You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, they say. I guess that is true, but there is the corollary, of course. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until you actually look at it.

I had a great morning with a Pal from up north- did the Clark Brothers stop and navigated the regulations with which they have to rigorously comply or face losing their license. Then off to the Frost Café in town for a rollicking late breakfast in a jammed diner. The euphoria of success on both events slowly faded into the realization that it really was going to be raining steadily through the rest of the day made the gray reality certain that not much productive could be done on the grounds, and it would be an afternoon inside.

Just getting down to the garage to look around for more boxes of Kodachrome slides was a soggy journey. The contents of the office looked about the way they did last November. Three yellow boxes were atop some detritus from one of the moves- I forget which one- and worse, they were sitting atop a fairly large box with the ominous notation: ”Pictures” scrawled on the side.

So, this is not over, but we may have reached the end of the 35mm slides. I had no idea what might be contained in the three carousels. Dad had ceased to annotate the boxes or the slides, and last weekend coughed up events captured between 1956 and 1968. Digitizing them as they were opened seemed to be the right approach, but we are nearing the point where some sort of order needs to be imposed on all the images.

That was not going to happen yesterday, and the prospect of completing at least a portion of the project was a welcome one. Particularly with the rain coming down and basketball to be watched on the side, maybe with a decent cocktail.

I slogged back up the hill with the boxes and got myself dried off and set up the little scanner and prepared like a skin diver to plunge backwards from the gunwale of the red couch and once more into the timestream.

I left the satellite radio on, and kept the volume down on the round ball, and disappeared into 1962.

(The kids in the ruins. Photo WER, 1962).

I won’t attempt to show you Disneyland in 1962, nor the large aquatic mammals of Sea World of the Pacific, nor the spectacular views of Hoover Dam, nor the incredible vistas of the Grand Canyon or the poignant ruins of ancient Indian pueblos. I remember that trip, and it was conducted in a vintage Rambler station wagon, with one of those burlap water bags that hung on the window frame, theoretically cooling the liquid within through evaporation.

The photo record is sort of curious- the people who were on the trip don’t appear very often, or only as incidental features in the landscape of the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, and the wonders of the 160-acre amusement park that had only been open since 1962.

The Grand Canyon had been open a lot longer, and was a little larger.

I scanned the images to the memory card and then transferred them to the computer and edited them with iPhoto and posted them to Facebook. That is wrong on so many levels that I blush to think about it, but I can’t think of a less painful way to share the images with the family. So for my Facebook friends, I apologize in advance.

With the conclusion of one of the basketball games, rioting apparently broke out in Arizona. I fixed another drink to contemplate how this intricate tournament was advancing with the force of a mountain river urgently heading downstream.

Which was sort of strange, since the last carousel contained exactly that: a trip from August of 1980. I was in Korea at the time, and had no part in it, but Raven and Mom flew out to Idaho, presumably, and took a little Cessna from the regional airport at Boise or someplace and landed at a dirt strip in the mountains. It is quite spectacular, and they joined up with brother Spike and his company of adventurers and River Rats to take a float trip down the Salmon or the Snake Rivers.

(Big Mama and Spike on the river, August 1980. Photo WER).

I will have to ask him the specifics, and see if he had ever seen the images before.

There are some great images there- the Rats were mountain men of their time, 34 years ago. It also marked a watershed of other dimensions. That is the great divide. Previous to this side deck, the narrative was of Raven taking the pictures, and the family providing the props.

From this point forward, the story becomes one of the kids creating their own families, their own archives, and the original nuclear band scattering to the winds, with the occasional intersections of reunion, and ultimately, the passing of the older generation, one by one, until the 3rd day of January of 2012, when Mom followed Dad by a couple hours on the Last Big Trip. No slides from that one. They were traveling light.

They were the last of their generation from both sides, and they left 63 years of memories together behind.

After transferring, editing, and posting the last carousel, I felt a little…empty. It was the end of part of the project, and it was still raining.

Now I can put the accumulated stack of yellow Kodachrome boxes back in a stack in the garage, but now they are labeled so that when the kids have to go through them, they can just send them to the dump knowing what they are missing.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303