The Tokyo-Montana Express Read Online Free PDF Page B

Coca-Cola. It was a
lonesome Christmas and President Kennedy’s murder was almost like one of those
birds that I had to feed every day.
    The only reason I am mentioning this is to
kind of set the psychological framework for 390 photographs of Christmas trees.
A person does not get into this sort of thing without sufficient motivation.
    Late one evening I was walking home from
visiting some people on Nob Hill. We had sat around drinking cup after cup of
coffee until our nerves had become lionesque.
    I left around midnight and walked down a
dark and silent street toward home, and I saw a Christmas tree abandoned next
to a fire hydrant.
    The tree had been stripped of its
decorations and lay there sadly like a dead soldier after a losing battle. A
week before it had been a kind of hero.
    Then I saw another Christmas tree with a
car half-parked on it. Somebody had left their tree in the street and the car
had accidentally run over it. The tree was certainly a long way from a child’s
loving attention. Some of the branches were sticking up through the bumper.
    It was that time of the year when people in
San Francisco get rid of their Christmas trees by placing them in the streets
or vacant lots or wherever they can get rid of them. It is the journey away
from Christmas.
    Those sad and abandoned Christmas trees
really got on my conscience. They had provided what they could for that
assassinated Christmas and now they were just being tossed out to lie there in
the street like bums.
    I saw dozens of them as I walked home
through the beginning of a new year. There are people who just chuck their
Christmas trees right out the front door. A friend of mine tells a story about
walking down the street on December 26th and having a Christmas tree go
whistling right by his ear, and hearing a door slam. It could have killed him.
    There are others who go about abandoning
their Christmas trees with stealth and skill. That evening I almost saw
somebody put a Christmas tree out, but not quite. They were invisible like the
Scarlet Pimpernel. I could almost hear the Christmas tree being put out.
    I went around a corner and there in the
middle of the street lay the tree, but nobody was around. There are always
people who do a thing with greatness, no matter what it is.
    When I arrived at home I went to the
telephone and called up a friend of mine who is a photographer and accessible
to the strange energies of the Twentieth Century. It was almost one o’clock in
the morning. I had awakened him and his voice was a refugee from sleep.
    “Who is it?” he said.
    “Christmas trees,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Christmas trees.”
    “Is that you, Richard?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “What about them?”
    “Christmas is only skin deep,” I said. “Why
don’t we take hundreds of pictures of Christmas trees that are abandoned in the
streets? We’ll show the despair and abandonment of Christmas by the way people
throw their trees out.”
    “Might as well do that as anything else,”
he said. “I’ll start tomorrow during my lunch hour.”
    “I want you to photograph them just like
dead soldiers,” I said. “Don’t touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way
they fell.”
    The next day he took photographs of
Christmas trees during his lunch hour. He worked at Macy’s then and went up on
the slopes of Nob Hill and Chinatown and took pictures of Christmas trees
there.
    1, 2, 3,4, 5,9, 11, 14, 21, 28, 37, 52, 66.
    I called him that evening.
    “How did it go?”
    “Wonderful,” he said.
    The next day he took more photographs of
Christmas trees during his lunch hour.
    72, 85, 117, 128, 137.
    I called him up that evening, too.
    “How did it go?”
    “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “I’ve almost
got 150 of them.”
    “Keep up the good work,” I said. I was busy
lining up a car for the weekend, so that we would have mobility to take more Christmas
tree photographs.
    I thought we should get a good sampling of
what San Francisco had to