CLOUDLAND CABIN JOURNAL - May 2005
Cloudland Cabin Deck Cam, 5/10/05, 7:11am | ||
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CLOUDLAND CABIN JOURNAL, updated 5/9/05 The fourth decade, my 30's
The May Print of the Month 5/2/05 We have a very PINK sunset this evening - however I was deep in the jungle and never got to see it until I returned to the cabin - the southwestern sky up high was quite lovely, but filled with jet contrails criss-crossing all over the place - made sort of a nice patchwork of brighter pinks though! I've hardly had time to catch my breath these past couple of days - had two photo workshops out here this weekend and then a quick trip into town today. But I did get to slip out just before sunset and visit my favorite stretch of woods out here on Cave Mountain. Something about this patch of woods - lots of tall trees all around that reach way on up towards the sky, thick underbrush in some places but in other places not much underbrush at all. The area is normally filled with sounds of jungle-like critters, and the echoes of the drumming of large woodpeckers. Even though it is not really damp and dripping in this forest all the time, it really reminds me of a rain forest with the giant trees and all the lush, lush vegetation. My lovely bride and I took an evening stroll through this forest last evening after sunset and it was just magical. We came upon a lady out there alone, wandering in the woods, and looking for wildflowers. We got her headed in the right direction, and her vehicle was not there today, so I believe she made it out OK. I made three photos this evening - one of a neat fern I had been seeing for about a week along the trail; a single yellow lady slipper bloom; and a low-angle shot of the showy orchis that I shot when it was nearly dark, and that I discovered a critter on once I got back to the cabin and the photo brought up on the big 30" monitor. Three photos, about an hour waiting on the wind, and I've had a good start to May! The sun was just beginning to dip down into the hillside to the west when I first entered this magical forest, and soon the light levels were getting dim. It was just beautiful light though, the sort I like to photograph in. I was heading straight for the lady slippers, but just had to stop and work with this little fern for a few minutes - actually about 20 minutes. I got the shot all set up and then had to sit and wait on the wind, oh yes, my old friend the wind! I just love these ferns, and they seem to have more color and life to them this year, and the light was almost glowing this evening. Only got a single photo with the wind nearly dead still, but I'll take it.
OK, onto the lady slippers. Same deal there - wonderful light, but lots of wind. I set up my shot and waited and waited and waited. With the lady slippers it is easy to tell when the wind stops completely - they have these thin strands of "stuff" that drape down around the flower, and they will move in even the slightest breeze - the actual yellow "boat" itself is much more stable. So what I do is focus my attention on the guys that are draped around the flower and watch very closely until they come to a complete halt, then I shoot the photo (knowing the flower must be dead still as well). My exposures were about a second long, and sometimes the breeze would pick up again after I started the exposure. While there are a bunch of flowers in this one bunch, I wanted to show this single bloom in a sea of green - the broad leaves of this plant are almost as neat as the bloom.
By the time I made it to the base of the giant ash tree where the showy orchis flowers were the sun had dropped out of sight and the deep forest was getting dark. I found a shot I liked and quickly set up my tripod - with the legs spread out flat and the base of the camera just above the ground. I had to lay on my side in order to see into the viewfinder. MY OH MY what GORGEOUS light I had! It was dark, but quite luminous, and coming from all over the place. The wind was dead still by this point so I was able to stop my lens down to f16 (to get all the flower in focus) - I was shooting exposures of 8-10 seconds. With film, I probably would have shot 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, & 32 second exposures to make sure I got it right. But with digital I know when my exposure is right on, which saves me a lot of time. Later this evening, after I returned to the cabin and brought up the images in the computer, did I find the little spider hiding there within the flower. The detail in the flower and in the spider are quite amazing, even when blow up really large. I am my biggest critic, and my bride is my next-biggest critic. She is not easily impressed with a photo of mine. But this evening as she walked past the computer screen she stopped and leaned over and said "Oh my, I believe that one will end up in a book some day!" The highest praise I could get. No way you will be able to see the detail in this photo here, but I hope some day you will stand in front of a very large print of this flower and remember the little spider hiding there.
SPEAKING OF PRINTS, you may have noticed the May Photo of the Month - the closeup of the dogwood blossoms that I took down (or is it UP?) at Petit Jean State Park last month - one of my favorite dogwood photos of all time, and the prints of it look really nice. The dogwoods in the Ozarks are fading away now, and this image is a happy reminder of the great beauty of springtime here. 5/3/05 Up and out of here very early in the morning, and not back home again until late afternoon. I did get to sneak out later on - just before dark as the sun dipped behind a cloud bank - and took a few photos of some wild honeysuckle blooms that grow nearby. The light was gorgeous - as it often is in the evenings around here - and the wind was actually CALM - yippie! However the "pecker" nats were out in full force - having just arisen from their winter slumber - and were hungry and pesky as heck. In fact, these little bugs literally drove me away from my work duties behind the camera and back into the truck - I was not prepared for bugs this early in the year, especially when we have FROST every morning these days! Looks like I need to start eating more garlic (which I love), and as a matter of fact we have several batches of them just peeking up out of the soil in the little garden near the cabin - so we'll get to have fresh garlic this summer.
You may think this humorous or not, but I have to tell ya that while I had my truck in for service yesterday (that grew into today) they broke the windshield - put two large cracks right down the middle (they were trying to replace a sensor that stuck out through the glass when it broke). As luck would have it, my recent travels have put four or five small cracks in the windshield already (none of those while driving on dirt roads - all of them while on pavement). And while none of my cracks were actually "in the line of sight," and so I was not planning to replace the windshield, they were getting a wee bit ugly for my taste, so it was actually a good thing the mechanic will be putting in a new windshield this week at their expense. That leaves me afoot all week (Pam has a ton of chores to do away from home during the days) - goodness, what will I do! Good thing we won't be having a ton of rain this week or I would be missing my waterfalls - however, we have some of the best of those right around here, so I could have always hiked on over to them. Hum, that is a great idea - but don't tell my bride (I really should stay here all the time and get some work done) - I believe I'll strike out for a hike sometime this week, one just for the heck of it. Oh, OK, I guess I'll take my camera... 5/6/05 We had a large, black, fuzzy, visitor during the night - seems he took a liking to our big metal can of cat food. I had put a trap at the food so that we would be alerted if something got into it, and the clatter began around 10:30pm. It was kind of scary going out into the dark of night looking for what I knew was a bear (in my underwear and bare feet), and each sound and movement sent a chill down my spine. But I knew the bear meant me no harm and was probably already on the way out into the woods and would not pay me any attention. The cat food now resides inside the cabin until next winter. I was up working around 4am, updating some computer stuff and getting things set up for a photo workshop tomorrow. As it began to get daylight my bride called me upstairs into the loft - to get lucky I thought! Nope, she just wanted to show me this brilliant summer tanager sitting in the top of a nearby tree singing his little lungs out at the rising sun! There are tanagers, gold finches, bluebirds, indigo buntings, and hummers all over the place this morning. The air is filled with their laughter, and breezes, and wildflowers in Mom's meadow below are dancing to it all. Lush, lush, LUSH everywhere! Yesterday evening just before dark I took off on a hike - more of a stroll actually - down into Dug Hollow. And I didn't take a camera with me! The umbrella magnolia trees are in full bloom right now, and man oh man some of the trees are just loaded with them. They don't really smell good until the flower is all the way open, but right now they are open, and the sweetness in the air is quite remarkable - sort of looks and smells like Hawaii, very tropical indeed. Oh yes, and as I started my hike (around 7pm), I ran into the UPS guy up at the office picking up our shipments for the day. He told me he STILL had ELEVEN stops to make before heading home - said it was almost like Christmas and that everyone seems to be ordering over the net since gas prices are so high. It would probably be 10pm before he made it back to the terminal in Springdale. Right now the sun is up above a layer of clouds, and the wilderness is dark with flashes of bright sunshine pouring in through holes in the clouds every now and then. A little while ago those clouds were being kissed with the full color of sunrise and were red and yellow and pink and orange, all of them drifting in front of a sea of bright blue sky. It was one of a hundred wonderful early mornings that we'll have this summer - I say summer since the arrival of the summer tanager this morning! By the way, just in case any of you will be in the greater Bruno-Pyatt metroplex area on Monday, I will be giving a slide program to the school system there and it is open to the public - 1pm at the school (located off the main highway between Harrison and Yellville, or Harrison and Marshall). This will be the very last public show that I know of until November, when we will have quite a few programs around the state (actually there is one more - at the International Butterfly Festival in Paris on June 25th - Paris, Arkansas that is!). Speaking of programs, I am getting close to putting the wraps on the shooting for my new picture book, and then will spend a couple of weeks selecting the final images and doing the design and layout for the book. I will be creating a new slide program of the images in the book that will be shown at all the programs beginning this fall - getting to spend the last couple of years out shooting for this project has been a great deal of work but also a lot of fun, but doing the design work is a lot of fun for me too - something most photogs never get to do (or want to, but I LOVE doing it!). I've already got one cover sample floating around, and will keep you posted once we get all of that finalized. OOPS, George Harrison is here, so I had better get to work ("Here Comes The Sun..."). HEY PETER, wat bent tot u? Wanneer u leest dit me gelieve te laten het weten - ik wil zien hoe goed nieuwe translater op deze computer is. 5/7/05 One of the very first memories from my first decade of life was being in the crib in my parent's room. At night, every time someone came in to check on me and then left the room - closing the door behind them - a pair of ghosts would come out from behind the door and dance around the room. They were friendly ghosts, like Casper, and were quite colorful. I would sit up in my crib, grasping the wooden posts of it, and just watch with great amazement and joy. When an adult approached the room and began to open the door, the ghosts would disappear back behind the door as it opened, resting up and waiting for the adult to leave the room so they could come out and play once again. My next major memory in the first decade of my life was on my fifth birthday. I was sitting on the freshly-cut stump in the lot across the street crying - they had just cut down all of the trees on this lot, clearing it to build a house. I was not a happy camper. We lived at the edge of Fayetteville, and at the very edge of the wilderness back then. My playground WAS the wilderness, and they were taking it away. I guess that would be my first environmental thought, at five years of age, and