Man With a Camera

The Mountain

In the summer of 1969 my two cousins and I took a drive out to California on Route 66. I had never been further west than Davenport, Iowa before that. Being three of us, we traded off driving and made it all the way to the Grand Canyon before we pooped out and had to sleep. On that trip I brought along my handy Super Eight movie camera. For the first twenty four hours I took very little footage. Then I spotted a "mountain" as we drove past Tucumcari, New Mexico. To a flatlander from Illinois that little mesa looked like a mountain to me and I started filming. As we drove further and further west the mountains kept growing taller and taller, and I kept filming. I must have taken three rolls of movie film of those mountains. All of it out the car window as we were zooming by. I'm not talking about the grandeur of the Alps or the High Sierras, just large rocky hills. I still have that movie film. It's all spliced together and labeled 'My California Trip'. I made countless people sit through that boring film. No way was I going to throw away one frame of that movie, I was nineteen and movie film was costly.

I must have got that thrifty trait from my dad. I was out at Mom's yesterday and was scanning photos again from the albums. What I noticed was how many of them were photos of nothing. Oh, I'm sure to my dad they were something. He paid for them, so they were of value. He never culled the bad photos when he got the prints back from the developer. Dad proudly mounted each and every picture he ever took in the albums, which is why there is a closet stacked full of them. He kept blurry photos, double exposure photos, and photos very reminiscent of those mountain movies I took when I was nineteen years old. Here's a couple of Dad's photos.

My Ghost Sister

I'm Sure It Was an Amazing Sight