The Making of Robsart Free Parking →

9 AM in Calgary and I was already sweating in the prairie summer heat. I got on the road early to try and get to the small, mostly abandoned hamlet of Robsart by early afternoon. I had photographed pretty much every abandoned building in Robsart for my DaySleeper series but with a new camera in the bag I thought I would shoot the last one on the main strip, an old restaurant and general store. I had never spent a lot of time in Robsart during the day and I really wanted to explore as much as a place with a population of 8 would allow. I drove my trusty VW into some ruts behind the houses that I assumed was once a lane, and when I got to the third house on my left I saw exactly what I needed to photograph. There was an old land yacht of a car and a beat up pickup truck with the hood up parked in the middle of a yard... the grass long enough to almost cover up the wheels. The sun was hitting the truck mirror and there was only one cloud low and to the left of the frame, that was moving at an angle that matched the dead electrical wire to the neighbouring house.  I had the photograph in my mind, and I knew I had to move quick.

Hurriedly I set up my tripod and put my camera on top. 38mm would be the focal length I said to myself and I carefully attached a 16 stop filter to really get the blur I wanted in the grass and sky. I figured the first photo would be a 15 minute exposure so I clicked the shutter and thought of how I would pass the time. That’s when I heard the first buzzing. Just a faint hum at first, then slowly growing louder and louder. That’s when I saw the cloud of angry wasps circling around me. I thought about retreating to the safety of my car until I realized that the bastards were seemingly coming from my car. What I wouldn’t know until later was that I had parked on top of their in ground hive. I would be angry too. 

I was now presented with a significant problem. There were 13 minutes left on the exposure and if I stopped the sun would no longer give the flaring in the mirror I wanted, and the cloud that was going to sit in the middle of the frame above the cars would have passed. So I did what any reasonable 46 year old man would do. I ran around in circles like an idiot, flailing my arms around until they simply lost interest. I sprinted as fast as I could back and forth and around my car, my short Filipino legs firing like the pistons on a 1986 Pontiac Fiero. “Success!” I yelled inside my brain and I turned to shake my fist at the diminishing horde. That was when I ran into the side view mirror of my car. Say what you want about Volkswagens... they may be creaky after a few years, and they may occasionally lie about emissions but they make solid side view mirrors. In an explosion of pain I crumpled over, holding my kidney. I had no idea there were that many nerve endings in middle aged back fat. I managed to get back into my car and sat there wincing, sucking in air through my gritted teeth. Looking down I could see my skin swelling and the colour going from pasty to aubergine.

I moved my car off of the death hole, threw an ice pack from my cooler on my side and snuck back to my camera. Two more quick exposures sans hornets and I was done. The final image is a montage of three (the grass and sky, the buildings, and the wire) that were put together in post processing to properly convey what I was feeling. There is value and beauty in the discarded. Maybe sometimes we are too quick to give up on things, no matter how easy it would be to quit, or awkward or painful or they might be. I reckon if there was a moral to the story that would be it.