Images on the Danube

His was the first arresting picture I took. A small group of us had assembled in Prague before we began a 395-mile boat trip from Nuremberg to Budapest, with stops along the Danube. At Nuremberg we would become part of a larger group, seventy-five West Pointers from the U.S. Military Academy class of 1961, together with wives and friends—all of us trying to ward off the shivers of old age.

The classmate in the photograph—the man I captured without his knowledge—reminds me of Douglas MacArthur: stern, vaingloriously sober, chin raised slightly with an air of contemplative superiority. He seems godly—predominantly and solely masculine with the gray hair characteristic of our later years. In real life he never seems so stern, so imperial, but the captured image betrays another man.

He makes me think about undercurrents, the unseen forces that mark us and move us around, sometimes without our knowing. Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, called them fortuities; Krzysztof Kielowski, the Polish filmmaker, coincidences; Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, synchronicities. These men are speaking of the inexplicable fates that connect, unmask, and unsettle us. When we encounter them, especially at the age of seventy, we cannot avoid taking our measure. Past our prime we ponder where we’ve been and where we’re going. Our lives’ journeys seem archetypal, bound to the earth’s prevailing rhythms, so we yearn for signs of life, images of satisfaction, as our minds and bodies begin to betray us.

Most of us who took advantage of the pre-excursion package in Prague agreed only to a single guided tour. The Castle—once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire—dominates the city that straddles the Vltava river. Drizzle and crowds spoiled the first morning, depriving us of the Gothic splendor inside St. Vitus’s Cathedral, so, late in the morning, we grumbled our way out of the ecclesiastical fortress and headed down to the Lesser Quarter. Only the androgynous naked boy in the smaller courtyard where we paused for coffee caused a stir among the crowds. His bronze penis was shiny from touching—people seeking a stroke of luck, one supposes, or, perhaps, some private satisfaction.

I had spent the morning fumbling with my camera, experimenting with the 200 mm reach of the lens as I practiced bringing the details of the larger world closer to me: the shapely stone women gracing the pediments on various buildings; the sweeping view of Prague, to make it more immediate, more intimate; the quartet of musicians enlarged from the far side of a courtyard; the occasional posed shot of classmates and wives pulled tightly within the frame, exposed.

Before the morning’s tour ended, the thrust of the cobblestones and damp weight of the weather had made our bones ache. There were wisecracks among us about the “ghostly assemblage” we still sang about on special West Point occasions. But, far beyond the gates of that other holy city on the Hudson, we knew that we were not yet “the men of the Corps long dead.” Our time was coming, but this was not our judgment day.

The skies cleared as we left the Castle compound, and despite our creaky joints the wisdom of restraint gave way to a puer spirit as we turned onto the steep path down to St. Nicholas Church. I felt a tinge of satisfaction in realizing that I was finally at risk in a new city, free perhaps as only a boy can be, free from guides to see what I could see.

My lollygagging distanced me from the group, gave me a chance to realize that I wanted my spirit roused, needed to be seized. I had come to this region of ghosts and goblins expecting to consort with archetypes, and so far I had found only throngs of people like me and my aging classmates.

When my wife, Ann, called back to me, pointing at the fountain in the fenced garden, I thought I had found Leda in Prague, fierce in her beauty. My first shot of her was close and tight, shutting...