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The other thing you have to know about John is that, at first, he can come off a bit cocky. It's not a bad cocky—in fact, it's quite endearing sometimes, once you get used to it. Partly, he has this personality trait because he grew up in Philadelphia, and roughly everybody from Philadelphia sounds like they think they are better than you. It's true. Panhandlers on the street sound condescending in Philadelphia. Anyway, we all grew to like it. Sometimes you get tired of people kissing your butt all the time, and you just wish someone would speak their mind. That's John.

Now, I don't know where you are spiritually, whether you are a Muslim or a Jew or an agnostic or just prefer not to think about it, but there is something good about listening to somebody explain complicated ideas, especially when they have to do with ancient themes—meaning-of-life themes—because listening to that stuff gives you the feeling life is a great deal more intricate, and perhaps more beautiful, than you thought. Studying an ancient text makes a person feel as though they are living in a complicated but wondrous reality that is greater than they are.

John was a Bible scholar, but he didn't teach the Bible for a living. He had a part-time gig teaching at a local school, but for a living, he took landscape photographs. I found this out because some of us would stay around after the Bible study and watch whatever was on television, and one time I asked John about the photographs he and his wife had hanging in the living room. They had landscape photographs, mountains and snow and sunsets and the like, a couple of them on the walls and one of them over the fireplace. These weren't normal nature photographs, like the ones your uncle took of the family in front of a waterfall in Kentucky, but the real thing, almost like art. These were the sorts of photographs you took by being dropped off by helicopter on a mountaintop just at sunrise, no footprints or anything. And that's when John told me they were his. I didn't believe him at first, but he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders like it didn't matter whether I believed him or not. That's when I started thinking maybe he was telling the truth.

Even though John is too cheap to buy his wife furniture, they live in a nice house. It sprawls out on a couple acres, and from the driveway you look directly at Mount Hood, all eleven thousand feet of purple-on-snow rising out of the rolling hills of western Oregon. I always wondered, when I went out to John's house, how he could afford a big place like that on a Bible teacher's salary, especially only teaching one class a year. It started making sense that he might have some kind of side job.

We would hang out after Bible study, sitting in the den watching Sports Center, and one evening John asked if I wanted to see some of his work. The rest of the guys got quiet. Sure, whatever, I said. The others stood up, and John looked at them with this kind of Bruce Willis glance and said, "I guess you guys want to see, too."

We went upstairs to John's office — a kind of library without shelves. There were stacks of black boxes all over the floor and on the desk, and John led us meandering through them. He flipped a switch on his desk and half the thing lit up—not a top light, but the actual desk was made of glass and it lit from underneath. John opened one of the black boxes and set down a couple slides on the backlit desk. These slides were pretty big, four inches by five, John told me, and when they were lit from behind they were remarkable. I couldn't believe a guy could get paid to go to the most beautiful places in the world to take pictures.

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June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50