I could tell you stories about Bill Lavallie, the beloved photojournalist from the Gold Country who just passed away.

Sitting in a bar with some Irish whiskey, I could probably talk about the man all night.

He was, for all practical purposes, my journalism partner during the craziest five years of my career: That’s when I was a rookie reporter in Amador and Calaveras and Bill was the photographer accompanying me to an endless parade of crime parameters, fatal collisions, catastrophic fires and all manner of natural calamity. But Bill was more than just an expert shooter who captured the sheer intensity of life in a still frame. He was totally committed to the less glorious and decidedly non-lucrative task of documenting a community’s life. Inaugurations. Retirement dinners. Chamber mixers. Holiday events. Veterans tributes. Artist performances. Fundraisers for the domestic violence shelter. From his mesmerizing glimpses of Independence Day fireworks to his shots of country canines and cows nibbling sprinkler heads, Bill Lavallie was framing – and immortalizing – every stitch in the fabric of the place that he called home.

Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz once said, “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” And what you see in Bill Lavallie’s pictures is that he wasn’t afraid to fall in love with an entire place – the California Mother Lode.

Outside of the creative spark, on a very direct level, no one would have accused this Air Force veteran of being afraid of much. Bill wasn’t an outwardly macho person, but some mix of curiosity and adrenaline continually propelled him into one chaotic situation after another. I was next to him for much of it. And when you spend time walking into high-stakes confusion with the same person, over and over, you get to know them pretty well.

What I admired most about Bill was his keen situational awareness and commitment to common-sense decency. Cops, firefighters and paramedics trusted Bill to do his job without getting in the way of theirs. Newspaper editors and public officials knew he would never photograph an exposed corpse or publish images that were gruesome or disrespectful. Even in the last decade, as the “attention economy” on social media joined forces with non-ethical algorithms to incentivize the worst instincts of so-called “content creators,” Bill stayed Bill – an old school journo whose standards and moral compass never wavered.

And he would have had to alter those things to really compete for viewership in this current moment. But Bill cared a lot more about the quality of his audience than the size of it. And that’s the reason so many people across the Sierra foothills know they lost a compadre last week. For roughly 20 years, Bill Lavallie’s photo work was a mainstay in Amador County’s 169-year-old paper of record, The Ledger Dispatch, and later his own page, Sierra News Bulletin.

What I remember most about working with Bill is his over-the-shoulder glances and deadpan one-liners, especially when the shit was really going down. One time we drove through a furious slate storm and gale-force winds to check on an overturned big rig on a steep grade outside Martell. We arrived to find two other semi-trucks stopped on Highway 88 behind the crippled vehicle as CHP officers observed the storm pushing and bowing the nearby power poles toward the ground. As Bill and I got closer, an ungodly cross-wind came firing low from the sky, causing the two paused big rigs – with their empty trailers getting hit like sailing masts – to start overturning right in front of us. This lurching, crashing Spielbergian spectacle sent Bill, me, the drivers and some officers jumping back.

When I caught my breath from the freezing wind, I saw Bill glance over his shoulder, muttering, “Guess we know we they call this Hurricane Hill now.’”

One of Bill’s favorite things to photograph beyond emergency response was Jackson’s annual Serbian Christmas. Many Sacramentans probably don’t know that this celebration on the Eastern Orthodox calendar includes Serbian-American families honoring a folk tradition from the Old Country by riding through Jackson while firing shotguns. On January 7, these locals steer a cavalcade of vehicles down the city’s main street before halting in front of the National Hotel to unload their roaring arsenal into the sky. Jackson doesn’t really put signs or advertisements up for the festivities. It’s one of those things where, “if you know, you know.” And if you’re an outsider who doesn’t know, it can appear as if some spell of gun-toting mass delirium has just seized the town. I remember standing next to Bill during one Serbian Christmas when Saint Sava’s congregates came down the timeless avenue with big smiles and weapons blazing. A couple of French tourists who had zero warning about any of this found their vacation to an Old West destination was suddenly getting too Old West for them – and they scurried to take cover with horrified looks on their faces as if they thought Jackson had randomly descended into a final Hatfields and McCoy-type shoot-out.

Bill looked over his shoulder and quietly noted, “Yeah, they don’t put that in the travel brochure.”

But it is the stories I can’t get into that would really show Bill’s character. They happened on blood-stained roadsides and under the smoke shadows of infernos and at the dangling perimeter tape of murder investigations. Sometimes they happened at lonely bodies found in the woods, like that girl under the oaks whose dog wouldn’t leave her side until someone finally came to her. Bill and I witnessed these moments next to tribes of responders, but we weren’t part of their tribes – we were a tribe of two. We were what the old Irish called the seanchaís. Our badges signaled conveyors of the tale. And to whatever extent I covered those sad stories correctly, Bill’s instincts were ever-present in my approach.

If Conrad is right that “a gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever,” it won’t change the fact that those momentary maelstroms we weathered together are as vivid in my mind as any in my career. And it also won’t change the fact that a California community, from the sprawling ranchlands of Ione to the granite mountainsides of Kirkwood, are saying goodbye to a photojournalist who genuinely believed their rural existence was worth documenting.