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Growing up in their Hillwood neighborhood, neither one of them would've ever predicted that they would create a book together, yet alone one that would be published, yet alone one that would be a successful bestseller.
Helga Pataki had always been a terrific writer and there had never been any doubt that she would have a successful writing career. Phoebe Heyerdahl, on the other hand, had always excelled in sciences and math, and in the memorization of facts. Everyone said she would grow up to either be a famous scientist or win a lot of money on a game show like Jeopardy; or probably both.
She had been on track for a career in the sciences when she started college; but after nearly two and a half years of nothing but difficult science and math classes at Yale, plus hours of lab time on top of that, she was burnt out. One night, on a tearful call with Helga, who was majoring in both film and creative writing at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, Phoebe admitted that she was considering either dropping out or taking a leave of absence for a year. Helga, in typical Helga fashion, yelled at her and demanded she calm down. It was enough to break through and get Phoebe out of her own head for a moment, though, long enough for her to stop sobbing.
They talked for hours, long distance, and Helga asked her questions, such as if she'd spoken to her advisor, and suggested Phoebe explore classes in other, more creative areas like writing or art.
"Use other parts of your brain. You have to take all your general requirements anyway. You can take a break from science and math."
Phoebe should've thought of everything Helga was saying; had someone sought out her advice, she would've told them the same exact things. It spoke to how distressed she was that she hadn't thought of any of it for herself.
"You know I've never been good at the creative stuff. I'll never be a writer like you."
"Yeah, but you don't have to be perfect. Especially in an introductory class."
Looking at the class offerings for the next semester, Phoebe discovered that Yale's studio arts department offered photography classes. Of course she'd used a camera before, so it felt accessible. She registered for both the general visual arts prerequisite course and the introductory photography class as part of her course work for her second spring at Yale. And loved it.
She was behind the students who'd been taking those classes as soon as they started school and would need to take summer classes in order to graduate on time, but she was willing to do it. And if she needed a fifth year to complete the major, she'd decided she was fine with that.
In another call to Helga during spring semester, Phoebe explained her plan to travel and document her journey that summer, in order to build a portfolio for review by the art department before she was accepted into the photography major.
"I've got no plans until next semester," Helga told her. She was going to spend her junior year abroad, enrolled in a film program in London. "You'll need someone to help with driving, at least."
Phoebe warned her that she wasn't going to just be traveling around taking pretty pictures of the scenery.
"I'm planning to go to off-the-beaten-path places and take pictures. Mostly in Idaho."
"Why Idaho?"
One summer, when she was a kid, her family had driven from Hillwood back to Kentucky to visit relatives. At one point driving through Idaho, they passed a bunch of school buses parked on a field of grass, miles away from the nearest town. The buses were run-down and decrepit, and even from far away she could see that the insides had been gutted from a couple of them. The image of those buses was etched in her mind and she wanted to find them again. Unfortunately she wasn't a wordsmith like Helga was, and she struggled to articulate what it was about that spot and its surrounding area that haunted her.
"So, it was like a graveyard for school buses."
"Kind of."
"Huh."
"There were other things, but that's the scene that has really stuck in my mind. I'm planning to follow the same route we took. It probably doesn't sound very interesting, but maybe I'll get good pictures, and Idaho is very pretty."
Helga didn't comment on whether it was interesting or not. She just casually remarked that she remembered reading that the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior had only a few years earlier established the Minidoka Internment National Monument on the site where the Japanese internment camp it was memorializing had operated. Then she changed the subject.
"I have to be back by the fifteenth to pack and leave for London in time. Other than that, I'm there."
~~~
Phoebe's paternal grandparents and their families were imprisoned in an internment camp in Arkansas when they were children, which was how they ended up in the south and eventually settled in Kentucky, where she was born.
They'd never really talked about it too much.
"It would've been much cooler here than where they were in the south," Phoebe mused.
They were at the monument on a weekday, so a couple of bus loads of children were visiting too, as part of their class field trip. Phoebe had taken a picture of the yellow buses parked in front of the entrance as well as the camp itself.
"You're really on a roll with this school bus theme," Helga quipped.
"Shhh!" Phoebe retorted, but she couldn't help but laugh too.
At that point she wasn't sure anymore what, if anything, the theme of her photographs would turn out to be. She concentrated on taking good pictures that she felt would help her portfolio review, and told Helga the little she knew about her own family's experience of being incarcerated for being Japanese.
~~~
That first portfolio that Phoebe put together wasn't her best, but it allowed her to declare the major and she never took another science or math class. Eventually, like Helga, she found a career in journalism, but as a photojournalist rather than a writer. When they decided to collaborate and pool both their talents, their success skyrocketed.