One day in 1969, I was taking photography as an 8th-grade elective for a semester. I had the use of Mom's Kodak Bantam, which used 828 film (eight exposures? EIGHT?). It occurred to me that I could take a picture of the view from our living room window and save it forever!
That's probably Mark standing on what they called "a treehouse," wood nailed up in squared-off shapes. There's Roxy, their pony, visible behind the doghouse of Lady, the least fortunate collie ever, trust me. There's the swingset and the full-size tree they put in there.
There's the back yard where the boys would drive the "old" pickup around and around when they were too young to go on the road.* There's acres of pasture** where cattle sometimes grazed, and I found one of our cats dead.
There's the first leg up the hill, and the notch where we'd first spy the glint of our yellow bus coming around the mountain. We knew exactly how much time we had to get to the end of our gravel driveway. There's Spring Canyon Dam. The Swimming Gorilla. Horsetooth Mountain.
Confession: I had to fix the negative, which was torn clear down into Horsetooth, and the image there now is something I did in Photoshop to make it less glaring.
And there's our huge sky, always a canvas for extravagant white clouds that passed from the west and north mostly. One day I realized why: No trees, huh. How about that.
Special bonus: the lighter rectangle floating behind Mark shows the reflection in the glass of the kitchen window on the east side of the house. Hello, little window!
So, darn. It really worked, and it still works. I wish to award myself a point. Where's the chalk?
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* Footnote: When I worked for RMFRES in 1980, I had occasion to visit the photo department at CO State U, and they had an aerial shot that must have been from right about 1969. You could clearly see the oval track in their back yard. rrr-RRRRR-rrrr!
** Feetnote: I referred to exactly this sort of terrain recently in a reminiscence of stepping out of a car in like 2004 onto ground like that and feeling like I was FINALLY HOME again, because the bottoms of my feet felt right at last.
*** ALT TEXT for the photo! I can't find a way to do it here, but here's what I used for alt-text at Twitter, where most of this originally appeared earlier this morn... afternoon.
"A black and white view looking west at the Front Range foothills of northern Colorado. In the near ground, scraggly trees, the neighbor's fence, a doghouse, a pony's back visible above the doghouse, a garage with a kid standing on a homemade construction of some sort at the south end. Acres and acres of mostly bare prairie with a long-unlived-in house visible just before the first hill. Spring Canyon Dam connects two hills, holding in Horsetooth Reservoir (named for the notch-shaped hill 3/4 of the way across the hilltops). Clothesline. Swingset."
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2 comments:
I remember all of that. Lying in the sun in front of that window was the good part of being sick and staying home from school.
The view in black and white is such a reduction of the view in color! Thank you for this blast from the really past!
I often wish I'd had 35mm film then. There were adaptors that would have allowed that (I think Mom said Uncle Dick had bought them), but I was getting eight exposures per roll.
This, it occurs to me, is an example of my parents backing my play. That film wasn't free, and I don't recall actually asking to sign up for the class.
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