would remain with me. It was a wake-up call that there were other folks who lived in the world that would be invading our lives. I spent the next several years, and decades, exploring my neighborhood, and trying to get away from civilization. In my first decade I would go out and wander during the day, most of the time alone, in the woods near where we lived. Back then it was just fine to allow your kids to wander - it was perfectly safe. Our neighborhood remained mostly unpopulated for several years, with a few houses going up here and there. But there was a large tract of land up on the hill that would never be cut down, and in fact is now a city park (located right behind McDonalds and the Veteran's Hospital). I would spend many wonderful hours and days up in those woods, and in fact the routes that I would run back and forth on day in and day out eventually became trails, and those very trails still exist - you can go hike them anytime. My best friend back then was Kim Turner, and he lived nearby. When I was very young his family moved and I thought the world would come to an end. We went to the same catholic school together in another part of town (St. Joseph's). When we were much older, in the fourth grade, we formed a "band" along with two other guys, and called ourselves, what else, THE BEATLES. Being left handed it was natural for me to assume the role of Paul McCartney. Kim would be Ringo and was the only member of the band that actually played a real instrument - he had a set of drums. The rest of us "played" tennis rackets. My mom made us matching suits to wear when we performed (yes, we really did perform), and we had black wigs. We also had four Beatle posters - giant photos of each band member (the real ones, not us) - that we would hang up on the wall behind us. We used to go over to Johnny Sutthoff's house (he was John Lennon, of course) to practice. Joe Ferrell was George Harrison. The crowing moment in our short-lived career was when we played a gig at the Veteran's Hospital in town - my dad was in charge of setting up recreation for the patients at the hospital, and we were it one Saturday afternoon. And in fact we sang on the radio that day - doing Beatle songs, of course. There was at one time a polaroid of the "fab four" wearing our suits and wigs and playing our rackets in front of those posters, but it may not have survived. Of course, what started it all, was that one Sunday night when I was nine - we ALL were glued to the tube when Ed Sullivan introduced them. I would never be the same again. Such electricity those gents had, and it was contagious. I have every official recording they ever released, and sometimes listen to them all from beginning to end (normally during a 24-hour drive somewhere). My dad was a world-class athlete back in the 1930's, and was one of the very best swimmers of his time. At one time he held the world record in the breast stroke (a stoke that he and his fellow swimmers at the University of Iowa helped develop), and was on the Olympic team at one point, although most of the team was disqualified and never went to the games due to them being labeled as "professional" since they all worked summers as life guards. I have a sheet here somewhere that lists him as the #1-rated backstroker in the country on the US Olympic team. When we moved to Fayetteville from Springfield, MO (this was before I happened on the scene), I was told we had literally a room full of giant loving cups and plaques and other awards from his swimming career, but they had to get rid of a lot of them during the move. When my mom died and we cleaned out her house, we salvaged a box of them - several of them are set up on a shelf here at Cloudland. (One of them is the very first award that dad won - he creamed all the competition in a very long race on the Meramac River just outside of St. Louis - the headlines in the paper the next day - which I have a copy of - reads ERNST OUTCLASSES ALL COMPETITION. It was his very first race ever, and I think he made quite an impression. The newspaper article took up about half of the entire page. Near the ottom somewhere on that sports page was the home run stats for major league baseball - Babe Ruth was in third place.) Anyway, I don't remember learning to swim at all, but I do remember being on the swim team when I was five years old. The only pool in town was City Pool, a giant pool that even today is pretty large in comparison to others. Since it was open to the public all day, the only time the swim team could practice was early in the morning before it opened, when the water was cold, and before the pool staff could clean out all the bugs. The water was frigid as we jumped in to practice, and often as we were doing laps and coming up for air we sucked in June bugs and other bits of protein! I remember my dad having a heart attack. We could not go visit him in the hospital since we were just kids. Oh yes, the "we" was my brother, Terry - he was (and still is) almost two years older, and my other brother, Tom, and sister Dorcas - they were much older. There eventually were other kids in the neighborhood, but they were Terry's age and not mine. Once Kim Turner moved away I did not have anyone else my age to play with. Sometimes I would tag along with Terry and his buddies - they all had bikes - but I only had a tricycle. It was a very large tricycle though, and I could sometimes keep up with them. But mostly I just played by myself, ranging out farther and farther into the "wilderness" and seeing what I could find.
My mom and I drove up to Minnesota one year during the winter - that is where she was from and where all of her family lived. We took our annual trip to visit in August, but we went in the winter this time for some reason. I remember the highway being blocked for a couple of hours somewhere around Kansas City by a big semi-truck that had wrecked and spilled its cargo all over the icy highway - it was a meat truck, and there were steaks all over the place! When I was seven, my dad (who just got out of the hospital from his heart attack) took us deer hunting. I remember driving out into the deer woods late at night just as the full moon was rising above the surrounding hills - this was my first real trek out into the big woods, and I was quite impressed. Dad's good friend from church, Paul Marinoni (yes, the same man that I named the scenic area on the OHT after), had this deer camp, and we all sat around a big table in the middle with Coleman lanterns glowing and played poker. Everyone there was from church, and sometimes even the priest from church came out. This would be a place I would return to year after year after year, and I would end up learning a great deal about people and about life in general at deer camp. In fact it was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life, and I know many of the things that I learned there have continued to shape my life ever since. It was not about killing animals, it was about growing up. My dad couldn't hunt because of his heart condition, but somehow he knew this was a good place to bring your kid, and he was right. Many, many, many fond memories of deer camp and the deer woods. I went to catholic school all of my first decade. Kindergarten was taught by Mrs. Heckle. I remember getting to lay down on a bright red mat in the afternoon and take a nap - something I try to do every day now (although it is on a leather couch instead of a red mat), however it seems like I don't get to take too many naps these days. We had one kid in the class that had a bad habit of biting people. He would just reach out and grab your arm and chomp down - he thought it was all quite funny. Mrs. Heckle did not think it was so funny. And in fact she did something that to this day I believe was a great teaching tool - especially for the rest of us, and I can almost guarantee you that no one else in that class has ever bit anyone as a result - when recess time came, she would put a dog collar on the boy and leash him to her desk. "If you are going to act like a dog, I'm going to treat you like a dog!" And she was right. I believe that kid flunked kindergarten and had to deal with Mrs. Heckle again the next year. By the way, all the rest of the teachers in this school were Catholic nuns, which would teach me through the seventh grade (with only one other exception). The really big thing that happened to me in kindergarten was my first kiss. I don't recall her name - and she moved away after that first year and I never saw her again. I had a container of some sort that had M&M's in it. During recess she and I would sneak off behind the school building and I would give her an M&M and she would give me a kiss - what a great deal for both of us! Oh yes, one final thought about school. I DID NOT want to go to school, and my mom had to drag me kicking and screaming into the building on that very first day of kindergarten. (of course, I did not know then about the M&M for kisses deal) I guess that sort of set the tone for the rest of my school years - I ALWAYS hated just about every second of school. Always. These days I look up to and respect teachers as just about the most important folks on the planet with really big jobs to do, but I still hated school. OK, back to the woods. I had a BB gun, a Daisy air rifle, manufactured in Rogers. It was my best friend throughout my early childhood, and would be with me on all of my treks into the woods. And yes, I shot birds. I am not happy to report that I shot a lot of birds. I was a very good shot, and a savvy hunter. I spent hours and hours honing my stalking and hunting skills. Of course, part of all that was being able to spend a great deal of time out watching the birds, and learning all about them and the rest of the forest environment. I probably could have and should have done all of that without the BB gun, but that is what got me out into the woods. I also spent a GREAT DEAL of time out hunting for snakes and lizards. I would spend hours and hours going through the forest in the summertime turning over every rock and old log and stump that I could find - snakes used to hide under there. When I found one, I would pick it up and play with it and carry it around. There were really no little girls in my neighborhood to scare with it, so it was just mostly for my own entertainment. Come to think of it, I don't believe I ever found a bad snake - they were all good ones, and actually not all that many at all. But lots of lizards, tons of lizards. And ants and other bugs. I got to play with a lot of nature. And I also remember one day when I was out looking for the rainbow clay at the bottom of a rainbow that I saw one day after a fierce rainstorm. While digging in the dirt I found a scorpion - YIKES, I had never seen one of those before, and I was terrified! OK, so there you go. That recaps some of the highlights of my first decade of life. I spent a great deal of time out in the woods, hated school, didn't have many playmates, but yet was still a very happy child - in fact I absolutely loved being out in the woods running loose. I guess that pretty much set the stage for where I am today, sitting at the edge of the wilderness, watching all the birds flying and playing around (good thing they didn't grow up in my neighborhood!). Amber has the BB gun these days, but she has never pointed it at a bird, and probably never will. Hum, I think I'll go out and turn over a few rocks and logs later today and see what I can find. HEY PAM, want some M&M's? 5/8/05 HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!
THE SECOND DECADE. It was the very best of times. It was the very worst of times. Holy cow, it would take me a month to write about some of the incredible things that happened to me during my second decade of life, but I will try just to touch on a few of the highlights here, and the lowlights. So many changes in such a short ten years. At times the months flew by, while often each second on the clock seemed like an eternity. I was becoming an athlete at a pretty young age, and veered away from the swim team for a while and out onto the ball field. Since I was left-handed - unlike anyone else that I knew outside of my family - I was immediately cast as a natural first baseman on the pee wee and then little league teams. And I flourished there. Two major highlights of my "career" happened in the same year when I was twelve and hit a grand-slam home run, and was picked and played on the All Star team. That year our poor parents had THREE boys on THREE different baseball teams often playing at THREE different ball parks on the very same night - I know it must have driven them crazy, but they made very ball game, somehow, and it gave me great encouragement knowing there was a parent in the stands supporting what I was doing. And these days sometimes I complain about having to make repeated trips into Jasper for Amber's basketball games and practice.
