Dead, Dusty Plants
It took nine days to get from Kansas to Montana, including a night stuck in a snowbank in Colorado we only escaped from with the help of Search and Rescue. We had gone off onto BLM land in pursuit of wild horses, one of the last items on Rachel’s increasingly urgent bucket list. It wasn’t until the next day, after getting stuck, that she saw a couple bands of the horses right by the side of the highway. She snapped a few photos and then was ready to move on.
She was in bad shape after those nine days. After getting to Flo’s house, she was almost delirious with pain. She reached for my hand in the ambulance, and I held it all the way to the hospital.
For a week, I drove back and forth from Hot Springs to Kalispell to visit her, bringing her three dogs and leaving them in the car with the windows down. Nights, I drove back listening to the White Album or the Koyaanisqatsi score by Philip Glass, tears streaming down my face.
One day on the way to the hospital, I stopped along the side of the road, amidst the rolling hills, and gathered some of the dead, dusty plants. After she died, when I was doing an art residency thousands of miles away in Rochester, NY, I took those plants and pressed them against glass and photo paper. These lumen prints are an act of mourning, decaying with each passing second in the light, as I try to remember the increasingly disparate traces of Rachel.