My word of the year was shift. I’m going to go ahead and say that on the morning of January 1st, 2025, I needed to apply it to my own attitude.
New Year’s Day in Gatlinburg. Snow that I hadn’t anticipated. A cheeseburger the night before eaten standing up against a garbage can in a crowd. Service at breakfast that set me off in a direction I won’t fully recount, other than to say I said some things to the camera that I’ve left in because they paint an honest picture of what I was like that morning, and honestly I find it kind of funny from a year and a half of distance.
The edit-room version of me watching the road footage wanted to reach through the screen and say: you are not working. You are traveling. What are you stressed about? Correct. Acknowledged. Moving on.
The Comparison Trap
I was putting together this episode while watching clips from a YouTuber named Natalie Lynn, who does a series called Borderless. She’s twenty-one or twenty-two. She is a genuinely gifted visual storyteller. I watched about twenty minutes of her work and felt that very specific thing that creative people feel when they encounter someone doing the thing they’re trying to do, but doing it at a level that makes your own work look like a rough draft.
I know this feeling. I’ve had it watching Trey Ratcliff or Joe McNally or Moose Peterson. You think you’re a decent photographer until you see someone who actually is, and then you want to sell the camera and take up something less subjective, like tax preparation.
Here’s where I landed, and I mean this: Natalie’s work is Natalie’s work. My work is my work. The mistake is thinking they’re competing. They’re not the same thing. She’s telling her story in her way. I’m telling mine in mine. The comparison is a trap and the way out of it is to stop looking at what someone else is doing and go back to doing your own thing.
I’ll link to Borderless here. She’s worth watching. So are you — just not as a measuring stick against yourself.
Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies
The crowds were what they were. The traffic was what it was. I missed tickets for Anakeesta up on the hill, which I’ll get to another time. What I did find, tucked along the river side of the main drag, was the aquarium.
The shark tunnel alone was worth the price of admission. You walk through a tunnel while sharks drift overhead — not through glass so much as through water all around you, looking up through the acrylic at a psychedelic scene that the lighting designer in me had to respect. They knew what they were doing in there. Well done.
And then the penguins. I had flagged the penguins the night before, standing in the rain outside the building, and they delivered entirely. I could not have been any happier about penguins, and I say that as a sixty-year-old man who has seen a lot of things. The penguins were great.
You exit through the gift shop, naturally. Just like Disney. The eternal law of the American tourist attraction.
The Bear Hunt
I had spotted something in my rearview mirror the night before when I was trying to navigate to the hotel — a dark shape moving between buildings near the dumpsters. I was fairly certain it was a bear. Everyone tells you there are bears in Gatlinburg. You never see them when you’re trying.
On my way out of town I drove up to the dumpster area behind the hotel. On purpose. Slowly. Looking for a bear.
There were no bears.
There was me, slowly circling a parking lot behind a hotel, peering into the shadows between dumpsters, which is not a dignified look for anyone regardless of stated purpose.
I would have felt bad if I hadn’t tried. I did try. The bear was not there. That’s the whole story.
Postscript from the Edit Suite
I went back to Gatlinburg in the fall — drove up after visiting my brother and sister in Michigan, went through Shenandoah, ended up back here almost by instinct. On the Roaring Fork Motor Trail, heading out of town, I saw two bears. One up on a hillside with traffic stopped, and then another that walked directly across the road in front of me and up someone’s driveway like it had somewhere to be.
The bears were there all along. I just had to come back in the right season.
Which feels like a reasonable metaphor for most things.
Chasing Light and Story
I keep mentioning it and I’ll keep mentioning it — ChasingLightandStory is live, it’s the hub for what comes next, and it exists because of a decision I made in a car driving through the Smoky Mountains on the last day of last year. Stories of places, stories of people, photography from the parks and the roads in between.
The pivot is in progress. Thanks for watching it happen in real time.
