send them off instantly. He didn’t even look at the images, but he knew what was there. It was the same as the faces he captured in street battles, at the Challenger launch, and of faces watching screens on 9/11 as the first tower collapsed.

“The diversity is amazing,” he told workshop audiences. “Those images are always a human reaction collage. Terror, fear, shock, grief, anger, confusion, goofiness, grins, hysterical, pleading looks of wanting the movie to stop and let the credits roll. Behind all those eyes, brains trying to figure things out, without much, or anything, to go on.”

Parnell was acutely aware of what was going on behind him. For billions of years, a status quo had reigned. In his plain view, that status quo had changed. He aimed and fired and captured the single image, the only one that mattered, after all, and then he turned his back on the sun rising in the west, and in that rotation, that sliver of time, he was nine years old, spending a morning cracking pecans with his grandmother at a big table in a cool, shady dining room. It was a fall day in 1952 or ‘53, when Parnell was nine or 10, he couldn’t remember, but he remembered the big dining table in the middle room of his grandmother’s frame and stucco house. Her name was Susie, and on that day, working on the pecans that had fallen into the yard beneath the three huge trees out front, she said to him, “You can never have it all, boy.”

Remembering the shady, cool, setting, which he loved, he remembered her words as part of it. They didn’t mean much, until one day in college, in a thoughtful mode (daydreaming, in Parnell’s point of view, beat hell out of reading “The Social Contract”), the words came to him, and he wondered what they meant. “You can never have it all, boy.” Susie was big on spirituality, and even bigger on reality. She had migrated from green farmland in northern Alabama to brown farmland in west Texas in a covered wagon at the turn of the century. There she married, had six kids, relocated to a small, nearby city, and watched her husband drop dead at 44, on July 4, 1929. “I don’t know what he dropped dead of,” Parnell said. “Nobody in my family talked much about family members dropping dead on the front sidewalk.”

Susie brought her kids through the Depression on not much more than beans and meal and grit. Gentle mien, tough eyes. Tough as nails. Decades later, at Chargers tailgate parties in San Diego, Parnell liked to say, “My grandmother Susie is the only person I ever knew who was tougher than Dan Fouts.” The Depression was over by 1944, when Parnell came along, but Susie was still very much a country woman, living in the city, with the lean days still very close on her mind. He decided she had wanted to tell him something about moderation, based on reality, with spirituality as the goal.

There the question stayed, for decades, until 1992, when Parnell and his second wife, Christie, moved into a hilltop house east of San Diego. This house was a special place, spaced between a low horizon in the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Every day, Parnell could see the sun rise in the morning and set in the evening, and the same for the moon, when it was out. One night that year, on a warm May evening, a huge, pink, full moon rose over the eastern foothills, at almost the same moment the sun was setting into the Pacific. He ran for his camera and spun from sun to moon, moon to sun, desperate to picture it all. But he could not. Every second that passed was a choice between the two. That’s when he realized what Susie had meant. “All” was whatever “all” was, all 360 degrees in three dimensions, any given day, any given time. And you had to make a choice. We live our complete lives looking at half the view.

That night in California, because he was Parnell, he chose the moon, culturing itself from the earth, in the basking spotlight of a disappearing sun. This night at Meyrin, or morning, whatever it was, in the bizarre glare of a re-appearing sun, he chose the people, as he always did at moments demanding choice. Whatever was happening, they were where the story was.

In the first 60 seconds of the event, he captured and sent out 45 images. After five minutes, he put the Phone aside and went to work with Dagwood Jr. The window for close-up reaction was gone. “I have seen it over and over,” he said, “but I can never get used to the idea of how quickly people adjust to things. It looks like an homogenizing effect, sweeping over the faces, replacing the first shocked reactions with a look of uniform, hopeful, anxiety. I think it’s because they have decided in those five or so minutes that there’s a good chance they’re going to survive.”

Dagwood Jr. gave him the power to bring in the mood of the entire Higgsfest field. He decided to follow his ears. The initial panicked roar that vaulted up from the crowd as the sun re-appeared receded into the steady, pulsing rhythm made by voices asking loudly, “What happened?” And, “What happens now?” Parnell looked for shots and compositions that would illustrate this particular clamor.