My baseball career moved up into another league as I got older, and somehow the coach realized that I could pitch, or at least that no one could hit a left-handed pitcher. I had it pretty easy - all I had to do was get the ball over the plate and they just couldn't hit it, or if they did, the hits were easily fielded by my team. I won game after game after game, until my final year I went undefeated and we won all the championships there was. By that time I was in Jr. High and thought I was some big deal, wearing white cleats in the style of one of my football heroes Joe Namath. But that would be the end of my baseball career. When the mail came on June 8th that summer a letter arrived from my brother Tom. He had been the one who took the time to teach me to throw and catch a baseball, and encouraged me to play and excel and do my best. Tom had been a star player late in his high school days on an American Legion team, yet he hated his coach who would not let him play at first. Anyway, in that letter that seemed to be addressed to the family he suggested that I not play for this coach when it was time for me to step up into the higher league. Those words from my oldest brother really hit home somehow and I decided to take his advice. This is the only letter that my brother had written home since he had graduated from the University six months before and moved to Baltimore, and then onto St. Louis where he had been working. In an absolute devastating blow to everyone, and especially to me, he had been killed three days before we received this letter in a car accident just outside of Festus, Missouri - you can imagine how we all were shocked to see his letter arrived, a letter it turns out he had just dropped into the mailbox a few minutes before his death at 22 years of age. I was at home alone with mom when the phone call came in. We were sharpening knives in the kitchen. Somehow I knew when the phone rang that it was terrible news. Even before mom got off the phone I knew my brother was dead, and I flew out the door and was running up the hill into the woods at top speed when she came to the front door and yelled out for me to come back. We had to figure out a way to tell my dad, with his fragile heart, that his eldest son was gone. He was summoned home and we three embraced in the front yard and told him the news. It was a terrible day, one of the worst days of my life and lowest I have ever been. I was 14. A couple of years before I played football for our little school in the seventh grade. There were only 12 guys on the football team, and we had to walk several miles to practice in the back yard at the Veterans Hospital since our school did not own any land. We played a touch schedule and normally got trounced by schools that didn't have to play team members the entire game on both offense and defense. I was a high-decorated alter boy during those last few years at St. Joseph's school, and we went to mass six day a week - everyday at school and on Sunday's. I rather enjoyed all the ceremony associated with "serving" mass as an alter boy, and we got to wear some pretty fancy and high-decorated clothing. PLUS we got to get out of class (which you know I hated every second of) early to go over and get ready for mass at noon. AND we had to fill up containers with wine. Hum, while I actually didn't sample any wine back in those days, I did pickup some sort of interest in the colorful liquid. And while I hated any sort of foreign language - they tried to teach us French in the forth grade but it was a bomb - I absolutely loved the Latin language for some strange reason, and could recite the entire Catholic mass in Latin from beginning to end. However, when they changed the mass from Latin to English, and I could actually understand all of the words, it somehow lost a great deal of luster, and I began to drift away from the church, especially once I had to move onto another school. We could no longer to afford to send me to the private, Catholic school (as we were required to do), and since Woodland Jr. High was literally in my back yard, I switched to that public school for 8-9 grades. I had been pretty led a very sheltered life out there at the edge of the woods at home, and then in school where my class size was less than 20 students per grade (and we often had two different grades in the same room with the same teacher at the same time!). So going to public school was quite traumatic to say the least. Oops, I almost forgot, while in the 7th grade back at Catholic school, I discovered, or should I say re-discovered, GIRLS! Oh man, I can't quite remember her name right now, but I did have a girlfriend in the 7th grade, and I can even picture her face clearly. I think our biggest leap forward in "that" department was only holding hands though - not much to write about. When I got into the big, crowded public school, I was terrified of everyone and everything (especially GIRLS). But I had two places where I could run to and hide and renew my soul and my spirit - out on the football field, and in the deer woods. I hunted A LOT, and was a star football player. Kind of like being the only left-handed pitcher in baseball around here, I was the very first tight end on area football teams that could catch a pass, or at least the only one the quarterback ever actually threw two. He was John Mills, and while he lived in the neighborhood, we never played together or anything - he was one of the popular kids, and ran in a different crowd than I. But when it came crunch time out on the football field, he would look to me in the huddle and I knew I had to perform. And I did, and became the second leading scorer in the conference at one time, and we won a lot of football games. It was easy for me to score - no one ever covered the tight end, he was just a blocker, so all I had to do was get off the line and out into the defensive field and turn around and catch John's pass and walk into the end zone. They reported each score over the school intercom system the next morning and I was always embarrassed to hear my name called out. It was kind of fun though, but also scary at the same time, when girls began to come up to me and start talking and want me to come to their parties. Geeze, just get me out into the woods! One other football note and then I will put it to rest. During my first year of high school, our football team went undefeated. One of the biggest moments for me came when we played Berryville - in a driving rainstorm. It was impossible to throw passes in that weather, and the field was built so that the water all sloped into the middle of the field - this deep water slowed down even our star running back, Mark McCutcheon. It was cold, and other than getting to slide about 20 yards every time you hit the ground, it was a miserable night of football for both teams - late in the 4th quarter the score was 0-0. We had worked up into the ten yard line, time was running out, and it was 4th down - it was now or never to score. Everyone on the planet knew John Mills would hand the ball off to Mark and he would score. Yet Johnny grabbed me by the jersey as I got into the huddle, looked me straight in the eye, and said "you BETTER catch this!" WHAT, me, you were going to throw it to ME? You must be nuts! Yup, coach was crazy like a fox. No one would ever throw a pass in this weather, especially to a TIGHT END! But there I was standing in the end zone, shivering, shaking, and scared to death, when that ball came whizzing my way. That old ball weighted a ton and was hard as a rock and I did not catch it at first, but rather fumbled it up in the air a little bit, then held on tight and we won the game, 6-0. That would be my last football game as I later realized I would rather spend my time in the swimming pool with GIRLS in swim suits than in smelly locker rooms with a bunch of stinky guys. So as I moved on through high school I literally dove into swimming, during one season having three practices a day - one before school, one during school athletics time, and one after school. We had to hike about a half mile to get to the pool, and often when I hiked back to school on cold winter days to get on the bus to ride home, my hair would be frozen - there were not hair dryers back then. And since I spent so much time in the pool water with all its chemicals, my blonde hair would sometimes turn green! Guys often asked me why I quit football in favor of the swim team, and I would remind them that the swim team got to go on two and even three-day trips out of town for swim meets, and that more than half of the team was female, and those females had pretty nice bodies. Hum, it was an easy choice for me. I was still terrified of girls in high school, me being shy, introverted, and very unsure of himself in all areas of life. But the possibilities were endless.
And it turned out I did start to date a girl that was on the swim team by my second year in high school (Celia Sutherland, daughter of the famous architect Cy Sutherland), and yes one of those out of town swim trips resulted in a little hanky panky going on between us. But I remained still mostly afraid of girls. OK, now for some WOODS stuff! I joined the boy scouts early on, and went to the famous Camp Orr on the Buffalo River in the summertime. But to tell you the truth, I found that I learned a great deal more about woods lore while going to deer camp than I ever did in scouting, so after a short stint with the scouts I hung up my badge. I do still remember the oath and motto (or at least most of them) - A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, curious, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty, to God and my country., and obey the scout law." Not a bad road map for life if you ask me. While in the deer woods I would range out as far and wide as I could - I did not want to be around other hunters, and I had to hike and hike and hike all day to get away from them. I never killed any deer in those days, but I did get to see and explore some incredible country at an early age. On some of those hunts I hiked areas that we would eventually build the Ozark Highlands Trail through, including the historical railroad bed that ran from Combs to Cass. And I was always drawn to waterfalls, and streams, and giant boulders, and vistas on my hunts - kind of like I am today. I used to get the "star camper" award at deer camp, and I listened and watched and learned a lot from the other guys about a lot of things, the least of which was deer hunting. The leader of the camp, Paul Marinoni Sr., a man I looked up to with a great deal of admiration and respect, was murdered in his living room many years later by his son, Buzz, who was in my class. Fred Deal and I were on the swim team together, and were buddies. He came from a different world than I, but we hit if off anyway. On spring break one year we decided to try "backpacking" - whatever that was. And we went out to our deer camp and began our hike in that area - I've still got a few photos from that trip somewhere (there you go Fred, I finally gave you official credit in print for that first backpack trip!). It was an eye-opening experience for me, and I was hooked. Later on when my second girlfriend in high school (Beth Barham) and I wanted to slip away from town to watch the sunrise, I took her to this very same location. Yup, deer camp brought me many more things than just deer hunting. Back at home and in the early part of this second decade I continued to range out into the woods nearby, and out into the countryside too. Seems like we spent a lot of time exploring in and around Zero Mountain - that was a several mile hike from our house, and is located in Johnson. My brother, Terry, and sometimes another kid or two would go with me. We would hike out in the morning, spend the entire day there, then get back in time for dinner. We put a lot of miles on our little feet back then, and we would also ride our bikes, so we had to fix a lot of flats! We also hike/rode out to Clear Creek, even farther away, and fished and splashed and explored this water wonderland. I remember once going out there and actually camping out in the cow pasture. I was going to live off the land, but didn't catch any fish that day, but I did find a small catfish floating in the creek and cooked it for supper - best catfish I ever ate! I remember going through a period where I would hike up to the top of the wooded hillside near our home, then run as fast as I could down the hill, leaping up high into the air over logs and other stuff, often not coming down to earth for a good long ways farther down the hill. In athletics I HATED to RUN (when I was on the track team, I threw the discus because I loathed running so much), but for some reason when I was out in the woods it just seemed natural, and I had a blast flying through the air. I spent more and more time out in the woods, both around home, and any time that I could get out hunting - hunting was my excuse for getting out into the woods. In high school, and after I got my first car (a 1963 Studebaker I bought from my Aunt Ruth for a buck - had the biggest back seat of any vehicle I had ever been in - which came in handy in high school!), I would drive out to a "local" deer hunting area just outside of West Fork and bow hunt for deer just about every day for several months each year. While I loved getting out into the woods, I also did this to keep from having to ride the school bus - I could drive to school if I was hunting, but otherwise I had to ride the bus. And I HATED riding the bus, mostly because it would force me to sit with someone, and I remained terrified of people, especially girls (well, not ALL girls, but most of them!). As a result of all this time in the deer woods I became an accomplished hunter, killed a lot of deer, and got to spend even more time in the woods. I would eventually become a hunter of some note, and had magazine and newspaper articles written about me and my picture in the paper with my trophies. I enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, but I didn't really much care for the taste of wild game. Mostly I just enjoyed being out in the woods.
