Dad's Camera

Episode 56 - Dad’s Camera

Official transcript: https://www.cheynemusic.com/transcripts

A conversation about our National Parks, Dad’s Zeiss Ikon camera, a bit of Richard Dawkins, and cash flying out of a Cadillac on a mountain.

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Transcript

[Music]

JIM (voice-over): It is 2 hours before dawn. Gray Mountain, Arizona. Mom & Dad awaken Jan & me. “Get up. Get your things. Let’s go.” This was the trip where Dad discovered Best Western hotels, but there was no Best Western anywhere near Gray Mountain, Arizona. We found some off brand motel that probably isn’t there anymore. Also on this trip, Dad started each day with what he called “an honest to goodness breakfast.” 2 eggs, bacon, toast, maybe hash browns. And coffee. Cream and sugar. But there was no time for breakfast on this particular morning. Dad had a more pressing appointment: To take a picture of the sunrise. We got in the car. Mom held the map. Off we went for the 40 mile drive to see something none of us had ever seen before: Sunrise over the Grand Canyon. August 4th, 1970.

[Music]

JIM (voice-over): Family vacations always involved National Parks: Yosemite, Sequoia, Yellowstone, The Smokies. Driving west out of Michigan, across the prairies and planes, Mom sang a song for each new state we entered. Then, someone got an idea. Who would be the first to spot the front range of the Rockies? [Music] Is that it? No, those are only clouds. There?. No. There it is! The Rockies slowly rose above the East Colorado plane. Soon, Big Thompson Canyon, then Estes Park, then the visitor’s center and Dad’s signature photo: Majestic Long’s Peak behind an American flag, and he timed it so the breeze would set the flag out full. We preserved these times in our memories, and in the pictures Dad’s camera took…

[Music ends]

JAN: Oh, I know what that is.

JIM: This is what we call a family heirloom. This is a Zeiss Ikon Contaflex single lens reflex camera. This is from the late ’50s, and this was Dad’s camera for - Jan - about the first quarter century of our life. The pictures that he took passed right through this lens right here.

This lens saw two kids sitting on a boulder in Rocky Mountain National Park at Bear Lake. This lens saw five kids standing around Spangler Spring…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …at Gettysburg Battlefield. This lens saw a very young Senator Edward Kennedy walking alone in Washington, DC, in 1964, briefcase in hand. This lens has watched Old Faithful erupt, and Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The Golden Gate Bridge, over which Dad and I walked while Mom and Jan did something else. And then having accomplished that feat, we realized, “Oh, now we have to walk back.” This lens has seen Sequoias and Redwoods. This lens has seen all of Garden City Junior High’s band trips that Dad took his band on, numerous Christmases, CMIs, family visits, church events, camping trips, and new cars. This is the camera I used to take pictures of the televised moon landing, July of 1969, pictures I still have. And because Dad let me borrow this camera for my overseas trip in 1972, this lens has seen the Colosseum in Rome, the Parthenon in Athens, Paul and Silas’s prison in Philippi, the throne room in Knossos, Crete, and it has seen a muezzin call people to prayer in Northern Africa. This is a Zeiss Ikon Contaflex Super model camera, which would have held Kodachrome transparency film, ASA 64, 36 pictures per roll. Dad bought this first because of our trip out to Rocky Mountain National Park in 1960. And so the first task put to this camera was, “Let’s take a look at a family in a national park.” So I want to talk about national parks. What is the first national park that you ever visited? Mine, of course, was Rocky Mountain National Park. Dee, do you remember the first one you visited?

DEE: It may have been the Grand Canyon. Yeah, and we went there after TMI.

JIM: Jan, what was your first national park?

JAN: Rocky Mountain.

JIM: That was a 1960 trip, right?

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: The one that kind of initiated everything for us in our travel stuff. Rob?

ROB: Yellowstone, 1961…

JIM: Wow

ROB: …with my grandparents.

JIM: The Markses?

ROB: The Markses and Mom and Dad, Rob, Rick, and Sandy.

JAN: All in one car.

ROB: All in one car, yeah, station wagon, big blue station wagon. Grandpa and grandma slept in the station wagon, in the back of the station wagon, and we were in my Uncle Pete and Aunt Dorothy’s camper - a pop-up camper. By the way, my mom loved to say, tell this story, that we were gone for 30 days. We paid a total of $29 for lodging on that whole trip.

DEE: Oh my goodness.

ROB: $29.

JIM: You can’t get a parking fee at a hotel now for $29 a night.

DEE: No.

ROB: I know.

