I worked as a researcher, production assistant and set photographer for the Nat Geo documentary “JFK: The Lost Bullet,” which airs this Sunday at 9:00pm. It was a great learning experience that introduced me to some wonderful folks. You can see some of the stills I snapped behind the scenes here.

John Graves, from a personal letter:

“To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into the backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth-not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails. But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one’s edge every spring and every fall. In recent decades it has become customary – and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight-to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to damn, mainly, though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best. But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in the books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky.”

Lately, I have been wandering the Trinity Corridor for a project with the Trinity Trust, trying to make sense of why this city feels like home. Thoreau wrote, “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness…” It’s exploring that heals, I think.

And yet with transportation the way it is: the ability migrate from sun-blanched Dallas to the frozen teeth of the Himalayas in less than twenty four hours, to swallow ground by bus and train and foot and still only just reach the crest of the wave where everyone else is headed soon, of course there is a sadness there. A fading sense of discovery. Where can we go to feel we have truly explored?

Perhaps our exploration is to dig deeper, to see what others pass by and therein find something new. Perhaps our wilderness has become an inward one. Or perhaps I am growing older, and talking myself out of another long journey.

I hope Graves does not mind me publishing words that are not rightly mine. We live to share just as surely as we live to explore. I’ll be checking out his book, Goodbye to a River.

Finished my first foray into filmmaking last week:

Living Plaza – Dallas, TX from Aaron Garcia on Vimeo.

It turned out alright–a strong story with some notable negligence in technique. Audio and time lapses could use some work, but as a first project, I’m pretty happy with it. Most issues can be resolved easily next time around.

It was interesting that people responded so positively (+2700 views), a testimony to the importance of story. Yes, you want professional technique, but technique without a story is still something intangible.

It didn’t hurt that the subject struck so close to home (pun intended). I’ve spent a good deal of time running from and returning to Dallas, so I tend to connect with stories of people who have decided for whatever reason, and for better or for worse, to call a place their home.

“Something special is going to happen,” Brady said. “I feel like we are on the verge of it now.”
“Yea?” I said, “Doesn’t everyone feel that way?”
“I don’t think so. Most people live day to day. I’ve been in friendships and relationships where the people around me didn’t want what I want.”
“What is that?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. That’s a pretty broad question-”
“I know.”
“-but I know I don’t want a life where I’m unhappy. I don’t want to wake in the morning and wish I was somewhere else,” he said. He was stern. “And I’m willing to risk comfort for that joy.”

A few months later, Brady was hired to design the dinner menu at Oddfellow’s in the Bishop Arts district of Dallas – the kind of work he dreamed about. I am fortunate to have him as a friend, and as a testimony that hard work and discipline, coupled with patience and a little good luck, can get you anywhere.

Here are a few photos of Brady from a last minute trip to New Orleans:

“Do you know a love poem in English?” Rahmat asked me one evening. We sat in the first of what seemed to be an endless array of cramped kabob shops casting unanswered light into the deep Kabul night. Here, Rahmat worked fifteen hour shifts everyday of the year except for Eid, when he returned to visit his family in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Though an Afghan, he came to Afghanistan for the first time eighteen months ago. “We are strangers here together,” he said when we first met, “you and I do not belong.” It was our principle bond.

He also loved the English language, but his long shifts left him little opportunity for study. I spent many a night helping him practice English while I ate. As we spoke, the streets gradually cleared and people hurried home to their families, fearful of whatever lawlessness might be unleashed in the growing dark. On this particular night, I considered the limited number of poems I committed to memory the past year.

“Okay, I’ve got one,” I said. “It is about love. But it’s also about overcoming.” He nodded excitedly and flattened a yellow strip of crumpled paper on the tabletop. I printed slowly and legibly as he craned his neck to see the words:

“Underneath an abject willow,

Lover sulk no more.

Act from thought should quickly follow,

What is thinking for?

Your unique and moping station

Proves you cold.

Stand up and fold

Your map of desolation.”

I asked Rahmat if he wanted the rest of the poem, but he said it was enough. I shrugged and slid the paper over to him. “That’s the important part anyway,” I said. He read it aloud.

“Fold your map of… desolation?” he asked.

