A few days before going to Cinequest International Film Festival for my first documentary ‘The Sonosopher: Alex Caldiero in Life…in Sound,’ I was sitting at a local café, resting from a long flight from Bangkok, when I suddenly felt the intense urge to get in my car and drive to Tarkio, Missouri, where my little brother Dane Morgan Bernhard is buried and died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1985. My body pulled me towards the door, while my mind scrambled to assemble the logistics involved. With ‘The Sonosopher’ world premiere approaching, I reluctantly put the idea to rest.
The next day, Travis, the co-director of ‘The Sonosopher,’ and I had a wonderful conversation while driving down I-80 West through Nevada en route to San Jose, California. We were discussing travel writing, hobos, and Werner Herzog’s trek, on foot, from Munich to Paris to save his close friend and film historian, Lotte Eisner. As we talked, the previously vague impression began to take form. I was supposed to go to Tarkio and make a short documentary, five minutes maximum. I was to use an audio recording I did with my mom for the sound underlying the images. I could hear her voice – the clip from the candid, five hour conversation I recorded with her a year earlier for oral history. I was to shoot the film on super 8mm.
When the conversation lulled into a brief pause, I shared my experience from the previous day with everyone in the car. I told them I knew I had to go. As soon as I finished my sentence, Travis told me that I had to do it. Marissa, my wife and co-producer, in the back seat, hearing this for the first time, also responded. I asked her if it was reasonable. She responded “no, it’s definitely not reasonable, but we have to do it.” We agreed to make it my birthday present.
Throughout Cinequest, I escaped the pressure of the festival by fantasizing about the upcoming trip. One day, while everyone else napped, I sat awake, ideas pouring. It would be called “Tarkio Balloon.” I would spend a lot of time shooting in the cemetery. I would shoot a balloon floating in the air, juxtaposed with the audio of my mom telling me that, as a kid, I would try to make her feel happy, after the loss of Dane, by telling her that I would get a balloon and go get him for her. While at Cinequest, we ordered fifteen rolls of 8mm film.
When we got back from the festival we went to visit my parents, who now live in Wyoming. While everyone was gone one day, I scanned Dane’s entire, small, but lovingly constructed, photo album. When the day came, we left their house, telling them that we were headed home to Utah, and instead drove from Wyoming to Missouri. Months later I presented the film to my parents as a surprise gift.
The following is an excerpt from my journal, while in Tarkio:
There is something significant about driving down the hilly roads my parents drove down at my same age. Here I am, 27, still a child. My mother, at 27, was driving unexpectedly to the sudden death of her fourth child.
I contemplated their hopes. I thought about my own. I intuited the darkness that lies beyond bends or in the lowland obscured by hills.
It felt like stepping into a myth. My mind sought to contrive the experience. It wanted me to make “sense” of the experience, structure it like an aimless road trip movie, where I leave my journey, resurrected by exhaled breath making ashes dance again in scattered procession. I knew that worshipping the moment meant having reverence for the ephemeral — letting it slip away was the only way to be with it.
We drove the final hill and entered Tarkio, Missouri. The sign, still in tact since we left it over twenty years ago, felt inviting. The cemetery stood a few yards before the sign, the brick wall forming its entry aged and decaying. The cemetery that I had once visited in a nine year old’s dream, surprised me now. In my blurry memory, the cemetery was tiny and unkempt. This time, with the light of concrete experience extending its borders, the cemetery was large and labyrinthian. We got out of the car, camera in hand, determined to find Dane’s grave as the sun slowly set.
Marissa, with meticulous precision, swept through the cemetery, row by row, looking for the marker. I, fighting my mind and the compulsion to contrive the whole experience, argued with myself, walking erratically through the rows, hoping for a chance encounter. As the minutes dragged on, and the grave lay hidden, it all began to feel like a dream. Maybe none of it happened. It was a nightmare, illusory, but haunting, in the recesses of my family’s collective identity. That day in September, my sister Heidi slowly walked up the stairs, dutiful as ever, to retrieve a healthy, cooing, infant. The tale of Dane simply served as a boogyman story — a folktale told to instill gratitude and compassion in young parents. My mother never performed CPR on her two month year old son. Mom never ran out of the apartment into the snow, feet numb, child in arms, to alert the volunteer ambulance drivers in town to bring Dane to the nearest hospital.
After forty minutes, we decided to split up and systematically look for the headstone. Using the picture of two devastated individuals and a naive two year old as a guide, I looked especially close around trees and combed two rows at a time. Fifteen minutes into our new approach, I found it.
It was strange to see my last name on a grave. I was looking at my own marker. The headstone was humble, bought with scraped-together funds. Dane was surrounded by strangers, a war veteran and other miscellaneous people, randomly placed anomalies in an otherwise small town gathering of family members who lived and died together. The grave should have been bigger. The miniature stature of it, hidden in the shadow of the large space left in our family as a result of it, seemed incongruent. Something that takes up so much mental and emotional real estate should tower physically. I can picture Tarkio, eclipsed by a grave the size of our loss.
I placed my index finger on the camera trigger and made attempts to catch the essence of a moment from the inside out.
We left the cemetery and drove through town. Main Street was full of abandoned buildings and century-old architecture. The city mourned with Dane. This is not an odd relationship in Tarkio. The dead seem to mingle seamlessly with the living. The dying buildings are filled with kind people, knowingly caring for their sick economy. The college died in the early nineties, ashamed and bankrupt. The famous “Mule Barn Theatre” my father ran during his stint at the college, burned down in the early nineties. Tarkio is replete with buildings that collectively tell a story of loss.
