The Late Great Rebellion

Pittsburgh had failed me and now there was nothing ahead but the road.

Twenty-three years old – petulant, ambitious and discontented. I was a recent graduate of Penn State’s film program which was an incoherence of beadledom and incompetence. We were hobbled by shoddy equipment, bureaucracy and professors whose only goal was to ruin students’ dreams. To diminish their lofty work into lifeless 16mm corpses by forcing them to comply to dogmatic rules of storytelling - or risk failing. I witnessed my fellow student’s projects blanched of all spark while spending their life’s savings. I too was threatened. “If you do it your way, don’t come back to us crying when it doesn’t work.”

It was an intimidating portent for a first-time filmmaker regardless of whether it was true or not. But I believed in what I was doing and being rebellious in nature made my choice easy. Screw them. Fail me if you want. A degree in filmmaking is useless anyways.

It was called An Early October. News stations interviewed us as our professors bristled. It went on to win a student Emmy and a distribution contract. I got a B minus.

After graduation I worked as an assistant editor on two mediocre features but which had great casts. Forest Whittaker, Sharon Stone, Jim Belushi, Patricia Neal and Shelly Winters among others. Despite the low pay, I was in the river of a burgeoning career. As a photographer in my own right, I entered Pittsburgh’s premiere Three Rivers Art festival. I was the youngest person to win the top prize. It seemed the world was opening its arms to me.

Then nothing happened.

Despite my successes and work, Pittsburgh seemed to not care and closed her arms to me. I couldn’t get an art show unless I was from a major city like New York or Los Angeles. And for the influx of movies coming to the city, I couldn’t even get Assistant Dog Poop Scraper on any production. Not even production assistant work. I was told once, “You know PA work is a LOT of responsibility, young man.” Inferring that I wasn’t qualified to get coffee and move boxes. It was baffling and depressing. This went on for over a year despite all efforts. I was depleted and confused. What was I doing wrong? I had no answers unless I was being given some message – The one that whispers, “It is time, son for you to leave.”

Los Angeles seemed to be to only logical option given my ambitions, but the notion of moving there was terrifying. Leaving the comfort of home, my friends and all things safe and familiar for a city in which I knew only one person was stomach curdling and wrapped in fear.

But that summer two friends were plotting a cross country road trip and it’s then that I knew. It was my invitation to adventure. And to grow up. That definitive rite of passage – Leaving home for the unknown. Where all highways were unwritten chapters that only you could fill in as the vast country flung open before you like a lover as the stars above arced northwards in their shifting latitudes as we barreled towards Tennessee.

I had the needful things packed for shipping. The tools of my trade - My enlarger, film negatives and enough clothes to survive embarrassment for I didn’t know how to dress for Los Angeles. I had a studio chosen for me by a friend and which I trusted would make a home. All things now in place and the only thing left was the hardest – To say goodbye.

My parents stood out in the drive as the VW van arrived with my friends Rob and Ira. They and I chipped in to buy it with the hopes of selling it afterwards and make back the money. It was a nondescript beige with a dubious history but with enough robust to travel the thousands of miles ahead of us or so we hoped. I had the minimal things for leaving. T-shirts, shorts, an army jacket and a camera with rolls of film to tell the story ahead. Anything else I figured we’d pick up on the road. Mom handed me a tin of her cookies. But there was one thing missing I felt. A last-minute impulse I knew the journey needed and was suddenly very important – My brother’s Animal puppet from the Muppets.

Yes, this was now absolutely vital. Animal had a storied history in our families’ travels as we photographed him on all our family vacations and by God he was coming with us for this. To be our mascot and journeyman with matted fur and repainted eyes, our implacable witness to adventures ahead. I didn’t ask my brothers permission. He was off at college anyways, didn’t need to know and I’d explain it to him later.

Out in the drive Mom and Dad feigned excitement that only supportive parents could muster to keep me from being sad at them being sad. It’s not that they weren’t happy for me, but it was the hard and brutal truth that their baby boy was leaving. A forever act with no reversal. Though I would of course visit again, countless times, this would never be my home again. Not in the permanent sense. Not in the familiarity of breakfasts and treehouses and returning home from school to Mom’s supper sense.

