Martian odyssey

County photographer embarks on epic journey

Photographer, journalist, teacher, traveller and explorer Phil Norton can truly and proudly call himself a Martian, having been born and raised in Mars, Pennsylvania. From an early age he had an interest in photography and hiking, and when he bought his first 10-speed bike as a teenager he started exploring the rural countryside. “That was the ticket to adventure for me, and at about 15 years old I was exploring the back farm roads, getting out of town into the rural areas. Seeing the endless landscape ahead of me on these back roads, and it’s like I just want to keep going,” he says. One of his memorable trips from those early days was a ride to Pittsburgh with a few friends, following the side roads. “And we got there on the day the Minnesota Vikings were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, so there was like 55,000 fans and crowded traffic, and we were on bicycles through all of this, and it just fed me for more of the same.” He attended Penn State University in Altoona, studying environmental science. The university bordered the Appalachian Mountains, and Norton eagerly explored the region, eventually joining a group of fellow students on 100-mile excursions. He also worked on the student newspaper, and that experience would later steer him into a career as a journalist. Before starting his career, he and a friend made a bicycle trip around the Great Lakes in 1979. “That was a four-month journey, camping all the way, meeting people like East Coast fishermen, staying in the homes of French-Canadians, and up into the wilds of northern Ontario, and then the following year, 1980, was a trip from Cape May, New Jersey to the tip of Texas.” He took notes on the latter trip, writing on scraps of paper held on a makeshift clipboard attached to his handlebars. Some of those notes were lost to wind and weather, but enough remained so that Norton could selfpublish a small book about his epic journey, titled Bikepacking Into Countryside And Lifestyles.

Norton’s career path evolved from photography to writing. He did a series of articles for Harrowsmith magazine about the dying sugar maples due to acid rain that was precipitated by pollutants emitted by smokestacks from Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley. During this time he created a personal library of stock photographs that he would sell to magazine publishers or filmmakers. By this time he was living in Quebec, and became the stock photo editor for the Montreal Gazette. “I dealt with selling the Formula One races in Montreal to Paris Match and German magazines, and then I had lots of sales from the Montreal Canadiens archives—Maurice Rocket Richard photos—and the FLQ crisis and Expo ’67. I was in charge of, you know, a million images, and we put out some books. We started with the great ice storm of 1998, and then we had two books based on archive images.”

Eventually the transition from film to digital images put pressure on the stock image industry, and aside from photographs of significant or historical events, it was no longer profitable, since images were available for low cost or even free online. By this time Norton and his family had moved from Quebec to the County, and he branched off into doing freelance work, teaching, as well as leading photography tours. Beginning with small groups in 2012,Norton would take them to some of the scenic but out of the way places in the County and surrounding region. He eventual led photography adventures to Newfoundland, the Prairies, the Canadian Rockies and the Yukon, as well as out to Alaska and down into the southern States, the mid-west and California. He is planning to continue those trips in some form when pandemic travel restrictions are over.

The onset of the pandemic disrupted Norton’s plan to recreate his 1980 journey on its fortieth anniversary. His original trip was driven by a desire to find out more about his country and the people who live there. “It was this hunger for that kind of adventure and discovery, but also inviting as a journalist. There were stories out there that I wanted to tell, and that needed to be told, like for instance the environmental story, the rural lifestyle story, and you know, what is my country all about?” he says. “And the other story is North America, you know Canada, US and Mexico. I’m very interested in that whole continent without borders, telling the stories of these people in a regional sense. Each region is unique and has its own colloquialisms and its own culture and history. And all of that is fascinating and I live for these adventures, and I believe it’s my life story. I don’t want it to be a boring nine-to-five office job story. I want my life to be something that my grandchildren will like to brag about. There are so many interesting people out there, and I try to capture their story, whether they’re catching shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico or gathering ginseng in the Appalachian Mountains. You meet all these people, the Amish, the Hutterites, youth and elderly, townspeople and rural people, and you get a good cross-section of who we are as a society.” This time Norton is forsaking the makeshift clipboard and will be using the audio recorder on his phone to keep his notes. He also has a Go-Pro camera, a drone and his trusty DSLR to capture images that he will post to his blog. One of the key aspects of this trip will be a comparison of his experience 40 years ago in rural America with the present day. “I will incorporate the story from the last trip into the story of today. I have this advantage as a dual citizen, as a Canadian and American, to travel through both countries and maybe show how the world has changed in 40 years, or in the short term through the pandemic. It’s a repeat of my 1979 and 1980 trips if you combine most of them, including Canada, New England, back to my original starting point in my hometown of Mars, Pennsylvania, and the deep south of the US and Texas. I’m as curious as anybody as to what I’m going to find. It’s not a story that’s been already written.”

Norton expects that the trip will take about four months and he has been meticulously planning his journey. There are many things to consider, such as health insurance coverage, availability of supplies in case his bike needs to be repaired, whether to bring along a cook stove and a cold-weather sleeping bag, or forgo them to save a little weight and thereby use less effort on the long mountain climbs. “Survival items I won’t skimp on. I’ll have good rain gear, waterproof everything, and have the capability of making a fire. If I need compass and direction-finding, I’m still going to use some analog methods. You never know if you’re going to have satellite or cell connection in some of the places I go. I’m afraid of bears and wild animals at my campsite. I’ve never carried pepper spray, but I might this time. Then there’s little things like a snake bite kit for the south, with rattlesnakes and copperheads and water moccasins. And now we’ve got to worry about ticks. These are sort of new concerns that I didn’t have to worry about 40 years ago.” He will be cycling solo for most of the trip, although he will be joined by his 1979 partner, Steve Jarrett, for about five days along the Allegheny Passage and Potomac Towpath, a series of trails from Pennsylvania to Washington DC. “I don’t intend to ride with anybody else mostly because of the journalist aspect of the trip. I’m often stopping for periods of time, either to take photos or meet people or fly the drone, when I feel there’s a story here to tell. Steven and I are really compatible, and he’s actually professionally leading bicycle tours this summer.” Norton expects to have his blog established before his departure at the end of the month, and hopes that people will follow him online through his journey. “I welcome anybody to join along and maybe make it interactive, so people can comment and maybe tell me they have a great-aunt down in a certain area that won’t mind putting me up for a bit and letting me have a shower. I see this as a story, and it’s not my story, but stories of other people. And not just the people, but the land, particularly the trends of environmental degradation. When I think about the things that I do well and that I have enjoyed doing all throughout my life, they are bicycling, camping, photography and exploring rural and backcountry lands and people. I might as well do the things I am good at and see where it leads.”

Interested readers can follow Phil Norton on Instagram @county_photographer, where details of his blog will be posted later.