Earle’s Trove

 They speak to me, these ancient photographs. Old Dan MacKenzie – Bob Nagel’s grandpa – stands atop a loaded hay wagon, his grandchildren before him, scrawny horses awaiting the old man’s instructions. My dear old pal Sadie MacLean, when she was young, on a Farmall Cub tractor about to take her turn in a community ploughing contest. Bird Islands lightkeeper Dan Campbell and his wife Barbara Livingstone in front of the Ciboux light, about the time the Battle of the Somme was raging in 1916.

 Then there is Johnny MacKenzie proud as a peacock in three-piece suit, leaning on his shiny new Oldsmobile, somewhere in Boston. A studio shot of Bob’s three siblings, obviously taken before 1929 because Robert is not yet on the scene. A summer’s day quartet, one of them a MacKenzie soldier freshly returned from France about 1919, gallantry medal proudly displayed on his manly chest. A trio of long-gone relatives, rifles in hand, a freshly felled deer on the left fender of a rickety Ford.

Yes, the old pictures speak to me and set my imagination running. Did lightkeeper Campbell ever spot a German U-Boat from his perch on the lighthouse peak? Entrants in the ploughing contest were most certainly men; what did they make of Sadie trying to rob them of the blue ribbon? Who was the decorated soldier and what was the action that earned him his Military Medal? Who took the fatal shot that dropped the deer and what were the highlights of that day’s conversations?

The latest haul of archival photos comes compliments of Cousin Earle, the boy standing before the hay wagon. Peregrinations readers who also pay attention to my Flickr collections know full well how much I value decades-old pictures of long-gone kinfolk. I asked Earl whether he had any old pictures. Sure, he said. Not only did he let me see them while answering a string of who’s-who questions, but he let me take the whole works away so that I might scan as many as I liked.

I was once told that I should get used to the idea that the well of old pictures must one day inevitably run dry. I don’t buy it. I continue to draw water and have a notion there are a few good hauls left.