Shell

I have lived in Reno, Nevada since I was just a little kid, and I always wanted to leave. Nevada was too much with it's oppressive dry heat, open expanses of multi-hued brown, and the people with whom I never quite seemed to belong. I spent my childhood running away to sunny beaches and mountains and forests, and always longed to live in a place that felt like those places did to me.

I decided to move to Montana; that great big vast open expanse of sky and mountains and greenery. The day I left was the worst day of my life. My father drove me those 800 and some miles, and all I could see was sadness in the desert and the sunset over fields and the night sky over the trees. The sun rose that morning just as we arrived in Bozeman, and it felt cold even in August.

I didn't stay there long. I transferred back home for my junior year. There it is, that word home. I realized too quickly and yet not soon enough that my home was not the sky and the trees and the quiet small town, but the city and the desert. Reno was never the hell that I thought it was, it was a home corrupted by people I didn't belong with and teenage angst. I didn't realize until I left.

My mother and I packed up the u-haul, and hitched her car to the back of it. In my backseat, I had a pop-up sort of tent buckled in with a litter box, food and water bowls, and two yowling cats. My grandmother led the way at first, guiding us nearly 200 miles out of our way around the construction on the main road, her chihuahua, Frank, in his seat by her side. He trembled when we parted ways in Butte, his tail tucked and a small whimper escaping him. We said goodbye, and left, a part of us sad, yet also feeling more free than we had in years.

Over time we had driven this sixteen hour trip three times, but this was by far the easiest of them. The drive seemed to pass in no time at all, and before we knew it we had stopped at a little rest stop just this side of the state line between Idaho and Nevada. The air felt right here, breathing freely for the first time the air that seemed so different in Montana, and different even than the last time we had been in Nevada. We were free to do as we pleased, not restricted by my grandmothers or ex-stepfather or father.

I played radio theatre to calm myself and the cats in the backseat as well as to pass the time, and that drive is one of my fondest memories. There is no better feeling than returning home.

We stopped in Valmy, NV for gas. It's a tiny little place, just a census town, and the same place that my father and I stopped in on the way to Bozeman on the worst day of my life. What a strange sort of returning, yet things were different this time. The gas pumps were closed, roped off with red rope that swayed in an early summer desert breeze. A burnt out RV sat at one of the pumps, the metal twisted and torn through in places; just a hollowed out shell remained slumped over to one side like a wilted flower. Above it, the Shell gas station sign was melted and reformed into a permanent drip. Storm clouds were gathered in the distance, and the air already smelled like rain and dust.

I stopped in my tracks. It was incredible, this hulking slumping mass of burnt out metal. I took photo after photo of it, crouching down in the gravel and circling it. I'd never have this moment again. Eventually, we went inside and I immediately asked about the RV. While the owners were inside the convenience store, it had caught fire. She said they called 911 and stood there and watched it burn. By the time the fire department had shown up it had burnt itself out and the remains of it had been there since the day before.

For years now, I've kept this photo and every now and then I see it in my phone and I'm struck again by this moment. This one little place in the world where two moments of my past intersected, going opposite directions and with opposite feelings and the burnt out RV that sits there. What a moment for me to have experienced there, just one of a few who may have passed through in time to glimpse it. This moment, this photo, to me feels like moving on. It is moving forward, letting go of the burnt and the broken, admiring it's beauty for just a moment, and then continuing onward. It is endings and new beginnings and starting fresh in a world that sometimes condemns and sometimes forces such a thing.

I took this photo on an iPhone 6s. There were no special apps, or anything else to filter out the raw experience of that moment. Due to the phone I was using at the time, it had the basic aperture of 2.2 and a focal length of 4.15mm. I later edited this photo using the standard editing available on the Galaxy Note 10+ to alter the photo slightly, making it primarily greyscale with spots of color in the melted shell sign and the red rope that surrounded the pumps.

The moment captured in this photo was breathtaking and inimitable and it was a moment that I thankfully got to experience, perfectly symbolizing my own journey and what I was leaving behind while moving forward.