I knew that somewhere around the house there was an envelope of photos I had taken of the dam being built. These were in the (my) pre-digital age, but I knew they could be scanned and presented for your entertainment and edification. If only I could find them. I looked in all of the usual places, but they eluded me.
It so happened that when Rachel was here a few weeks ago, she and Libby started "scrapbooking" and brought up boxes of "scrap" from the basement. Then one morning I found an envelope beside my computer. Within it were the photos of the dam construction.
Memory is a funny thing. In my memory I had taken impressive pix showing in instructive detail all of the important stages of the dam construction. Perhaps I should have continued to live in my memory.
Not only are there fewer of these pix than I remembered, but they are all pretty miserable as photos. Take that down a generation or two as they go from print to scan to pdf to jpeg to here and you get a sad reduction in quality.
Still, this photo will give you some sense of the construction of the dam. I took this shot standing in what would become the pecan plantation. I'm looking to the west, and what you see is the notch in the dam before it was filled in. This notch was a route the dozer man used to go in and out of the lake bed. It is also where he laid the drain pipe so that it would be at the lowest part of the lake bed before he buried it with the rest of the dam atop it. Curiously, this part of the dam is water tight. I would have expected it to leak, but I suppose the part of the dam built here is no different from the other parts of the dam (well, expect for the parts that
do leak).
You can see one of the burn piles to the right. That's all gone; I have a photo of it I will share with you that merits a little discussion.
Missouri calendar:
- Voles and mice feed on grass and seeds under the snow.
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November 29th, 2007 at 4:08 am
Is it possible that these pictures in the envelope were the culls of the lot, hence being with the scraps in the basement, and the good ones are yet to be found?
November 29th, 2007 at 6:39 am
I think you should rejoice in how much better you’ve become as a photographer. I’m not saying the picture above is bad either. I thought it did a good job of illustrating what you were writing about.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:37 am
ANY pictures are better than NO pictures. Evidently that picture is only worth 374 words but it is still worth 374 words!
November 29th, 2007 at 9:20 am
I thought I had documented the construction of our house, quite a bit of which was done by me, but I guess most of my documentation is mental, too.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Burn piles?
Did you have to bulldoze lots of forest to create Lake M?
November 29th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Gin – Nope, these were the keepers.
RCW – Nonetheless, I am disappointed with them. I was shooting with a Canon SLR, probably using 200 speed film on a day with good light. I don’t know why this one (and most of them) came out so ad.
Ed – I knew these pix were somewhere, so I am glad I have at least these.
Mark – I’m still hoping that some other long-forgotten pix will turn up.
FC – Yep, about four acres total were bulldozed to make the lake, dam, and pecan plantation.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
I hadn’t noticed that quip about the voles and mice form the Missouri Calendar when I wrote my prior comment. That is interesting to me. It almost sounds as though whoever wrote that expected snow to always be on the ground by this time of year. I don’t live in Missouri, but I would guess from what I’ve seen from being there at times of the year later than now that that isn’t the case anymore. I wonder in what time period that statement was written.