Speaking of the taste of game, I remember one weekend my brother, Terry, and I got to spend the entire weekend out camping and hunting on our own. We didn't bring much to eat so we ate squirrels for just about ever meal. By the end of that weekend I vowed to never eat another squirrel, and promise that has held up to this day. I have nothing against eating wild game - and in fact am very supportive of hunting - I just got to where I could not stand the taste of the meat. On another trip the two of us hiked into the wild backcountry of Devil's Den State Park (to an area where the Butterfield Trail is today). It rained the entire weekend, and we spent a lot of time constructing a shelter with thatched roof made from cedar tree limbs. I believe about the time we got the darn thing waterproof it was time to go home! Several things happened late in high school that would change my life forever. The first was meeting and actually going steady with Beth Barham. She was in a class well above me (older yes, but I mean MUCH smarter than I, and MUCH more refined than this old hayseed was). Knowing her was pure magic in so many ways, and perhaps above all else, she taught me that I could be the equal of anyone if I wanted to. She was a goddess, one of the smartest people in town, and had a great deal of class. Our relationship was brief, and went at 1000 miles an hour for a few months (I was a sophomore, she a senior) day and night, then she left town and moved out of my life to attend Vanderbilt University. It had been the highest point in my young life so far being with her, but I was dealt a crushing blow when she left, and even more so when she broke up with me long distance. I could not get any lower. And while this may sound crass and all of that, her sister, Sarah, was around to help me pick up the pieces, and I ended up sailing through my senior year of high school with Sarah at my side. That lasted until Beth came back home again the next summer, but I won't get into all of that! My swimming career really took off as a senior too, and our little hippy team won meet after meet after meet, setting state records along the way. We had four or five pretty good swimmers on our team, plus a great coach. Actually our third coach that year was pretty good. One coach we had (it may have been the year before though) was a real tyrant, and hated by all. She eventually found her way to Hollywood and hosted her own national television show for a season or two (I think it was called Speak Up America or something like that - I recall her having the largest mouth I had ever seen, and brother she could use it, and she was LOUD!). But our very last coach in high school, Tom Proctor, had been on the Razorback swim team and was a real stud, and we all looked up to him. The guys were kind of going through a hippie stage, with long hair and all that, and when it came time for us to shave our entire bodies for the state championships, good old Tom wanted to make sure that we did NOT cut the hair on top of our heads - "we have an image to uphold" he would tell us. So we shaved out legs, back, and arms (supposedly to make us swim faster), but kept our long hair. We walked away with the state championship easily and set more records. Towards the end of high school I was approached by several colleges and universities with offers of swimming scholarships. I was kind of interested in going to Arkansas Tech in Russellville, but found out the ration of men to women was about 9 to 1. Off the list. Then I visited John Brown University - there were plenty of nice ladies there, but having slipped away from the church almost completely by that time I did not want to go to a religious school. I ended up turning down all of the scholarship offers and remained in town and attended the University of Arkansas, and made it onto the Razorback Swim Team. It turned not to be a good match for me, and I did not last long - our coach was VERY religious, and I wanted to spend my time out in the woods rather than in the pool and praying. I did one neat thing though while on the Razorback team - I had a genuine wild razorback skull that I had picked up somewhere out in the woods - complete with a couple of curving and sharp tusks - and I would put this skull at the end of the lane I was swimming in just to give me a little mental strength. I continue to ramble, I'm sorry, but those ten years of my second decade were a very rambling time and so long there is a great deal to cover, and yet a great deal to be left out. Oh yes, getting back to another of the things that changed my life. As you may recall I LOATHED every second of class, young and hold, and I especially hated to READ anything. When I was in fourth grade somehow I managed to write an essay that actually WON a writing contest put on by Readers Digest - that story was, of course, about deer hunting. I won a fancy pen and everything. That would be the only highlight of my school career for a good long while. I remember every time I had to turn in a book report I would simply copy the text on the inside cover jacket, normally word for word, and turn it in. I got a lot of A's. One time in 9th grade we were told to write an essay that HAD to be at LEAST ten pages long (this was for science class). Holy cow how could I do that? One day in the checkout line at Gibson's Discount Center ("where you buy the best for less!") I picked up a small booklet that told the story of Apollo 11 - I was a true space junky, and followed every of the space program, staying up all night when Neil stepped out on the moon. Anyway, I copied that booklet word-for-word and turned in a 24-page report in class the next week! The teacher made an example of me, how great my report was. Hum, sorry about that Coach Gillam! OK, ok, back to the life-changing deal. Oops, this paragraph is much too long, so I'll begin a new one. We had an English teacher named Mr. Thomas. I remember one day he got so excited about the story of Moby Dick that he leaped up on top of his desk as he read the book out loud to us - that was pretty exciting, and I read that book from cover to cover. Later one we had to write a book report on any book we wanted to, and while I was in the deepest depression of losing the love of my life, my mom brought home a book from the library called "The High Adventure of Eric Ryback." To say that I devoured that book and read every word from cover to cover over and over and over again would be an understatement. Something about this lonely and unpopular kid just out of high school that ditched his high school graduation to go take on the greatest wild hiking trail in the world all alone hit home and stuck a very strong chord with me. I sat down and wrote a long book report about it - actually the ONLY real book report that I ever wrote in my entire life. I did not need to copy anything from the jacket cover. Much to my great HORROR my book report was chosen as one of three that would be read in front of not only the entire senior class at assemble, but the entire dang school! Oh my goodness, here was this terribly shy and cowardly child who would tremble when asked to speak to anyone he did not know, being forced to stand up in front of the entire world it seemed and speak. I got out the book and underlined quite a few important points in the story and took the book with me, hoping the entire time that the school would explode and burn down before my talk. As it turned out, once they got me up at the podium they could not get me to shut up! Hum, finally something besides hunting and athletics took hold. And brother did it. I immediately began to dream of and plan a solo trek across Arkansas, but that would have to wait for a little while. I had college to pay for, and a summer job to do. I applied to the forest service as a guide at Blanchard Springs Caverns - WHAT, ME standing in front of strangers and TALKING? What was I thinking? As it turned out, after I filled out all the paperwork and took the required Civil Service Test and all that, I heard nothing back from the forest service. I began to look elsewhere. Then I called the forest service and asked what was up. They told me they had sent a letter to me requesting an interview but that the letter had been returned, weeks ago. All the positions had been filled. I found out later that out of the 31 guide positions available at this brand new and rather incredible national facility, they had received literally THOUSANDS and thousands of applications form all over the country. No way they were going to give one of these jobs to a hayseed high school kid from Arkansas. And then something happened that to this day I still do not understand - the head of personnel for the entire forest called me back and offered me the job - WHAT? No interview, no nothing. The other applicants had to go through several layers of interviews before they were hired. The other 30 guides were the cream of the crop of interpretive folks in this country, or at least they all came with impressive credentials, or at the very least were in college going after specialized degrees (or were science teachers). I turned out to be the youngest guide by far, and in fact when they hired me I was actually under age, although by the time I reported for duty I had turned 18. Still don't know how all of that happened, but it would turn out to be one of the greatest life-changing periods of my life, and I would work at Blanchard for four years, and would end up being the very best guide they ever had (my interpretation, of course!). I will say that the guy who has been running the cave for the past 20-something years used to tag along on my tours and take notes - he said that he wanted to be the best guide there was, and he wanted to learn from me. I loved just about every single moment of working at Blanchard - we were all treated like royalty by the forest service and by the public, and were getting paid a great deal of money (at least for a kid just out of high school), with many expenses provided, and a super work environment - plus, I LOVED caves, and so was in heaven in so many ways. I learned a great deal about public speaking with all of the intense training we received, plus getting to lead five tours a day - and these were not canned speeches, but rather off the cuff from beginning to end. We had a great deal of fun, or at least I did, and learned out to size up an audience and play to their wants, and sometimes play to their fears as well! One guide that I became good friends with was Peter van den Heuvel. We ended up becoming roommates in the years to come (the only non-female roomy I ever had), and we still keep in touch - in fact his dad's shotgun is in a corner of our closet here right now, and he writes often from his current home on the other side of the globe (Peter spent a lot of time out at Cloudland last year). Thanks began to go sour towards the end of my time at Blanchard, when the government put in policies of forced hiring of minorities and others that were unqualified, and hired them ahead of much more qualified people who just happened to be white males (and I'm not talking about me - I was always offered a job). At one point I filed a sex discrimination grievance against the forest service (through my union, can you believe it, I was in a union!), and I won. The problem was that the male guides were forced to wear neck ties, even though we spent most of our time in a muddy cave 200 feet below the ground. Yet even though a tie was also part of the female uniform (we got to wear neat uniforms, with badges and everything, and had the power to arrest people and write them tickets, how cool was that!), the ladies were not required to wear ties. I though that was a little unfair, so I filed the grievance. From that point forward (at least as long as I worked there), NO guides wore ties, and rightly so. I do not own a necktie today and have not worn one in many long year. Working for the forest service gave me access to a great deal of information and people, and much of that would help me along in later years. I also got to go exploring and hiking on all of my days off in the Sylamore Creek area - some really incredible places over there. There were no hiking trails back then, but I was quite happy to bushwhack around and follow the creek. I lived in a small trailer at the edge of the town of Fifty-Six that was owned by Gus Mitchell. His family once owned the old grist mill that was located just below the Mirror Lake dam at Blanchard - remains of that old grisk mill remain today and are in fact a historical landmark for the area. Gus's wife, Elsie, would often bring me dinner when I arrived home from work. Other days I would detour down to Mirror Lake on my way home and catch a couple of rainbow trout and cook them for dinner. Life was good in Fifty-Six. Oh yea, and one time I decided that I wanted to go hiking and spend the night alone in the woods - a first for me - and I didn't want to carry anything with me - no food, no water, no shelter, nothing. I drove to Gunner Pool and hiked downstream on Sylamore Creek, exploring and enjoying everything I could find. When it got dark I found a little tree with a bed of soft leaves at the base of it, so I laid down and curled up around the tree to spend the night. Holy cow it got down into the 40's that night and I nearly froze to death! No matches for a fire, no sleeping bag or blanket. It was a very long night, but I did survive, and I think it taught me that I could survive a night alone out in the woods with nothing and be just fine. College. Goodness how I hated college. I will try to skim through this as best I can. Three items about my early college days. On the first day of freshman English the teacher came running back to my deck and grabbed the Herters catalog that I had. Turned out he would become the famous outdoor writer Aubrey Shepherd and he was as much into the Herters catalog as I was, and in fact used the catalog to teach out of