Shuttered

After many months of hair pulling, teeth grinding, explosive profanity, carpal tunnel pains, deliberation, indecision and feverish obsession, my first book is available to the public. What a way to end the year!

Shuttered

Through the Viewfi...

By S. Theune

Book Preview

I wanted to have the most memorable experiences of 2007 in tangible form on my shelf, not only because it has been an amazing year but because such a wide spectrum of emotions and sights has never before crossed my path. So much has happened and I have met so many interesting kindred spirits. Doors have been blown open - literally and figuratively. I never before thought such a life was possible! Whether one copy or ten million copies of this book will be printed, I am grateful to have any experiences and images to put into these pages at all.

The journey of the last year has been a hard one, but I would never trade a minute of it for the world. Thank you to all of my friends and readers.

Kyoto Part I

Unfortunately it's been well over a month since I have had the time to think and put together a few thoughts about our stay in Kyoto. Now, near Christmas, weeks after the fact with the whiskey swirling in my head I think that I'm ready to say something. Or not, I don't know. I am so sorry that I neglected to write even a note or two on a spare napkin, as is customary for when I am on the move. If I have a thought usually nothing will prevent me from jotting it down, not even the maddeningly tidy Japanese custom of making napkins scarce in public eateries.

Kyoto was a city that I had picked to visit because I couldn't imagine being in Japan and not going. Also, Derin had said most of his friends and family were going and I thought it would be an adventure to trek out there. As it turned out we saw no Americans in Kyoto and we were on our own - but in the end I preferred it that way. The wedding was a storm of busybodies and a family that was not my own... why not take the time to have the adventure with Trav? Us against the world. That's what it is, and that's what it would be!


Kyoto was not at all what I expected. Like everyone else I had read Memoirs of a Geisha and had grown up knowing the stereotypes of Japanese culture. But hold on, let's back up a bit.

The train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto was one of the most interesting experiences I have ever had. Not that it was so unique and exciting - I much preferred the Deutsch Bahn system and the cleanliness and efficiency of Germany. Japan is right on the money when you talk about timeliness, but they really do mix the most high tech breakthroughs with old tradition. For example, walking through Tokyo station was a jumble of confusion and order. The only thing I remember now is seeing a group of extremely beautiful teenaged boys and a group of Japanese girls with shockingly suggestive thigh-high boots. I wore boots like that when I was their age! And my parents damn near whupped me! Oh, to grow up in Tokyo.

Lunch was a quick run into one of the quickie marts on the platform to grab two bento boxes. I had waited a long time for these, the legendary lunch staple of traveling businessmen. They are approximately $10 apiece, not bad! Especially when paired with a Sapporo.

Ten minutes before the shinkansen pulls in, a gaggle of middle-aged women line up on the platform in pink uniforms, looking eagerly in a westerly direction. I thought they were cute and only later realized they were the cleaning crew. But lo! What a strange country it is to see laborers so anxious to get started with their work! Surely in my country such dedication is never seen. As the passengers from Osaka disembark and get lost in the crowd, they climb aboard and scrub every surface with powerful disinfectants and ready the cabins for a fresh set of riders and another trip.

[Note: Mount Fuji is impressive only because it is the only mountain in sight with snow on top. Compared to the Canadian Rockies or the Alps it is just a hill, but it is certainly a sight to see if you ignore the countless oil refineries that reside at its base. I thought it smacked a little of hedonistic industrialism - isn't Mt Fuji a terribly holy landmark? Anyway, the top is quite often shrouded in clouds, blending seamlessly with the haze in the air. Then with a last sigh of the train, it's gone.]

The Japanese landscape is largely familiar to me even though I had never been there before. Years of hearing my parents' stories about growing up in 1950s Korea with bamboo groves and persimmon trees had painted such vivid pictures of traditional Asian landscapes. It was not strange or unexpected, only the end to an inexplicably long wait. The houses are corrugated and dark, set between rice paddies on long dirt roads. It was strange to think about the technology that packaged and preserved the sushi I was eating, manufactured the "wood" of our lunch boxes while watching such old traditions slip by the windows. Neat little rows of tea bushes lined the steep hillsides bordered with lush forests of thick bamboo. Such a strange, different world.


Kyoto, when described in any guidebook, is prefaced by "Don't be disappointed...." We all tend to think of red-flanked ochaya, geisha, cobblestoned streets. Heck, I did. I knew it was a regular, bustling industrial city but hoped in the back of my mind we would discover the ancient Japan between the walls. While I failed to find the Kyoto of my dreams, we stumbled upon many personal and private experiences that surely few tourists have seen themselves. I lost count of the number of times I almost got hit by a stone-faced business(wo)man zipping to work on the sidewalk. People in Kyoto, I discovered, are much less uptight about which side of the street is the "correct" one for going the way you need to go (unlike *cough* Tokyoians). We lost ourselves for hours and hours in the tiny narrow alleys between the major streets. A city is a city is a city, we concluded, and the real pulse of the people are found off these mainways. Like freshly turned earth, the activity is hidden below the surface.

