Kansas Milo Field at Sunset

Spring reading art is a photographic artifact of the 20th century and an almost cross-country journey.

Somewhere in Kansas…Photo by Eric Francis.

Dear Friend and Reader:

In 1998 after returning from six months in Germany and presenting at the Loving More conference in upstate New York, I was without anywhere special to be or anything special to do except write the horoscope.

(Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go…)

My friend Linda Lou Sundragon was driving back to Boulder and didn’t have a traveling companion, so I offered to come along. She invited me to stay for a while at the home she shared with her partner.

We took Interstate 78 out of the New York area, up accross southern Illinois and then southwest toward Kansas. When we got to the Midwest, there were purple fields of grain everywhere. It was a color I had never seen, which looked like a kind of tannish brown in some light and a rich violet in other light. It was the strangest effect of looking at something and not quite being able to define what color it is.

These plants turned out to be milo, also called sorghum.

It’s used as cattle feed and also as a flour grain — and is what Redbridge beer (gluten-free, from Anheuser-Busch) is made of. Two photos from the trip survive — the one above, and another of a tattered American flag attached to the sideview mirror of an old bus (next to a milo field).

Like most people, when I got to Boulder, I didn’t want to leave so soon. I was probably in town for a month or so before coming back to my friend Neal’s place in Ho-Ho-Kus New Jersey to meet up with Keikio Ito, a woman who flew in from Tokyo to hang out with us. And on Dec. 20, 1998, the three of us figured out some software apps and posted the first edition of the Planet Waves website.

The photo above is a print of a slide, scanned and minimally edited in Photoshop. It’s an artifact of film photography and also of the late 20th century — and my only almost-cross-country drive.

I recently dusted off my film camera, a Canon EOS-1 introduced in 1989, and am on my latest experiment shooting with film. I will be sure to send you the results.

With love,

Your faithful photojournalist,