Destiny’s Fences

The car dinged its door-ajar warning. Dad crouched over near the fence. Between the car dings I could hear the shutter click of his Nikon D3.

This one was more photogenic than most we had seen on our drive: a split rail fence of pretty, weathered wood, like the one back in our New Jersey front yard. The fence seemed to stretch without end down the straight Oklahoma road.

I imagined home and childhood on the eastern vanishing point, and in the West, the beginning of something new. Dad was road-tripping with me, back to my new college home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Golden grasses swayed. Sometimes, in excited anticipation, I’d mistake clouds on the horizon for distant, craggy peaks. When we’re young, we see what we want to see in the future.

Dad returned to the car. “Shame to see all that beautiful land fenced in,” he said. “But they clarify the landscape too—fences, I mean.”

It’s easy to think of fences as limitations, but Dad was right. Fences have a way of closing off paths, so that the right one can be seen and taken. Life has a way of doing that too, if you’re paying attention. On that road trip, Dad taught me a lot about that sort of thing, just by sharing the story of his life. I was distracted by the delicious approach of college freedom, but I did my very best to listen.

Dad used to talk about putting together a photography book devoted to fences. He picked up photography when he was young, developed his own film, even quit one job so he could collect unemployment and spend his time taking pictures instead: high-contrast urban textures and reflections, moody Ansel-Adams-esque pastorals, and of course, fences. Farms, forests, highways, industrial parks, fancy suburban homes.

He talks about those days as light and happy and free, often including a few Bob Dylan lines for good measure. Dad got better at developing his own film, even learning Cibachrome so he could develop color film. He still speaks with wonder about how bright and lush those prints were.

But freedom often brings poverty along with it. He didn’t have a pot to piss in, as he puts it. Camera film and developing equipment became a luxury of increasing rarity, and he started to worry—as twenty-somethings do—that maybe he’d have to grow up after all.

But how?

Before long, he was confronted by a stark answer, an impassable fence of sorts: the Vietnam War draft.

He’d been to Woodstock, digested all the anti-war rhetoric, and been around hippies long enough to know two things: military service was not for him, but neither was draft dodging. So, frantically seeking a college deferment, he applied for the first program he saw advertised in the local paper: Computer Science at the New Jersey campus of the now defunct ITT Tech.

Dad turned out to be a brilliant computer programmer—he got his first job by completing a supposedly unsolvable coding problem in record time (the employer didn’t officially have any open positions, and was using the “impossible” problem as an easy way to reject applications). He had a knack for high-level strategy and management too.

And so, despite his freewheeling roots as a hippie photographer, he ended up climbing the corporate ladder, eventually working as the CIO (Chief Information Officer) of a Fortune 1000 company.

“That draft letter forced me down a very different path,” he told me as we approached the New Mexico border. “Who knows what kind of career I would’ve had without it?”

At the time, the thought of destined career tracks was far from my mind. I was sporting the bright eyes and bushy tail of a college freshman. The world was my oyster, and the future was for me to choose, not a track to be herded into like cattle. But as I’ve aged, I’ve started to think—as thirty-somethings do—that there’s a lot of wisdom in my Dad’s stories.

My generation was raised on the dream of endless possibility. It has become normal to move far away from your place of origin, to pursue unconventional jobs, to individuate with full, unbridled sovereignty. This lifestyle is a far cry from that of my grandparents, who only ever left New Jersey once their entire lives—they honeymooned in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of all places. (That was a little reminder for me about destiny.)

In a way, my father’s baby boomer generation was a transitional one from normalized limitation to normalized boundlessness. And Dad straddled the divide in a fascinating, fruitful way. He learned to balance creative freedom with quotidian stability. When the world offered a direction for his life, he listened—and he channeled the “limitations” of a corporate job into the creation of a rich and varied life. He never lost touch with his hobbies and passions, even while balancing the roles of model father and successful businessman.

He’s well-read and widely traveled. He put his enviable carpentry skills to good use throughout my childhood (he built not one but two treehouses, as well as two chicken coops and multiple decks). He fell in love with stones and crystals, then set up his own lapidary studio after retiring. He still quotes Bob Dylan lyrics.

And, of course, his interest in photography has endured. He never did put together that book of fence photos, though. Maybe, one of these days, I’ll do it for him. It’s the least I can do to thank him for everything he’s done for me.