The Long Way Around: Learning to Be Seen

Self-Portrait, close-up By: Lynn Mohr

My grandfather measured time in miles, not minutes.

I can still picture the passenger seat of my grandfather's car, usually a bright red or yellow truck, the model never the same for long, but the feeling of being there beside him always unchanged.

From that seat, I remember the soft hum of the tires on Oregon highway pavement and the way his hand would lift slightly off the wheel whenever something caught his eye. A weathered barn leaning into a field. An old shipwreck disappearing into the fog. A covered bridge quietly tucked between trees like it was trying to stay hidden from time itself.

He would slow down, not always enough to stop, but enough to notice. And then he would talk.

Footprints in Sand, Oregon Coast
By: Lynn Mohr

Our drives were never about getting somewhere. They were about everything he had seen before me, and everything he was trying not to forget.

My grandfather worked as an insurance claims adjuster before retiring, a job that took him across the Pacific Northwest. To most people, it was practical work. In practice, it became a map of detours.

He learned roads most people never had reason to take, and he returned with photographs instead of souvenirs. Ghost towns, abandoned churches, painted hills, beach sunsets, and always, always covered bridges.

Photography was not a hobby for him. It was how he held onto the world. For most of my childhood, I did not understand that.

I only knew that visiting him meant long drives through Oregon, and that those were the best days of the year. We moved slowly through Cascade Locks, Fort Stevens, Lowell, his childhood hometown, and he narrated everything like the land itself had a memory. What used to be here. What had changed since the last time through. What no one else seemed to notice anymore.

Beneath those drives was something more subtle, a thread of anxiety, depression, and self-doubt that ran through my family, often unspoken. My grandfather carried it through constant motion and exploration. I carried it through hesitation, avoidance, and the lingering belief that anything I created, and even parts of myself, were never good enough to share.

Rainbow in the Breakwater By: Lynn Mohr

As I grew older, I began to recognize the same insecurities in him. Around the same time, our drives started to change. They became a space where we could both step away from the negativity at home and just exist without judgment.

My family joked about how often he traded in vehicles or how much money he spent on photography equipment. They called it wasteful. He called it living. On the road, it felt like we were the only ones who understood it.

Even away from the noise at home, doubt never fully left him. I saw it in the way he hesitated to claim his talent.

Once, in Salem, he showed me a large landscape photograph printed across a glass-like acrylic panel inside a friend's auto shop. It was expansive, claiming a whole wall, impossible to miss. It was also, as he told me quietly, his only piece of work that might ever be displayed publicly. He did not think his photography was good enough for galleries or publication.

Gold and Omen By: Lynn Mohr

I did not believe him, and I remember telling him so. I insisted his work was thoughtful, detailed, and captivating. But belief is complicated when it does not come from inside yourself.

I understood that feeling more than I wanted to admit. In middle school, I wrote constantly – poetry, lyrics and short stories – filling notebooks I never showed anyone.

Teachers encouraged me to submit my stories and poetry to competitions. In seventh grade, during a peer review assignment, a classmate handed me a business card for his brother's publishing company and told me I would be crazy not to try. I kept the card, and I never used it. Like my grandfather, I mistook fear for honesty.

Years passed in a series of almosts and not yets. Then life changed in ways I did not expect, and I entered adulthood trying to rebuild stability while living with severe PTSD and fatigue that never fully went away. At the same time, my grandfather's health began to decline.

Rust, Timber, and Time By: Lynn Mohr

He went to Avamere rehabilitation in Eugene expecting a short stay. Weeks became months. Months became a kind of waiting. Depression set in. Physical therapy went undone. His body weakened and eventually he lost the ability to walk.

The man who once built entire days around memorizing Oregon roads became confined to a room that grew smaller the longer he stayed.

He passed away in that facility before his eightieth birthday.

After he was gone, what stayed with me was not only grief, but recognition. I had lost the one person who understood both the need to create and the fear of sharing it. And I began to see how closely our lives had mirrored each other in the ways we held ourselves back.

Artist's Reception at
Albany City Hall Gallery

Not long after, I made a choice I had avoided for years. In the spring of 2024, I submitted three small acrylic paintings and a poetry chapbook to an open call at a local gallery. I did not expect anything to come from it. Months passed, and I forgot I had even applied.

Then, one day in October, I received an email. My work had been accepted for a month-long exhibition in November.

For the first time, I allowed myself to be seen.

I still feel that fear. It does not disappear. But now, I move forward with it instead of stopping because of it. I think of my grandfather on those long drives, slowing down for things others would pass by. I think of everything he created, and everything he never believed was enough.

This time, I am choosing differently.

I carry him with me in that choice, in every risk, every submission, every moment I decide not to run away. The long way around taught me how to see the world.

Now, I am learning how to let the world see me.

(Left to right) "Eat Me" (2018), "Why'd I have to go & cry so much" (2024) and "Drink Me" (2018)
Acrylic on Canvas By: Savannah West