“Desolation,” I said. “Do you know this word?”

Rahmat shook his head no.

“It’s very beautiful,” I said.

He nodded eagerly.

“It’s like destruction.” The word did not register on his face. “When everything is in ruins,” I said.

“Ah ruins, yes yes,” he said.

“And the map only leads to ruins.”

“Ruins, yes yes.”

“So the poet says, ‘Stand up! Forget all of that! Forget your map. Forget the ruins!”

Rahmat’s eyes glinted in the dimly lit shop. “Ruins!” he repeated.

The word lingered as another customer entered. Rahmat stood and served him, then returned and sat down.

“One time, in English class,” he said, smiling, “I learned a very short poem.” It was the only class he ever took, and considering that, he spoke well. “We were asked to write a poem. Everyone wrote in Dari or Pashto, but me, I wrote in English.” His smile widened. “I gave it to a girl.”

“What was it?” I asked.

His eyes turned upward as he searched for it. “It says, ‘Love is hard, love is sweet. With two people, love’s complete.”

I laughed, and a wounded look flashed across his face. “It’s good, it’s good,” I said quickly. And it was. It made my night, that poem. A little humor amidst the ruins on which I tended to focus too much anyway. The childlike rhythm bounced in my feet as I walked home. It was restoration, and the simplicity of it carried me through a menacing blackness, over gaping holes where there was no earth to be found.

New Orleans, Louisiana

I found this shot amidst a hoard of pictures I took while hosting a friend from Cairo. There’s a lot happening in Cairo now; the people are diving headlong into a shadowy future. May their lives be better because of it.

Behind the cracked glass door of a small, inconspicuous bookshop, Bird sat in his favorite chair and looked out on the street. A herd of armored vehicles passed and the view filled with dust.

“It wasn’t always like this here, you know,” Bird said of his country.

“I know,” I said. Bird was like a wind up toy. Say one thing and he would go until he could not go any further. He had a lot interesting things to say, so I wound him up; I mentioned television in Afghanistan.

“You know, back in the fifties, a bunch of films were shot here,” he said. “Afghan films by Afghan film crews. Now they play these same films on TV and censor the hell out of them.” I saw this all the time – a woman’s bare arm blurred out like it was a boob.

“I mean, come on we’re moving backwards here!” Bird shouted across the bookstore. No one else seemed to notice. “Sixty years later and we’ve gone back in time a hundred and fifty years,” he shook his head.

For an Afghan, Bird is well-traveled. He flipped through his pictures: Prague, Italy, London, Ireland, Greece, Barcelona, Germany, Sweden. You name it in Europe, he’s been there. At least one city, if not the whole country. He bought one of those rail passes and traveled on the cheap.

“Picture this,” he said, “I’m in Poland. Have you been?”

“No. I hear the women are beautiful though.”

“It’s not just that the women are beautiful, man. I challenge you to take a magnifying glass to the streets and look for an ugly woman. You won’t find one.”

“Really?”

“Yea. It’s that amazing,” he said. “Don’t go to Warsaw, though. Warsaw’s boring.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, imagine: I’m sitting there with this Polish girl. She’s gorgeous. We’re eating dinner on the street. There’s bacon, you know, pork. I mean, good bacon. We’re drinking ice cold beer, and we are sitting on the street. People passing by, no one says a word, you know, cause it’s Poland. Not Afghanistan. And my God, what she was wearing!”

He threw himself back in his chair and reconstructed the image in his head. “This beautiful dress, man, with spaghetti straps over her shoulders.” He sighed.

“At one point, she leans over to me and says, ‘Bird, you’ve traveled a lot and I haven’t. What is Afghanistan really like? I mean, you spent your whole life there. What is it like for you, having been to all these other places?’

“So I say to her, ‘It’s the most fucked up place in the world.’ I stop there. I try to leave it, but she wants me to go on. She can’t believe it’s that bad. I resist for a few minutes. She keeps bothering me about it, so I open the floodgates.

