim
