“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.” Jack London

Albus being a boss at Canon Beach, Oregon. (November 2019)

Three summers ago my dog Albus turned 12, and, after having to carry him out on the last day of a 3 day hike, I finally admitted to myself that he was too old for multi-day hiking. My Lightroom Catalog was full of 15 years of Albus and I backpacking our way around Washington’s Cascades and I wasn’t even close to ready to stop adding to our story. Since then, the day hikes have gotten shorter, too. We’re down to less than a mile.

Sometimes it takes a while to notice what we have noticed. Albus hadn’t just become less mobile, he had chilled out. This meant more time sleeping in his leather recliner and less time fighting puppies, chasing crows, and otherwise demanding his authority be respected. All I had noticed was that he couldn’t hike with me anymore. I was sad, and stuck. The solution was obvious, but I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t an epiphany—I don’t even remember when it happened—it just kind of seeped in and became a fully formed realization in the back of my mind weeks before I made plans to act: Road Trip!

Thanks to the Washington State Highway Patrol, Albus and I arrived at Canon Beach, Oregon 30 minutes behind schedule, perfect timing for golden hour light and this seal waiting for the incoming tide.

I can drive for days and days, I love it. Albus had always found riding in the car for more than an hour intolerable. Increasily, I realized, he just slept and slept. So, last November, Albus and I headed for the Oregon Coast—I was driving, he was riding shotgun, my road-trip playlist was pumping out Roll Me Away, Highway to Hell, and Take It To The Limit, among others, and we were flying down the 101 doing 65 in a 55 and waiting for the passing lane. We spent a night at Canon Beach, one in Lincoln City, and one in Bandon, before making the long run back north on the last day. It was perfect. We hit the road again in February, with two more trips during Covid in June and July, adding Yachats to our list of all time favorite places and revisiting Bandon, this time at low tide. These trips were about Albus, not photography. Or were they? They were certainly about Albus, and decidedly not about me—I was purposeful in this. But a strange thing happened on the way to “not about photography.” My photography got better.

Previous to all this, I was at a point in my photography where I had rejecting chasing iconic landscapes in magic hour light, determined to do my own thing. Following Albus, however, I found emmense satisfaction basing our road trips around some iconic locations, and found some unique images in well-trodden places. I figured out how to keep sea spray off my front element, make my tripod work in the sand of a retreating tide, clean the salt water off of my gear in the motel shower, gained an emmense appreciation for sunrise light on the coast, and learned to better see when long exposures were the right choice.

Sunrise near Bandon, Oregon. (November 2019).

Most importantly, I learned to wait. Sitting with Albus on the beach because he didn’t want to walk anymore, I had to slow things way down, which has never been my best skill, and just look out at the sea. I saw all kinds of things—reflections that happen in the calm between waves; rocks distributed in patterns or forming shapes in the surf that could be visually connected together, not unlike stars seen as constellations; directionality always, with everyting leaning into this or away from that; and erosion happening in real time, not just worn rocks testifying to time having passed. I got better at seeing because I took time to see, time I would not have taken if my priority was something other than sitting on the beach with my dog. By doing what he wanted, not what I wanted, I found myself presented with an entirely new environment, a more received, less envisioned or previsualized one. Perhaps advocating for a less previsualized approach is anathema to photography, but consider me a heretic; as it turns out, when you are not in charge, you must be gifted what you want. Many of these images feel like gifts.

We also had a ton of fun—trying to take a selfie of both of us with Thor’s well filling and empying in the background, accidentally turning on the video during the attempt (mostly a fail), sliding down a clay embankment searching for the boiler in Boiler Bay (found it!), and being stalked by suspicious looking seagulls hoping to fly off with one of our jumbo praws. We now have our favorite coffee stands with the best milk bones, favorite sea-food shacks with the best shade, and favorite pizza joints with the best heated patios. We made friends with some locals and fellow travelers and got some pretty damned good photos along the way. My points in simply this: if you ever lose track of why you got into photography or your progress as an artist feels stagnant, you should get a dog. If you can’t get a dog, find some way to make it not about you--show up, shut up, and be of service. It might just work out in your favor.

I would be remiss not include an image of the Wizard’s Hat in a post about a dog named Albus. If I had to choose, this is my favorite image from the trips (July 2020).

The images in the collection I am calling “Following Albus” must have something in common, besides being from the Oregon Coast, but I am too close to them to say what that is. I don’t know if we will head down the coast again, or find some other destination for our trips in the months to come, and I’m not interested in deciding. I am just listening. Because if I learned anything, it’s that I will know when I know and we will go and see what we see, and mostly just be there, together, taking it all in, and maybe recording a little of what we expeience. Or maybe not, because sometimes that just isn’t what matters.

You can see all the images from our trips in the Projects section of this site, just click on “Following Albus”, many of which I have included in the Prints section as well. I also want to say thanks to Tom Ryan from whose wonderful book Following Atticus I took the title, and to Lauren for the gift of that book.

David