My life so far has been a series of voyages, with hardly a moment to catch my breath. A childhood on the move, thanks to my Air Force parents. Attending 7 different high schools as we moved bases. After high school, I spent a decade in the merchant marine. Working on cargo ships with voyages to all seven seas; from the Arctic sea to the Southern Ocean. I then got my pilot’s license and have spent the last 15 years working as an airline pilot, living out of a suitcase yet again.

The one constant in all of this incessant movement? My camera. My father, an avid photographer gifted me my first, a 110 film camera called the Mini HOTSHOT, on my 5th birthday.

Like most other families, the camera and the photograph always featured centrally in our lives. Instead of coffee table books we would have stacks of photo albums in the living room. Moving home every 3 years or so, my parents must have used the photo album as an Anchor, as a way for the 4 of us (my parents, my brother and I) to track home, memory and a sense of belonging.

Ozark is the persona I created in 2020 to represent me in Art and in NFTs.

In Japan, an artist would adopt a name in place of their ‘real’ or given one and that name would change as the artist evolved. When I read that Hokusai was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime, a light bulb went off.

Falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2017 required me to learn and adopt not just twitter culture but the ‘anon’ and ‘crypto twitter’ sub-cultures for the first time. This was totally new to me; all I had known and used until then was Facebook.

And so when it came time to choose a name as I prepared to present the Voyages that I had been shooting for almost a decade, I decided to go… back to Arkansas.

You see I had learned to fly planes in a flight school in Oklahoma. It was a magical time in my life, I was taking charge of my destiny. Where earlier I had kind of fallen into becomig a sailor more from NOT wanting to go to college than anything else, here I was finally taking the reins and spending my life’s savings (and a large chunk of my parent’s savings) on learning what I had always wanted to do: fly planes.

Now, the FAA requires you to complete a certain number of “cross country” solo flights as part of the syllabus before they grant you a CPL (Commercial Pilot’s License).

I was looking at the map of Oklahoma and surrounding states one day and noticed I hadn’t really explored out east as much. So I plotted a flight plan to an airport I found called Ozark-Franklin County Airport, code ‘K7M5’.

My ‘Cross Country’ flight to ‘K7M5’ took place in Autumn 2008. It was a beautiful day as I flew out east in a Cessna 152.

Visibility was perfect. You could see forever. I just remember that flight being the absolute peak of my time in Flight School. I was by then proficient with the airplane and well versed with the American ATC system as well. I was in my element. Childhood dreams do come true you see? And the Ozark Mountains never looked so beautiful.

Here is a screenshot from google maps showing the area just south of the Ozarks. The pin is on the Ozark Franklin County Airport.

(Got to love that review: “Great place if you have a small plane”!)