thedude.com

Welcome! You certainly picked a gorgeous day to fly in to Oakland.

My Achiever wife and a couple neighbors got up very early this morning to participate in the KFOG Bridge-to-Bridge Run (OK - walk). I don’t know how they do it. I wish I had a fraction of that energy! While Jack and I were just too busy to squeeze in a 7K walk, we did get to pose with them in front of this giant inflatable floss dispenser!

Thanks, Steve, for taking this fun shot!

Need I say more?

thedude and Steve out on a shoot on a clear day in October, 1983. I don’t remember where we got the 4 x 5 camera, but I know Steve got some great results with it. Got more scans, Steve?

My old pal Steve is scanning his old slides and negatives, and he sent me this gem, shot somewhere in the late eighties - Steve thinks it was 1988 or 1989. He shot this with Kodak’s nearly grain-free Ektar 25 negative film in his Pentax ME Super from San Franciso’s Corona Heights Park. (Google placemark) Yep, that’s a young dude in the foreground. If Steve’s time frame is right, I would have just returned from a year in Diego Garcia.

My circle of old friends is getting wider. Yesterday I received a long e-mail from Troels Nørlem - another old pal from Greenland. What a thrill it is to hear from Troels - the official Thule Air Base Photographer! Sounds like he’s is doing well with his wife and two kids in what he refers to as, “the outskirts of the civilized world (Djursland, Denmark)”. These days he’s working as a photojournalist and sells photographic flash equipment on the side. That’s him on the left.

Way back in 1987, Troels and his friend Jesper flew to Germany in a 1953 Danish military aircraft to visit yours truly. The trip turned out to be a test of their endurance and bravery. The two of them managed a top speed of about 70 miles an hour in the old plane with fabric-covered wings and a back seat made of bare sheet metal. I remember Troels telling me how frustrating it was seeing cars on the Autobahn below speeding away from them. Not only that, but the plane had a very short cruising range meaning they had to land every two hours to refuel. I think it took them 8 hours to make the trip from Copenhagen to Pirmasens, Germany - a distance of about 500 miles.

I got a chance to fly the old plane - but only for a few seconds. I “took control” and immediately realized that if the pilot was to release his tight grip on the stick, (it took both hands to control) the plane would go straight into a nose-dive. Yikes! All I can say is that it was a very good thing that Jesper was able to take back control of the plane, as we’d certainly have crashed with me on the stick.

There have been more than a few occasions in my life when I felt that I was witnessing something that few people will ever see. You could say that everything that each of us experiences is by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime event. The thing is that in this case, I was smart lucky enough to have had my trusty Pentax ME Super and a fresh roll of Kodachrome in hand.

This image was shot in Thule, Greenland in 1985 or ‘86. As far as I know, it’s the only barracks fire ever to have occurred there. The devastating fire started very early in the morning, during Julemand - an annual fund-raising event occurring every Christmastime in Thule. (I have several fun photos from this fun event, and maybe I will get around to posting some one day.) Anyway, at around 3:00 AM, while photographing the marathon event at the Thule Air Base TV station, someone yelled, “Fire!”

The fast-moving fire completely consumed the living spaces of several Danish friends in about an hour. Nothing survived. All who lived in Barracks 204 lost everything.

The next morning, Erik discovered that his collection of walrus tusks - arranged neatly by size - looked as if it had somehow survived the inferno. But, although their shape had not changed, their composition had. The tusks had been baked into pure, almost weightless ash.

Not all of my Danish friends in Greenland were this crazy - but Erik and Randi got this idea…

When you live in a place where the average temperature in February and March is -30 degrees Centigrade, it’s only a matter of time before someone will ask to have their picture taken in an unheated room wearing nothing but their underwear. It’s totally predictable, right? What else would you do after five months of darkness?

In case you’re wondering - yes, it was VERY cold in this unused section of some building on the air base. Don’t worry - the photographers dressed a bit more sensibly.

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.)

Lelah found Lohtse in an adoption agency in Saigon about 6 months ago. My hunch is that they’re lucky to have found each other.

All of us - including Orion - love you very much!

Still loving the new camera. Any excuse to shoot with it is good enough for me, but especially when it involves good food and fine friends!