civilized ku # 2611 ~ whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories
Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 10:39AM 
A sign of things to come ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack Park • click to embiggen
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after .... ~ Kate Morton
One of the qualities I particularly liked about Rist Camp was the traditional Adirondack camp atmosphere of the place - dead animals and pelts everywhere, along with an assortment of family memorabilia accumulated over the past 100 years. I am certain that each and every one of those bits and pieces has meaning and memories attached. In all probability, the meaning and memories associated with those bits and pieces are as strong as the memories attached to the nearby mountain and large stone monument named after / dedicated to Ernest D. Rist, aka: Mr. Adirondack, the builder (c. early 1900s) of Rist Camp and the current owner's grandfather.
That written, one item in particular caught my eye and attention - the family snapshot pictured in this entry, a picture which depicts Ernest Rist's grandchildren, c. mid-1950s.
Why did it capture my attention? It did so because it triggered a flood of memories for me. How so? If you embiggen the picture, dead center you will notice what is undoubtedly the reason for the picture's making - a good size black bear looking for all the world as if it is posing for the camera along with the kids.
My first reaction, upon noticing this detail, was to laugh out loud. The first thought which came to mind was the sentence, "Hey kids, go stand by the bear and smile." - a true Kodak moment if ever there was one. But the thing which really hit home with me was the fact, somewhere in my family's old picture albums, there might just be a similar picture of me, my brothers, and a bear.
During nearly every visit to the Adirondack's in my early childhood, there was usually one mandatory after dinner trip to a nearby village dump - each town had one. At that time, village dumps where nothing more than an open pit where everyone dumped their garbage. The aroma generated by the creation of this installation art, so to speak, was pungent to say the least.
However, as we all know, what's garbage to some is gold to others. In this case the others were bears. Consequently, for all intents and purposes, the dumps became easy-pickings, dining al fresco gourmet restaurants for the bears. Most of the bears seemed to make reservations for the 7:30-9PM time slot, as did quite a number of tourists who came to savor the view, not the aromatic edibles.
On a typical evening at a typical town dump, 30-40 bears would show up to dine along with as many (or more) human gawkers. My brothers and I would sit on our car's front fenders and watch many of the bears, who could have not cared less about our presence, coming and going within a few feet of our front row seats. The proximity got a little adrenalin flowing but, hey, that was just part of the deal.
All of that written, at the time of my discovery of the above picture, I had been thinking about - and still am - the notion of pictures and memories and, in part, this picture addresses and validates the idea of the more you bring to the viewing of a picture, the more you can reap from a picture. In this case of this picture, it's about memories - someone else's memories and those of mine which I brought the viewing thereof.
Reader Comments (1)
The picture and your story brings back memories for me too, but at Allegany State Park, our summer camp getaway, closer to my childhood home. After so many "slide shows" over so many years many of our family pictures are so burned into my head I can now see them without the need for the projector or the Kodachromes. They are part of my permanent memory. An interesting phenomenon... images can be so familiar that they can "exist only in memories" without the need for the "fog of events that came after".