Views of Daggett Rock (Me, circa 2008)

Let’s have a post for the mere sake of posting and to let you know I’m alive and still in business — although Amazon has had another round of random purges.

Here’re a couple views of Daggett Rock taken in 2008 or a bit earlier. The more that I think on it, the more I’m convinced it was 2007, but I’ll not be bothered to change a YouTube description.

Daggett Rock is a local-ish natural attraction that, like most Maine attractions, does its best to keep tourists away. It’s down a long single-lane dirt road winding around a mountain followed by a half-mile trek up a ravine until you hit a clearing in the woods. There you’ll find a big rock historically called “The Big Rock” until the Daggett’s bought the land it sits on. It’s the largest glacial erratic in New England, although it split in three pieces under its own weight as the glacier receded. There’s a person in a light-colored shirt milling around both views for scale. You can walk around it, walk through the cracks, and there are usually some logs propped-up on it if you’re game enough to shimmy up them and reach the top. There’s a Victorian-era brickwork bench if you’d like your picture taken in front of it, as travelers have done for some 150 years.

The views were taken with my silent-era camera on a couple 36-exposure cartridges of Tri-X film bought at the local pharmacy — the film pulled out and wound onto spools in a changing bag in the trunk of the car. It was developed in much the same way, bucket-style, with the processing stripped down to just a developer bath and then fixer. The transfer, I’m sure, was just videotaping the view port of my upright Movieola that I watch all my 35mm film on.

I mostly remember hauling the camera and tripod, which have to weigh 30 pounds combined, up the ravine, which is not the easiest hike in the world. It was barely Spring and the rocks were still coated in ice. Going back downhill was much worse than the ascent.

 

Edit:

Every video has been relisted except Bathing Beauties and Big Boobs (1918) because I think Amazon thinks it’s porn — it’s not, it’s using “boob” in the sense of “foolish person”; and Romeo and Juliet (1911) for reasons that are beyond me. Nearest I can tell is that it’s only part two, and that’s for the very good reason that part two is the only part that exists, but then again, they’ve got no issue with The Timber Queen and that’s only part twelve.

Cinderella (1911) they initially rejected because they said the title wasn’t visible in the key art. It’s literally written in a highway sign font — DIN 1451 very closely matches the Thanhouser house typeface — bold, white, with a thick black outline, sized to cover as much of the image as possible. I fail to imagine how more visible it could be. I submitted it again and it went through the second time.

Amazon’s ways are not our ways.