Monthly Archives: May 2008

Many of you know of my never-ending scanning project. Well, the scope of the task expanded this afternoon. Through the miracle of the Internets, my old friend Erik Larsen found a photo I shot of a cabin he built near Thule Greenland. You can view this image both on the Panaramio web site and on Google Earth. I was inspired to post it because it was at the time one of the northernmost images on the planet. When I uploaded the shot, I hoped Erik and others who have been to this remarkable place would see it, but I rather doubted that they would. Well, amazingly enough, Erik found the image and e-mailed me. Now I’ve been chatting with Erik from his home in Copenhagen all afternoon.

This upshot is that I now have to sift through and scan a pile of slides and negatives taken during my 17 months in Thule. Luckily, there aren’t as many of these as there are shots from my youth in Wisconsin, but now that I have located one friend from my tour in Thule, it probably won’t be long before I reconnect with others.

This Internet thing is pretty cool. You know – I think it may catch on!

Anyway, today’s shot was taken at one of the Danish barracks – maybe number 204, which later burned to the ground. (Yes, I have pictures of that too.) I was lucky to have been befriended by this group of wild and crazy dudes. Although I don’t remember all of their names, I do remember faces and what some of them did while in Thule. Erik (lower right) ran the base woodworking shop. Access to lumber is part of what enabled him to build his amazing cabin. Looks like this shot was made at a gathering of a little organization we called “Tyyynde Skiver”. Loosely translated, this means “thinly sliced”, which was a highly complimentary way of describing items of high quality – especially if they were related in some way to the female anatomy – a topic hot on the minds of the men on base, who outnumbered women by at least 20 to 1. (It wasn’t all bad though, there were a few fine Danish and American girls on base.)