“Without beauty, life would be unbearable. We need the beautiful as much as we need love. Beauty and the beautiful are not the preserve of luxus or the elite privileged. Everyone needs it. There are people in the world now who are holding out on the rawest edges of what’s humane – in refugee camps, in prisons, in hospitals, in places of starvation – who are only able to hold out because they’ve got some glimpse of the beautiful. Sometimes beauty is like that. It turns up as a minuscule moment in a dark landscape and recalls us to possibility and inspiration and encouragement. We can hold out in very bleak places if we are in touch with the presence of beauty (John O’Donohue – ‘Divine Beauty, The Invisible Embrace,’ Greenbelt).”
Alzheimer’s disease had found Dad. The life he had built for himself in retirement at Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, was no longer sustainable, and the time had come to bring him closer to family. In the summer of 2011, we moved him home to Edmonton, and what followed was the hard, tender work of clearing his house and settling his estate in preparation for a sale.
The drive back was long — two days behind the wheel. Somewhere near Vavenby, British Columbia, a side road offered a reason to stop. There, half-hidden and quietly rusting, sat a collection of old trucks. Stiff from driving, I got out to stretch — but it was more than the need to move that held me there. These trucks had lived working lives. They had hauled and strained and weathered, and now they rested in the kind of dignified stillness that only time can produce. Something about them engaged my curiosity and imagination in ways that felt, just then, entirely necessary.
The owner gave me permission to photograph them.
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