Page 5 of Goode Vibrations
“Well, I’m in the States, right? My ticket is supposed to take me all the way back to Christchurch, but the only way I could get out of Norway was through Atlanta which somehow included a layover in St. Paul…whatever, you don’t care about my connections. Point is, the idea that’s been rattling around in my head lately is sort of a different take on things for me. I was thinking something like a photographic essay of unusual parts of the States. The title I’ve got in my head is ‘The Unseen America.’ Sort of my own unique take. The kind of shots I’m good at, but here, Stateside. A tour of the country, no real itinerary, no plan, just…bang about with a few cameras.”
“A break from the usual, but still working.” Len chuckled. “Meaning, getting me to pay for you to take time off.”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “But you’d get a few thousand photos out of it, at least. I just need a bit of time to recharge, you know?”
Len mused, still idly flipping through my photos, which was a collection documenting the Norwegian fjords, but most of them had been taken from the side of a hovering helicopter, or rappelling halfway down sheer vertical faces, or from a kayak…the kind of shots impossible to get—birds nesting in the cliff faces, the sea hundreds of feet below—as seen from the chimney crack of a granite face.
“How long are you thinking of spending on this?” Len asked.
I shrugged, yawned again. “I dunno. A few months, at least. Four? Maybe six.”
“If I’m not getting a new project from you for four to six months, it had better be your best work yet.”
“When you get it, Len, I promise you, it’ll be a cover feature. You’ll want to give me at least half the rag. Maybe even a full magazine special feature. It’ll be brilliant, I swear. Also, if I don’t take time off, my work will go to shit. So there’s that.”
“Sounds suspiciously like an ultimatum,” Len said, smirking at me.
“It’s not even a real holiday, Len. I’ll still be shooting just about every day. It’s just not a high adrenaline, wildly dangerous project way the hell out in the wops, accessible only by helo. I love those, you know I do. But I’ve been doing those back-to-back for years now. I need a little break from it, is all.”
“I know, I know.” Len closed the iPad and rubbed his jaw as he looked at me on his computer. “All right. Six months. Then I’m gonna need a pitch for something high octane. A real attention-grabber Errol Sylvain special.”
“How about I give you the pitch now? All the highest, most challenging mountain peaks in the world, as only I can shoot them. K2, Annapurna, Everest, Kilimanjaro, Fuji, St. Helen’s, Kilauea. Like, standing on the actual real highest peak? Looking down into an active volcano. The corpses marking the path on Everest. Hanging off a cliff on K2, or El Capitan. Crazy, crazy shit. I’ve wanted to do that one for a while, and after a nice long boring break, I’ll be all geared for a new challenge.”
Len’s eyes lit up. “All right. If you’ll do the peaks project next, I’ll give you six months at full salary, and full creative control over this. No check-ins, nothing. Just take six months off, call it a sabbatical, and if you’ve got a killer new photo essay at the end of it, great. Beautiful. But I’ll expect the peaks project ASAP following the time off.”
“Sweet as,” I breathed. “You’re the best ever, Len.”
“I know. You’re lucky you’re a talented sonofabitch.”
“I’ll ring you up in six months, bro.”
“Sounds good. Have fun and try not to…what’s the phrase you use? Cork it?”
I laughed. “Cark—try not to cark it.” I shook my head, snickering. “One of these days you’ll get the hang of it.”
“Not bloody likely, cuz,” he said, in a passable impression of my native accent. “I’m an old dog, and that’s a new trick.” He glanced to the side, lifted his chin in acknowledgment, and then glanced back at me. “Gotta go, my nine thirty is here.”
“Chur. See ya.”
My iPad made the disconnection sound, and I flipped the lid closed.
“Flight DL 1234 to Los Angeles, now boarding…” the PA squawked, and I began gathering my things, as that was my flight.
But now I realized I needed a new plan. My flight to LAX was a connection meant to take me home to Christchurch, where I’d been planning on kicking off a short holiday before my next gig. But now, with Len’s blessing to take an extended sabbatical, I needed a new destination. I could just take the connection and figure things out from LA, but I hated LA something fierce, for reasons I always had trouble articulating. It was too…everything. And not enough of anything. See? I just didn’t like it there, and I’d rather start in New York. I was more comfortable with New York, if nothing else.
So I hiked my bags onto my shoulders and headed up to the counter, where a pretty young black woman with fantastically long box braids offered me a welcoming smile. “Hi, how can I help you?”
I leaned against the counter and smiled back. “I’m meant to be on this flight to LA, but I need to reroute. Can you switch me to a flight to New York?”
She scanned my boarding pass, displayed on my cell, and then tapped at her keyboard for a while. Frowned, tapped again. “Well…not directly, or soon, unfortunately. If you can wait till tomorrow morning, you could fly directly to La Guardia at six thirty, or if you want to leave as soon as possible…no, you won’t make that connection.” She chewed on her lower lip, and bobbed her head. “Well, maybe. If you’re quick. How do you feel about running across airports?”
I laughed. “Piece of piss. Done it heaps.”
She blinked, snickered. “Piece of piss, huh? Is that Aussie slang?”
“Nah love, I’m a Kiwi. New Zealand.”
“Oh. Cool. So, yeah. So you get on this flight to LAX, and if you can get across the airport to your connection in less than fifteen minutes, you can fly into Atlanta, layover forty-five minutes there, and then fly into New York.”