An Image with a Story

“We can't stop here, this is bat country!” - Hunter S. Thompson

Loaf Made is a slow-moving, high-quality chronicle by a photographer who takes travel, film, books, print, leisure, and craft seriously — or at least seriously enough to write about them. It’s for people who still buy books, see films in theaters, and believe well-made objects matter.

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An Image with a Story

The wind found my tent before the sun did. A light patter against the nylon, then soft rising light over the hills to the east. Thirteen miles today, deep into the Sawtooths. Lying there in my sleeping bag, all I could think about was water coming to a boil. The Aeropress. Single-origin Peruvian beans, notes of honey and elderberry, or so the label claimed. I could taste it already.

Footsteps. I sat up fast. I hadn’t seen another camper the night before, hadn’t heard one either.

I was out of the tent before I’d finished the thought. A man in a tie-dye shirt stood over my fire pit, both hands in my pack.

“Hey. What the hell are you doing.”

He looked up at me with small black eyes, close-set, reptilian. Something about him made my skin go tight. He straightened slowly, my bag of beans in his fist, and then he ran.

“Stop!”

I put my boots on wrong and didn’t care. Grabbed my bag, went after him. He had a hundred yards on me already, and whatever he was, he could move. I couldn’t close the gap. If anything I was losing it. So I settled into something I could hold, this was going to be long.

We hit the main road together, him ahead, me behind, and he cut toward a school bus painted the color of a fever dream, a dozen hippies cheering him on from the windows. Not just one thief. A whole commune of them.

He climbed aboard. The engine turned over slow and gave me just enough time to get to my car and fall in behind them. Then we were running the mountain roads of Idaho, bus and car, nose to tail.

It had turned into a beautiful morning. Somewhere in the middle of the chase this occurred to me: this would make a hell of a photograph.

One hand on the wheel, one hand digging through the bag on the passenger seat, eyes moving between the road and the bus. I found the camera. Exposure was wrong, badly wrong for the light. I eased off the gas, took the wheel with my knees for half a second, and fixed it with both hands. The road bent hard to the right. I lifted the camera and shot as we rounded it.

I thought it might actually be good.

…

I’m sorry to tell you, none of that happened. The truth is boring. This is a photo from a drive between Sun Valley and Stanley, on the way to go horse riding back in 2023. I was in the passenger seat. I saw a bus that looked like something out of Into the Wild, and I raised the camera and took the shot.

That’s all it was. I still think it’s a good photo. The story just needed some help.