that day. Herters was at the time the largest sporting goods store in the world, and the owner of it just happened to have grown up with my mom in Waseca, Minnesota. In our annual jaunts to the Minnoseta farm to visit relatives, we always went to Herters at least three or four times. Just about everything I owned that was outdoors-related came from Herters. The catalogs were filled with eloquent writings of their products, and that is what Aubrey wanted to share with the class - that unique use of the English language. Another class was a creative writing class of all things. And son of a gun, I did a pretty good job of it. The class was taught by a local poet named Reed Durbin. I will always remember Reed sitting there in front of the class, puffing on a cigarette, with a large NO SMOKING sign up on the wall right behind him. He would read selected essays to the class, never divulging the authors. He read every single one of mine. And then I went to the first class of my chosen major - Environmental Science 101. This was a brand new major that was just starting at the U o A, and we were the first class ever. I was really fired up to be doing all of this environmental stuff, especially have just come out of being indoctrinated by the forest service. In his opening statements, Professor Richard Meyer, talked about how Smokey The Bear was the very worst thing that the forest service had ever done. WHAT? Then he informed the class that there would be no actual grade given in this three-credit-hour course after all, unless we wanted to write a single term paper at the end of the year, and that would be our entire grade, if we wanted one. Right then and there I decided to write a paper on Smokey The Bear, and defend this symbol of my revered forest service. Turns out I went to work for Dr. Meyer, me being the main chemical analysis guy in the water resources lab at the University. I ended up spending many long nights deep in the dark depth of Old Main - just me and this huge and very expensive chemical analysis machine. The log book that I filled out each time noted that not a single person had ever been able to stand working with this machine for more than an hour at a time, while my normal work periods with the machine were often four or five hours - I loved it! And yes, I wrote that term paper, defended good old Smokey, but also agreed with some of his original statements - in the fact that since the Smokey anti-fire campaign had been SO successful, that now the forests were in danger of burning up big time due to the buildup of natural fuels that normally are burned off by wildfires. (all of that sort of ties in with the controlled-burning issues of today - that is all true for the great forest out west, but really doesn't matter all that much in Arkansas because of the fact those fuels simply do not build up here - they rot away long before they become a big problem) I got an A for the paper and for the class, and I worked for Doc Meyer for a couple more years. During spring break of my first year in college I took that much-dreamed about hike across Arkansas, or at least I hiked from one end of the national forest to the other, with nothing more than a crude map and very crude equipment. I was miserable most of the way - wearing bad cotton socks and even worse hiking boots that created quarter-size areas of raw meat all over my feet. The weather was terrible - it rained or snowed or sleeted just about every day. I covered a LOT of ground each day simply because I was so cold I could not afford to stop to eat lunch or rest, so I just kept on hiking. There were no hiking trails of any kind at that time, and I simply planned my route to take advantage of the available drainages. It turns out that the current route of the Ozark Highlands Trail is almost exactly the same route that I took way back then. Of course, I helped lay out the trail years later, and liked my original route. Near the end of the hike disaster stuck. I was unable to call in to my dad to check in (I would have to stop at farm housed and beg to use their phones as there were not pay phones, nor any towns along the route). The last time I tried to check in the storms had been so bad that all phone service was out in the county and in the next, and in the next. I wound up hiking more than 30 miles on the last day, trying to find a phone that worked. When I finally did get through, I found out that my dad had had another heart attack and was in serious condition. That was an obvious blow to me, but also heaped a giant pile of guilt right squarely on my shoulders - he pleaded with me before my hike not to do ALONE on this trip, and it caused him a great deal of stress. But I HAD to go alone, there was just no other way for me to do to do it - I had to prove something to myself. As always, in the end, dad threw his full support behind me, but I knew it must have led somewhat to his heart attack. My mom was out of the country, but my brother was at home and eventually came out to pick me up. Dad survived, and I think got quite a boost when we all sat next to him in the hospital and watched the story of my just-completed hike on the local television station. And MY NAME was flashed across the screen, and they were talking about ME. That was, of course, a great turn on, but also rather embarrassing. My old English teacher wrote a lengthy article about my hike for the local paper - I still have a copy of that around here somewhere - and it included a couple of photos taken by me of me - my first ever published photos! During that year, my brother and I, along with several other folks, started a club of sorts at the University of Arkansas Union, which eventually became the Outdoor Recreation Center, a place for students to rent outdoor equipment, and get information. In fact I started teaching a non-credit class about backpacking (can you believe it, ME, teaching?) My partner in crime was the son of the mayor of Hot Springs, John Ellsworth. Our classes were packed, and our weekend trips down into the Ouachitas were always full (there were no trails up in the Ozarks to hike at that time, but there was the Caney Creek Wilderness Trail, so that is where we went to backpack, and also some of the Ouachita Trail had been built so we hiked it too). It was during one of the trip down into the Ouachitas that I saw Forked Mountain for the very first time. I was mesmerized by this mountain, and it has become my favorite mountains in the state. On that trip me and another guy backpacked 32 miles in one day - a record for me that still stands today. We were forced to hike that far because of inaccurate information give to us by the forest service. Hum, I wonder where the idea for me to write a hiking trail guidebook with ACCURATE info in it came from - yup, from this very hike so many moons ago. One vivid memory from one of these hikes into Caney Creek with the class involved as assistant deal of students, women's students I think. We were all sitting around the campfire, passing a joint around, and a bucket of water that everyone drank out of. I was stuck by the fact of how tolerant our society had become, what with this university official sitting there with us smoking pot and not saying a word. It was a sign of the times for sure. (Hey, what can I say - we were in college, and it was the 70's...) Towards the end of my second decade I had discovered photography. I went on a trip to Hawaii with my brother to visit my sister and her husband who were living there. My brother in law, Corky, had given me a Minolta SRT 100 camera a few months before I was taking photos of anything and everything that I could get my hands on. I had started scuba diving by then, and we had many great scuba trips on that trip (my first real trip on a big airplane). I came home with hundreds of photos, and all of them had these dang rainbows in them! Back at the forest service office, I was basically given free reign with a refrigerator filled with color and black and white FILM that I could use all I wanted of - so I shot a lot of photos on the government's dime. By the end of my second year in college I continued to hate school as much as ever, and out of sheer boredom answered an ad placed in the local college paper that read "Make money taking pictures" or something like that. I called the number and the very next day a guy named Joe Ownbey came to town and sat me down with a six-pack of beer and told me how I could make a ton of money taking photos of beautiful college sorority girls and drink all the booze I wanted to. And there would be no up-front money required by me! So at age 19, down in the dumps and still terrified of girls and shy, I started a photo business that would require me to interact with ROOMS full of beautiful girls at a time. How could I have ever done such a thing? The photo business was an instant success, and began a business that I would run for five years and make a great deal of money at before finally selling out to my good friend Phil Ezell. The business I started became Photographs Unlimited, and the opportunities were indeed unlimited on many fronts. More on that later! My daughter asked me just yesterday if I had been a "hippie" when I was young. No, not really. My hair was a little long, but not even approaching shoulder length. I was against the war in Viet Nam, but I did not go to protest rallies or anything. I listened to the Beatles and to the Carpenters and to Bread. Some of my friends were sort of borderline hippies, but nothing too serious I guess I was just a little on the young side when all of that was going on. I was quite happy to just be me and mind my own business and stay out of trouble. We went on several float trips on the Buffalo River (this was before it became a national park). I remember one trip when we launched from the low-water bridge at Ponca just BEFORE dark. It was a full moon, and we wanted to float in the moonlight. Son of a gun, we managed to make it all the way through the night without dumping a single time! We had some great times on the river back then, and one of them I even wrote about while in college for my smoking-poet-teacher Reed Durbin - and yes he read it to the class. We had stopped at the famous Grey Rock and were up on top of it watching to see if any other floaters came. I seem to recall we had been drinking quite a bit - typical on those float trips. Anyway, about 100 yards upstream a lady appeared on the opposite side of the river - there was no "Kyles Landing" at that time and all of that area was private. Don't know where she came from. She waved to us (the river was quite loud so no way we could speak with her), then sat down on the river bank in the bright afternoon sunshine. Then she took off her t-shirt and then her bra. And then her shorts! Yup, this outdoor stuff was pretty neat. She obviously knew we could not cross the river nor paddle upstream so she felt pretty safe I guess, and so there the four or six of us sat, drunk on a rock on the Buffalo River, watching this wilderness beauty sunbathe naked right in front of us, and we could not do anything about it but enjoy! Well, the story I wrote for Reed sounded pretty good when he read it to the class anyway. OK, ok, I ramble on a little too much, so I will wrap this up now and get on with my day. Needless to say my second decade was filled with, well heck, FILLED period. It was a tremendous ten years of growth in so many ways, with tragedy along the way, but also triumph. I was mostly a happy kid, although still very shy and would much rather be out in the middle of the woods than anywhere in town. But I did enjoy taking photos of beautiful women, and making money. I still hated school, but that would end soon. I had had several girlfriends, fell in love, lost my virginity, and gained a little bit of confidence in know that even though I was somewhat of a country hayseed, I could sit down and carry on a conversation with anyone, and even have a relationship with a girl way, way out of my league. Oh yes, and I loved the woods - did I mention that? 5/9/05 My third decade (my 20's) was kind of split into two parts - the first five years spent burning the candle at both ends and being out most nights until the wee hours of the morning (working five or six nights a week - taking photos of beautiful sorority girls, always); and the second half, being spent mostly out in the woods at often a much slower pace. My new party picture business really took off when I was 20, and I quickly ran the other guy in town who had been doing party pics out of the party pic business (Don's Photos - he only did black and white, his service was terrible, and his lowly photographer wasn't much fun to be around - he tried to beat me up one night on a gravel bar where I was taking pictures of "my" girls - turns out he was too drunk to even strike a blow, which was a good thing for me because I couldn't punch my way out of a wet paper bag). I backed off and promptly took away not only that sorority house from him, but also eventually all the fraternities as well. At the height of our business we had more than 25 photographers working for us, two secretaries, a fulltime darkroom guy, and a commercial photographer. In addition to the party picture business, we shot weddings, portraits, and literally whatever walked in the door. I ran the business out of my parent's house for the first little while, then when I took on a partner and named the business Photographs Unlimited, we moved into a real business building and set up shop. While there were many highlights from those fast and furious years of party photos, a couple come to mind. First, one night when I was called out to shoot a party at a private house with one of my favorite sororities, I didn't arrive until about an hour after things had really revved up. I guess the girls were not too happy with the fraternity guys who their function was with, because when I arrived on the scene and walked through the front