Ornge at YPQ

Long Weekends Are Busy

Cottage country opens up. More people on the water, on the roads, on ATVs and motorcycles in places where a land ambulance takes too long. The ORNGE crews know this. You could see it in how they moved.

Peterborough sits in the middle of a lot of that country. YPQ isn't a dramatic airport - no commercial gates, no crowds - but it's useful. A place to refuel and keep moving.

What I Was Actually Watching

I photograph machines the same way I photograph people. I'm not interested in the object - I'm interested in what it carries, and what it says about the people who operate it.

An ORNGE helicopter on a refuelling stop on a busy long weekend isn't a static subject. It's a verb. It's in the middle of something. The ground time is just a comma in the middle of a sentence that started before I got there and finished somewhere else, over a hospital in a city I'll never see.

I don't know what call came before this one. I don't know what call came after. I just know they didn't stay long.

That's enough of a story for me.