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| Sunday, May 8, 2005 |
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Later 
| | Hitting the road for DIDW. See ya on the Bay side. |
Re: collections
| | Happy Mother's Day to ya'll. |
| | Last night I was thinking about how ironic it was that 95% of my public photography has no people in it, when people are my favorite subjects. I certainly have a pile of people pix I could put up on Flickr (which I'm not bored with, by the way; so that disqualifies me as a Digeratum after all, I suppose). But I don't want to post any without people's permission. In the case of the Les Blogs series (1, 2, 3 and 4), the subjects were bloggers (and in a few cases the founders of Flickr itself), and it would have been wrong not to post what I shot. Yet even there, one blogger preferred not to be photographed, and I respected that. |
| | Then I realized it was past midnight, and already Mother's Day, and that I had some scans of old photos laying around the hard drive that I hadn't put up, with Mom's help, during the couple weeks before she died. |
| | Hence the Wanigan 1 set of photographs. The originals were hardly much bigger than the Flickr thumbnails. They were shot in the summer of 1949, in the pine barrens of New Jersey. My parents, Allen H. and Eleanor Searls, bought 1.5 acres of nondescript land for $150, not far from "The Shack," a tiny house that my grandfather, George W. Searls, had built for their family a generation earlier, on a grid of sand roads called Cedarwood Park. (Here's Mom and Pop with my cousin Sue Apgar in front of the Shack in 1948.) To get some idea of how far back all this goes, George W. Searls was born during the Civil War, in 1862. His wife Ethel was born in 1882. They married in 1900. Daughter Ethel followed in 1903, my father in 1908 and daugher Grace (still going strong, by the way) in 1912. |
| | My parents called their shack The Wanigan, which was an Alaskan term for A small house, bunkhouse, or shed mounted on skids and towed behind a tractor train as eating and sleeping quarters for a work crew. Mom and Pop met in Alaska in the early 1940s. (Some pix of Mom in Alaska are here. She helped me put that one together three days before she died.) They brought the house on the back of a flat-bed truck to a clearing in their piece of woods, and proceeded to build a summer place with no running water or indoor plumbing. I don't think they even had electricity while they did the work shown in pictures like this one, of Pop and his brother-in-law, Archie Apgar, building out a kitchen addition to the Wanigan. |
| | I turned two years old that summer. My sister Jan was born in May (here's Mom with the two of us). Yet I remember everything about the Wanigan vividly. (It's weird, but my memories go back even to the crib.) For example, I remember Mom and Pop standing in a pit, driving our well by dropping a larger iron pipe, half filled with lead, over and over again onto the top end of the growing length of well pipe that it hammered into the ground. We finally got good water from the aquifer (then one of the world's finest) just 25 feet into the ground. The hand pump Mom's working here came to stand inside the house. An electric pump came the next summer, and indoor plumbing the summer after that. |
| | The place was paradise. We went swimming almost every day in the ocean at Mantaloking Beach, in the Metedeconk River or in a logoon at Kettle Creek. Both those water bodies were estuaries of Barnegat Bay, where we also eventually came to operate a small homemade boat, for fishing and camping expeditions. |
| | The forest floor was a network of clearings among blueberry bushes below pines and scrub oaks. Mom would send me out to graze on blueberries while picking enough of them for her to bake into pies. I'd come back with a purple face and stand still while she seached for ticks, as if I were a dog. Pop and Uncle Archie cleared winding paths through the woods to a pair of other houses: "Bayberry," where Grandma & Aunt Ethel lived, and the unnamed house where my great aunt Florence Dwyer (Grandma's younger sister) lived. I still remember those paths as clearly as my parents' faces. |
| | I can also still hear the sounds of tree frogs, crickets and whip-poor-wills that would fill our summer nights for the thirteen years we lived in the Wanigan. The whip-poor-wills' loud whistle (after which it's named) always came about half an hour after sunset, and signaled bedtime. |
| | Alas, paradise has been lost for more than 40 years. My parents sold the Wanigan in 1962, after it was clear that the area would soon all turn to suburb. Grandma left Bayberry a few years later. (She lived until 1990, when she died at nearly 108 years old.) |
| | Our little acre and a half is under the white building in the middle of the photo here. Bayberry and Aunt Florence's were obliterated by the shopping center just South of there. |
| | But Cedarwood Park's grid of roads is still there to the right of that shopping center. And the Shack still stands, maintained lovingly by the current owners. |
| | When Mom and I took a tour of the area three summers ago, we confined our interests to sites that were still around: the boardwalk at Point Pleasant, the ruins of Asbury Park. Visiting the Wanigan's paved woods would have been painful. |
| | And now it's almost time for my 8 year old and his Mom to get up. |
| | What a long, great trip it's been, huh? |
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