“‘You really want to know what it’s like?’ I say, ‘There’s a public army and a private army, public police and private police. There are even private militias. There are four or five foreign forces on top of all that. Literally, guns on every corner. Even more guns line the streets outside every bank and hotel and building. Road blocks, blast walls, concertina wire, convoys with cannons the size of street cars. There’s still kidnappings almost every day and night. I mean, not just white people. These assholes kidnap anyone – road construction crew from India or Pakistan, guys who are just trying to feed their families. Some of them get their heads cut off in the street, stuff like that. I’m telling you, it is the most fucked up place in the world.’

The man who helped him run the shop entered with a mouse trap and a mouse pinned on it. The tiny black eyes darted back and forth between Bird and me. It squirmed a bit, but stayed calm. I couldn’t see where the trap caught it.

“You fat fuck,” Bird said. He showed me where the bar was buried in the mouse’s back. Then he said something to the worker, who nodded and carried it away. Bird turned back to me.

“So I keep telling her about my homeland. ‘There’s dust everywhere,” I say, “fecal matter in the streets and the smell of rot; the ruins have crumbled or been filled with bullet holes. What was new is now ruins, what was ruins is now dust. Traffic is the only thing that has steadily developed. That and violence. The roads are shitty, the sidewalks littered with garbage and rocket-holes and men sit around without arms and legs. Because of the war you know. Because of the Taliban or the peace forces, or a Russian landmine or some other fucked up thing. These men hold out fingerless hands as you walk by, asking for money.

“‘Say you pass by the same guy every day, well you also pass his maimed brother, a handful of women in dirty burqas with dirty, crying babies, and a dozen kids without a place to sleep or anything to eat. Everyone is begging from you because you have shoes on, and you’re the lucky one.’

“She looks at me like she’s going to cry. ‘You asked!’ I say. And she still doesn’t believe me! She says, ‘How could people live like that? Live how you described?’ They’ve got no fucking choice, I say, that’s how. I try to convince her, but she can’t believe me it‘s that bad here.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. There are parts of Afghanistan that aren’t that bad. But then there are parts of Afghanistan that are. The worker passed by with a pack of syringes in hand. For Bird, every year of life has been a year of war, and I can only imagine what that’s done to his mind.

“So, ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘How about this. What do you think about this moment we’re having here?’ She says, ‘Come on, we’re not having a moment.’ I laugh out loud. ‘This is why you can’t believe me,’ I say, ‘You just don’t understand.’ She asks what I’m getting at. I say, ‘I am sitting on a street corner, drinking cold beer and eating bacon with a girl I hardly know, and she’s wearing next to nothing. This is not even a dream in Afghanistan. None of this will ever happen there. Not even a chance. The thirty million people who live in Afghanistan will never know what this is like. This is heaven compared to Afghanistan,’ I say. ‘This is heaven.’

“She smiles, then. God, she was beautiful. Naive but still beautiful. She asked nothing else about it and for the next hour or two, I didn’t think about it either.”

Bird shouted something over his shoulder at the worker.

“I like your Egyptian tattoo,” I said. Ra governed his right arm with a golden scepter. The image was ornate, vibrant and immediately recognizable beneath his tight, short-sleeve shirt.

“Ah yea, I love Ra.”

People called him an infidel when they saw it, he said. Or when he tried to explain Western culture to them. He would say, “Look, that’s not how it is,” but they would point out his tattoos and travels in the West. “You are one of them,” they would say. The vast majority of the population who did not agree was silent.  He said this was the most frustrating thing about Afghanistan: The silent throng.

“But it’s my home,” he added. “And I’ll die here.”

I let the weight of his words settle. “Why Ra?” I asked.

“I love Egyptology.”

“Have you been to Egypt?”

He screwed up his face. “No, I mean, it’s mostly Arab now. The Arabs are arrogant and they have no reason to be.” He sat still for a moment. The tattoo was unfinished; Ra faded out at the knees.

“All religions die,” he said. ”It’s my reminder.” He ran a thoughtful finger along the tattoo. “The pharaohs ruled for five thousand years. Three thousand were the height of power. The first and last thousand were rise and decline. Islam is young, man. Founded in 622. We are where Christianity was six hundred years ago. That’s why we’re still so violent. Anyway, it all goes the way of Egypt, and where are the Pharaohs now?”

