Page 23 of Goode Vibrations
I slid him a slow, coy smile. “We can figure something out, I’m sure.”
Oh, he caught the subtext all right. “Yeah, I’m sure we can.” He gestured up at the sky. “I mean, it’s a warm, clear night. If nothing else, we can just sleep out here.” A glance at me. “You ever sleep outside under the stars?”
I shook my head. “Suburbanite city girl born and raised, my friend. Closest to camping I’ve ever been is glamping with my family the summer before my dad passed.”
“Your dad’s passed, too? Sorry to hear.” He blinked at me. “What’s glamping?”
I laughed quietly. “Ah-ha! A slang term for you! Camping is, like, tents and sleeping bags and those little unfolding stoves and stuff, right? Glamping is when you have a big RV and you sleep in a bed and cook in a kitchen and all that, but at an RV campsite. Glamorous camping. Glamping.”
He snorted. “That doesn’t even count as camping.” He gestured to the van. “So is this glamping, then?”
“Nah. Not swanky enough. I’m talking the RVs that are like decent-sized apartments on wheels.”
He nodded. “Sleeping rough under the stars? Nothing like it. You’re never so alive as when you fall asleep watching the stars go ’round and the moon go over, and then waking up to a pink horizon.”
“Best sunrise you’ve ever seen?” I asked, wading a little deeper with my skirt hiked up around my thighs.
He stayed where he was. “Word of advice? I wouldn’t go much deeper. Bound to be leeches in water like that.” He laughed as I made an abrupt U-turn right out of the water, checking my legs as I went.
“Best sunrise, hmm? Hard to pick one—I’ve seen some truly incredible sunrises. Last project before posting up here in the States was a piece on the fjords in Norway. We went over the whole coast, near-about, from Oslo all the way up around to the Barents Sea and the national park up there, which I still can’t pronounce properly, way up where Norway curls over the top of Sweden and meets Finland. Varangahol…something near that, leastways. I don’t know. Gorgeous country. Cloudy there a lot of the year, but when the sun does come out? Really makes you believe in God, I’ll say that, and I’m nowhere near a religious person. I slept out rough with my guide more than a few nights, in the bed of the truck we used on the journey, and you watch the stars and then the sun comes out and it’s huge and red and gold like the molten, freshly minted coin of some great giant god, I dunno. It’s…there aren’t words for it.”
He went back to the van, tugged open the sliding door, reached in and rummaged in a backpack, pulled out an iPad protected by a rubberized case that looked like it could survive being dropped from ten thousand feet without a parachute. And, from what I knew of Errol so far, it wouldn’t surprise me if it had.
He opened the iPad, tapped, swiped, and then scrolled through a rotating display of photos until he came to a particular section, and then handed me the iPad. “There aren’t words, but therearephotos. Swipe left.”
I swiped.
And gulped.
His photography was…breathtaking. I know I’ve seen his stuff in the magazine, but you assume that’s all been professionally retouched and such before publication, and things always look different on the glossy pages of aNational Geographic. But…seeing his raw, unedited photos? Fucking stunning.
“This is all the rough stuff, mind,” he said, as if he had to qualify what I was looking at. “I sent something like ten thousand shots to Jerry and he had to cull it down to a dozen or so for the feature. I went through them myself before I sent those on, and after he picked, I cut what was left to my personal favorites. I’ve got cloud storage by the ass-load, of course, and I keep all the originals on the memory cards I shot them on, but what’s here is my personal collection of untouched photos that aren’t straight rubbish.”
“Shut up,” I said, “I’m admiring.”
He laughed. “All right, then.”
One shot in particular I had to stop and just soak in for several minutes. It was taken from the back of a small fjord, where two spits of land angled away and then curved back toward each other until they nearly touched. The sun was perfectly framed between the points of land, and the sea was nearly still. The shot was taken from low to the sea, and a small fishing vessel was backlit by the huge golden-red half-sun, a net in the process of being cast caught in perfect clarity mid-throw.
“Jesus, Errol.”
He looked over my shoulder. “Oh yeah, that one. I stood waist-deep in the freezing water for an hour to get that. I was on the beach before sunrise, and those fishermen were getting ready—there’s a little fishing village just out of the frame to the right, and I watched them most of the morning. I knew the shot I wanted, and I knew there’s this moment, real early, when sometimes the water is just still like that. I mean, it’s never like glass like you’d see on an inland lake, but it goes quiet like that, just around dawn, but only sometimes. I was hoping and praying it’d be one of those mornings. I waded out as far as I could, and I had to wait for the ripples to stop and the sun to come up and the fishermen to go out. And it was just straight up luck that they stopped to cast out justthere, while the sun was justthere.”
“All good photography is art, but that’s just…sublime.”
He grinned, rubbed his hand through his hair. “Thanks. I am proud of that shot.”
I swiped through a few more, and then handed him the iPad. “Better give that back before I get lost and just keep swiping.”
He pulled out a little folding camp stove, and browned some ground beef, sliced up some fresh tomatoes, set out a little bag of shredded cheese, and a package of tortillas. When all was ready, he gestured at the spread. “Not fancy, but it’ll fill ya.”
I gaped at him. “Seriously? You can just…whip up fuckingtacos, from a van, in the middle of nowhere?”
“It’s no great magic, Poppy. There’s a little fridge I keep the meat and cheese in, fresh tomatoes I got from a farm stand day before yesterday, and the tortillas I got at a petrol station dairy last week.”
“Petrol station dairy?” I puzzled that one out. “A gas station with a little grocery store?”
He chuckled. “Got it in one.”