The bellowing cries of Buddhist monks, the covert glares of elderly housewives as they bow to the peaked hat and pointedly ignore my camera, the slap of rope sandals on modern asphalt and the proud-but-humble stoop of the elderly dodging cars. The snick-snick-snick! of whizzing bicycle wheels, happy shouts of business owners as they wash their vehicles and storefront windows before the customary opening hour of 11, all circle around the dark brown fluted rooftops of temples and houses. Everyone has a tiny garden, everyone has a tiny little piece to call their own and they tend it even more lovingly than the McMansions of suburbia at home. Even though life happens primarily behind private walls, it is impossible to ignore the sense of pride and order in Japanese culture. I wished I had an in, someone to take me there and receive my gifts and show me what it is really like.

Munching steamed curry buns we walked all morning and all afternoon. Eventually the tourist trap of Nijo turned us off and the smog over the traffic drove us away. The shopping districts are as enormously glitzy as the alleys are humble. It was strange to think that within a 4-block radius one can find such tidy little homes to national museums to art boutiques to global name-brand fashion designers. Kyoto really does have everything, if you look. Before breakfast we were personally invited to visit a historic printshop and after lunch were being regarded with disdain for not paying $1,000 for a pair of jeans. OK, I see how it is.


At night, hunger sets in . The city does not sleep but it rains and unveils Act II. Each nightfall the difficulty of procuring food becomes a very pressing matter and is made much more difficult by the language barrier. I am firm about selecting places with pictures on the menu or -- even better -- the plastic examples set in display cases outside the door. Finding someplace that offers one of these is actually quite difficult in a city as mixed as Kyoto. I sense that the majority of visitors stay in tourist areas and the rest of us who are not willing to do so are, um, left to their own devices. On our last night in Kyoto we happened upon a very hot, smoky yakitori joint populated by youngsters and businessmen. The young, handsome chef spoke more English than our server and was very helpful and understanding of our predicament. We ordered and ate whatever he put in front of us, but we had more fun listening to the man in the next seat slide further and further into his sake and more insistently into our ears. Every culture has one, I suppose. Every bartender has to toughen himself to the crowd one way or another.

Okini! we learned (Kyoto dialect for Thank you!)

Gion is not the beautifully romantic collection of teahouses and geisha that one would expect. There are craft stores and bars, yes, and quite a few small restaurants and red lanterns and sure, even cobblestone streets. But it is dry, clean, and swarming with tourists like ourselves. We walked down Pontocho Alley and watched the other pedestrians. We even crossed the Kama River hoping to find a more beautiful vista, but none was to be had. The river, protrayed so lovingly in my imagination, is nothing but a strip of silent water falling industriously over pebbles and carefully constructed steps. It was dark but I could only imagine the sandbars being formed of even more gray concrete.


I felt that we were biding our time in Kyoto, passing the days until we could pack up and head back to Tokyo. Our hotel was beautiful and quite comfortable, but we spent our time exhausted from looking for things we couldn't see. Maybe we were trying too hard. Maybe we were seeking the wrong answers to the wrong questions. I enjoyed myself but felt hollow inside, wondering if there was something more.

OK, maybe I was ready to say something after all.

Kyoto Gallery (Part I)

Leaving my heart...

I. Love. It. Here. Driving through rugged brown hills that resemble piles of soft brown velvet, then coming down the black ribbon of road that empties into the cool blue bay. We drove for an hour through suburbs and business parks, but when I first saw the shimmering water and the sprawl of San Francisco, my skin literally prickled. This is only the second time I have been here, but this is the second time I felt like I was coming home.

The day was spent shooting American landmarks and there is no chance that I captured anything that was unique in any way. But the company was the most important thing. Something about these people creates a perfect balance between being alone and being cared for and I have found this simpatico almost no where else in my life. This also makes it very hard for me.


Add to this the fact that the views were just so plain beautiful I couldn't even shoot. For the first time ever the landscape has disarmed me!

I've never seen the sun set over the ocean until today but I never thought I would care. Not being a beach or a water person, why should it matter? But now I will never forget the views here tonight, the salty air, the silhouettes of the cypress trees, the twinkle of the city lights, the chilly wind and the unbelievable rainbow of hues that pattern the surf as the sun sinks down.

I'm being pushed to "miss" my flight tomorrow. I can conceivably "miss" the next 6 months of flights. I suppose I'm writing this as a bit of an insurance policy to my family and friends out east who might notice that I didn't come home.

But I feel like I'm home. Doesn't that matter?