The worker reappeared. He removed the cap from a loaded syringe and handed it, along with the nervous mouse, to Bird. “I’m about to get medieval on his ass,” Bird said. He walked over to the shop door where the dust and soft light filtered in. I watched him insert the tip of the long syringe into the mouse’s shoulder blades. It twisted and squirmed and pawed at the needle.

Then it shrieked.

“What is that?” I asked Bird. The mouse thrashed violently against the needle. It blinked and squealed again. It pawed at its back. I did not look away.

“Water,” he said. He pressed the syringe and leaned into it. The tormented creature convulsed. “Afghani style,” he said, laughing.

Life, diluted, leaked from the wound onto the floor. After what seemed like a long time, the syringe emptied and Bird drew it out. The miserable thing still twitched and pawed and breathed, but slower now, and he laughed at it. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” He handed the quivering mass to the worker, who took it outside. Blood and water dripped out the door. The worker cast the thing amongst the garbage in a ditch.

Bird sat again in his favorite chair and looked out on the street as I found him.

“I can’t seem to remember her name,” he said. The cracked lines in the glass carved up strangers as they passed. Heads separated from shoulders and the convoys kicked up dust and everything washed into a gunpowder gray.

“I wish I could remember,” he said.

The shells of broken down trucks ran parrallel to the mountains, and a corridor of shanty shacks formed the center of town where the rusted scrap metal and truck parts came to an end. The men, stonefaced and suspicious, stood motionless in their shops and stared as I passed.

The mud walls cracked in the sun and shop entrances were dark and uninviting. I walked cautiously.  I felt their heads turn to follow me, look me up and down. I felt hot and anxious.

On the outskirts of the town, the scenic countryside a few kilometers from the center, people bristled with motion. They balanced buckets of water on long poles and slapped their donkeys with brooms. They smiled and invited me to come with them for tea. They greeted with affection.

But as I entered the town center, trash festered in the canals on the roadside, and an unfamiliar stillness caught my attention. For the first time since I arrived, my stomach turned with discomfort.

Bushy, pious beards hung statuesque from sullen faces, and eyes squinted with distrust. A handful of women in blue burqas quickly rustled by, and suddenly I realized where I was. “This is Afghanistan, Wheeler,” I thought, “What are you doing here alone?” I cursed myself as I shuffled up the main road.

The sun was fading and I had a terrible feeling in my gut. The silence pointed a telling finger at my incompetence and inability to communicate. I felt vulnerable. And everywhere there were eyes. Eyes on me. 

Just two months before, all foreigners were asked to leave this town. I had to push back my flight and only now, in early September, was I arriving. 

And my cell phone – The signal was dead! I had no way to contact anyone, and for a few days at least, no one to contact. I did not have a place to stay. “I don’t know what the hell I am doing here,” I thought. “What am I doing here?”

I should go back. Now.

I felt my legs twitch. Should I  turn? Should I trust my gut? I stepped down the middle of the road, casting short glances around me like I was walking the plank. Afghanistan, no cell phone, no place to stay. I imagined the violence of the ocean. Am I crazy? Do I have a death wish? God…

At the other end of town, an armed guard called out to me. He asked something I could not understand.

Then approaching, “Speak Russian?”

“No.” He said something again.

“Hello,” I heard from behind me. I turned around to a man in a spotless white shalwar kameez. From his neck draped a black and white scarf, and his clean shaven face glistened amongst the beards like his white linens against the dust.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To a guest house.”

“Which one?”

I looked up and down the road. “I don’t know yet,” I admitted.

He looked at me. “The guard says, when you get your translator, come back so he can register you and everything.”

“Is there a problem?” I did not have a translator yet.

“No problem. Just to know you are here in case something happens.”

“Okay.” I looked up and down the road again. I looked at the man, then at the guard. I wished I was somewhere else.

From some distant place, somewhere well outside of Afghanistan, I heard myself ask the man in white why he was dressed so well. He was from Kabul, he said, but he was marrying a girl here in Ishkashim.

Then he invited me to the wedding. 

“I do not have a date yet, but I invite you to be my guest.” He pointed out a guest house a little further up the road, and smiled.

Suddenly, the weight lifted. As I walked back through center, I took a closer look at those faces. They now seemed sleepy and lackluster. Disinterested, even. Maybe the bulk of my discomfort was unfounded, I thought. 

