Fading Edge (2025-)
In the summer of 2025, I traveled across the Mountain West — moving through Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado. I drove backroads, walked small towns and big cities, slept in my car, and drifted along the outskirts of places where the country feels stretched thin.
Along the way, I kept brief notes. Fragments appear here as observations, encounters, and impressions that settled into the texture of the road.
The landscapes I moved through held a mix of beauty, strain, distance, and uncertainty. Some places felt in motion; others felt suspended. Conversations touched on work, land, identity, loss, and the quiet routines of getting by. I met ranchers, dancers, fishermen, workers, travelers, off-gridders, clerks, and people living out their days in the places that shaped them.
Fading Edge is an ongoing documentary study of American spaces in transition — where decline and renewal overlap, identity shifts, ideologies clash, and the future remains unresolved.
Heard in gas station: “Isn’t the Everglades in Florida full of gators and shit?”
“Keep Montana Montana,” she said, after explaining how she came here and never left.
A man in Poleman, MT told me that since the Covid-era, the population in the Flathead Valley had boomed. That most of the people coming in weren’t the “treehugging types.” A lot of Texans. Some Californians. People would come into the hardware store he worked at and buy seven-inch PVC pipe to bury guns in. Preppers. Doomsday types.
He smiled, with several teeth missing, and said he was from Eritrea. “The sun is shining,” he said.
He lives alone. His little place of solitude. For entertainment he might turn on the radio, or read. But mostly he just gets outside. He rides around an old cruiser bike. “A World War II special.”