JIM: So, national parks, what was it Ken Burns called them? Is he the one that said, “America’s best idea? The national park idea started in the United States. The very first national park, which was…?

ROB: Yellowstone.

JIM: Yellowstone, in 1872, is what I’m trying to remember. And that was - who was the one that signed that into law?

ROB: Grant?

JAN: Yes, it was Grant.

ROB: Ulysses S. Grant?

JIM: U.S. Grant.

JIM: “America’s best idea” is attributed to a writer and historian, Wallace Stegner.

JIM: Stegner.

ROB: Pretty darn good idea.

JIM: It’s a very good idea. And what is the idea, really? Why do we have a national park? And what is it? What’s the purpose of them?

JAN: Just a quick thought here on the rest of that quote, because the rest of that quote kind of answers part of that. “National parks are the best idea we ever had, absolutely American, absolutely democratic. They reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” And that to me is - there are reasons why we have the parks, why they were established, but what’s unique about them is their democratic nature in that they belong to all of us. Anybody can go there. You don’t have to be wealthy to go there. They are our parks.

ROB: It’s been a battle that’s becen fought from the beginning, too, with private enterprise who want to develop these parks, to enrich themselves, to turn it into what Niagara Falls became and turned into.

JIM: So when you say democratic, that’s true. There is access for everybody, but not everyone could get to them. And in the early days of the park, it was mostly the wealthy that could get there, because how are you going to travel? How are you going to pull up? And for weeks sometimes to get to a place, can you afford to get there? Trains were set up. There’s still that train station at Grand Canyon, but we grew up at the time when the interstate road system…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …was being developed. This was Eisenhower’s idea in the ’50s, right?

ROB: Right.

JIM: And so interstate travel became much more accessible. And so if you had the time, then there were roads going right to the parks, and then they really became more democratic to where just about anybody could get there, but it’s not a club. It’s for all of us.

ROB: All of us.

JAN: There’s a - interestingly, in today’s America, most Americans, 80% of Americans, live within 100 miles of a national park. So they are both more accessible because we have roadways, but also there has been a great development in preserved land, bringing it into most of our states.

JIM: Yeah, I wanted to find out the closest national park property to where we are right now. Let’s say to Tampa, Florida. So I did a Google search, and Yelp just takes it and does an automatic - says, “Top 10 national parks in Tampa, Florida.”

[Laughter]

JAN: Okay.

ROB: All right.

JIM: “These are the top 10 national parks.” But if we were to hit the road right now, where would be the closest? Would it be the Everglades?

DEE: That’s what I would think.

JIM: Straight south to the Everglades.

JAN: I think so.

ROB: Yeah. I think the Dry Tortugas or the - what’s the one we just saw?

JAN: Biscayne.

ROB: Biscayne Bay might be a little bit further up the coast, but it’s out into the water here.

JIM: Yeah, Biscayne we visited on our anniversary a couple of years back. That one’s down to the southeast.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: Over in the Miami area. Dry Tortugas, uh, driving there is very difficult.

[Laughter]

ROB: Yeah, very.

JIM: To get to Dry Tortugas, it’s an island…

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: …off in the Gulf of Mexico, let’s say, and it’s a, uh, and that has a very famous fort there. And it was the prison for Dr. Mudd. Dr. Mudd, M-U-D-D, is the man who set John Wilkes Booth’s leg, but he spent time there. And it is available by sea plane or by - I think they actually have a landing strip there. You get there by plane or by boat. So other than Busch Gardens, the closest thing to Tampa, probably is the Everglades. You were just down there recently, weren’t you?

JAN: Yeah.

ROB: We were.

JAN: It was awesome.

ROB: Yeah. We spent some time down there with my sister and brother-in-law. And we took a couple of boat rides with - they were park personnel. It wasn’t a ranger. Which we find more and more. There are a lot more volunteers…

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: …and concessionaires that run a lot of these special activities in the park than there are rangers and naturalists. I think one of the first thing they’ve done is they’ve done away with naturalists. And they’ve got the law enforcement part of the national park still intact pretty much, although not now. Who knows? They’re laying off everybody, or firing everybody, I should say. So anyway, yeah, we had a really good time in the Everglades. They got the only place in the world where you’ve got crocodiles and alligators in the same place.

DEE: I saw something recently, a video. And what is the difference between a crocodile and an alligator?

ROB: Crocodiles have a narrower snout.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: And they’re usually bigger, different color.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: But you can definitely tell when you see a crocodile; the - the alligator has a very rounded snout, broad.

DEE: Okay.

