A reel I forgot I had

I flew to Hawaii to shoot a friend’s wedding. The rehearsal dinner took place at a lovely Japanese tea house, and I dug an unlabeled reel out of the bottom of my camera bag and loaded it. I got about ten seconds of the tea house before I hit the end of the roll. I said WTF and loaded a new one.

I had no clue the rest of that reel was Jalama until I threaded it into the scanner.

The rest was one of the fog days. Jalama sits far from everything else, and in spring and fall the fog socks it in. In black and white it looks like the way I’d imagine heaven, or the great beyond, whatever you call it.

And I’m a sucker for grain. I think grain feels like a true memory in a way no pixel-perfect digital photo can. Call me a snob. I don’t care.

I’d been practicing slow-mo that day and working on composition with the dogs. Indy, the black-and-white one, chasing birds. A living sand dollar. We find plenty of them when the beach goes quiet. Walk thirty minutes up or down the beach from the campground, and you can go hours without seeing another person.

And Cameron fishing. Fishing makes him happy in a way nothing else does. It fits him. We caught a perch, a small one, and let it go.

Oslo died last year. On the reel he naps next to my mom in the sand. He was such a good dog.