All you ever hear about from this part of the world is violence, and I read that violence in their eyes. But maybe I wrote it there, as well. Maybe most of our fears are like this. Maybe they mostly come from the inside out.

We will never know it if we do not face them.

From sunup to sundown, these men could not eat or drink. After all, it was Ramadan. They stood sweating in their shops throughout day, and with the orange sphere teetering on the ridgeline above us, they had a hard time seeing me. Their minds were elsewhere, with food and family.

And from  some distant place, they could see a stranger inching his way through their town, kicking up dust and glancing nervously over his shoulder.

Late at night, you can blink twice and still not miss the shooting stars. They burn with tails fat and full and purple tinted. The mountains breathe in the black, a tangible thing you can feel, and in them, far away, a man is walking. He has a flashlight in his hand and the light spins in a peculiar way as he swings his arm. At the other end of the valley, an orange fire flickers. There’s not much else to see.

I am beginning to feel at peace here. It has been good for my soul to reach these distances, to realize these places that until moments before were only imagination.

It can be a lonely existence though, traveling independent in Afghanistan. Family is such an important part of society, without one, you eat alone, you cross long distances alone, you live alone.

But it’s a good kind of alone. The kind that gives you perspective and wisdom and shared experience with people who are not like you. People you would never know if you came with someone else. The isolation leaves you vulnerable, at times even needy, and people respond to that vulnerability here, often by showing you their goodness.

It’s a kind of alone that can be addictive and alluring, that whispers what is not always true: I am content.

Yet I will miss my brother’s, sister’s, brother-in-law’s, nephew’s and father’s birthdays to be here. I’ll even miss my own. I did not really plan it that way, but after pushing the flight back several times into the beginning stages of winter, that’s just how it happened. And of course, they understand. They’ve always understood, even when I could not.

I don’t ask for much, but the things I want, I want without compromise. This country is for people who will not compromise. The people who do not belong here come for a reason, as I have. Nowhere else in the world will do. Many a landscape hosts mountains and shooting stars and fascinating people and challenges, but these places will not do. I don’t know why.

It’s quiet, and what electricity there is dims and dips. The mountain air sidles up to my neck and toys with my hands.  Another shooting star.

It’s comforting, really. To be here may not comfort some people, but it comforts me.

I am lost in the maw of a black mountain night.

09/08/10

There is a hesitance in everything I do here, everyone I meet, every step I
take. Whether warranted or not, it’s still palpable. Beneath
every smile and every welcome I receive, beneath the warm sun and the shallow mountain streams, something runs deep and cold.

And I somehow feel I owe this country something because of it.

Perhaps it’s because I’m American. If I’m honest with myself, that is at least in part what brought me here. I feel in debt for what these people have endured. It’s nothing new for me. I’ve always been drawn to people in need, sometimes, heedlessly. Sometimes to Afghanistan.

Some faces are hard and impenetrable. Though I have met no wrong, no hostility nor aggression, I have at worst met abject indifference. That steely cold vacancy that could harbor anything. The unknown nature of what lies behind makes it frightening. Rarely do we fear what we know.

I did not and do not know this country, and I hope to change that.

A few soldiers motor by to get water. ISAF, I guess.

Today, for the first time, I was afraid. Passing through town alone, after hiking from the border. It was only a moment, and it passed, but the uncertainty still lingers.

 A few boys stand next to me with a wheel barrow and watch me write. They are brothers. I asked them, and they said, “We are brothers.” Then they just
stood there. Children are the only doors in the world where a stranger can always enter in peace.

A man limps by with a terrible gait. He puts two hands over my one and smiles. His hands are rough and his face, weathered. “Are these your sons?” I ask. “No, no,” he says and moves on.

The sun ducks behind the ridges and a cooling breeze settles over us.
The boys smile when we make eye contact, but mostly they just look at me.

“Here,” I say, trying to think of something, “at night, is it safe?”

They shake their heads barely, No.

I nod. My first day in Afghanistan is coming to an end. The gold light has
drawn from the countryside and everything hovers in a dull, confused gray. I rise from my perch, bid the boys goodnight, and lean into the evening chill,
climbing the road toward my room.