ROB: But the alligator just goes down almost to a point.

JIM: The crocodile does.

ROB: Crocodile, that’s what I meant, sorry.

DEE: The video I saw was one was pursuing the other. And I already couldn’t tell which one. And there was one that was walking up, not upright, like, tall. And I said, “That must be the crocodile.” Because I always see alligators, like, kinda going along on their belly.

ROB: But they can. They can get up. They can run. They can run up to 20 miles an hour for a very short distance.

DEE: Well, this other one was low to the ground. This other one was up on its legs. And I was like - because that was the one pursuing the other one. But…

ROB: The only crocodile we have in the United States is that one in the Everglades. It’s an American crocodile.

JIM: And alligators, if they’re big enough, they could come over our back community fence there.

ROB: Sure.

JIM: From that wetland area that’s over there. They could come over there if they really had to find something.

DEE: The reason why I will never go there is because of the boa constrictors.

ROB: Yeah, well.

DEE: Did you see any?

ROB: We didn’t.

DEE: Okay.

ROB: We didn’t see any of the pythons.

JAN: Is that what you really mean?

DEE: Oh, that’s what I mean, the pythons.

ROB: We asked about them. And they’re still a major problem.

JAN: Well, in fact, one of the things we learned while we were there is you’ll see no small mammals. Because the pythons have taken them all out.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: You mentioned there’s another difference between crocodile and alligators, and that is what kind of water they’re usually in?

ROB: Yeah. Salt water. Crocodiles are generally salt or brackish water animals. Now alligators can go in - we’ve seen alligators in Tampa Bay over at Philippe Park.

DEE: Really!?

ROB: There’s an alligator that - well, I don’t know about regularly, but we see him - we’ve seen him on several occasions out in the Bay. And I wanted it to be a crocodile so bad…

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: …but it’s not. We got a close up, and it’s an alligator. So they can do that for a little while. But yeah, the crocodiles thrive in that salt water, brackish water.

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: So I have in my wallet a pass that allows me to go into any national park I want to at any time (that they’re open). Some parks are just drive-through parks. The Smokies, it’s just a drive-through because that’s a thoroughfare that gets from one side to the other. And that’s used so much for business and just for commuting that they can’t put a fee at that. Acadia is another one where you don’t need a pass to get into that. Did you need a pass into the Everglades?

ROB: Yes.

JAN: Yes. That was the greatest thing when we turned - when I turned 62, I believe, is when I could get my park pass. And it was right before - it was when they were their original crazy low price. Was it like $20?

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: And so now I get this pass for $20 that gets me into every park for the rest of my life, and gives me - it’s because I’m a senior; I guess it’s the gift of age - and it gives us a reduction on the cost of…

ROB: Half off.

JAN: …camping…

ROB: Yup. 50%.

JAN: …in national parks.

JIM: That’s great, yeah.

JAN: Just this ticket to wonderfulness.

JIM: Ticket to paradise. My pass was $80 because I’m much younger than you. But it was a lifesaver. When we were in Hawaii, we were driving along someplace, and there’s this little point of land, and that’s the national park. I think it’s a lighthouse. Wasn’t it a lighthouse we went to? Just on the…

DEE: Kauai.

JIM: …it was on Kauai House just before we came back. And just a point of land there, but it was the only bathroom facilities anywhere. My pass saved me that day. [Laughter] When we were kids, you would just pull into a national park. You had a tent. You’re ready to go. Later on, I actually would put in a reservation for camping. I did that in ’87 when I went out to the canyon. I remember making the reservation, but it was kind of like, “Just pick a site. You’re fine.” Not so much these days. The population of the United States, north of 300 million. And the visitors at national parks last year, just north of 300 million, right?

JAN: 331,863,358.

ROB: Yes.

JIM:  Exactly.

JAN: There you go.

JIM: And when we went to the canyon, I was so glad we were staying inside the park because getting in every day to the canyon was a long line of traffic.

ROB: In the ’60s and early ’70s, you never needed a reservation. We would go in. We’d get there early in the morning, and there’d usually be a lineup waiting to get in. And as soon as they released the sites for the day, you’d get in there. And they didn’t assign you. You got to go through and look. And so we would drop - the three kids, we’d get dropped off at different things because mom always said, “Oh, there might be something better. There might be something better than this one.” But oh, it always started, though. Mom was such a pessimist. She said, “Oh, we probably won’t find anything. You probably won’t find anything.” And then the first thing we come to, “Quick, Rick, get out. Stand right there.” So yeah. And it wasn’t until - well, actually, until Jan and I started camping that we - I don’t remember in 1980 if we made reservations in all those parks we visited.

