The rain won’t catch me now. Since leaving Las Cruces the sky in my rear view mirror has gone from blue/black to clear blue. This is no cause for silent celebration in these parts, where, as the guy in the gas station store informs me, there has been no precipitation since December. Then it was only a flurry of snow that didn’t amount to much.

He offers no thoughts on a cause or a solution, just adds it to a list of reasons that has convinced him to sell up and move back to east Texas where his son lives. He and his wife have run the place for four years now, but the business is in decline and it’s time to cut and run if he can find a buyer. He seems frail and vulnerable, his hairless bare arms pale and blue-veined sticking out from a short sleeved shirt, his grey watery eyes focussing on something far distant from behind the thick lenses of black framed spectacles. His words slow, then finally peter out, his story told. I thank him and without thinking to reason why, I offer my hand to be shaken, which he does, his own hand strong and calloused from a lifetime’s hard toil. I can still feel his grip as I step out into the sunlight.

His is a story that I see repeated in every hamlet, town and city that I pass through.
Abandoned businesses litter this country from coast to coast; a lonesome trail of broken hopes and shattered American dreams. Sometimes its as if whole communities have just upped sticks and moved on, leaving empty homes and stores, to fall piece by piece back to the earth from which they have sprung. In the vastness of this land, it’s as though this is the natural thing to do; if it’s not working here, pack up, move on and start again someplace else. The wind, rain and sun will take care of that which is left behind, until there’s just a trace in the weeds and half-grown trees, with a scattering of bent rusted nails, flaky remains of corrugated iron and charred wood to mark the spot.

I start to climb, leaving the open grasslands and pass into the round topped hill country that characterises much of New Mexico, as seen in the paintings of Georgia O’ Keefe. Small twisted pines, spaced widely at a regular distance, grow on the slopes, getting more numerous and taller the higher I go, until finally the hills disappear under a thick covering of dark green. It’s in a valley below these peaks, in Grant County, that I find the old mining town of Silver City.

Now moving north on Interstate 25, I consider driving up to Truth and Consequences before heading for Silver City. I have no good reason to do so. Indeed, it will take me out of my way, but everywhere on this trip is ‘out of my way’, which is, after all, the sole purpose of my being here: to go to places that I have no reason to be in, to pursue each whim and fancy as it occurs to me. And so it is; the only reason I wish to go to Truth and Consequence is that I like the name, nothing more than that. But if it wasn’t for an NBC television and radio producer called Ralph Edwards, this small New Mexican town would be known by the name of Hot Springs and I’d be driving west, not north.

The town’s original name provided a clue to its main source of income; tourists seeking the healing properties of the naturally heated mineral baths to be found in the area. But it had not been fully developed as a recreational resort, its potential somewhat lost among the hundreds of other ‘Hot Springs’ to be found all over the United States.

Then in 1950, Ralph Edwards, on the 10th anniversary of the Truth or Consequences radio programme, called his staff together and said, "I wish that some town in the United States liked and respected our show so much that it would like to change it's name to ‘Truth or Consequences’". On hearing the proposition, the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau relayed the news to the manager of the Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce and the news spread like a prairie fire. Here was an opportunity to advertise the city and it's resources free of charge. Better still, no longer was this town to be confused with that ‘other one’ in Arkansas and the others throughout the nation (California alone has more than 30 towns called Hot Springs).

So, in a special city election, 1,294 of the town's residents voted for the change to Truth or Consequences. But, 295 area residents opposed the change and a protest was filed, so the city returned to the polls and again voted - by a margin greater than four to one - to go ahead with the name change.

Almost 14 years later, in January 1964, the question went to the people again and they voted to keep the city's unique name. A fourth election was held on August 18, 1967, and once more a majority voted to keep the name Truth or Consequences.

By the time I reach Las Cruces there is the first sign of a change in the weather. The sky up ahead is beginning to fill with cloud, the kind that is thrown up thousands of feet, forming towering castles in the air. I take an exit off the freeway and come to a halt on a patch of gravel close to where the road crosses a railroad track. There is a small church on the other side of the crossing, with two Mediterranean Cyprus’s grown to identical heights either side of the brick-built porch. The sun, not yet covered by cloud, is lighting up the mountains on the horizon in detailed relief, the air coming through my open window clear and clean, with the smell of rain on it.

