This is a photo of my old 1999 Mercury Tracer station wagon and a UHaul trailer, at a rest stop somewhere on I-64 West in the fall of 2004. It was taken by my then-girlfriend on a Polaroid i-Zone, a toy camera that printed tiny instant 1” x 1.5” photos on pullout strips of metallic paper that were decorated with moons, flowers, cubes and hearts. i-Zone photos also had adhesive backs, so the photos could be stuck to anything. This one was stuck to the dashboard of the Tracer shortly after it was taken, where it remained until MPR hauled it off to tax write-off heaven a few years later.
In 2004, both the girlfriend and I had finished our formal schooling in Kentucky — she with an MLS, me with a BFA — and we’d decided to go our separate ways. She found a job as a librarian in southwestern Indiana that fall, and I’d already decided to move to Minneapolis at some point in the very near future.
My last official act as boyfriend was to help her move from her place in Lexington. We loaded all her possessions up in her Volvo, my Tracer and this trailer, and drove them to Indiana. When we were done, I drove by myself back to Louisville, and suddenly I didn’t have a girlfriend anymore.
A few months later, I rented an identical UHaul trailer, packed it up with all my possessions, and drove it north to Minneapolis. I arrived in the city on February 3, 2005. That was six years ago yesterday. That makes this, what, year seven? This is year seven. Happy anniversary, Minneapolis.
The thing about this photo is I eventually started telling passengers in my car that it was a photo of my Tracer making the trip north to Minneapolis in 2005. It made more sense, because if they knew me, my passengers knew that story already; they didn’t know about the time I helped my girlfriend move a few months earlier, and there was no reason for them to know that story. In terms of calendar accuracy, it was only a few months off. The equipment involved was identical. It may as well have been a photo of the trailer combo that moved me up here. I didn’t take any photos of the trip up — I know it’s weird now, but I didn’t have a reliable digital camera (or even a drug phone camera!) until a few years ago. The whole first half of the ’00s is very poorly documented. Moving here was as major a life decision as I have ever made, and this is as close to a visual record of that experience as I have. Like the line the reporter delivers in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
And this little photo has followed suit in the intervening years by taking on a mythical visual quality without any direct intervention from me. The sun damage from sitting on my dash for years has bleached it out, and the instant obsolescence of the format makes it seem much older than it is. It looks like it could be forty years old. It looks like something your grandparents could have handed down to you. I actually choke up a little when I look at this long enough. I know six years isn’t a long time, but god, it sure seems like it. This isn’t actually a photo of that February day six years ago, but it could be.
