When I’m wasting time, chewing on electronic distractions like a cow chews cud, I turn pack rat. Not that it is a drastically distant fall. The Force may run strong in some families–all I got was this encysted hoarder thing in my belly. Its not cancerous yet, but I need to keep an eye on it. With the interwebs, even my modicum of restraint is unnecessary. I have 2 terabytes of closet space for all the crap I scrounge. At one point, before some serious deleting, there were 25,000 bookmarks on one of my browsers. It is time to give some of this crap away. So here, take it–not all of these posts will be so cheesy, but it is a Junk give-away, so the bar is low.
More rain. 34 of the past 38 days. Death to meteorologists! A pox on all their houses. If only I like rain even of a fraction as much as this young lady seems to.
It’s actually the morning of Day 6 because, on the heels of my my vapid post ever I was too 1) Shell-shocked with shame, 2) Quietly Bemused, or 3) just distracted doing a bunch of other crap, that I didn’t the Day 5 post out. On behalf of the entire Old Road Apples staff, which is pretty much me and the geriatric dog, we beg your forgiveness and understanding.
Bad puns, anachronistic but appealing garters and hose on the pilgrim lass, and foreshadowing of the coming strife betwixt colonist and indigenous, and some Freudian imagery –I dare say this photo has it all: history, pyschology and literary instruction as well as the obvious sex appeal. God bless America and pass the sweet potatoes. Also, interestingly enough, not a turkey to be seen.
Anybody miss me while I was out of town and away from the Interwebs? Well, I missed you–or “yinz guys” as we like to way in western PA.
NAU Cline Library, Special Collections and Archives, Colorado River Plateau Digital Archives. Photo by Josef Muench. Call # NAU.PH.2003.11.4.3.H3828A
I had several ideas I thought I could write about today, but a second look at this morning’s “random” photo inspired me to do a little digging to see who this woman is and what she’s about. Fortunately, this was an easy one to run down.
As I’ve said before, most of the photos represented in this series have come by way of Tumblr and Pinterest, and are either unattributed, or have been reposted so many times that it’s difficult to figure out the original source.
This Sunday’s photo has a lot of clues, and while it shows up all over the net, I had no problem figuring out that the woman in the photo is Georgie White Clark, a fairly famous and historically significant river guide who made her mark floating the Colorado River through Arizona’s Grand Canyon (among other places) –which she first descended in the mid 1940’s. It deserves notices that while most people run the Colorado is rubber rafts, Ms White and a friend did a 60-mile stretch by…swimming it, wearing lifejackets.
Just so we’re clear on what we’re talking about, here’s a glimpse of one of the rapids:
NAU Cline Library, Special Collections and Archives, Colorado River Plateau Digital Archives. 1955. Call # NAU.PH.92.17.1
Not only was she the first woman to swim the canyon, she was the first to row a boat through the canyon, and the first woman to run an outfitter service to guide others through the canyon as well. Her story is easily found spread across the web, and deserves a look.
NAU Cline Library, Special Collections and Archives, Colorado River Plateau Digital Archives NAU.PH.96.4.190.218Glen and Bessie Hyde
And what a good story it is–“controversial” in life–though, for the record, after an admittedly cursory bit of research I’ve found little explanation for her “controversial” resputation beyond the observation that she wasn’t a modern-style feminist and that she liked to pack tin cans for her float expeditions and I suspect, had she been a man that word would not been been applied to her, her legend grew in death. Numerous, but nebulous, clues suggested that her auto-biography was filled with manufactured information, and that she may have been someone entirely different, possibly even a murderer, in the part of her life before she began running the river: Bessie Hyde, who infamously disappeared, along with her husband, on a honeymoon float down the river in 1928 that would have made Bessie the first woman to run the canyon. Was Georgie actually Bessie, returned 20 years later to finish what she’d started? It’s an exciting story that reads like a movie, and can be read in detail here:
I love to tell stories with words and images, often with a darkly magical twist. While speculative fiction & dissecting pop culture are my primary passions, I also work with clients & brands by assisting with content creation, editing, marketing & design.
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