My hands on the steering wheel, I push back, stretching my aching limbs, my eyes closed in a rush of weariness. I reach for the DeLorme State Atlas on the passenger seat, already open to the correct page. With the prospect of a gathering storm, I decide to skip Truth or Consequences and find a route that will take me cross country toward Silver City - with a hot shower, some food and the promise of rest. But before I start the engine, there is a photograph to be taken; a picture of the moment to use as future evidence that I am here, fifty miles short of Truth and Consequences, a town that, like me, had changed its name to bring about a new beginning.

It’s been five days since I was on an interstate and it’s taking a while for me to adjust. Trucks thunder past with the hammer down, their chrome exhaust stacks flashing, buffed to a blinding shine by the owner/drivers from Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama; hauling loads to all points west. My compact saloon rocks as the volume of speeding metal and cargo displaces the air like a ship carving a passage through the waters of the ocean and I’m left, tossed aside and wallowing in the wake of these monster roadsters.

If the trucks are the full-ahead battlewagons of the road, then the pickups are the destroyers - the greyhounds. With all the power and weight concentrated upfront, growling under the hood, the Dodge Ram badge acts like a ship's figurehead, butting and battering a way through. Diving from lane to lane, they spare no-one in the ruthless race to the front. Then come the family SUV’s, the occasional sports model, and if I’m lucky a classic Corvette or Mustang, their guttural engine note bringing back the spectre of Steve McQueen, scorching his rear wheels in Bullitt. But these are rare on the interstate, their drivers preferring to stick to the state highways and country roads. Next are saloon cars of all make, shape, size, colour and condition. And bringing up the rear, slow-moving farm wagons, listing crazily on worn-out suspensions, weighed down with produce or machinery. The drivers of these, stoic and resigned, have both hands firmly on the wheel, freebie baseball caps carrying the names of local wholesale suppliers worn high on their round, closely-cropped heads.

I’m on my way up to Silver City in New Mexico, passing El Paso on route. I’m making good time on the I-10, but need a comfort halt at a state truck stop. The facilities are new, kept clean by a uniformed attendant, who is presently sitting on the brick wall of a raised shrubbery while he directs an arcing stream of water from a bright yellow hose. A trucker of oriental origin approaches him and begins to mime the action of taking a drink from the end of the hose. Is this mute manoeuvre due to a lack of English or just an attempt to raise a smile? Whatever the reason, it fails to shift the expression of stony-faced, bored officialdom and the attendant silently points out a standpipe some twenty-five yards away. The driver bows in formal thanks and in a couple of minutes is back with two large plastic water containers that he fills under the tap. Thirsty work, I guess, driving a truck.

The city limits of El Paso start to appear twenty-five miles out from the centre of downtown. The interstate is flanked on both sides by the usual visual chaos of commercialism that marks the boundaries of most towns and cities in the United States. Gas stations, lodgings, retail units, diners, restaurants, bars, liquor stores, drive-in banks, automobile showrooms, truck part pit-stops, lube change and tire sales, thrift stores, souvenir shops, malls, laundromats, firework outlets: all on the strip and all out to grab attention in the cut-throat competition for customers. Although a blight in the urban landscape, with seemingly very few limits applied by local planners and environmentalists, these forests of neon lit shapes and names have come to symbolise this country and much that it stands for: the unabashed and unbridled pursuit of wealth and happiness as laid out in the Bill of Rights.

Forty minutes on and to the left is the centre of El Paso. The main point of entry to Juarez on the other side of the Rio Grande is marked by a giant flag in the green, white and red of Mexico, billowing slow and stately above the rooftops. The traffic has slowed to a crawl as it snakes its way forward on the elevated section of freeway that takes me through this part of the city. I pass massive junctions, roads flying, curving and diving in all directions above and below, like giant unravelled knots of concrete and reinforced steel, somehow managing to be beautiful and brutish at the same time. It takes concentration to drive here, but as I start to climb the slope that marks the northwestern city limits, the local traffic begins to fall away and the lanes become clearer.

Within twenty minutes I cross the state line and after ten days in Texas, the friendship state, I drive into New Mexico, land of enchantment.

As I wait to check out of the motel, there is a couple ahead of me. The man, tall, skinny, greased black hair swept back off his face, is dressed in black tee shirt, jeans and careworn cowboy boots. His Aviators are pushed back onto his head while he puts a signature to the list of billable charges that have just chattered out of the printer. His companion, a woman of around the same age - late twenties by my reckoning – is telling the duty receptionist, Donna, that they’re heading back to San Francisco from attending the South by Southwest music festival in Austin. After detouring down here to take in Big Bend country they hope to make it home with just one more stop over, possibly Needles on the Arizona /California border. Without referring to a map, I know that leaves them some considerable way to go if they’re to do it before nightfall.

