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By Root 947 0

Here is a picture of my wife, hair and halter top drenched, leaning against the owner of the plantation inn where we often stayed in St. Thomas. They are standing under an eave of the great house, rain bullets slicing behind them. They are holding onto each other, half-mugging, half-in-earnest, as Hurricane Lenny mows down the Eastern Caribbean. In my wife’s eyes you can see the strain we all felt, holed up for four days, watching our roofs billow, listening all night to their timbers’ ghostly wails, wincing from the far-off surf crashing thunder-like against the town. In the horizontal rain, denuded palm trees bend like jackknifed legs, their nesting birds long dead. A torrent of brown runoff roils down the stairs and mountainside, down, down. For once the Kodachrome is lusterless, soaked gray, as if the developing process had broken down. But the soddenness is not the film. It is in the deluged earth. In the slide’s absence of color you can feel the utter wetness, the oxygen-starved, muted red of my wife’s bathing suit, the winter brown of her hair, the cistern gray of the owner’s shirt and beard. He hugs her shoulder, my wisp of a wife, preventing her from being sucked into the storm. He smiles, she frowns. She wants to go home. We have run out of food. There has been no electricity for three days. The only drinking water is what guests collect from the great-house roof. In front of my wife and the owner sits a large cooking vat, which they had just filled with rainwater, each holding a handle, before I told them to turn and face the camera. I do not like this picture. There is something primordially evil about hurricanes, something that suggests original sin. When we found ourselves trapped on island, I thought it might be an interesting experience, something to tell our (future) children. But it did not work out that way. Now I remember something else. When I shouted above the wind for the owner and my wife to put down the vat and turn around, when I snapped that picture, how hard it was to breathe.

Because digital photography is the new technology, it is virtually impossible to get 35mm slide film anymore. The truth is, for all of its magic, Kodachrome was doomed. It was a difficult film to manufacture and even more complex to process. There is only one remaining photofinishing lab in the world processing Kodachrome: Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. And that will last only until either Dwayne’s chemicals run out or he does.

I haven’t bought a digital camera yet, but one day I might. In the meantime, my original Kodak 35R4 sits on my closet shelf, collecting dust. I thought I might one day show it to my kids, just as those Nebraskan partiers must now be showing their grandkids pictures of that long-ago cruise. That’s what I thought. But it’s just in the closet. It may still have a partially exposed roll of film in it. Maybe someday I’ll throw it away.

Gary Buslik writes essays, short stories, and novels. He teaches literature, creative writing, and travel writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work appears often in Travelers’ Tales anthologies. You can visit his latest book, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, at www.arottenperson.com.

BILL FINK

All in the Same House

Saints come in all kinds of strange disguises.

THE RAIN PELTING THE GLASS WALLS OF MY PHONE booth woke me at dawn, still a hundred miles from Hiroshima. I was sitting on my backpack, legs cramped against my chest, head cushioned against the glass by a dirty t-shirt. Overnight while sleeping in the booth, my body had curled into the shape of Japanese Kanji character, I thought perhaps the symbol for “back pain.”

I had been searching for a home, both figurative and literal, for some time in Japan. For six months as an exchange student, I studied the language and culture in an effort to fit into this very foreign land. But it was difficult to feel like I belonged. Even a simple question about my birthday could create trouble. Whenever I told older Japanese my birth date of August 15, they would suck in their breath, hiss