Images by Altered Art: Time Capsule on Wheels

It's crazy, how I don't even have a gig doing fire and emergency vehicles - and yet for years they have been my favorite thing to photograph. I spotted this truck resting quietly in a corner of the Ocean City convention center during the annual Maryland Firefighters Convention. It wasn't front and center as were the new pieces of gleaming apparatus and the freshly detailed latest rescue rigs, but I'd sure love to know it's story. "1966 C-95 Mack, owned by Sean Space of Baltimore, Maryland" read the plaque fixed on the side just above an antique ax. "Zelienople 3 Fire Department" was painted on the doors in gold, and across the front of the engine as well.

This truck rolled off an assembly line somewhere several years before I was born and I can't begin to image the places it's been and the lives it has saved. I can't help but wonder who the owner is; someone connected to that fire department perhaps; maybe the son of a member from years ago; or could it be just a collector who fell under the spell of this vintage time capsule on wheels?

I can google all these things, and I just might. But deep down my real craving is for the threads that weave our local fabric of time and history because those vehicles and trucks and stations hold the years and decades of our community.....I'm wanting desperately to find someone who needs the story told because I can both listen and write it down, along with the photos of what is now. And I know these words need to be saved and preserved because far too soon the speakers will be gone.

I spoke with someone at a fire station a few months ago - he was a test case, a person who I hoped could be the golden ticket to a gig like this - and even if he wasn't, it was a chance for the conversation and a few rushed snapshots. Shaking his head he told me of the department's recent loss; the passing of the only remaining charter member just a few months earlier. "It's all gone with him" he explained in distress; "we just lost the last original person who knows all the stories". I wanted to say that is isn't too late, there are others who have walked the walk and fought the fires and who may have been here for more than half a century.....but it wasn't the time. There isn't much of a market for wanting to get older guys down to the station to sit by an antique piece of equipment and tell me things I can weave into these crazy and different and strange photos....I want to though, because there's something I believe people miss when they've lived in one place for a long time, often for most of, if not all, their lives. It's that connection to the past that some of us take for granted, and it's the legacy that lives on in the future generations, the ones that are crawling around his legs as we are trying to talk. I want to say that these stories will one day mean so much to his children as they read them to their children - because unlike my torn family, they are all here now and that priceless history is something that can slip through one's fingers in an instant. "Do it now" I want to say, but I'm afraid of coming across as an overly crazed artist and so I leave instead.

Maybe in a few more years I'll find the ones that are ready to talk and tell their stories - maybe time will march on and people will realize the recollections and stories are fading away. While I'm sorry to have so far been unsuccessful in landing a gig for "pictures served up on against a backdrop of words", maybe what's bothering me more is that in our world today, perhaps no one else feels the urgency to save these memories.