We took the ritual photos of leaving and embraced. I’d be back for Christmas I promise. The door slid shut as the van’s engine thrummed as we embarked down the long graveled driveway to Glasgow Road towards Route 8 and to freeways only known by maps as all points familiar vanished behind us in the rearview mirror, as we caterwauled south till we were now in the embrace of the unknown.

But as we left the house, when my parents thought we were beyond the radius of sight, my mother turned to Dad and wept. I did not know it at the time, but Dad had lost his job and soon they were going to have to sell the house. They didn’t tell me because they didn’t want to ruin my trip.

West Virginia slurred into Kentucky and we felt like convicts after a great heist longing for poker and booze found in imagined shacks slung up along byways just out of sight. The landscape blurred past us in lush green like leafy blankets in which you’d want to nest as the verdant upper branches slung the wind behind us to speed our passing. The air was thick with humidity and infused by the rich scent of Magnolia as hot rains and ill-fated insects pummeled the windshield in a slurry of beauty and untimely death. Ira played guitar in the passenger seat, his feet out the window as the road hummed beneath us and by Tennessee the cookies were gone.

Animal gazed unblinking from the dashboard, gaping among maps and trinkets from rusty gas stations and all creation was violently alive and at Knoxville we aimed the bug spattered lights west and nothing could contain us.

We survived being run off the road by a mindless eighteen-wheeler, jammed with this wayward hitchhiker kid named Nickel who we dropped off outside of Little Rock and met Janice and Frankie who left everything behind to travel the country in their rainbow covered RV till his cancer ran out. We knew we would make New Mexico by dawn.

It was all things abundant and vast, horizons farther flung and the sky lofting proudly above us in greater measures with each state. And when we woke that dawn among the grand mesas in their variegate of millennial colors, beckoning upwards as if waiting for God to land, I knew I was no longer the same. Three days looking backwards to a driveway two-thousand miles behind me, now shifted eternally forward to the new life burgeoning ahead. It was in that moment as the young sun raked the plateaus into strakes of shadows yearning west, I knew I had grown up into something new. It was that day in the meridian of rust desert and sun shattered trees that I had truly left home. And Animal was witness as we climbed impossible summits to partake in the grand aria that was America.

But the journey was far from over as we shot north through Colorado west to Utah, speeding upwards through Wyoming till on the cusp of Montana, our lives changed at Yellowstone – because we met them. The three. Carrie, Kelly and Andrea. The Young Patriots.

Festooned in their red white and blue bandanas, they were on break from North West University and we casually joked, wouldn’t it be funny if we all became best friends? And we did. Eschewing awkward hook-up games, we rushed north into Montana and camped for the night under grand pines with good whiskey and a bonfire whose logs collapsed just after midnight to form a peace sign as we all gasped whoaaa…

Signs and signifiers of our destined journey were etched in all things we saw – Owls alight by off roads beckoning us to take the paths they marked, rainbows around moons in Washington and fellow puppets held by our new friends who Animal embraced. Dropped transmissions in Spokane, hot tubs in the Orcas Islands, numbers exchanged, promises made as the world screamed go go go!

And in the years that followed, those promises were kept. Road trips and spontaneous adventures where we would reunite under the moon to perform theatrical improvisations in the ruins of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Kelly and I traveled to Europe. I photographed all of their weddings.

But time steals into life eventually. Babies are born, families are raised and road trips quietly grew farther apart. It’s now been years. But we remain friends in this awkward slowing of things yet knowing we found rare magic that night. In the end I gave up filmmaking for my own art. The path of my own making. These things you learn along the way.

I still have Animal. Yes, I’m a middle-aged man with a puppet by his bedside. He holds now the ashes of my brother, scooped into a plastic maroon flashlight for that’s all I had to take him in. Dad’s ashes have now been added. And if I ever had to flee fire by night and could only take one thing, it would be him.

And if the councils of memory have taught me anything, and to you who are reading this – Just GO. Grab a puppet and fling yourself at the vast land on cheap wheels and good coffee and chase the sun across broken roads and chilling winds. For out there in the wilderness of the grand country is your life to be found.

The Late Great Rebellion - Music by Ira Caplan