Salty, real name Steven Harrison, packed the small bag with clothes and the big bag with camera equipment.

His luggage choices mirrored his life choices. Since boyhood, he’d always been much more interested in capturing the beauty of the world around him than in trying to look good himself.

The small bag had three of everything - t-shirt, jeans, underwear and tube socks - a tube of laundry detergent and a piece of rope he could string for drying. The only shoes he needed were the ones on his feet.

The camera equipment, on the other hand, was anything but nondescript. He was a connoisseur of photography technology - he acquired every new innovation, often before it hit the market. For insurance purposes, he estimated his travel bag alone had equipment worth $25,000, but it was worth so much more to him than that.

As a professional landscape photographer, Salty traveled all over the world. But for this shoot he wasn’t going far. He was headed two hours east to the small dying mill town where he grew up. The town historian had asked him for a favor. Would be come shoot the town before it completely crumbled into the ground from neglect? How could he say no.

As he drove into town that afternoon, Salty looked around and realized he really should have said no to this poject. At first blush he saw no beauty worth photographing, no visuals worth preserving. The town had fallen on such hard times since he was a school boy there, it was essentially unrecognizable.

Then, as he rounded the corner from Main onto 2nd Street, wondering out loud what he could photograph that would do the towns’s rich history justice, he saw her. Had she never left? Was she back? It didn’t matter.

In her he had the embodiment of the rugged beauty and understated elegance of this town, of what it had been for generations of residents. The first picture he took would have to be of her.