JAN: I don’t know. I think we might have.

ROB: Well, and now, beyond that, back to how many people have been to the park, it is that overuse…

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: …stress on the parks right now. Now, in the most popular parks, you also have to make a reservation to get in during the day.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: And that’s the case in Rocky, and, well, all of the big parks, really, you need a timed entry to get in.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: And that’s to manage - because protecting the land is also part of it, as well as making them accessible…

ROB: Right.

JAN: …to manage the number of people in the parks.

ROB: They talk about loving the parks to death.

JIM: Yeah.

ROB: So many people want to visit them, and it takes its toll.

JIM: Going to a national park, it’s a different place. And for me, when I’m sitting in a park, time just stops. I’m looking at things that have been that way for millennia.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: I mean, the wildlife you can find there, the experiences you can find there, the water, the air, what you’re walking through, the way the weather is. A national park is a completely set aside place. The idea is you don’t leave a trace of yourself, right? So you’re not allowed to take anything out of a national. Not so much as a pine cone can you take out of a national park, if you have any integrity at all. And if you say, “Oh, this one won’t make a difference,” well, yeah, first of all, you’re harming yourself, and then a bunch of people with that attitude, it starts to make a difference.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: So you don’t take anything out of a park. What else do you do? What else is there about a national park that you remember as, “This is a special place,” other than just the gorgeous environment? This is a special place because…?

ROB: It’s a cathedral. They’re cathedrals for me. They’re huge, vast illustrations of a creator that’s beyond my reckoning.

JAN: That’s a big thing right there, that sense that you’re in some place that’s bigger than you.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: And it represents something beyond really your ability to comprehend.

JIM (voice-over): Sorry to interrupt, but while editing this podcast, I’m reminded of a passage from a book called “Science in the Soul” by Richard Dawkins, and I’ve just pulled my copy from the shelf. I realize Richard Dawkins’ name can be a lightning rod in the theist community. He is not only a world class evolutionary biologist, but over the past couple of decades he has been numbered among the so-designated “new atheists” for his rather trenchant opposition to faith over empiricism. Nevertheless, he too finds what we could call numinous, or transcendent, experiences in places such as the Grand Canyon.

Here, yeah, here it is.

“I am writing this,” says Dawkins, “two days after a breathtaking visit to Arizona’s Grand Canyon… To many Native American tribes the Grand Canyon is a sacred place: site of numerous origin myths from the Havasupai to the Zuni; hushed repose of the Hopi dead. If I were forced to choose a religion, that’s the kind of religion I could go for. The Grand Canyon confers stature on a religion…”

“In the dark night I walked out along the south rim of the canyon, lay down on a low wall and gazed up at the Milky Way. I was looking back in time, witnessing a scene from a hundred thousand years ago - for that is when the light set out on its long quest to dive through my pupils and spark my retinas. At dawn the following morning I returned to the spot, shuddered with vertigo as I realized where I had been lying in the dark, and looked down towards the canyon’s floor.”

Yes, if Dawkins was staying at El Tovar or the Bright Angel Lodge, I know the area well, and I would not lie down on that low wall, day or night.

He continues, “Again I was gazing into the past, two billion years in this case, back to a time when only microbes stirred sightless beneath the Milky Way. If Hopi souls were sleeping in that majestic hush they were joined by the rockbound ghosts of trilobites and crinoids, brachiopods and belemnites, ammonites, even dinosaurs.

“Was there some point in the mile-long evolutionary progression up the canyon’s strata when something you could call a ‘soul’ sprang into existence, like a light suddenly switched on? … a soul on the scale of a Beethoven or a Mandela? Or is it just silly to speak of souls at all?

“Not silly if you mean something like an overwhelming sense of subjective, personal identity. Each one of us knows we possess it…”

Yes, and he goes on from there, but that’s the bit I wanted to share. It’s a passage like that that cures me, I would say, of this trope of the cold, detached scientist, and reminds me of the power of nature to elicit the - I don’t want to use the word “numinous” again - it’s the power of nature to elicit - to provoke, a spiritual experience. To awaken the soul. For the four of us, it happens especially, inevitably, at national parks.

Sorry for that interruption. Back to the conversation.

JIM: So there are ranger-led talks…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: ..walks, experiences. What are some that we’ve taken in - let’s go with Rockies. This is common to all four of us. So we’re in the Rockies. What are some of the ranger experiences we had there?

