One of my favorite portraits of all time. 1999. I had just shaved Micah's head, and had blithely announced to him as I sheared off his shaggy red locks that he was, in fact, going bald.
We had just graduated from UMM, and were about to set off on a road trip from Maine to drop him off at Springer Mountain in Georgia. He was to have walked back to Maine, alone, along the Appalachian Trail. He was trying to figure out his next step, after college. 46 days into the hike, in southwestern Virginia, Micah found his direction. He walked into the next town and hopped a bus to Texas, where he lived and worked for years afterward at a farm dedicated to alleviating world hunger.
He was a young man, just out of college, and facing a monumental undertaking. I think you can see that in this photograph. I wasn't going anywhere, and that was fine because I didn't know where I would have gone even if I were leaving Maine. I didn't really want to deal with it at that time. But being so close to Micah, and watching him prepare to leave, was a sort of preparation-by-proxy for me. The next year, when I left Jeff, left Maine, and left the security of those days, I could look back to this time as a precursor.
And now, almost 8 years later, this picture still has all of that resonance for me.
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