door you would have thought I was Paul McCartney himself or something - ALL the girls jumped up from their dates and came running towards me screaming "Tim, Tim, TIM IS HERE!", and they all came rushing up and fell all over me. I recall some guy sitting on the couch yelling out "Who the hell is Tim?" Those were some really heady years for me. But, of course, the "Tim" they all were yelling for was really just a guy with a camera, not really ME. They knew all our photogs as "Tim" - very few of the girls really knew that I was me. In fact I remember at one party late in the evening, I was having a conversation with a young lady who pulled me aside and out of earshot from the others and asked me "What is HE really like?" When I asked her "who" she said "Tim!" Yup, that really brought me right on back down to earth! I remember my first really big sorority group photo - I stood to make several thousand dollars on this single group photo in print sales to the girls. I had just purchased a brand new and very expensive Nikon F2s camera an 24mm lens. I was out in front of the Tri-Delta house and had all the girls lined up - must have been nearly 100 of them. I was just getting ready to shoot the photo when I needed to raise the camera up just a couple of inches higher. I looked over at the girls and was smiling big time and cranking up the camera when I heard a loud THUD, followed by the collective gasp of 100 ladies - the tripod I was using had broke, and my new camera and lens fell about five feet onto solid concrete! Boy, that was a way to impress the girls ey! And this is especially for all of you folks who have been in my photo workshops lately using Nikon cameras that I have been ragging on so badly - I simply reached down, very calm and collected, and yelled out to the girls - "Don't worry, it's a NIKON and I'm sure it will be OK!" And it was - the meter did not work, but I took the photo and it turned out just fine. And quite contrary to popular opinion of the day - and you are hearing it right here first - I did not go home with a different babe every night from these parties. In fact, that never happened a single time! Oops, sorry to let that out. I know that a lot of folks always thought that, but at the end of the day it was really all just a job, and I was just another photographer. Of course, I got to take home a lot of money. It was always fun to go shoot Dad's Day at the sororities - that was when the girls would come around and introduce me to their dads, and oh brother, you should have seen some of the faces on the dads - "So YOU are the guy my daughter has been writing all of those checks to!" And before he could say another word, I would line them up and shoot a photo - $$$, yup, he would have to write me another check in a couple of weeks! Our day at the "office" would often be something like this. We would arrive and open up around 10am, do a little bit of paper work and then go out for lunch. We had this place nearby that had some wonderful food, and five cent beers for lunch! (in the same location as the Pesto Cafe is today - LOVE their food too!) By the time we got back from lunch we were in pretty good spirits. We would spend the afternoon shooting a portrait or two, perhaps work in the darkroom some, eat a bit of dinner, then get ready and go out for the evening with a case of film and lots of batteries. I would often check back into the office around 2-3am (this was during the WEEK), label and sort all of the film, then stumble on home for a few hours sleep. We kept up that schedule often times 5-6 days a week, for several years. The money just poured in. By the time I had had my fill of it all, I wasn't shooting too much. In fact I eventually got to the point where I would only shoot for a single sorority and give all the rest of the parties to other photographers. I was getting tired of it all, and the money did not shine quite as bright as it once did. Backing up a bit, I took one and only photo class at the University - Photography 101 in the journalism department. This was when I was just getting started in the business and didn't know too much about normal photography (ANYone could do a good job with party pics - it was meatball photography as far as the technical end of things went and was touch to mess up). The professor was David Sloan. I think I managed to botch up every single photography assignment he would give us. Like for instance, when we asked us to go photograph "motion," I mounted a snail shell with a clay snail body on a "lazy Susan" - that is a plate with a smaller plate under it with ball-bearings in between so you could rotate the top plate freely. I would then mount my camera on the opposite side of the top plate (the fake snail was on the other side), focus on the snail, set the self timer on the camera and set a long exposure, then set off the timer and spin the top plate - the camera would take a perfectly-focused image of the snail, but the background would be all blurred since the plate was rotating. MOTION! That wasn't exactly the way that Mr. Sloan had wanted us to do it, but the class loved it and voted it as the top photo. Next assignment, portrait. I had been doing some scuba diving in a cave during this period and would dress up in some very wild outfits in order to keep from freezing to death. I also had a long beard and looked kind of shabby. I set up my camera on a tripod in the water one day, and took a self-portrait of this creature coming out of the spring. Once again, Mr. Sloan did not think too much of it, but the other students loved it. I did several more assignments like that that were sort of, well, out there on the edge, but DID show off my creativity. Later on Mr. Sloan "hired" me as the staff photographer for a newspaper that the journalism department published every other Sunday, and it was delivered with several large newspapers across the state. This was actually real journalism, and I got to do some serious work. And I got PUBLISHED for the very first time. In fact I got the cover of the magazine a bunch of times, and man that was really a lot of fun. We got to do all of the design and layout too - well, some of it. My buddy, Sharon Bass, was the real editor of it, but I got to look over her shoulder a lot and I think learned a great deal from her, and from Mr. Sloan. One of the last months that I worked for the paper something happened to the cover photo and they wanted a new one - this was at something like 10am on Thursday (our deadline day). "Hey Tim, could you go out and shoot our COVER and have it processed, printed, and on my desk in about three hours?" Yup, no problem. I grabbed my camera, ran out the door, and produced a classic photo of a student at play in front of the symbol of the University of Arkansas - Old Main. It was a great photo, and worked out perfectly for the magazine cover (this was all black and white). I mentioned cave diving. During the very first week of working at Blanchard Springs Caverns (we went through several weeks of intensive and very expensive training before they opened up the cave to the public - and turned us loose on them) I met an incredible man named Tom Aley. His story has been written up in many publications and his story was even on NPR last year. He basically dropped out of society, bought a cave in southern Missouri, and almost overnight because owner of one of the most important biological labs in the world - the "Ozark Underground Lab." My interest in wild caves grew by leaps and bounds, and I combined that with my love of scuba diving and wound up doing quite a bit of underwater cave exploring - some of it in big caves, but a lot of it in tiny unknown water-filled-cave passages and springs. Heck there for a time I would crawl into any little opening you pointed me at as long as I could swim in there. Anyway, in one spring that I started exploring I discovered what would become the only population ever found in Arkansas of a species of blind cave fish. Tom Aley helped me identify it, and my discovery wound up in textbooks. I could easily write an entire book about my underwater cave exploring adventures, but I will highlight just a couple of things here. By the way, I have never written much about this because if my mom EVER found out what I was doing she would have KILLED me! First thing - never scuba dive alone. Second thing - never go caving along. Third thing - Never, EVER go cave diving alone! Well heck, I didn't know of anyone else who wanted to go with me, so what the heck, I started cave diving alone just about every weekend for a couple of years. Most of this diving was in one particular spot - Clark Spring. As far as I could tell no one had ever been inside this water-filled passage. The opening itself was only about 18 inches tall but 6-8 feet wide, and the water that poured out of the base of this small cliff filled up a nice hole of water probably 50 feet across. The actual opening was a couple of feet underwater. I knew from a wild cave exploration trip or two that we had taken to a beautiful wild cave in the area (then it was known as Alexander Cave or Roasting Ear Cave) that there was a big river in the very bottom of the cave, but no one had ever explored it. I got to thinking that perhaps that very same river was also Clark Spring. So I got my gear together, told NO ONE where I was going or what I was about to do, and ducked my head underwater. If you have never dove in a spring before let me tell ya, even with special extra-thick wet suit and other outer clothing, that water is FRIGID! I could not afford a dry suit, so I made do with a custom blue with red and white stripped wet suit that I had built for me. I made up a special set of scuba tanks that consisted of two tanks with each one having its own regular and mouth piece. I wore a thick pair of coverall over the wet suit, and a wool vest under the wet suit. I had rubber booties and robber gloves. And I had three special underwater flashlights. My goal was simply to go into the mouth of the spring and see where it went. When I first stuck my head underwater and squeezed through the opening - I could just BARELY get through with my tanks on - all I saw was a solid limestone wall. But when I looked to my left I saw an amazing tunnel - about five or six feet in diameter - completely filled with the clearest water I had ever seen. YIPPIE, I was CAVE DIVING! I eagerly swam to the far end of the tunnel, but then the passageway changed direction and made a sharp right and down and then back to the left. One thing about cave diving that I must tell you about - in water-filled passages like this the water actually moves at a snails pace. Anything suspended in the water will remain there and not get washed away too fast. That means that any cave MUD that you happen to stir up with your big flipper feet will just hang there in the water. Your visibility - and your very life down in there - is limited by how far you can see, and that is limited by how powerful your flashlight is, and how much MUD there is suspended in the water. In real terms this means that the water will be perfectly clear when you swim in, but you will often have ZERO visibility when you turn around and come out. The only way to find your way out, I deduced, would be to lay out a string all along the way, somehow secure it on the far end, and then follow it out with your hands. And the would turn out to be the way I exited this cave system in just about everyone of the more than 100 dives that I did over the years in this spring. You may have to stop and think about that for a minute. Oh yes, one really neat thing about cave diving in a cave like this one where the passages are all water-filled - if anything happens to you - like, for instance, you run out of air - you die. Pure and simple. There is NO PLACE to go for air! The danger was off the scale, but the high I got from doing this after, oh, about the first ten seconds, was quite remarkable, and nothing was going to stop me from proceeding. My goal was to make the connection to the dry cave system. At the time I got into all of this cave diving stuff I had a freshman chemistry lab on Friday afternoon at the University. I think I only made one lab in three semesters of freshman chemistry. Yes, that's is correct - three semesters of the same class. I never passed it in three tries, partially because come Friday afternoons I was headed over towards Blanchard with my scuba gear. I also never really GOT any of that chemistry stuff - and thought it kind of funny that while at the same time I WAS DOING chemical analysis in the Water Resources Lab at the university and getting paid for it, but could not pass freshman chemistry - I kind of figured that some of the stuff that is taught doesn't have a whole lot to do with reality. OK, back into the cave. While what I was doing was kind of insane, I did it in a very safe fashion - I would always have AT LEAST one tank of air reserve, three lights, and I would never go more than a couple hundred feet into new passageway. I would buy 100 yard rolls of nylon rope at the store, and unroll this rope as I explored deeper and deeper into the cave. When I got to the end of the rope, that was it for this dive - I would tie it off and return to the entrance. I figured that I would waste 100 feet or so of the rope in the process, so really only got into 200 new feet of cave at a time. I would dive once on Friday night, then again on Saturday evening, then again on Sunday evening if my air held out. (I took along a lot of air tanks.) What was I doing during the day on these weekends - I was working at the big cave leading tours, of course. OK, just TWO stories from the deep. Or actually, it really wasn't deep - the passageways seldom ever got more than 6-8 feet deep, which meant I would stay in there all day if my air held out and I could stand the cold without having to worry about needing to decompress. Another big plus for cave diving! Where was I, oh yes. I discovered