Hi there. I’m Eric. I’m a photographer. If you don’t know much about me, I suppose here is as good a place as any to get to know me.

I live in Seattle, but almost never photograph anything here. My preference is the eastern part of the state, and I’m out there in the spring and autumn as much as I can be - mostly weekends. I also have messed up my life enough to get a month off every year for more extended travel, a four-week photography trip that is equal parts exhausting and productive. It is not a vacation in the sense that there is nothing relaxing about it. More on this later.

My work is generally black & white and shot on film. I prefer medium and large formats. None of my cameras are lightweight, and this has somehow not stopped me from hiking with them. This practice is inadvisable and not sustainable. Each year I tell myself I’ll figure out a better way and never do.

Often, I take winters off from photographing. This allows me to enjoy a kind of hibernation and to sort out what I’m doing in the coming shooting season, which generally starts in March-ish.

Each winter, I lay out my coming trips and my plans for the next few months. And I think I’ll share a bit of that here. I don’t know if it’s interesting, but we’ll see.

Last Summer Was Bad

I’ve had an amazing string of luck on my summer trips. No accidents, no injuries, nothing stolen, I wasn’t shot at, everything was basically fine.

Last summer this streak ended. Though not dramatically. Sort of.

I left Seattle with the idea of getting to my parents’ house in Pennsylvania in three days. I’ve done 1000+ mile days before and figured that doing three in a row would be a great idea.

This was a mistake. The first day was indeed fine. The second was okay. I was tired, but knew I’d be “home” tomorrow. On the morning of the third day, somewhere in Indiana, I became intensely nauseated.

I was on the Indiana Turnpike and pulled over at a rest area to sort it out. By “intense,” I mean that I was green and felt like I was going to barf. I couldn’t move without waves of nausea spinning me around. I tried to walk it off, I tried to sleep, I tried to ignore it. I knew that the longer I spent there, the longer it would take to get off the road.

I am a stubborn person. Getting a hotel room is almost out of the question. I figured that if I was going to be nauseated, I might as well be nauseated while driving.

After a few hours at the rest area and feeling slightly better, I started to drive. Most turnpikes have emergency pull-outs every mile or so. I used almost every one of these until the next rest area, where I again stopped. It just wasn’t going away.

I crossed into Ohio, and eventually, the nausea calmed some. My stomach was empty, but I was still too nauseated to eat. By Pennsylvania, I was exhausted. Every ounce of strength and effort had been spent on the road. When I rolled into my old hometown, I had nothing at all left in me.

The next morning, the nausea was gone, but it had taken my will with it. The day after that, I got a bit better. I spent two weeks at my parents’ house in varying degrees of nausea, stress, and exhaustion.

My first thought was that I somehow made myself carsick. This was all but confirmed by riding along with my father on a few short drives. It wasn’t consistent, but it seemed like I was getting carsick.

The time with my parents was good. I was able to get out and photograph some cemeteries as well as the town of Shamokin, which became the subject of my latest book Anthracite.

Last Summer Got Worse

I left my parents’ house and gave myself two and a half weeks to return to Seattle. Along the way, I wanted to explore a bit of Virginia and North Carolina, as well as stop in Missouri, Kansas, and a few other places.

Normally, I have a route and see places along that route, almost never staying more than a night in any single location. This time, however, I decided to find a couple of towns and explore the surrounding area in loops that would bring me back to the same campsite each night.

I don’t think I mentioned this - I camp. It’s rare that I stay in a hotel room. Out of the thirty days on the road, usually around 28 nights of them are spent inside a tent. I love it and it’s cheap or free. If I didn’t travel this way, I couldn’t afford to travel at all.

Because I stayed too long at my parents’ house, I had to cut down some of these loops. But that would come soon enough. First, I wanted to explore some railroad towns in Virginia and North Carolina.

I will have much more to say about these towns and this experience in the future (possibly a zine will come of it).

