American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

By Melissa Farlow

FOR RANDY AND ME, leaving is a familiar ritual. We pack our bags, say our goodbyes and scurry out the front door, not knowing how long we will be away. We are excited to leave for adventure and new experiences, yet, coming home is always the sweetest part of the trip.

My husband, Randy Olson, and I are freelance documentary photographers. For the past 20 years we’ve worked primarily for National Geographic magazine. We have traveled to more than 50 countries on assignment, sometimes together, often apart. Our nomadic life means that we find home wherever we are, whether for one night or three months. We may occasionally experience a luxurious hotel with a marble bathroom and a heart-stopping view. But more often, accommodations are less cushy. We’ve slept on cold floors, shared space with strange creatures that come alive in the night, and sweltered in hot, baking climates where we longed for any hint of a breeze to penetrate our mosquito-net shelter. We adapt to diverse situations and acclimate to odd, sometimes bizarre living arrangements wherever we find ourselves in the field. What keeps us grounded is the knowledge that soon, we’ll be coming back home.

A World Away
While on assignment, it’s best not to dwell too much on ideals of luxury. On one National Geograph-ic assignment, Randy experienced three seasons of weather in a single month while camping with explorers in the Siberian arctic. He’s also lived with a tribe of Pygmies in the Congo, wandering with them through the forest in one of the last places on the planet that can support their way of life as hunter-gatherers. He’s photographed cultures in such faraway lands as Easter Island, Australia, China, Kamchatka. Thankfully, advances in technology allow us to keep in touch, even when we’re on opposite sides of the world, one of us ending the day, the other at home just beginning it.
As photojournalists, it’s our job to record what we see. As human beings, we often get more involved than we’d planned. On a three-month stay in war-torn Sudan, Randy endured seemingly endless days un-der house arrest while the heat soared to 120 degrees. His equipment was confiscated by government spies. When finally released, he chartered a plane, evacuated three wounded men stranded in the no-fly zone, and managed to get three tons of grain flown back in to the starving people, who were surviving on the last leaves plucked from the tops of trees.

Sitting in the sweltering sun, covered with swarming flies, Randy called on a satellite phone to reach me at a horse farm in Kentucky. I was photographing a 92-million-dollar Thoroughbred whose home was a gorgeous stone barn with chandeliers in the cupolas. In a thin, faraway voice he told me about the horrors he’d witnessed; I told him about upcoming Derby parties. The contrast could not have been greater. I re-member the only comfort I could offer him was to hang on, that he would be home soon.

Angry Bears and Worms for Breakfast
Compared to Randy’s swashbuckling adventures, mine are much more tame, but I’ve had my share. Most-ly, I’ve been drawn to cover stories of the American West.
I’ve slept in a jeep—my home for five nights at Burning Man Festival in Nevada—enduring the non-stop acid-techno music until desert winds mercifully drowned out the monotonous pounding, thump, thump, thump. I’ve flown into the Alaskan wilderness on a floatplane and slept in an unheated cabin, soaked to the bone. For three days I struggled to keep up with wildlife researchers who waded up flooded streams to tag large and menacing brown bears.

As most travelers do, Randy and I often bring home keepsakes from our trips. One of my least favorite “mementos” was from an assignment in Ethiopia. I became infested with fleas after spending a little too much time with a family whose animals were kept under their roof, sleeping alongside them.
I once ate worms for breakfast with the Mexican military in Chiapas. Behind the walls of an ancient cloistered convent in Peru, I witnessed a rare break in the regimented life of young nuns as they joyfully played kickball in the 16th-century courtyard.

As photographers, we find that sometimes there are unintended consequences for the people whose lives we record. On a return trip to Mali, where I was photographing for a book comparing women of differ-ent cultures, I shared a copy of the book shot there two years earlier with some of the subjects of those earlier shoots. They were thrilled to see pictures of themselves for the first time in their lives. Their fascina-tion grew as they compared those images to similar ones taken by other photographers in Japan, the U.S. and Arab countries. As I watched these families, standing with all of their possessions in front of their homes, I realized that though I found their lives rich, I had unfortunately made them aware, for the first time, that they were some of the poorest people in the world. Our work may sound exciting, but there is a great deal of tedium—many miles, many hours of downtime between meaningful photographs. Who would ever think that a house in Pittsburgh would keep us sane?

