She used to say that I didn’t really care what happened so long as I got to photograph whatever it was. I think that’s overstated. We’d gotten an early start out of Billings. I drove, she talked and when she went quiet I pretty much let the silence hang. I said just enough to let her know I was listening and kept my thoughts to my self. It’s not like I didn’t have a preference but as I saw it this was her call. She needed to make a decision and depending on what she came up with I’d either follow along or not. “decide” - someone once told me that the origin of the word is the same as words like “homicide” “genocide” “suicide”. As in to murder the alternative. Just south of Casper, dusk and the first few flakes of snow. She asked me to pull over, got out and walked a little ways up the road and just stood there looking out over the big nothing. I watched her for a while and then got out too. I left the engine running. There wasn’t much of a shoulder and not the kind of place you wanted to stick around. It was really cold. I shot a few frames and got back in the car. A couple of minutes later it was settled. She’d made up her mind. She said what she needed to say and then we didn’t talk about it anymore. A mile or two further along we hit a pothole and the radio started working again. The weatherman said it was going to snow - we could already see that.

One morning we did some paper cutting with an apparently well-renowned artist. This is the mess on the table after Denny, me, and the 11 eighth graders from Oregon Episcopal School (OES) in Portland had cut out star and snowflake designs, a flower, and a rat. I bought one of the artist's pieces; my talent with scissors is a little lacking. We did several activities with OES students this week. They seemed pretty intelligent but a little obnoxious. I feel like we kind of ended up acting the part of distant, disinterested older teenagers. I wish we had talked with them a little more. (Now that they're gone, I miss the sweet sound of English spoken without an accent.) Middle schoolers or not, it's nice to be around people who are like you, and I think we could have found more in common with them than our nationality if only we had tried.