Rodney.
At one point during our short time with Rodney, I asked if I could use his restroom. He kindly showed me where it was, then discreetly closed a door to another room. Suddenly, I was viscerally aware of his vulnerability. Not just in his story he was sharing, but, maybe more poignantly, his opening up his home, his space. In the bathroom there was a used bar of soap. A worn toothbrush. Rust stains from some sly but maybe steady drip in the plumbing. I hurried, not wanting to take advantage of his hospitality. We had a job to do, after all.
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Backing up only a few hours, my filmmaker Justin and I sat in the flourescent-lit and way-too-bright-for-the-time-it-was-in-the-morning lobby of the only hotel around, sipping drip coffee. It was far too hot to chug. Someone who maybe frequented the place shared how the machine defaulted to dispensing decaf. I realized I had been duped, so I dumped what I was slurping, grabbed another chintzy styrofoam cup and pushed the ‘Regular’ button so it’d dispense something stronger. Actual coffee.
Then we rolled our bags out in the still-dark morning to the frosty rental Jeep we had picked up at Dulles the night before. I pulled out a credit card to scrape the windshield. It was time to go. We were meeting Rodney at seven o’clock sharp. Just after sunrise.
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Before our national awareness campaign with the National Forest Foundation and US Forest Service, I had never heard of Rodney Stotts. Justin found him. His partner was into falconry and they lived in DC, a few hours from Rodney’s bird sanctuary we were set to visit he had named Dippy’s Dream after his late mother. Rodney was, after all, one of only a few black American master falconers, and his story is one of inspiration.
More than that, or in fact the reasons why it’s inspiring, the central themes of his experience fit nicely in the larger narrative we were telling through the Forest Foundation. His were wrapped up in loss, recovery, and fittingly for the project we hired him to speak to, nature. Specifically, the quiet surrounding his sanctuary interrupted only by the punctuating sounds of his animals. In his dealing with loss, he had named each of them after those in his life whom had passed. There was Gloria, Nanny, Jack, Agnes. Glendale, Boomer, Ginger, Puzzle, Dippy. Pasta, Unc, Genip, Lovebug. By saying their names, Rodney was keeping their memories alive.
At one point, while Justin walked around his property to get establishing shots, I found myself sitting in the sun with Rodney on his front stoop. The day was warming quickly, from being downright chilly to comfortable in a very east coast sort of way. We joked about an over-prepared drone pilot with Ron Howard’s film crew. We talked life. We talked loss. We just talked. Then he excused himself for a phone call.
While he was on the phone, I wandered his property, alone, looking for photographs. Justin and I found each other before circling back to Rodney, at that point pacing out front. Something had happened. Just as open as he had been all morning, he shared the news he had just received. A loved one was given only a few months to live. Loss, the inevitable theme it seemed for Rodney’s life. Balancing the humanity we both felt with what in the back of our minds was the footage we still needed to get, Justin and I offered him space. Maybe though, in that moment, the last thing Rodney wanted or even needed was space.
So instead, we followed him as he meandered over to an old trailer on the side of his property, piled high with detritus from a life lived hard. He sat down, and Justin pulled out his video camera. The air, heavy with dew and poignancy, was a mixture of coolness and warmth. I felt goosebumps. Having allowed the silence to lift us, I finally broke it with a question. “How do you deal with loss?” I asked Rodney, somewhat pathetically. I was summoning empathy for a situation I had never experienced, for a life I couldn’t even imagine. What he said in reply, looking directly at me, as directly as I had in asking him the question, I knew in the moment, just as it came, would stay with me forever.
“You’re born on a date and you die on a date. In between is a dash. Make the dash count.”
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From time to time as I reflect on my career, this project with the Forest Foundation and, very specifically, this chance opportunity to spend even a few hours with Rodney, will stand as a highlight. Culling through the images on the flight home from Dulles that night, playing with crops and listening to Opus on headphones, I felt the sudden and distinct sense of tears running down my cheeks. Of a gratefulness and privilege to have been, if only for a flash in time, trusted enough to photograph Rodney and to have him share with us his story. To learn from him and from his life for which surely I’ll never fully grasp, even as I know and tell myself how fully grasping someone’s lived experience isn’t the point, and it’s impossible. What is, I must consciously remember, is to listen.