ROB: Well, we did the thing up at Rock Cut, where we drove up. That’s up Trail Ridge Road near the top. And then walked back into the rocks. And they had - I recall a campfire. Is that true?

JIM: Mm-Hmm.

ROB: Yeah. They had marshmallows and hot dogs?

JIM: I remembered hot dogs.

JAN: Hot dogs.

ROB: Hot dogs. That’s what it was.

JAN: Because you got sick.

ROB: Because I got sick. That’s right. Yeah. And that was in the evening. And that was really cool.

DEE: I did not do a ranger talk in the Rocky Mountains. But we have a Trail Ridge Road memory, because there was a car ahead of us…

JIM: Oh, this is great. No, this is a payback. Let me set it up this way.

DEE: Okay.

JIM: Before we’re getting married, we’re down in Sanibel Island, looking at places where we might have our honeymoon.

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: We go into a 7-Eleven. And there on the floor is a carefully folded $100 bill. So what am I going to do? I’m Jim and Ethel’s son. I turn it in. Someone has lost this $100 bill. And I turned it in, perhaps to a teller who simply put it in their pocket. But anyway, I did what I thought. So when we get to Rocky Mountain National Park: karma. So what was the karma that happened there?

DEE: Well, suddenly, the car in front of us, money just starts flying out the window. [Laughter] Jim and I are like, bills everywhere. So we pull over to the side. And this car just takes off. They’re clueless as to what’s happened. So, and there’s a lot of wind. And there’s just money blowing around everywhere. So we just start grabbing things. There’s like $20 bills, wasn’t it?

JIM: 20s, 5s, 10s.

DEE: Yeah, and so we’re just - and we’re seeing, like, money going over the side of the mountain. And so we’re just trying to get as much as we can. And then after we got everything we could, we went up because we thought they may have stopped at…

JIM: Well, they were on their way up to the center at the top.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: But then you can keep going over into the Western Slope. We had $125. It was a Cadillac.

ROB: Oh, Okay.

JIM: If it had been a Yugo, we would have chased them down. But a Cadillac. So we had that money, and we went to every pullout from there on up. And even up at the top, we could not find them.

DEE: No, we did try to find them to give them their money. But we couldn’t find them.

ROB: Couldn’t find them.

JIM: So we had a meal at The Plantation restaurant…

ROB: Nice.

JAN: That’s perfect.

JIM: …in Estes Park.

JAN: Not there anymore, but perfect.

JIM: That was - oh, it’s not there now?

ROB: No, it’s not there.

JIM: And so we went back there for our thing. So I’m thinking that’s the karma. That’s - the $100 bill that I gave up in Sanibel was now $125.

JAN: Interest made.

ROB: You see, memories like that. You can’t - I mean, for me, four or five of the best years of my life, four of the best years of my life were when I was a teenager from ’69 to ’73. My dad would leave - he was a teacher - and we would leave the day after school was out. And, usually, we would head towards wherever the National Education Association was having its annual meeting. And that was in different cities around the country. But we planned our whole trip around that. We’d go there. On the way, we’d stop at national park after national park. And we would get home maybe one or two days before school started. We were gone for the whole two months. And in a little Apache Eagle pop-up camper with two beds and an area in the middle. And it had a chest, where we could put some clothes and stuff. Sandy was in a cot in the middle. Rick and I on one side, Mom and Dad on the other side. And we traveled like that, for those four years, for two months. And we loved it. We had a great time. We learned so much. We got to all of the 48 continental states during those years. And, you know, that was such an educational experience. Not just the parks, but the people that we met, the places that we visited, the cities that we were able to visit. There’s no - you can’t put a price on that…

JAN: Well…

ROB: …and the slides that Dad took.

JIM: Well, this was the tradition afterwards. We’d get all those slides together. We’d put them in carousel trays. We’d get a projector. And then the two families would get together. And relive the summer…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …through the slides, which are treasures.

ROB: Yes. Yes.

[Music begins]

JIM: And so some from this camera and some from your dad’s camera. And some of the things that maybe even the kids were able to take with our Kodak Instamatic cameras.

JIM (voice-over): The Grand Canyon is too vast to capture in just one shot. There’s the sweep of the plateau, the depth down to the Colorado, the many trails that have guided feet for 10,000 years, the minuscule marine fossils from the Cambrian half a billion years ago now here at 7000 feet above current sea levels. And then there’s a family of four - and, for all that’s transpired, we still are a family of four posing for a photo, August 4th, 1970.

All these scenes, captured and remembered by Dad’s camera.

Until next time.

[Music ends]