In the summer of my fourteenth year, I stood on a mountaintop in New Mexico and photographed a storm moving across a lake in the valley below.

I didn’t know anything about photography then. I had grown up seeing pictures…lots of pictures, and I knew just enough to lift a Kodak 110 to my eye, shift my body until the frame felt right, and press the button. That was it.

Philmont Scout Ranch sits in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northeast New Mexico. Each year, two boys from our local Boy Scout troop were chosen to go. Through the generosity of more people than I could name, I was one of them. After days on a bus, time in base camp, and a few days in the mountains, we day-hiked to the top of Mount Baldy — 12,444 feet, the second-highest point in the state. I haven’t heard the word bald since without hearing that number echo back.

That day was cool and clearish. Standing on Old Baldy, I looked southeast toward the village of Eagle Nest and the lake beyond. A storm was moving across it — not rushing, not hesitating — just moving across the water. From that height, I could see the front edge and the back, the beginning and the end, all at once.

Even now, decades later, I remember thinking that this must be something like what God sees — the Alpha and the Omega in the same frame.

I pulled the Kodak from the pocket of my nylon jacket, raised it to my eye, framed the storm, and clicked. I remember thinking that no one back home in Nutbush-- seventeen hundred miles away --and twelve thousand odd feet below where I was standing, would ever believe what I had just seen.

I kept clicking, off and on, over the years. I never really learned photography. I never knew how or where. I stopped writing, too. But even without a camera or a pen in my hands, I never stopped seeing. I kept framing. Shifting perspective. Noticing Light. Taking notes — even if only in my head. Even when I didn’t realize it.  

I don’t chase storms the way some of my friends in Texas, or even around here do. But every once in a while, I’ll get on one. 

These photographs came from one of those afternoons. I had left work at NAPA and headed toward a friend's sunflower crop I’d been using for portraits, wondering if there was anything left in it. July storms here are never a surprise, even when they are. I noticed this one near Ontario and stopped at another friend’s tobacco barns for the first frame. I didn’t stop again for a few miles, just moving along with it.

At the sunflowers, I watched the storm churn and roll — darkening, lightening, tightening, then releasing. The clouds rippled, flattened, breathed.

Ethereal sinew. 

A quiet power moving at its own pace.

In the final frame, I stood on a farm road and watched it move away from me and the fields, moving down the river.

I saw the Sangre de Cristos again ten years ago on a photo trip — even more beautiful than I remembered. A few days after these photographs, I returned to the same sunflower field and made one of the most meaningful Milky Way images I’ve ever photographed.

As cliché as it may sound, I had a “mountaintop experience”.  A seed was planted on a mountaintop, with a storm, and a boy who didn’t yet know what photography was — only that he needed to look.

And the storm passed on, and I stood and watched.

--after 1 Kings 19