After a long day, we settled down in the Big T Motel and tried to sleep in preparation for the next day. I awoke, sometime in the middle of the night, to a vivid 8 mm shot of the dramatic hills leading into Tarkio. The image was hypnotizing. I knew this was how the short film was to begin.
The next morning was bitter, Missouri cold. We set out to complete the actual documentation of the film, in heavy winter coats. We covered the small town for hours, shooting thirteen rolls of film, our faces stinging with the gusts of sharp wind. We purchased two red roses and put them on Dane’s grave. His grave looked beautiful for the first time in many years. Around three PM, as snow began to fall, we drove away from the city, this time the hills an exit. Images of Tarkio slipped in and out of my rear view mirror.
The trip has changed me in a way I still do not quite understand. I was altered by the pilgrimage. It is inside me. The actual moments may have evaporated, only evidenced by crude film, but they accrued in my body like an organism. I imagine I will carry this new being with me for the rest of my life. There is so much I have left out. My only desire is that I have somehow left bread crumbs for a future self to find his way back to Tarkio.
The Lost and Found Series
Every film in ‘The Lost and Found Series’ has a similar tale. Each story spoke to us, in one way or another, and we tried to listen. I hope that you will continue this journey with us, as we explore the theme of losing and finding through five remarkably diverse subjects. Our plan is to release three of the films (including ‘Tarkio Balloon’) online for free and include the last two in a DVD set with essays and meditations on each documentary. ‘Tarkio Balloon’ recently premiered at the 8th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. I encourage all of you to contact me and let me know ways that you are finding what has been lost in your own lives. Here’s to your personal quests.
This post was also featured on The Good Men Project. Check it out here!
Posted at 8:46pm.
![I am happy to announce “Boomtown,” the second film in the Lost and Found Series, has been accepted into the 9th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival! The film will screen in competition for the Big Sky Award and premiere at the historic Wilma Theater on February 20th, opening weekend of the festival.
Yesterday, the Salt Lake City-based blog “Selective Echo” published an excellent article on “Boomtown” and the entire series. Read it below!
“At its peak in the early 1880s, the Horn Silver Mine in Frisco, Utah was cited in the U.S. Annual Mining Review and Stock Ledger as ‘unquestionably the richest silver mine in the world now being worked.’ Miriam B. Murphy, who has written frequently about Utah’s early history, described the town’s story as the perfect setting for pulp fiction:
‘Two prospectors casually discover a rich ore body, a bankrupt financier promotes the venture, the boomtown of Frisco becomes one of the wildest mining camps in the West with a murder or two every evening, a tough lawman who shoots on sight begins to clean up the town, after producing millions the huge mine collapses, and Frisco becomes another ghost town.’
Nearly 125 years after a mine collapse essentially sealed Frisco’s inevitable doom, Utah filmmakers Torben Bernhard and Travis Low scouting the Beaver County area some 15 miles west of Milford completely missed the town’s location on their first pass. As Bernhard recalls, ‘the former boomtown was once home to thousands of people, but is now mostly sagebrush, building foundations, old mining equipment, and scraps of metal. The old charcoal kilns are listed on the National Register of Historic Places [as of 1982] but they are beginning to fall apart as well.’
In their short film ‘Boomtown,’ which premieres next month at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, Bernhard and Low reconstruct Frisco for a contemporary audience through excerpts from rare recordings of oral histories taken from individuals who had lived in a town that disappeared from the map by the end of the 1920s.
As much as this 12-minute film, which also was produced by Bernhard’s wife Marissa, reflects countless hours of historical and scholarly research, the visual imagery and tape excerpts in ‘Boomtown’ underscore the primal challenge we all face in the lifelong predicament of preserving identity. Like the other four films in their forthcoming Lost and Found Series, ‘Boomtown’ suggests, ‘nobody or very few people know our history but this will change.’
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![The Lost and Found Series is featured this week in SLC City Weekly. Check it out below!
How did the lost & found theme come about?Each documentary in the series started as a separate project. One day, in an “aha!” moment, we realized that the five projects we had all been working on individually and collectively were actually tied together by the theme of losing and finding. Some deal with literal loss; others with the idea of being overlooked. All of them, directly or indirectly, question the role of film, and particularly documentary [film], in preserving stories.Also, my experience has been that sometimes subjects present themselves to you as short pieces. When the idea for Tarkio Balloon came to me, for example, I always thought of it as being under five minutes. I wanted to “get in and get out” and leave the impression of loss instead of explaining it.What was it like visiting Frisco, a ghost town near Beaver, Utah?The first time we visited Frisco, we drove past it and had to circle back. The former boomtown was once home to thousands of people, but is now mostly sagebrush, building foundations, old mining equipment and scraps of metal. This was the impetus for the documentary Boomtown—the idea that a town that once exported $60 million worth of precious metals and carried so much life could now easily be driven past.
It was when we started our research of Beaver County families with relatives who lived and worked in Frisco that we met Dick Davis. He was kind enough to grant us an interview for use in the film, but kept telling us that he didn’t have much to say and that we should really listen to these tapes he had. He brought out a tape player, cued up the cassette and pushed play. Our jaws dropped. Instead of scholars or family members talking about Frisco, it was the people who actually lived there! They spoke vividly about their time in the old mining town. He couldn’t remember how he came by the tape, but knew that one of the interviewees was a family member of his.
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