David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry seven: the bypassed story of how my wife's first kiss knocked me for a loop... back to the workshop

These are the first two young Elders that I saw exit the building that houses both the temple and the church house gymnasium were the conference took place. I did follow them briefly into the subway, where I did a couple of portraits and took a shot of them exchanging sign language. The missionary in the lead with the taxi-cab-matching water bottle is hearing-impaired. They left me with the understanding that they do missionary work with the hearing impaired.

When I stopped at their house the other day to pick Margie up, Lavina told me that she had read the post that I wrote about what I went through to marry Margie. She said she had enjoyed it, but she had expected to see the story of our first kiss in it and was disappointed that it was not there.

I told her that I had intended to write it, but felt like the post was getting impossibly long and so skipped over it. She told me that to her the length had not mattered, that once she started reading she was enjoying it so much that she just wanted to keep reading and reading. She wished that I had included the story.

So, here is the story of the first time I kissed Margie, told briefly - because a kiss, after all, is a brief act. Well, usually... not always... and when it is not, babies sometimes follow...

I had wanted to kiss her after our first date, I had wanted to kiss her on our second date... in fact, I had wanted to kiss her even before we dated at all, like the moment leading up to the first date when we walked across campus together, came upon a rain puddle and she suddenly stomped in it, splashing it all over me. 

I was thrilled, because if a woman does something like that, then you know she likes you, has a crush on you, maybe even loves you. So I wanted to kiss her right there - but I did not dare.

I did not work up the nerve until our third date. Neither one of us had a working vehicle then, so, when it was over, I walked her home and then up the flight of stairs that led to the second-floor apartment in which she lived with a couple of roommates.

We stood talking in the doorway for awhile, close together and then I just did it - leaned in and met her willing lips with my own. It wasn't a super long kiss, but it was super nice. When it was over, we said goodbye, but I could not make myself leave until she finally closed the door. I then turned to go.

I felt so exuberant that I spontaneously decided not to walk, run, or skip down the stairs, but to leap completely over and past them so that I would land directly on the walkway below. Above me, the stairs continued in a zig-zag up to the next floor and I leaped so far and high that I struck the top of my head on the bottom of a stair up there.

This caused the forward motion of my head to slow down in relation to the rest of my body and my feet to speed up and swing foward. I then sailed completely past the flight of stairs below and landed flat on my back on the concrete walkway.

I lay there stunned and dazed for what I figured was maybe 15 or 20 seconds. Then, shakily, my head hurting, but the rest of me seemingly okay because I had landed so flat as to evenly distribute the force of the impact. I got up, walked off and headed back to my own apartment, close to one mile away.

When I next saw Margie, she asked why I had taken so long to leave. About 15 minutes after she had closed the door behind me, she looked out her bedroom window and saw me walk away just then. She could not understand what I had been doing all that time.

So, instead of lying there dazed for 15 or 20 seconds, I must have cold-conked myself. I must have lain there unconscious for the entire 15 minutes that passed between the time she closed the door and looked out the window.

I fell hard for my wife. Her first kiss knocked me for a loop.

Even though I am no longer an active Mormon, my mission totally changed my life and set the course for all that would follow. The story of how Margie and I came together makes that point, but my mission also determined the course my career would follow.

I was already a photographer when I entered the mission field and would have been, anyway. In some ways, one could say my mission was a two-year setback to my career. I did bring my camera into the mission field and I did use it - yet, my entire two-year take totalled fewer images than I now sometimes shoot on a single day when working in the field.

Before my mission, I had conflicting goals - to return to the coast that my father had moved us off of during the middle of my high school sophomore year, immerse myself in surfing and in surfing photography - or to move to Alaska and settle here. I had wanted to do this since I first became aware of Alaska. Also, I had figured out that there was no reason one could not surf in Alaska as long as he dressed for it. I did not think the goals necessarily incompatible.

I often pictured myself as an Alaskan surfer with an airplane, flying from beach to beach.

I am pretty certain that one way or another, I would have wound up in Alaska - but what would my relationship have been to this place, and to its Native people? In the course of my wanderings and travels, I meet many Alaska residents, politicians included, who have absolutely no empathy, understanding of or even the desire to understand the original inhabitants whose state they now live in.

They do not recognize Native rights and see them only as impediments to fulfill their own desires, be they economic or recreational hunting and fishing.

