Though he had taken the summer as personal leave, neither formally enrolled nor formally disconnected.
The trip to Yellowstone was his own initiative, funded by savings from two years of teaching assistant stipens and a modest inheritance from his maternal grandfather, a retired machinist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had spent every spare dollar on National Geographic subscriptions, and had pressed the entire run from 1948 onward into Daniel’s hands before his death in 1971.
There’s more truth in photographs, the old man had told him, than in anything a professor will say to you.
Daniel had written that sentence on the first page of every field notebook he’d kept since.
The Nikon F2 Photonic was sitting on the wooden shelf beside the door when he went back inside to retrieve his pack.
He had purchased it 8 months earlier from a camera dealer on East 42nd Street in Manhattan, paying $312 in cash, 3 months of saved stipended money, and had since put nearly 18 rolls of Kodakchrome 64 through its mechanism, shooting everything from shorebirds on Kauga Lake to highway construction sites to the faces of strangers in the Columbus Avenue subway station.Buy a New Camera