A Great House in Sewickley
Returning to our “real” home in western Pennsylvania is like putting on a pair of comfortable, old shoes. Occasionally, the first night home can be disconcerting. We sometimes wake in a panic, trying to figure out where we are, to sense something familiar. But soon, we return to our rituals and routines. Our home keeps us grounded.
We live in a 1912 Craftsman-inspired American Foursquare outside of Pittsburgh. We moved here 27 years ago to work as newspaper staff photographers. When the paper died seven years later, we began a new life as freelancers, keeping our wonderful home as base camp.
We are the third owners of the home. The Koch family built the house in 1912 and stayed for several generations. Their names, still legible, are written above the little box mounted in the kitchen that houses a maid’s buzzer.

During the 19th century, Pittsburgh’s steel barons built estates and summer homes away from the city; with just a short train ride, families could escape the sooty city air. Our Arts and Crafts home is a bit of an anomaly, on a quiet residential street surrounded by ornate Victorian houses in the town of Sewickley. The town developed along the Ohio River as a support community to those mansions in the hills.

On Assignment—the Home Front
We were not familiar with Arts and Crafts architecture when we first toured our house-to-be. Hidden behind a towering three-story Norway spruce, the house offered little curb appeal. The stone was so stained and darkened with decades of soot from the steel mills that we really didn’t notice the tile roof. But when we stepped onto the massive front porch with its tile floor and large swing, our minds began to change.

Once we were inside, the wood floors, beamed ceilings, built-in bookcases, leaded windows and fire-place all began to work their magic on us. I remember sitting down on the built-in wood bench spanning the length of the living room, staring at strange iridescent light fixtures (original Steuben art glass), and my heart warmed. I didn’t want to leave. The house felt good. It felt right. When Randy returned from wandering through the other floors, he sat down beside me; he felt the same way. We had found home.
Over the years, we have made renovations and improvements, but have tried to be faithful to the intent of the original architecture. Rather than make changes immediately, we decided to live with painted wood and dim lighting until we understood the house better.

Coming Home Again
Last winter, we received a visit from Albin Koch, who lived in our house when he was a boy. What a trea-sure it was to walk through the entire house with him, from the basement to the third floor, listening to his stories. His grandfather, John Julius Koch, who built the house, worked his way up in the Pennsylvania Railroad from switchman to traffic manager. We learned our powder room had once been the telephone room—the house phone number had been 68. Albin told us the house almost burned down one night when hot embers were left overnight in the fireplace. He remembered being cold in his second floor bedroom with leaky windows; we told him that had not changed.
We struggle for simplicity, yet our plumber teases that our house looks like a mini-Smithsonian. Our col-lection includes hats, baskets, scarves, sculptures, candlesticks, books, rugs and “precious” things from all parts of the world. We bring home gifts such as a lump of coal, a bottle of sand from the Black Sea, leather cowgirl boots worn on a Western cattle drive—all find a special place somewhere in the house to remind us of our travels.

But the “stuff” is not what is important. We struggle to keep our place simple—we find it beautiful on its own. It’s the feeling of being in this space—reading by the fireplace, filling the dining room with friends, see-ing the well-worn steps and hearing the familiar creaks and the smell of wood—that makes this home im-portant to us.
Once, Randy, on assignment for a long period, was ready to return home. He recalls lying in a tent, mi-serable, held hostage by the malarial mosquitoes coming out at dusk. Lying beneath his mosquito net, he walked through our entire house in his mind, seeking solace. He opened the front door and counted sinks, fireplaces, framed prints on the walls—he remembers thinking that it seemed insane to have so much in comparison to the people he was photographing.

I find my peace in the garden. Rather than herbaceous perennials, I planted mostly conifers, which are better suited to survive on their own during long periods of neglect. But I do plant a few annuals, and always tomatoes and basil. One year, I was sad to leave on assignment just as everything was finally ready to harvest. A week later, I received a surprise gift from Randy—tomatoes, sent overnight, a reminder of home.

The Longing that Connects Us
When we travel to other places, we spend time documenting truth as we come to know it. We try to under-stand other cultures, not looking for what is different, but what is the same—what connects us all.

In Ethiopia women rub handfuls of fresh dung on exterior walls to strengthen them. In China, factory workers live in identical modern, suburban cookie-cutter homes on perfectly aligned streets. In the Cauca-sus in Georgia, Svans live in stark, 12th-century medieval towers. Nomadic tribes in Africa carry fire as they walk from place to place, setting up temporary shelters to eat and sleep. But for all the differences on the continents, much is the same. People all over the world find shelter, and often share it with others, sometimes with strangers, in the place we all call “home.”

Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts. - Oliver Wendell Holmes