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The
caption read:
This early photograph is rare view of a 19th century mining
camp. No further biographical information for the subjects or
the photographer has surfaced since the print was located in
an attic trunk. The miners, in a row, were recorded for posterity.
This does not include, however, the man chasing the mule who
wandered into the foreground. The man moved as the plate was
exposed; his face obscured and identity unknown.
“How awful,” Joe thought after he read the caption.
“That man is known only as a blur because a fly or whatever
startled that mule. Chance is too fickle!” After another
hour of seeing endless portraits of oil barons’ wives decked
out in jewelry and Paris fashion and, in the other gallery,
European aristocrats sitting idly in flower gardens, Joe needed
fresh air to clear his head of the stale museum. By the exit
he searched the gift shop to no result for a postcard of that
photograph. At least the blurred man and the rest of the miners
could accept their fate of the earth swallowing them up again
or striking the elusive mother load to not bother to ask life
for more. Circumstances had other things set aside for the museum’s
other occupants. The oil barons and their families spent themselves
into a stock market crash; peasants with pitchforks were waiting
at the gate for the aristocrats. Well, one can only imagine…
Outside the museum Joe walked a steady pace down the avenue.
Many folks had just been released from the surrounding offices
and crowded him on the street. In his walk the passing and surrounding
faces just bobbed along into a streak. Alternately, he realized,
his face must also look the same to others. His face had blurred,
his body had fallen out of time. Like the miner, like other
wandering souls…
A recent single on Johnny
Kane Records features the
Relict song “Out of Time”. Blink and the sound
has passed already—the song is only one minute twenty-seven
seconds long. “People I’ve known are only fleeting…”
That line echoes between the minutes and the hours as everything
is disappearing. Other side is Below The Sea’s swirling
instrumental “Pola Mountain” sounding like a song
to send one gently away…
Gently away beyond… Had the aristocrats, the oil barons,
or even the miners been warned of their ends? Perhaps a traveling
gypsy had peered into her crystal ball and foreseen the future.
Or had the writing already been on the wall. Joe thought as
his body streaked down the street that he had a solution. The
man in the photograph had kept moving and avoided a concrete
fate. The solution seemed so easy: do not stop moving.
| Matthew
Patrick, June 2002 |
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