IN THE COMPANY OF DOGS
Writer’s Block By Richard Hirneisen
I sit down at my computer and my mind goes blank. My fingers hover over the keys. I stare at a depressingly blank screen. I have a bad case of writer’s block. I thumb through my old, dog-eared and coffeestained shooting diaries, hoping to dredge up inspiration. Nothing. I try out opening lines. “I shouldered my sideby-side as the huge cackling rooster pheasant burst like a gaudy mortar round from the golden switchgrass.” Or, “My Wirehair skidded to point, head low, locked on target, intense…” That doesn’t work either. Maybe if I search my past… It is 1954. I am sixteen. A slim magazine called Michigan Bowmen has just published “My Lucky Little Brother,” a story I wrote about bow hunting in Michigan with my younger brother, Jack. I bring a copy to school, but despite my hopes and desires, my literary success doesn’t make me any more popular with the girls in my 11th grade English class, any more than being shy does, or having a mild case of acne, or being a middle-ofthe-pack runner on the cross-country team, or belonging to the camera club (which was really, really “square” back then). Nevertheless, I begin to think of myself as a budding Ernest Hemmingway. Fresh out of high school, I join the Navy. I tell the recruiter I want to go on a ship right after boot camp, want to see the world, feel a deck thrumming under my feet. But instead they send me to Navy Photo School, probably because of that stint in camera club in high school. I graduate near the top of my class, surprising myself. I am now a Navy photographer. I spend a year on Kwajalein, a tiny coral speck in the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Hawaii and Japan. It’s the height of the Cold War, and I do aerial photo surveys for the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) base being built on the atoll. In my offduty time, I fish for sharks and ride my salt-spray rusted bike to the enlisted men’s club to drink scotch on the rocks and play shuffleboard.
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WIRE NEWS
©2010 GWPCA
The next two years I spend on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. I shoot photos and movies of flight ops for pilot training and accident reports, sailors at work and play for hometown newspapers, nuclear bombs. I see the world, at least the Pacific Ocean side of it. After the Navy I go to college, get a scholarship, major in English (ah, Hemingway…) meet, woo and marry my first wife. We have a baby. I work in the college photo department - a meager living. Hand to mouth. I drop out of school, and for a year I work as an assistant in Detroit’s biggest car studio, Boulevard Photographic. We travel around the country shooting Cadillacs, Chryslers and Lincolns, on the road for weeks on end. But it’s a rocky road at home. Separation, divorce. I migrate to San Francisco. Fertile ground for picture taking. I shoot riots, anti-war protests, hippies cavorting in Golden Gate Park, naked girls on the Mendocino beach. After two years I’ve had enough. It’s too crazy and I’m adrift. I come back to Michigan. Flee back to reality. I do a photo story about teens and motorcycle gangs hanging around the parking lot of a suburban