THE PHOTO TRAVELER

PROLOGUE

What do you do when a sudden gust of wind forces your boat totally off course and into the unknown? When from one moment to the next, the last seventeen years of the life you knew quickly morphs into one you’d never imagined?

Ever since I could remember, I believed there had to be something more to life than the one I’d been thrown into as a child.

I would ask myself if it was wrong for me to feel this way. If I was being naïve to think there was something greater out there. Something that really belonged to me. But what do you do if you feel an unknown force pulsating through your blood, constantly reminding you of it? Are you just supposed to ignore it?

I suppose that most of the time that’s what people teach us to do. You know, “Forget it. Take the easy way out.” Sure. Always the easy way. Never the right one.

That’s what they kept telling me. “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can have a better life. Learn to live with what you’ve got.” Things like that.

Maybe that’s why I started taking photos as soon as I got my hands on my first camera. It was a way I could distance myself from the life I was being forced to live. It let me create images of the world around me, finding life in the most ordinary moments…like when the sun makes a lonely tree sweat and it in turn gives water to a struggling, thirsty grasshopper below. Those things were real. Not the crappy life I’d always been trapped in.

  And then, just a few weeks ago, my life took a turn for the unexpected.