Inheritance
Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat
Text by Liza Stewart
Bryan Schutmaat, Vessels
Alone, Alma drove to her father’s blighted orchard. Thin trees huddled on the hills’ piebald slopes. Deserted towns, bracketed by the rise of foothills and the interstate, felt confined and claustrophobic.
Chipped paint and unkempt lawns, grass poking through cracks in the paved lots—spaces abandoned to the belief that hard times could be left behind. Farmers were bought out or, like her father, took their defiance to the grave.
Bryan Schutmaat, Grays the Mountain Sends
The slumped exteriors of faded mining towns faced the highway. Alma passed four or five gas stations, out-of-service, parking lots like obsidian oceans where rusted, broken-down cars foundered. Vacancy signs marked the exodus in flashing neon. A quiet melancholy settled, the houses shuttered, the steeple of a church outlined against the sharp rise of rock. Red earth swirled sullenly in the gusts of wind that blew through the valley. Clouds gathered over the ridge. Alma prayed for rain.
Bryan Schutmaat, Vessels
The sign over the door read Closed—Thanks for your business. God bless. The building’s blue paint had turned ashen gray, the lace curtains yellowed with age like teeth. Tangled bushes choked on the dirt outside the convenience store. A pump hung to the ground like a loose thread.
Perspective was lost to distance, the flat sweep of the valley manifested as sediment left by the receding river. Before the drought, the low, verdant slopes harbored a dense patchwork of vineyards and orchards. The spoiled earth was scored and barren, the faint breeze stripped of mountain snow. Rock the color of bone bordered Highway 6, which took Alma to Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery, where they buried her father. A plaque at the edge said, “In the West, when you touch water, you touch everything.”
Bryan Schutmaat, Vessels
The sun sank down below the peaks; their shadows lingered like ghosts. She stood in front of her father’s farmhouse, arms at her sides, taking in the blind eyes of the windows. A fracture in the glass distorted her reflection and broke the distant ridge, each crack fragmenting the twilight. A spider busied herself on the patio between two slats of iron railing, her glistening web both a home and a trap.
What had it meant to own something?
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer based in Austin, TX. His art in print is displayed in many galleries, including the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; as well as in his books: Grays the Mountain Sends (2013) and Good Goddamn (2017). He is the recipient of numerous awards; the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an Aaron Siskind fellowship and, recently, a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Vessels, his ongoing project on the American West, can be viewed on his website here.
Liza Stewart is an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where she teaches freshman composition. Her work has appeared in Winning Writers and was a 2019 finalist for The Pinch Literary Award. She is currently at work on her first novel.