O, Bethlehem

I have probably half a dozen blog entries where I started to write about Bethlehem Steel and then discarded them. The electronic equivalents of wadded-up balls of scratch paper with pathetic scrawls of story written on them is not quite as romantic or frustrating as what technology gives us here. No typewriters and no angry lobbing the trash across the room into my IKEA wire-mesh wastebasket.

Bethlehem Steel is a huge, sentimental city of rust, flakes, ghosts and American history. Perhaps I never wrote about it because it just plain intimidates me. I felt so much the very first time I laid eyes on it and I was never able to properly describe the feelings in my heart since that day over a year ago. Before I even knew of it's existence I had dreamed about it, caught in a frantic race through cold hallways of corrugated metal, the sky obscured by something bigger and taller than I could have ever conceived. I didn't know the place until months later and I saw Bethlehem for the first time. Something big, something important clicked in my mind. It was surreal, having memories of a place that I had never been.

Photos make the huge metal spires of the blast furnaces seem so much smaller than they are. In reality, the steel mill is an industrial Emerald City and there is no word in the English language that can describe the thick silence created by the close metal jungle of pipes and towers. The first time I stepped to the dark, wet earth below those blast furnace spires and heard the whining rasp of metal on metal, my skin crawled. Oh what inexperienced babes we were in that forest of cold, flaking gloom! Until then I never dreamed anyone would have a reason to poach from that wasteland, but my naivite assured that we would have no beef with those scrappers. To this day I am sure no explorer has ever had such an amiable, peaceful run-in with copper thieves, but I was just relieved to know that the noise was caused by something alive and human.

Today the mill is mostly gone, torn down in an effort to build the new casino. Crossing the Stefko bridge across the river, what used to be 5 square miles of warehouses, train depots, rail lines, coke ovens, administrative buildings are now just flat riverbank. Occasionally a building still stands, face seemingly turned towards the sky as if in defiance to the wrecking balls that promise to defeat them. In contrast to the shiny modern cranes these survivors look weathered and ungainly. The eastern-most structure appears to lurch towards the bridge, desperately running for cover as his ancient companions were swiped off the earth. It is sad. These undignified survivors weep with moisture that stains to rust.

It is never warm when I see Bethlehem Steel. While most of the other adventures I've had give me ghostly reminders of a languid, humid summer, suffering in heat and sun with flies buzzing around my face, Bethlehem is always cold, crisp and alive. I first came here in November and subsequent visits were always in the darkness of the seasons. I would never have it any other way. Something about the way the furnaces hunker over the little town, gray and seeming to suck the light of the sun no matter how bright the day... it is so apropos. Bethlehem is a vibrant little town, so under appreciated and charming. It is full of art and artists, wonderful cozy houses, gift shoppes, parks, students, families and visitors. Around Christmastime the village explodes into evergreen trees and starry lights, the biggest star on the north mountain mimicking the biblical tale. Anyone who knows me might think it strange when I say that I would happily live in Bethlehem if my cards were dealt differently, but it is true.

This past visit was an unexpected trip to a snowy wonderland. We stood quietly under the spires and contemplated our individual histories beneath them. I shivered in the sub-zero temperatures listening to the cacophony of ravens across the river, trying to imagine the glitzy lights of Sands overlaying the present silence of the blast furnaces. The outlying buildings near the main office building have not changed in a year, despite their relative simplicity and (you'd think) ease of comparative demolition. The only living things here are the crows and one lone police officer who chides us for disturbing his reading. My fingers are slow and clumsy in the cold, even through my gloves.

After warming up at the brew works and downing several creamy oatmeal stouts we hike back down the river path in the ice and snow. By now night has fallen and the irony of Bethlehem is returning as it does each winter night. In a little village made famous by its German immigrants, Christmas traditions and the Star, suddenly nothing is open. When darkness comes the town glows in twinkling lights but there is nary a soul to be seen in the streets. I can't quite figure this out. From every light post a Christmas tree is hung, tied with lights in a cheerful warning to all evergreens that enter here.

The canal opposite the blast furnaces is dark but the lights from town trapped under the clouds create an orange glow that shows us where to step. There are too many trees by the water, so many that choosing a place to set up is difficult. At the end I have to make do with hanging branches because I am too tired to care. The rushing waters two feet below threaten to happily drown us in a slow, chilling whisper. In the end I take only a few shots because I know that home is still more than two hours away. I'm not cold anymore due to the magic of snowfall and running water. But gazing out at the silhouetted towers and the mist-shrouded mountains beyond makes me wish for clearer nights and different circumstances.


If I could keep just one place forever, this would be it. There would be no razing, no investments, no financial gains. I could escape to a place literally out of my dreams, where the enormous steel leviathans force time to stand still. Of course, people like us don't get such a choice and must keep moving, hunting and photographing to enjoy the game.