The Bridges of Madison County / Мосты округа Мэдисон. Роберт Джеймс Уоллер

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his mother noticed something different about him. He never spoke a word until he was three, then began talking in complete sentences, and he could read extremely well by five. In school he was an indifferent student, frustrating the teachers.

      They looked at his IQ[59] scores and talked to him about achievement, about doing what he was capable of doing, that he could become anything he wanted to become. One of his high school teachers wrote the following in an evaluation of him: “He believes that 'IQ tests are a poor way to judge people's abilities'. I suggest a conference with his parents.”

      His mother met with several teachers. When the teachers talked about Robert's stubborn behavior, she said, “Robert lives in a world of his own making. I know he's my son, but I sometimes have the feeling that he came not from my husband and me, but from another place to which he's trying to return. I appreciate your interest in him, and I'll try once more to encourage him to do better in school.”

      But he had been content to read all the adventure and travel books in the local library and kept to himself otherwise[60], spending days along the river that ran through the edge of town, ignoring proms[61] and football games and other things that bored him. He fished and swam and walked and lay in long grass listening to distant voices he fancied only he could hear. “There are wizards out there,” he used to say to himself. “If you're quiet and open enough to hear them, they're out there.” And he wished he had a dog to share these moments.

      There was no money for college. And no desire for it, either. His father worked hard and was good to his mother and him, but the job in a factory didn't leave much for other things, including the care of a dog. He was eighteen when his father died, so with the Great Depression bearing down hard[62], he enlisted in the army[63] as a way of supporting his mother and himself. He stayed there four years, but those four years changed his life.

      He was assigned to a job as photographer's assistant, though he had no idea of even how to load a camera. But in that work, he discovered his profession. The technical details were easy for him. Within a month he was not only doing the darkroom work for two of the staff photographers, but also was allowed to shoot simple projects himself.

      Robert Kincaid checked out photo books and art books from the town library[64] and studied them. Early on, he particularly liked the French impressionists and Rembrandt's use of light.

      Eventually he began to see that light was what he photographed, not objects. The objects merely were the vehicles for reflecting the light. If the light was good, you could always find something to photograph. The 35–millimeter camera was beginning to emerge then, and he purchased a used Leica[65] at a local camera store. He took it down to New Jersey[66], and spent a week of his leave there photographing life along the shore.

      He began keeping notes of his camera settings[67] and places he wanted to visit again. When he came out of the army at twenty-two, he was a pretty decent shooter and found work in New York assisting a well-known fashion photographer.

      The female models were beautiful; he dated a few and fell partially in love with one before she moved to Paris and they drifted apart[68]. She had said to him: “Robert, I don't know who or what you are for sure, but please come visit me in Paris.” He told her he would, meant it[69] when he said it, but never got there. Years later when he was doing a story on the beaches of Normandy, he found her name in the Paris book, called, and they had coffee at an outdoor cafe. She was married to a cinema director[70] and had three children.

      He couldn't get very keen on the idea of fashion.[71] People threw away perfectly good clothes or hastily had them made over[72] according to the instructions of European fashion dictators.

      It seemed dumb to him, and he felt lessened doing the photography.[73] “You are what you produce,” he said as he left this work.

      His mother died during his second year in New York. He went back to Ohio, buried her, and sat before a lawyer, listening to the reading of the will. There wasn't much. He didn't expect there would be anything. But he was surprised to find his parents had accumulated a little fortune[74] in the tiny house where they had lived all their married lives. He sold the house and bought first-class equipment with the money. As he paid the camera salesman, he thought of the years his father had worked for those dollars and the plain life his parents had led.

      Some of his work began to appear in small magazines. Then National Geographic called. They had seen a calendar shot he had taken out in Maine. He talked with them, got a minor assignment[75], executed it professionally, and was on his way[76].

      The military asked him back in 1943. He went with the marines and slogged his way[77] up South Pacific beaches, cameras swinging from his shoulders, lying on his back, photographing the men coming off amphibious landing craft[78]. He saw the terror on their faces, felt it himself. Saw them cut in two by machine-gun fire[79], saw them plead to God and their mothers for help. He got it all, survived, and never got drawn by glory and romance of war photography.

      Coming out of the service in 1945, he called National Geographic. They were ready for him, anytime. He bought a motorcycle in San Francisco, then turned north to explore Washington. He liked it there and decided to make it his base.

      Now, at fifty-two, he was still watching the light. He had been to most of the places posted on his boyhood walls and felt happy when he visited them.

      The Lake Superior shore was as nice as he'd heard it was. He marked down several locations for future reference, took some shots to jog his memory later on[80], and headed south along the Mississippi River toward Iowa. He'd never been to Iowa but was taken with the hills[81] of the northeast part along the big river.

      Cutting over to U.S. Route 65, he went through Des Moines early on a Monday morning, August 16, 1965, turned west at Iowa 92, and headed for Madison County and the covered bridges that were supposed to be there, according to National Geographic. They were there all right, the man in the Texaco station[82] said so and gave him directions to all seven.

      The first six were easy to find as he mapped out his strategy for photographing them. The seventh, a place called Roseman Bridge, eluded him. It was hot, he was hot, Harry – his truck – was hot, and he was wandering around on gravel roads that seemed to lead nowhere except to the next gravel road.

      In foreign countries, his rule of thumb was[83], “Ask three times.” He had discovered that three responses, even if they all were wrong, gradually vectored you in to where you wanted to go. Maybe twice would be enough here.

      A mailbox was coming up, sitting at the end of a lane about one hundred yards long. The name on the box read “Richard Johnson, RR 2.” He slowed down and turned up the lane, looking for guidance.

      When he drove into the yard, a woman was sitting on the front porch. It looked cool there, and she was drinking something that looked even cooler. She came off the porch toward him. He stepped from the truck and looked at her, looked closer, and then closer still. She was lovely, or had been at one time, or could

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