Perhaps I would have become one of them. Perhaps right now, we would share the same viewpoints.

But after living with the Lakota-Dakota for two years, I could never join them. Furthermore, I soon found that when I get disconnected from Native cultures for any length of time, I feel dislocated and empty. One way or another, since the day I first stepped onto the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation as a missionary, I have lived my life Native people. I have made my career with Native people and have been fortunate that Native people always seem to accept me, wherever I go.

The above photo is one of my Looking Back at Me shots. Frankly, I am not very happy with it. I wish that I had worked it a little harder, composed it a little better. I wish that I had stuck with it until I could finally have got Elders Uele and Peck to drop the silly "thumbs up" thing, but they seemed determined to do the "thumbs up" no matter what. I was shooting a job, so I took just a few frames and then gave up, left them and went on to shoot my job.

I should have stuck with it until I got it right. Those pictures behind them on the wall of the Iñupiat Heritage Center in Barrow are my pictures. Had I never served a Mormon mission, I never would have taken them. I don't know what I would photographed instead, but it would not have been these aged Elders, and I would not have spent the time that I have out on the ice and water of the Chukchi Sea, following the Iñupiat as they went out to receive the gift of the bowhead whale.

Even though I am now long inactive, I took these pictures and all these events transpired only because I served a Mormon mission.

Many years ago, Erik Hill, the photographer pictured here, followed some Mormon missionaries based in Anchorage and did an essay on them for the Anchorage Daily News, where he continues to work. I was long puzzled how he ever managed to get the cooperation of church authorities to do the essay, but I never got a chance to ask him about it.

When I was in New York, failing at my own attempt to get that kind of cooperation, I thought of Erik often. Then, about ten days after I returned home, he and I both wound up photographing the Alaska small schools state championship football game, where the Barrow Whalers fell to the Nikiski Bulldogs. Afterward, we shot this same scene from opposite views.

And after that, I visited Erik a bit and asked him how he managed to do his Mormon missionary essay.

He told me that it had taken a lot of negotiation back and forth, over a week or more, with mission and church authorities not only in Anchorage but Salt Lake City. Then, when they agreed to cooperate and let him follow their missionaries, he had to agree to allow them to send someone along to observe - to make certain the shoot stayed within what they considered to be the proper parameters.

This is in no way a criticism of Erik - he succeeded at getting an essay that he would not have been able to shoot otherwise. During the leadup to and early days of the Iraq war, top national and international journalists accepted the terms of the Saddam Hussein regime and agreed to be followed by minders, as that was the only way they were going to get anything on the ground.

Yet, I am not certain I could have accepted such terms - maybe, but I kind of doubt it. It would have grated too much against me. I suspect that in my short train ride, I got a few pictures that such a minder would have sought to put a stop to. There is nothing wrong with those pictures; the activities they depict are innocent. They are real. Yet, I do not think a minder would have allowed them to unfold in front of my camera.

Given the state of my computer monitor, it was difficult, but that night back at the Brooklyn apartment, I did select a representative sample of the day's missionary take - even tough I bypassed a couple that I might have included if I could have better made the images out on my monitor..

In the morning, I got up very early, walked to the train station and then rode the subway all the way back to the Lincoln Center/Mormon temple subway station and from there walked to the Apple Store, where I positioned myself at the very front of the line that soon formed behind me. The door was opened at exactly 9:00 AM - the very time when all workshop participants were supposed to have gathered at The Loft with David. I knew their first activity would be to eat bagels, fruit, cold cereal if they wanted it and to drink coffee, so I had a little buffer. 

Still, I knew I would miss the first part of the workshop session. I charged into the Apple Store ahead of everybody, took the stairs to the below-ground level two at a time and got to the service desk ahead of anyone else. I signed over my computer to repair staff, who told me it would be ready sometime in the afternoon. I had no idea where I could find the time to come back and get it, but I needed it. 

I then sprinted up the stairs and onto the street. I hailed a cab. Traffic looked impossible, but the driver was good and made the right decisions about which route to take and got me back faster than the subway would have. The work session was in progress when I entered. Critiques of the previous days work were ongoing.

Soon, the man on the right entered - Steve Fine, the Director of Photography for Sports Illustrated. He had a presentation to make, but afterward agreed to join in the remaining critique sessions - including mine. He would have some pointed remarks to make.

That is where I will pick up in my next entry.