this species of blind cave fish, the Southern Cave fish. They were not as rare as the Ozark Cave fish that is only found is a few caves in the northwest Arkansas area, but it was the first documented population of this species ever found in Arkansas. It was important because somehow the species managed to get UNDER the Mississippi River - the other populations were in Kentucky and around there. These fish were really neat, and I knew each and every one of them - I think there was a total of 33 of them. They would either be alone, or with one other fish, and almost always within the same two or three foot stretch of the passageway. These fish have no pigment in their skin, and you can look right in and see the body functions, the heart beating, etc. When you spot on in the cave passage, they stick out like a sore thumb and were very easy to spot. But they were few and far between. I kept careful records - first of the cave passageway as I mapped out each new section - and then the location of each and every fish, and noted anything they were up to. And in order to identify this fish, I had to somehow catch one of them - a LOT HARDER to do then you might think - bring it out of the cave, drive over to the main Blanchard Springs Caverns complex, put the fish in a petri dish and set that in ice water with a thermometer in the little fish dish - the water had to remain about 56 degrees or the fish might die - then I set up a microscope with a camera attached and carefully focussed on a tiny row of "things" on the very top of the head of the fish and photographed them. Once I had some film shot, I had to do everything in reverse and take the fish back into the cave and release him in the same exact area I had gotten him from, unharmed. Once the film was processed I sent it to Tom Aley who then passed it onto the main guy in the cave fish business, Tom Poulson at the University of Chicago, and then the Chicago Tom told the Missouri Tom which species it was. Oops, that was not one of the things I wanted to tell you, but just wanted you to know that I was actually doing something of scientific importance in there, not just cooling off. One time when I was just beginning the first dive of the weekend, as I got near the very first turn in the passageway I saw something and just new my life was about to end - it was a GIANT creature nearly completely blocking the passageway that was coming right AT ME!!! Yikes, I was about to be eaten by some underwater cave-dwelling bear or something! Turned out to be a BEAVER, and he was not a happy beaver at all - I was in HIS passageway! He looked so large to me for three reasons - first, in the water like that his fur was floating straight out in all directions; also my flashlight cast a shadow of him on the ceiling and walls of the passageway that was obviously a lot better than the actual animal; and lastly, I had not seen any living in side the cave larger than the one-inch long cave fish so did not expect to see anything else living in there. OK, so WHAT do I do? Even though it was not a ferocious underwater bear, it was a wild animal with large sharp teeth and claws and could rip me to shreds in an instant. I could not back up, or go forward. I ended up simply freezing into place as he continued to swim towards me, and I eased myself up against the right-hand passageway, and then he just swam right on past me. I started breathing again, but just barely. I went on into the rest of the cave and wound up spending a couple of hours back in there before I made it back out to the entrance again. But as I neared the entrance I had a REAL SHOCK - the beaver had been spending his time - being busy as a beaver - cutting branches and small trees and plugging up the entrance - I was TRAPPED INSIDE!!! That darn beaver did not want me in there at all, and I guess he just decided to lock me in. One of the main things you MUST do if you are a cave diver is to REMAIN CALM. If you begin to panic, you will die. So that is what I did, and I simply began to push out one stick after another until there was enough room for me to swim on through to freedom. I never saw that beaver again, but by the next day he had plugged up the hole again, and I once again removed all of the sticks - that was the last time he did that. Another time when I was WAY back in the cave and on my way out, I got tangled up in my string, and as I fought with the string it tightened and actually flipped off my underwater light. I had been in the cave so long my fingers were kind of numb, and not too flexible, and there I was, in total darkness, all tangled up with string, and could not see or feel anything. Once again I had to keep telling myself to just calm down, I was OK, and all I had to do was think about the situation a little bit and figure a way out of it. I had plenty of air. What I ended up doing was trying to get some feeling in my fingers by moving them around a lot and grabbing things and flexing them (to increase the blood circulation to them), then I was able to grab my knife that was strapped to my leg and carefully select some ropes and cut my way free. Then I was able to find my flashlight and turn it on. No harm done, but it was kind of weird floating there in the darkness all tangled up like that way back under the mountain. Early on I figured that at some point I would lose my lights and I would have to swim out in total darkness. So as not to worry about it too much if it ever happened, I used to practice doing that - when I would get 100 feet or 100 yards or more from the entrance on the way out I would simply turn my light off and follow the line on out in the darkness. One time when I did that the water near the entrance had cleared up a lot, and in fact was almost totally clear. As I came up into that final 100 feet stretch of passageway I could see all the way to the entrance, and the entrance was flooded with rays of golden sunshine coming in at a low angle - I was really chilled from being in the cave so long and that warm-looking sunshine was a welcome sight - but also that entrance was filled with a hundred small fish - it looked like a darn tropical aquarium. That vision will go down as one of the greatest natural sights I have ever seen in my life. By the way, I never took a camera in there with me, so did no not have a photos of any of this. That is OK - it is locked inside my brain. One time when I came out of the spring - and mind you I was dressed to the hilt and looked like the Creature From the Black Lagoon or worse - as I popped up out of the frigid water and floated there in the sunshine I could see several people running for their lives on the shore - with a rubber hood and mask over my head I could never hear a thing - I only saw bodies running off but did not hear anything. Several minutes later, as I had started to take my gear off, I could see motion out there in the woods - it was two older couples that were having a quiet picnic at the spring - not having any idea there was someone inside - when this CREATURE from the deep came up. We all had a good laugh about it, especially me. Good thing they did not have a shot gun though! OK, ok, just one more little story from my spring. I DID eventually trace the underground river back into the hillside nearly a mile to where it popped up inside the dry cave - EUREKA! But then I wanted more. Turns out there were two other passageways inside the dry cave that took off - just the continuation of the one I had been exploring obviously. I never did explore the one straight ahead, and I did start to explore the one off to the right - it just LOOKED really interesting to me. So this is after 30 minutes or so of swimming to get into the cave, then stomping through the dry cave for a little while, then finally down into this new passage. I don't know how well I can describe it, but I will try. This new water-filled passageway took off at a 30 degrees angle DOWN and away from the main stream. The height between the ceiling and floor of the passageway was only tall enough so that I could fit through it when there was NO AIR in my lungs. When I would take a breath, I was trapped. Exhale, I could move a few feet at a time. That was no big deal going in, but coming back out, in total darkness since the mud I stirred up made it impossible to see, and using only the fine line that I had laid out to follow, well, let's just say I got scared to death way back in there one day and really wanted and needed my mommy. I came out of the cave and never returned. I had a good run though, saw some incredible things, and advanced the scientific world just a tiny bit. Man, it was cold in there. One more thing about cave diving. When we first worked at Blanchard Cave we were encouraged to go explore the undeveloped parts of the cave on our own, either at night or on "weekends." And we did so. I used to push way back far into the cave with Johnny Thomas, Herb Evans, Vicki Firestone, Karen Allred, and others, sometimes getting to what we believed was the very end of the cave itself. And we explored in all directions. (some of this "wild" passage is not open to the public as both the Discovery Trail and also on the wild cave tour, but we went much, much farther into the cave) Sometimes we would spend the entire night in the cave, then put on a clean uniform and lead tours all day long the next day. We were not just students spitting out a spiel, we really knew a great deal about this cave system. I also was lucky enough to be able to get to scuba dive through the lowest, water-filled section of the cave with two of the three original guys who first explored this underwater world. That trip was really something - my buddy Peter was with us - but it would take another day for me just to write it up. I loved to cave dive, but it was very dangerous, and kind of rough on the body. At the height of my cave-diving career, I was hired by the state of Arkansas to explore every known underground water passageway in a three-county region - I was looking for a particular species of cave crawdead that had only been found in limited supply in a single cave - Hell Creek Cave. Goodness those guys used to drag me into some pretty wild places, then point into the water - go there! And I gladly did. We did not find any more sites for this species, but did confirm a large population inside Hell Creek Cave (I stuck my head into one water-filled passage and there was dozens of them all over the ceiling, walls, and floor - they had only seen single individuals before). The state went ahead and purchased this cave system and now it is protected as a Natural Area. Whew, OK, back out into the daylight! After five wild years of party photography, cave diving, and all sorts of other wild and crazy things, my world came crashing down pretty hard. Within the span of a few weeks, my main girlfriend (I had gotten back together with my childhood sweetheart, Beth Barham, and we were living together) left me and ran off with one of my photographers and married him; I decided that I did not want to continue in the photography business so I sold it; and the biggest blow of all - my dad died after complications from another heart attack. He was at home, we left him to go have dinner, and when we came back, he was gone. At that very moment, after years and years and years of advance first aid and being taught exactly what to do with a dying patient, I froze when I came home and found him on the couch - I did not perform CPR and he was dead. It was probably much too late anyway, but goodness the guilt piled up on myself and remains with me to this day. What if..........Somehow I believe that he was ready to give up - he had been fighting it for so long. At least, that is what allows me to sleep at night. I wrote a note to myself the next day and stuck it up on the mirror in the bathroom - My girlfriend is gone. And I did go, I dropped out of it all, left town, and got out and away from everything back in Fayetteville. The sale of my photo business was financed to the point that I did not have to make any money for the next five years - the checks that were enough to cover my bills would come in each month no matter if I made any money or not. My goal was to continue to take pictures, but to shoot nature photos instead of wild sorority girls. I knew the pay would not be very good, but I had to get out and get away, and after all, I had been running to the woods all of my life anyway, so it was the easy and natural thing to do. One of the first things that I did was sign up for an outdoor photo workshop in Wyoming with Boyd Norton. Boyd would become my mentor, boss, and good friend. We had some wild times together in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Virgin Islands, where I eventually helped him teach a series of underwater photo workshops. In fact, I have some compromising photos of Boyd that I like to slip into slide programs every now and then.... My first great adventure would be to Alaska. I had planned to go to Washington state and camp out on the side of Mt. Saint Helens and see if I could get some photos of it when it erupted, but decided to head to Alaska instead - I drove through the ash clouds two days after it blew - a lot of photographers were vaporized. I could have been one of them. But instead I picked up Peter van den Heuvel in Montana and we drove on up to Alaska, spending nearly a month on the road. Peter was not a photographer, but a geologist, and he was very nice about allowing me to stop and take pictures. As it turned out I did not get any really good images during that trip, with the exception of one photo that I got on the way home. I got some sort of food poisoning and was sick as a dog as we got on the ferry that would take us down through the Inside Passage from Haines to lower Canada. I spent a good bit of time that first night on the upper deck - at the back of it - throwing up over the edge. I was pretty sick. At some point in the middle of all this, I