Three things happened almost simultaneously. First, the nausea came back. Second, the temperatures went from the low to mid-80s to triple digits. Third, my air conditioning went out.

The nausea seemed to be related to the road, especially the interstate. When I travel, I almost never use the interstates. I’m all for backroads and a lot of stopping. But this trip required them, and every time I was on one, I got gripped with intense nausea. And when I knew I would have to be on one, I’d spiral into anxiety and would receive the nausea in that way. It got to the point where I didn’t know which came first and which was the symptom.

If I could have just gotten on Interstate 80 and sped back to Seattle in a handful of days, I would have. But I had learned my lesson on the trip east. So going slow was necessary. And that was the plan all along anyway.

I did my best to keep to my schedule. Now, in most years, the schedule needs to be flexible. It needs to change with everything that happens around me. This year the schedule had to be forgotten. This was convenient, since I wrote out my schedule on a notepad and forgot it at home.

My maps still showed the roads and routes I wanted to take, but not where I hoped to be each night. And not the number of days I anticipated the trip home to take.

I won’t take you day-by-day through my trip. I honestly don’t remember much of it anyway. The heat was oppressive and the nausea was various shades of debilitating.

Two nights were spent in the Land Between the Lakes, an 170,000 acre chunk of public land on the Kentucky/Tennessee border. I fell in love with the place, exploring dirt roads and old cemeteries, old homesteads and churches. I can’t recommend it enough.

The plans were to stay in Coffeeyville, Kansas for the next three nights, exploring the loops I mapped out the previous winter. But I also needed to get my air conditioning fixed. I had it flushed and checked for leaks a couple of times so far on the trip, but nobody could sort it out.

Pulling into nearby Independence, Kansas, I stopped at a shop recommended by another shop, and they took the whole thing apart, found the leak and tried to fix it. For three days in a row. Most of those days, I sat outside the shop waiting. I’d explore some in the evenings and even in the mornings before they opened. I camped at a nearby lake.

On the fourth day, they said they probably fixed it unless pieces of the pump found their way into the evaporator. If that was the case, there’s nothing anyone could do apart from replacing the entire air conditioning system, which they couldn’t do without the parts which would take a week to get there.

A lot of money later, I left the next morning and it promptly stopped working again. The nausea also returned, requiring me to stop every few miles to … actually, I’m not sure what. Rest? At that point, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I figured it was motion sickness and that stopping would help. Which it did, in a way.

The nausea would come in waves and then leave. Sometimes it would come back. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it seemed to react to food or lack of food. Sometimes it seemed fully independent of anything I was doing.

I eventually wound up in Grand Junction, Colorado. Camping again, I ate a little that evening and was utterly plagued by nausea and heat. The next morning, with temperatures somehow still in the 90s, with my AC out, and with my inability to eat anything, I had quite the nervous breakdown while driving through town.

Realizing that I might not actually be able to drive myself home, I talked myself into eating. I understood that even though I was nauseated, I was also very undernourished. I had been eating almost nothing since North Carolina. I forced myself to down a plate of tofu and broccoli at a Chinese restaurant, knowing it would likely bring on the nausea. I also had to hit the interstate again, which would apparently also do the same.

I-70 into Utah was a mess. The afternoon sun was melting me; my phone, which I used for navigation, wouldn’t charge because it was too hot in the car. My nausea required frequent stops, and everything I wanted to photograph was left unshot.

I can’t convey how much I did not shoot compared the the previous years. I had such big plans! I had actually convinced myself to travel in a slightly different way (the loops thing), and I think it might have worked if not for the various maladies befalling the entire trip. It had slowly become a war of attrition which I was quickly losing.

The broccoli and tofu did enough of the trick to get me into Utah and Idaho. I don’t remember much of the run at this point. I had plans for Idaho, but I always have plans for Idaho. These plans are almost always pushed aside to get home.

Through clouds of nausea, I finished the trip, leaving the interstate even through Oregon to spare myself any further problems. It didn’t work as well as I hoped, b