Three hours and a switch of lithium batteries later, he let Dagwood Jr. rest. He felt a strange, burning fatigue, rooted in his eyes, and radiating across his face and down his neck. He felt drowsy, and, given the excitement of the event, it puzzled him. Then he remembered. He looked at his watch. In 95 percent of his cells, his organs, his systems, it was after midnight. The other five percent? They saw it as midmorning, and they were being joined by more particles of Parnell’s existence, individually, flowing like grains of sand in an hourglass. It would take time.

Faces, official and serious, on the festival’s television screens transmitted facts, surreal, and interesting, but of not much immediate use. Yesterday and tomorrow are the same? Maybe we really ARE dreaming. And they were caught, too, in the same slow shift as Parnell, from after midnight to what appeared to be about 10 a.m. Nobody was sure. Particularly the officials spewing the facts at hand, and not just once, but over and over, in the standard manner of CNN not having anything new available to say.

“So calm,” mused Russell, stepping down from the shuttle bus at the Chenin du Tonkin gate to the Higgsfest media complex. There must have been 30 people on the bus, and no one said a word. No cries, certainly no panic, no prayers, uttered or yelled, going up. Oh, they were all thinking about the same thing. Nobody was reading, not an iPad in sight, all eyes on a common focus on the middle distance. He jotted in his notebook: “No fear. Just like always.”

Practically all people of Russell’s acquaintance, his wife included, told stories of life experiences by beginning at the beginning. “Damned chronological order,” he would grouse to himself, settling in politely for several minutes of details and “uh huhs” leading up to what happened. When he told stories, Russell just went ahead and cut to the chase.

“When I was 15 years old,” he would begin, “I was on an airplane that I truly believed was going to crash. It didn’t, but I was spread-eagled to the ceiling of the plane long enough to believe that it was going to.

“It was 1958. The plane was a chartered DC-3, carrying our football team to a playoff game in El Paso. Our pilot cut the power to both engines and stood the airplane on its left wingtip to avoid a collision with another plane. He dropped a couple of thousand feet, he said, before he recovered and leveled off. In the paper the next day, he said the other plane, a military jet, missed us by about 25 feet.

“We flew on to El Paso, played the next day, and won, 45 to nothing, and flew home without incident. But in that two-thousand-foot drop, all of us on that airplane became members of a club.”

The membership knew three things.

One. Your life really does pass before your eyes. “I was only 15 years old,” Russell said, “so there wasn’t much on the reel. But I saw it all.”

Two. You don’t fall to the ground. The ground comes up to get you. “I was stuck to the ceiling, and the G-forces were so strong I couldn’t move a finger. Couldn’t close my eyes. Believe me, I tried. Directly below me was a window, and below that was the brown ground, and it was coming up to get me. And I couldn’t close my eyes.”

Three. No panic, or terror, or even fear. Nobody yelled or screamed, or, to Russell’s memory, even made a sound, from plunge to recovery. “I didn’t know why, for the longest time. Then I decided it must be because the brain is a logical instrument. It wants to put patterns on the data it receives. That takes time. Not much, but more than we had, in falling two thousand feet. We didn’t have time to be afraid.”

In 2009, when the US Airways Airbus leaving LaGuardia hit birds and glided to a landing in the Hudson River, Russ read all the stories, most closely the interviews with the passengers. The same phenomenon appeared. Passengers reported warnings (“Brace for impact!”), instructions from the stews, and the sound of prayers going up. But no terror. No panic.

“Been there,” Russ smiled. Not until they had time to understand — their aircraft floating in the river, water rising in the aisle — did panic start to appear. Even then, in the photos of the people standing on the wings of a jet aircraft which was floating in the Hudson River, they appeared orderly. Bizarrely so.

It was bizarre now, riding in a 10-passenger electric cart toward his campsite, up Route de Bourdigny, which bisected the festival grounds from southeast to northwest. Looking at the crowds on either side, it was hard to tell they were experiencing anything but an ordinary, beautiful May day in a green Switzerland valley. The sky was impossibly blue, the snowy Alps impossibly gorgeous, the sun stood straight overhead, and alpine cumulus streaked the sky just like the day before. Russell snorted out a chuckle. It would be better for all concerned, he decided, if they were standing on the wings of an airplane floating in the river.