Every photographer can hit a wall when they are traveling. It’s one thing to just drive for hours, which is hard enough; but to drive with your antenna up, and stop and make photos when you can, can wear you out with a quickness. It takes effort to create, and like any work, can make you tired. So you’ll hit a wall before the sun sets, and still be a hundred miles from where you figured you could end up.
I hit that wall in Scottsboro on Christmas Day.
Scottsboro, Alabama, SX-70 (Christmas Day 2021)
The black and white film for the SX-70 had been working beautifully—all these soft grays and deep textures and infinite detail it found on that overcast day. So of course I had used it all up and was left with the color, which was behaving, to be charitable, erratically. A grown person should know that the cure for being tired is to sleep, and if you’re hungry you should eat, and if there’s no light and your photos are coming out not just bad but ugly then you should ease up on the throttle.1
I met Artistic Stylings while trying to find a good spot to pull over and look at a map, and was like okay, I’m retracting my antenna, I’ll just listen to music and drive. I had meant to go up to see Jason Isbell in Muscle Shoals a few months before, and had even gotten tickets and a hotel, but got real involved with watching Alabama dismantle Ole Miss in Tuscaloosa and didn’t make it.
Just what I thought was the prettiest and most delicate little gate I had ever seen, from what looked like a very long time ago, Stevenson, Alabama, SX-70 (2021)
Dart thrown, I turned roughly West and kept going. I felt like I had unfinished business in that part of Alabama, a few photographs I tried for and missed a few years ago. It felt like a long drive—it was a long drive—mostly in the dark which left me gritting my teeth over what I might be missing.
Exhausted, I finally rolled into Tuscumbia and checked into “the Shoals’ Finest Hotel” (it looks nice as it can be — across the street from the Music Hall of Fame). Without looking up, the young woman working the desk suggested if I wanted any food to hit up the truck stop, since everywhere else was closed for Christmas; to avoid the bar down the way named Stagger Lee’s; and to skip the hotel’s free breakfast in the morning and just go to Jack’s instead.
Muscle Shoals, Alabama, SX-70 (2021)
This was information a weary traveler needed to have and I was very grateful. I responded that I’d spotted the bar on the way in, and that I didn’t go to bars, but even for someone who lives in Mississippi it looked pretty dang rough. She said “you might end up with summerteeth if you go there.” She was now looking at her nails. “You know, some of ‘em are in, some of ‘em are out.”
I almost collapsed, I swear to God. I had managed to to be on this planet for nearly half a century and never heard that, listening to a record named that for twenty years and didn’t know it. Clearly I was in the presence of some kind of Southern royalty and while she was clicking around nonchalantly to get me a room I was feverishly trying to write all this down, thumbing it into an email to myself.
“So, I mean, you are stuck here on Christmas? That must be kind of tough,” I said, trying to stall and keep the icon talking. “Naw, I like it this way, I chose it,” she said, tapping in my driver’s license. “This is the surest way to avoid my family.”
A little house in Tupelo, made on the way back to Jackson the day after, Polaroid 600
I laughed all the way to my room, and after dropping my bags and heading back down to see what there was to see at night—revitalized after the briefest of exchanges with a stranger in Colbert County, Alabama—I asked the desk clerk if she wanted anything from the truck stop, since I was going to go pick up something to eat.
“No thanks,” she answered, with the hint of a smile. “I’m sad enough.”
“TRUCK STOP DINNER” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, a newsletter devoted to art and life in the South on instant film. If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
A photograph can be bad for a lot of reasons—underexposed, overexposed, weird angle, blurry, or all of the above. You will make a lot of bad art trying to make some good art, so making bad art is itself part of the process. I don’t mind making a bad photo when I’m trying. But boy I really get fussy if I’ve made an ugly photo. That’s my own fault.
This is a good one. Really wishing I had a biscuit from Jack's right about now.
Great shots, great story! Bravo! (That little gate is a keeper.)