Life on the Road

Her eyes haunt me. If I am condemned to live as long as time itself, I shan’t ever forget her, the little girl who sat by a river in a world so far away from mine….

Despite the artistry of our work, we are photo-journalists. We have always observed a kind of Star Trekean “Prime Directive.” We observe the people and circumstances around us and record our emotional response to what we have observed with a kind of detachment that is, well, often disarming, even to me. It is, after all, what our Forebears – the likes of Gordon Parks, Avedon, Atget, Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith - all did before us. It is a skill we have worked tirelessly to hone: See it, capture it, and move on. Whatever the “it” that moment happens to be. The way we hold our cameras, our ability to shoot from a moving car and still get what we saw, everything we do is designed to take hold of the one moment that caught our eye. Forever.

The water of the river without a name surged over rocks that rested deeply beneath its surface. I was soaked from the river crossing – from the neck down. The length of my black cargo pants hung pressed against my legs beneath the rising heat of the Honduran sky. Barefooted, I stood at the edge of the river, just letting the water run from me to the earth beneath my feet.

We had passed her and her siblings on our way to the river – they lived in a small cluster of, well, I am not sure what to call them. Hovels. Dirt covered shacks. Primitive shelters. All apply and yet none speaks to what I saw and felt as we passed along the narrow dirt trail to the river. I had seen her and the other two children as we walked to the river. I was surprised that they had somehow followed us to the edge of the river. We had been gone some time – perhaps an hour or more – there is no sense of time there, far from the edge of the city and I found that it took little for me to fade into moments that seemed elastic and random. She held her cat – the same kitten that had been near her feet when we passed the partially finished shelter that was her home.

The youngest of the three, held by the one who I took to be her brother, had a distended stomach, skin that seemed pale and white and hair that was thin and reddish. She was covered with welts. There was some speculation about the cause of the welts and in the end we were told they were mosquitoes. But I had seen all this before. In the third world, young children suffer all manner of illness and cruelty. It is my job to keep a kind of aesthetic immunity from scenes such as this. I can only allow myself to enter so far into all this lest I loose the distance that erodes my sense of objectivity.

She sat on a single stone next to my feet. Her kitten sitting in her lap as though it were a person – its back was to her chest and its paws extended in a way they might were the kitten sitting a dinner table somewhere. I smiled at her. I wish I could say that she smiled in return but she did not. There was little emotion that I could see or feel. I sat down next to her on another stone.

At first I stroked her kitten from across the distance between us. Then, for a moment, I took the kitten, held it so that I could try to show her that I shared her affection for it, and returned it to her.

I am still trying to understand her reaction to what I did. It was, for me, a profound departure from our Prime Directive: “Observe, react, commit to an image, and then detach.” But never, under any circumstances, are we to cross the line between what we observe and ourselves. Doing so compromises our objectivity. Doing so blurs the line between what we see and what we feel to the point where it is emotion that drives the creation of an image, and not the observation of the moment that elicits the emotional response that gives birth to the image.

I had crossed the line.

I knew I was doing it.

I would do it again.

I smiled as warmly as I could. Usually, that is sufficient to elicit a smile in return. There was no smile. No warmth. Yet I sensed in her something. No, I cannot find the words to express what that was. Not even now.


We had been gone longer than anticipated and around us there was a stirring of conversation and movement. It was time to return to our world and leave hers behind. I smiled, gently touched her hair, and stood. She stood too and from behind her kitten spoke to me without words. I took the last two photos – photos of her - my memory card could hold, and by the time I reloaded, people had begun to move down the trail towards the van and the Land Cruiser. It was a long way back to Trujillo over difficult and rutted roads. Darkness falls quickly and we had already had one vehicle stuck in the river. It was a long way back to our hotel and the showers that would cleanse us from the sand of the river.

From behind the kitten she smiled at me.

I remember standing there for a moment, the past person in our party, looking at her.

Another time, another place, I might have cried. But as I stepped away from her, I pulled myself back over the line. Back into the distance that I always keep around me. Back into the objectivity our Prime Directive demands.

And yet, she haunts me still. Even now. Even securely in my world. Thousands of miles away. She haunts me.

Tags: NyghtFalcon Honduras Trujillo little girl eyes haunt ph

One Response to “Her Eyes Haunt Me Still”

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.