Divided #13 – Day 88

We stayed a day in Sheridan before leaving Wyoming, not without a bit of sadness. Although the Cowboy state is one of the most conservative corners of the US, we like being there and like the authenticity of its people.

After passing into Montana the land got much flatter. The Bighorn mountains, we had crossed before reaching Sheridan, had been the last real mountains we had to cross. What really came as a surprise was how green the land was. The prairie of Eastern Montana was supposed to be brownish/yellow in July. But what we drove through looked more like Ireland: A deep green dominated the rolling hills. The weather in that normally rather dry part of the US had been dominated by rain for the last couple of months. Another side effect of the unusual wet weather was an abundance of insects, resulting in a bugs-massacre on our big windscreen. Each day we had to clean the window at least 2 to 3 times of the remains of hundreds of insects.

Reaching South Dakota was an anticlimax for us, resulting in us being really, really tired (we probably just felt the way we were supposed to feel after countless hours behind the wheel and over 80 portraits and interviews…) and not being able to find any people for our project. We were oversaturated with Cowboys and Indians, that still could be found in the Western part of the state and not quite ready for the midwestern more boring part of the Eastern part of the state. After all the excitement of the South West, the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest, it took us a moment to adjust to the endless flatness and sameness of the Midwest. We drove for over 600 miles through the whole of South Dakota, before finally shooting a portrait of 2 baseball playing brothers in the very South Eastern corner of the state…

And then came the proper Midwest, with Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Cornfields as far as you can see, farms, small towns and endless straight roads. Dull and boring? Not at all! We were loving it! Our crisis was over and one of our most productive weeks of the whole project started. The Midwest turned out to be a gold mine for us. It all started with the portrait of the chief of police of Pocahontas, Iowa. When we read the name of the town on the map, we knew we had to shoot a portrait there. And since a police chief was on our bucket list anyway, we walked into the police station of that small town in the middle of nowhere and sure enough 5 minutes later we were sitting in the office of the chief who was happy to be part of this. We also had a happy boy, when Elias could go on a cruise through town in the police car. And from then on, it was portrait after portrait. An old retired farmer couple who talked about Iowa and its agriculture in the 40’s and 50’s, a John Deere tractor collector with the most impressive beard who drove for us some seriously old tractors, a young progressive girl working in a co-op in Wisconsin, that could have been standing in a hip neighborhood in Brooklyn. And we were even lucky enough to find a small county fair in Minnesota, where Elias could go wild with the local farmers boys, while we were shooting portraits of the farmer girls with their animals that were being presented for best in show.

But one of the absolute highlights of this Midwest week was when we met David Geiger and his family in the above mentioned progressive co-op in Viroqua, Wisconsin. When we saw David and his family we knew by the way they were dressed, they were Amish. We also knew that shooting a portrait of somebody Amish was really, really difficult, because they were not supposed to be photographed. Still we approached David and asked him. And to our surprise he said that he was not Amish, but the rest of his family very much so. It turned out that he was a former actor/hippy who had lived and partied for a long time in San Francisco. Then he met Raquel, an artist from Barcelona, who was interested in religions. Today, they live with their children on a farm in Wisconsin, she has become 100% Amish and raises the kids accordingly. He has become kind of a Christian fundamentalist who is a bit too comfy to be Amish all the way. He still drives a car and uses a mobile phone and an ipad. But thanks to his wife who now is Rachel, his life style is about 90 % Amish. The 10% he was not Amish, was just enough that we could shoot a portrait of him. For Rachel that was a no go, but since she really liked us she made a compromise and said that she was ok with us filming her while she was doing her daily chores.

We spent half a day with the Geigers and it was a truly fascinating experience. We both learned how to milk a cow, Elias was playing with Samuel, their boy, in the haystock and in the fields and in the evening we were treated to a wonderful dinner. And while we don’t share their rather dogmatic Christian beliefs, we could see the beauty of a very simple life style, absent of the countless digital gadgets that dominate more and more our daily lives.