Lake Drive Redux
March 1st, 2025, was my first night in a new apartment and my last day at a job I’d held for four years. I had been living in Milwaukee for two years and was now struggling to find a compelling reason to stay. Facing dead ends and an anxious future, I did what I always do when I need to recalibrate: I took a trip, this time into the woods of Wisconsin.
I found myself in a small gift shop, buying a bottle of maple syrup, when I froze at a display of postcards. A local photographer’s work, playful and unselfconscious, flooded me with a feeling I mistook for envy. It wasn’t. It was grief, sharp and sour, for the version of me who once lived for the joy of making. The goal of this trip had been to figure out my next career move and living situation, but I couldn’t deny the squall now confronting me.
For the next four days, I wrote, read, meditated, walked trails, sat in the glow of sunrise, and stared at the stars. I could finally feel the calluses I’d grown over a decade, layers of protection dulling the curiosity and hope that had once driven me. How had I drifted so far from my creative center?
I had picked up the audiobook The Creative Act: A Way of Being for when I was driving around without cell service. I found the book a bit difficult to get through; Rick Rubin’s nonstop philosophical prose nearly stripped all words of meaning. However, one passage refused to leave me:
If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. …The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. …They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.
Determined, I challenged myself during this limbo to surrender and attune to my rabid curiosity again. Storytelling lets me parse the world, but photography allows me to fossilize myself into the soil beneath. When I’m making photographs, I’m immortal.
After returning, I began bringing my cameras along on walks through my new neighborhood. I did so nervously at first; my camera had been feeling more like a paperweight than any kind of creative tool. Yet soon I was pulled, again and again, to a construction site on Lake Drive, a two-mile stretch of torn-up road lined with million-dollar homes overlooking Lake Michigan. Typically consumed with traffic, it was suddenly quiet in the evenings when the work crews were gone, leaving behind cement dust and the sweet smell of diesel.
I returned week after week, confused by my fixation but reminding myself not to get wrapped up in the why. There was a compelling contrast in these grand homes with their severed driveways and manicured lawns now fraying at the edges. The residents stepped over debris with a patience that unnerved me. They trudged through the disruption with neither resignation nor frustration, but with an understanding that this was a temporary discomfort.
After four months of unemployment, I was about to start a new job. This uncertain time was done; I had come to the other side with a clearer sense of how I wanted to live. How to listen to the whispers of longing. How to trust in the new paths unfolding. The camera in my hand buzzed now, arcing with playful energy again.
I walked out to the site one last time with an inexplicable feeling that I no longer needed this place. During that final evening walk, my attention was captured by freshly laid concrete, connected driveways, preserved handprints, and a message stamped into the new sidewalk—one I presumed was left just for me.
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