Who I Am, and Why I'm Here
I’m an Oregon boy, born and bred. My grandmother came here in a wagon train. The man that married her walked in over an old Indian trail — there were no roads to Tillamook in those days, and he’d missed the boat that sailed from Astoria only once a month. So that’s who I am.
I’m a photographer, and a teller of tales. Friends say I’m pretty good at both. One friend in particular has urged me to create this site to share them. Thanks, Dave. And that’s why I’m here.
I got my love for the mountains, and my love for the camera, the same year. My dad, an old photog from way back, had built a darkroom in the back of the house, and gave me a Kodak Brownie Starflash camera for Christmas. It used 127 film. If you can remember 127 film, you’re probably as old as I am.
He made me develop my first roll of film myself. He loaded the film onto the reel for me, but I had to do the rest (basically pouring solutions into and out of a lightproof tank).
Later that same year of my life, he began a mysterious project. He’d cut down an alder tree at the back of the property and used his table saw to cut it into what looked like cabinetry lumber. Then he boiled a big ol’ can o’ water on a fire out back, put some of the sticks in it, and proceeded to bend them.
He was preparing to take my brother and I backpacking, and they didn’t make backpacks for little kids back then. So he made them.
So in the summer that I was seven years old, and my brother was five, we went in to Horse Lake, in the Willamette National Forest and camped. It changed my life.
Here’s a topo map. This is a few miles west of Bend, Oregon. Horse Lake is in the upper left corner:
There isn’t much to see there now, but here’s a shot I took at sundown a couple of years ago:
Sorry about that. I’ve been in there twice in recent years, and still don’t have any good shots of the place.
So that’s my introduction to myself. Stories here will not be in chronological order; I’ll write them as I think of them.