happened to look up and see one of the most incredible sunsets going on that I had ever seen - before or since. It was the midnight sun, and it was pure gold all around. I rushed around and got out my camera gear and shot a few photos, then went back to throwing up. That image later became the cover of the largest-selling calendar in the world one year, and I paid for much of the Alaska trip with it. Later that summer I returned west to attend Boyd's workshop - a trip that would change my life forever in so many ways. My roommate turned out to be the assistant district attorney for the county that Denver is in, and we had a great time with Boyd and the rest of the crew. We also consumed a great deal of wine that a guy from Missouri had brought with him. Nothing like getting drunk at high altitude to make your head spin and nearly come off! I got some great images during that workshop, including an entire essay on Boyd's assistant's legs, that I called "Lodgepole Pine Legs." This girl had really long legs (she was not a model but could have been one - Dyan Zasolowski), and even though many of the photos were almost revealing, her husband came to the final presentation and loved the photos - then bought several prints from me to put up on his wall. Later I spent a week roaming around in the Tetons - my first time there - and would fall in love with them. Then I returned to the workshop place and spent ten days with the executive editor of Audubon magazine (Gary Soucie) - what I mostly got out of that workshop with Boyd and Gary was that I COULD NOT write, and even if I could, I HATED IT! Also on that trip I linked up with a group of hikers that were hiking across the United States - they would eventually pass through Arkansas, and I would become their leader. I would also remain with them for most of the rest of their hike to the Atlantic Ocean - another life-changing event. It was called HIKEANATION, and was composed of 50-60 folks of all ages and from all walks of life who were hiking across the country. Once again, I could write another book about all of that, but suffice it to say that getting involved with this group that was sponsored by the American Hiking Society was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and to the future of hiking in the state of Arkansas. By the way, we finished up that hike in 1981, and I STILL use the tent and sleeping bag that I purchased on that trip - some of the best items ever made, and I expect them to last a few more years. One of the highlights of that entire 13-month voyage (I was only with them for about half of it), was when they closed off part of Pennsylvania Avenue and we hiked in mass past the White House and up onto the steps of the US Capitol. There was to be a major event there with us and quite a few of the guys from up on the hill. We looked very weird in that environment, what with our full backpacks and everything. Just as the big shots were beginning to gather on those famous steps, and we were getting ready to begin the official ceremony, someone stepped up to the microphone and announced that the Pope had been shot. Most of the dignitaries fled, but we remained and had a subdued celebration. We eventually all gathered around the base of the Washington Monument for the final event of the day. We were swarmed over by press photographers and television crews from the major media outlets - as we had been much of the way across the country (I don't know how many television and radio and newspaper interviews I gave along the way, but it was a bunch). I learned later that one of the main Associated Press photos that came out of the event that day and was used and published in hundreds of newspapers all across the country, was one of my and another hiker, embracing. I never got a copy of that, but heard about it from a lot of people. We continued to hike on towards the sea, and I learned all about stuffing myself with all-you-can-eat crab. When HikeANation was over I returned to Arkansas and began to formulate a plan to start a hiking club of my own, mostly one that would continue the construction of the Ozark Highlands Trail. The forest service had started to build the hiking trail of my dreams, along much of my original route I hiked years before, but they lost funding and interest in the project and it was dead in the water. I called a meeting in September 1981, hoping to get ten or twelve folks to show up to help me work on this new trail. We had more than 50 people show up at the very first meeting and we were off and running. Several of the folks at that very first meeting are still active in the club and good friends of mine (and will be out here at the cabin next weekend) including Scott and Carolyn Crook (who own the Pack Rat Outdoor Center in Fayetteville), Luke Collins, and the WILDMAN himself - Carl Ownbey. At that time Carl was not much of a hiker, but we were going to change all of that. The timing was right for all the planets to align and things to come together and all work out - I did not have a job and didn't need one, and the trail needed to be built. We jumped into this project head first and hit the ground running and never looked back. We put together a team of volunteers that would eventually number more than 3,000 folks from almost every state in the union (we still have members from about 20 states even today). And by gosh we all got out there and built hiking trail. We not only built it, but we also designed it and decided where it would go. This would become perhaps the very first long-distance trail in the country that was put together totally from scratch by volunteers, and I happen to think that fact is one reason why it is consistently rated as one of the top hiking trails in the United States. Sometimes we would have six work trips each month, with everyone piling into my poor little Subaru station wagon (I went through a couple of them in those early years, and they performed like a champ), with tools strapped to the roof. Once a month we would go on a fun hike instead of working. And during the week I would go out with Ken Smith and we would map out where we wanted the trail to go. The next several years would find me almost constantly out in the woods - building trail, taking pictures, hiking, and eventually drawing the first map of the Ozark Highlands Trail. Since no one had a map, and we already knew how well the forest service could do them (not!), I decided to publish my own map of the trail. At about the same time I published that first map, I also had written my first real magazine article and submitted it to a national magazine - they bought it and ran it in the August 1983 issue of Backpacker magazine. Two things about that article - first, they changed just about every single word that I wrote - except for the first paragraph - they left it intact; and secondly, I ended up selling more than 10,000 copies of that trail map to folks who had read the article and wanted to come to Arkansas and hike! My publishing business was off and running! Long about the same time I heard through the great photographer Matt Bradley that National Geographic needed some photos from Arkansas and he did not have the ones he wanted - I made a submission to them and presto, they bought several that were published the next year. So BINGO, right out of the box, I had a photo on the cover of the largest-selling calendar in the world, sold 10,000 copies of my first self-published item, and was published by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC! None of this had all that much to do with my skill as a photographer or publisher, but rather had almost everything to do with TIMING - I simply was at the right place in the right time and things happened. I would be published by National Geographic several times in the years to come, but you know, once I had that feather in my cap, I never really worked at them for more - I realized early on that being out there all the time and hustling my photo work did not appeal to me. So I got published by most of the big names in the business over the year, nearly all of them due to them coming to me, yet I was not a really big-time national nature photographer, and I guess I never wanted that in the first place. I was quite content with my blend of some big-time stuff, along with my trail work, and my own publishing interests. I learned early on that getting out and going through the PROCESS of taking nature photographs was a natural high for me, and most of the time that was enough. But the sales continued - when the editors call and want photos, what can I say? On the girlfriend front, I was no longer terrified of women, and was happy knowing I could sit down with anyone and be their equal, but just as in high school and in college, I never went out and chased after women, nor did I feel compelled to have a date on a Saturday night. There were a number of very close ladies in my life during this period, and we had some really fine times. But I also remained very shy around people in general, and girls in particular. UNLESS I was up in front of a group - speaking to a large group of people was very easy for me, it was being in groups of three or four where I really curled up and rolled into a ball. Sometime in the latter half of my third decade I bought my very first house. The moment I saw this house I knew it would be mine. It took me almost a year to talk the owner into selling it to me, and then I moved in and lived there for 20 years. It was a tree house right in the middle of Fayetteville, right around the corner from where mom lived. It set way back in the lot and you could not really see the house because there was no yard - just woods. To get to the front door you had to walk across a 50-foot long bridge that spanned a creek below, and then you entered the house in the living room. When the leaves were on the trees you could not see another house in any direction, yet it was located only a half block off of both North and Gregg streets - does that sound like a great house for me or what! I immediately built on a very large deck on the back of the house, and put in a hot tub. And then the parties began. For a while there we had a party just about every weekend, and any time it snowed I didn't even had to make any calls - folks would show up with towels and booze. I will only pass on two bit of info here. During one party when we had about 6-8 inches of new snow, we all had been sitting in the hot tub and drinking for nearly an hour when we got the idea to all get up and go roll in the snow. Carl Ownbey - in his mid-60's or later by this time - was the elder statesman of the group. But he got right on out and rolled in the snow right along with us, wearing only a very tiny swim suit. Quickly, we all ran and jumped back into the tub and went through the process of heating back up again. Eventually someone noticed that Carl was not with us - OH NO, we knew the cold had been too much of a shock to his fragile and aging body, we thought he might be in trouble. Then we heard him singing - the old man was STILL out in the snow, after more than five minutes, making snow angels, and singing at the top of his lungs. This episode, and another one that I won't go into that happened in the Hurricane Creek Wilderness area and involved a funny cigarette - is what led me to tag the name of THE WILDMAN on Carl - a name that has stuck with him ever since. And the other little tidbit about life on Patricia Lane in the trees in Fayetteville is, well, heck, I had probably better not get into that!
So I was a guy with many faces - very shy and aloof and spending most of my time alone out in the woods, organizing a major volunteer effort with folks from all over the country, getting published in the biggest publications in the country, and having wild parties. But mostly I remained a loner, quite happy with myself and loving every moment I would spend in the woods. I was not really ready to grow up, but I was maturing in many ways. Oh, oh, before I must put this to rest and get to bed, I want to tell you about one night I spent alone with a beautiful lady on board a large sailing ship anchored in a deserted bay in the Virgin Islands. We were there for the photo workshop with Boyd, and our boat would be on we would use during the workshop - we arrived a few days early to get things all set up. It was late at night that very first night, there were a million stars out, and the sea air smelled just great. There was a warm breeze, and not a single light in sight anywhere on the horizon. The wind shifted and the boat began to swing and was headed into a part of the cove that I did not want us to go into. In fact it seemed like the darn anchor had broke loose. The beautiful lady that was with me (she was a student, I a teacher, or at least an assistant to Boyd) was fast asleep below deck. I decided that I had to do something about the anchor. Going back to my cave diving days, I jumped into the water and grabbed a hold of the anchor line and followed it on down into the deep, dark waters. When I finally reached the anchor sure enough it was just dragging along the sandy bottom of the ocean floor - probably only 30 feet deep in this cove. I managed to get the anchor up and dug into the sand and it seemed to be holding. And then I noticed THEM. It was a moonless night and pretty dark in the water, but the sea was alive with color, and LIGHT. Actually hundreds, no probably thousands of tiny lights moving all over the place. That he HECK? I had never seen anything like this before (I did not have a flashlight). Turns out they were some sort of algae that lights up when disturbed. It was, like the fish at the entrance to the spring in the afternoon sunshine, one of the most incredible sights I had ever seen in my life - and once again, no way to ever photograph it. That's OK, at least for the moment, my mind is still a pretty darn good camera. | ||
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