Twenty minutes later I’m on Highway 90, heading north towards Marfa. Today I’m moving on. I press the button to switch on the car radio:

One morning I woke up and I knew that you were gone.
A new day, a new way, I knew I should see it along.
Go your way, I'll go mine and carry on.

The sky is clearing and the night has gone out.
The sun, he come, the world is all full of light.
Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on.

The road ahead is empty, stretching out as far as I can see. On mornings like this, with the sun picking out every detail in sharp golden relief, the sky bright, the air chilled and fresh, these are the days when it feels like I can drive forever, leaving all behind with only the future waiting for me someplace up ahead.

I cruise silently through Alpine and pass a train on the edge of town that is getting on for a mile long. Hauling imports in from the Pacific coast to destinations in the east, the freight containers are loaded onto flatbed wagons, the names of the shipping lines overwritten and reclaimed as their own by the nocturnal graffiti artists of the San Diego freight yards.

I take breakfast in Marfa at a small, comfortable place that looks like a regular house from the outside, with tables on the porch, a front yard, a gate and brick pathway. Inside, the homey theme continues; a kitchen to the rear with adjoining rooms laid out with mismatched tables and chairs, a sagging sofa, books on shelves to pick out and read, a rack of vintage clothing to buy. I order at the counter, fresh orange juice, pancakes with fruit and maple syrup, then take a block of wood with my order number etched into it and find a seat in the next room.

The food is some of the best I’ve had so far and I settle the check to the sound of ‘Marty Robbins Gunfighter Ballads’, the warped scratchy vinyl spinning at 33rpm on an old portable deck perched on the counter top. I leave with a slim-fit Fifties western style shirt with pearl buttons bought to celebrate the occasion, ‘The Streets of Laredo’ playing me out of the door.

The early morning town traffic soon drifts away at the perimeter and I find myself the only traveller on the road once again. It was on these flat grasslands, that in the Fifties, the location shots for the movie ‘Giant’ were filmed. Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, it has passed into folklore as being the last movie James Dean made before driving himself to death in his silver Porsche Spyder on September 30 1955, at the junction of Highway 46 and 41 in California. Dean was on his way to race meeting at Salinas airport, when on a downgrade approaching Cholame, estimated to be travelling at 85mph, he crashed head-on with a large Ford black and white coupe.

Recalling an iconic image of Dean, stretched out in the back of an open car, boots resting over the front seat, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, gloves in hand with a brooding Hopper style gothic mansion in the middle distance on the horizontal prairie, I catch site of a building about three miles distant. No mansion this, but a small, square construction with a flat roof; nothing remarkable to set it apart, except it being the only building in view on this vast Texas ranchland.

As I pass, I get a flash of store windows, some kind of display and a name on the façade. I check the mirror before pulling onto the verge and turn the car around. I park and get out into the quiet stillness of this remote place, the only sound my boot heels crunching in the gravel. The type on the building reads ‘PRADA MARFA’. Through the plate glass window are women’s shoes and bags perched on plinths of varying size. Is this some kind of joke? To the side is a plaque mounted on a concrete column. This replica store is an art installation, conceived and built by a gallery in Marfa: inspired and all the more unexpected given its location.

Back on the road, I approach Van Horn, an untidy truck-stop town that sprawls either side of the junction where Texas Highway 90 joins Interstate 10. With the outer city limits approaching I come up behind a motorcycle and sidecar. As I close the gap I recognize the couple from the motel lobby earlier this morning. He leans back, legs out straight in the Harley riding style, red bandana whipping in the warm breeze; she sits upright in the open sidecar, one arm draped over the bike’s passenger seat, her hand resting flat against his back. It seems to me the most romantic of images, this couple, close and touching, otherwise silent except for the steady beat of the engine, eyes fixed on the forward pathway, the tarmac passing under their wheels on the westward trail home:

Where are you going now my love?
Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness?
Will you bring me sorrow?
Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams,
what you do and what you see,
Lover, can you talk to me?

Time is unstoppable and incessant. We talk of past, present and future, but there is really only past and future. In the instant that we recognised ‘now’, marked by the blink of an eye or a finger click, it is already behind us.

To take a photograph is to record a fraction of time. In the instant the shutter closes, that moment is already history. Every picture taken is unique; an event guaranteed never to be repeated due to the irreversible progression of time. In a photograph time becomes visible, preserved to claim a place in eternity.

