Rick Vanderpool jokes that he got the idea for his latest photography project while working on his previous one, a photography book, "The Texas Hamburger: History of a Lone Star Icon." He was finishing a burger in the Amarillo Club, 31 stories high, when he got inspired.
"I was eating one of the highest hamburgers in the state," he said, "and while I was there, I looked due east. It was a clear day and I could see the Groom cross, and that's when it hit me."
OK, maybe not. But it sounds good.
His idea for "CrossIn+America" is less dramatic, but no less impressive. Vanderpool, 67, who lives in Lubbock, likes art, photography, traveling and storytelling. This fit.
A few years ago, a friend suggested an idea, "Crossing Texas," envisioning Vanderpool traveling the state again, this time photographing crosses wherever he found them. He nodded, but thought bigger. Why not the entire country?
Now this is an artist who traveled 30,000 miles to mark the 500-year anniversary in 1992 of Columbus discovering America by photographing all the towns in the U.S. named Columbus. He traveled to every state in the lower 48, and found 70.
It was time to hit the road again, but this one with a deeper spiritual meaning. His quest, which took two years of research, was to locate the oldest site of religious significance in each state. Included in that was capturing crosses, big and small, public and private, along the way.
"A thought came to my mind - 'Am I worthy?' because I didn't know if I was,'" Vanderpool said. "Then a friend told me, 'Maybe if you aren't worthy when you begin your project, perhaps you'll be worthy by the time it's complete.'"
It's one thing, Vanderpool reasoned, to tour Texas for a taste of the state's hamburgers or travel to all 254 counties to shoot the word "Texas" in each one, to even appear on Bob Phillips' Texas Country Reporter, and another to do this.
But in late April 2015, Vanderpool climbed into his 2008 Dodge truck with a new Canon camera. It took four separate trips of over four months and 27,000 miles to cover the contiguous United States, a project funded by a friend.
About 8,000 pictures later, Vanderpool had photographed 165 sites in 48 states, about 75 percent of them were crosses. They were as tall as the 208-foot Beacon of Faith Cross in St. Augustine, Fla., and as small as one-inch effigies in a New Mexico mission.
Included in his two photo montages are about a half dozen crosses in the Texas Panhandle - the 190-foot cross in Groom, of course, but also the rugged simple beauty of the Goodnight cross, as well as one in Hereford and a couple in Amarillo. Vanderpool can produce a photo of at least one cross in all 52 counties of the Panhandle and South Plains (www.cross
inamericatrail.com).
"Doing research, I had 95 percent of the sites plugged into Google maps and could go right to the site," Vanderpool said. "So only about 5 percent were serendipitous finds, lucky happenstance."
Oldest known religious site in Texas is McMahan's Chapel in 1838 at St. Augustine, near the Louisiana border. Ysleta Mission in El Paso is the oldest operating parish that began in 1851. In Oklahoma, it's the Wheelock Mission in Millerton from 1844.
At least two crosses could not be photographed. Vanderpool was not allowed to shoot any crosses at the country's oldest Baptist church in Providence, R.I., a building built in 1774.
The World Trade Center cross, constructed from beams, is below ground at the 911 Memorial. No pictures can be taken below ground.
Vanderpool visited two cross sites steeped in controversy, both of them, not surprisingly, in California.
The Mojave Memorial Cross, 12 miles in the center of that desert, and the 29-foot Mt. Soledad Cross near San Diego have been the targets of legal fighting with religious symbols on public land. The Mojave cross was stolen and later replaced.
Through 27,000 miles, Vanderpool eventually felt a connection, that the upper peninsula of Michigan and the East Coast and West Coast, kinda felt like West Texas. Maybe not the scenery, but the decency of people.
And the holiest of Christian symbols could be found wherever his eyes took him.
"There would be some communities that looked like they needed a double-wide trailer at most to hold all the inhabitants and there would be a
European-style Gothic cathedral in the center of town," Vanderpool said. "Those types of images, the things I didn't expect, were pretty special."
Jon Mark Beilue is an AGN Media columnist. He can be reached at [email protected] or 806-345-3318. Follow him on Twitter:
@jonmarkbeilue.