Aaron Wessling

 

Four years ago, my younger brother began to disappear into the mountains of Northern California. He had headed south a few years prior to farm cannabis on a property tucked deep inside the backroads in the Trinity Alps, but with each passing season our regular phone calls became less and less frequent, our steady stream of messages dried up, and his cell number changed. After six-month lulls in communication from him, I would eventually make the 350 mile drive south from Portland to his property to check in on him. Our reunions were always emotional and filled with his promises of a more consistent connection moving forward. He struggled, sometimes all at once, with substance abuse, rocky relationships, loneliness, and the fickle nature of life in an inherently high-risk industry. On each visit, his new tattoos and the hand-written notes that I found scattered around his property, as well his fierce love for his dog B-Boy, would offer complex clues into the current state of the brother I had known and the man he had become. The images in this series were all made on those visits, the last of which I made in early March 2020, a week before the property on which he farmed was sold by the owner and he was forced to move. I've been unable to contact him since.