Each of us who has ever taken a photograph has done so, in part, to make sense of the passing of time in our lives. When we look at the pictures we have taken we impose sense and meaning on what could otherwise have been a succession of incomprehensible and chaotic moments, passing unrecorded and destined for oblivion.

What is it then that moves someone to press the button on what appears through the viewfinder in front of the camera? The answers to that are as endless as the millions of photographs taken around the world every second of every day. Every picture is the result of a desire by the taker to record what their eyes are seeing and preserve it. For me, it can be winter sunlight falling on a wall: a hotel stairwell: a car abandoned in the summer weeds: the back of a cab driver’s head; a man stretched out asleep on a window ledge; steam rising from a manhole cover: a bunch of balloons caught under a gate. But it is about more than what I see; it is what I feel. The act of picture taking is fulfilling a need. Without it I would not feel complete.

Photographs are a window to the mind and more significantly, the spirit and will of the photographer. They can be full of joy, melancholy, grief, wonder; every human emotion can be on view. And every picture tells a story, with each new viewer creating his or her own version of the tale that lies within. But the true story is that of the picture taker.

So it is, in search of new stories, that I come to accept Hilde’s invitation and climb the steps of the boardwalk in front of the Big Sky Gallery. An ‘open’ sign hangs in the window below a poster announcing an exhibition: ‘BIG BEND. A collection of photographs by James Vernon’. A tinkling bell announces my arrival, quickly silenced when the door slams shut behind me. Hilde is on the telephone, seated at a table at the back of the room. She waves in greeting, and then uses the same hand to beckon me over. Still talking, the phone tucked under her chin, she hands me a printout of the exhibits, nodding in answer to my silently mouthed ‘thank you’.

The twenty or so photographs arranged around the walls are all black and white. There was a time, not so long ago, when black and white was thought of as the only true medium for ‘serious’ photographs. Colour photography was regarded as a gaudy, brash and trashy; OK for the masses snapping away with their cheap Kodak’s, but not worthy of serious consideration by professionals and aesthetes. Then William Eggleston and his followers changed all that and blew away all that prejudice and stuffy nonsense, giving us a new art form with their colour prints. But despite this, or maybe because of it, black and white photographs retain a sense of gravity and depth: they’re the real thing in a tinted Technicolor world. They have a timeless quality about them, but one that inevitably places them somewhere in the past. It’s not by chance that film directors often depict past events in the stories they tell by switching from colour to black and white.

As I walk around I see the rear view of a man seated in the front of a vehicle, a Stetson on his head, his neck criss-crossed by deep lines from a lifetime spent working under a punishing sun. I see a freight train crossing flat grasslands under a black storm cloud, rain sweeping earthwards, blown sideways by the wind. I see the feet of a dancing couple, caught in the air, young and weightless, not yet grounded by age and responsibility, he in Wranglers and boots, she in white ankle socks and swirling skirt. I see a hawk in the instant it has taken flight from a wire fence, half of it already out of the frame, too quick even at 125th of a second. I see Hallie crossing the parking lot at the Stillwell Store, the sun overhead, beating down as she walks with her Old Testament staff past a child’s pedal car.

‘What do you think?’ Hilde is off the phone.

‘I like them. Does he do his own printing?’

‘Yes,’ Hilde replies, walking from behind her desk across the painted wooden floor.
‘he’s got a place here in town… there’, she says, pointing out through the window, ‘that new place, across the railroad tracks. He’s set up a darkroom, as well studio space’.
The building is a modern, single story, metal clad construction with a pitched roof, silver and shiny in the bright morning light. It looks like a warehouse on the moon.

‘Is he local? I mean, does James come from around here?’ I ask.

“No, he moved here from Chicago about ten years ago. He came down on an assignment for a magazine, fell in love with the light, the space and the folks around here, and decided he’d like to stick around’.

‘I can see why’, I say, casting my eyes around the walls, ‘ He’s got himself an interesting cast of characters living in a wonderful setting. Can’t miss with that combination’.

‘The talent helps a little’, Hilde says, turning to face me, a small frown combining with a half smile, a touch irritated by my last remark.

I laugh, ‘Yeah, I know. Trouble is you can never have enough of it. It’s not something that you can buy or acquire; need to be born with it, like perfect skin or blue eyes’.

‘But these days, given the money, those things can be fixed’, says Hilde, ‘so far at least surgery can’t implant talent, but just about anything else can be changed’.

‘Including a name’, I say, finding the sudden need to study the outstretched fingers of my right hand.