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It’s 1952 and you and your family are traveling through Yellowstone National Park on your very first visit. You are eight years old and your little sister is four and you’re in your dad’s pride and joy, a 1950 Tudor, Palisade green Ford with the grey plush upholstery that only had a few root beer stains on it from the A & W visits. He had bought it used because it was a demo and it only had 28,000 miles on it and it was a really good deal. It was the first nearly new car he had ever had.

Mom is riding shotgun smoking like a fiend because she’s nervous. Dad’s been telling her all the stories of how Grizzly bears have been pulling kids out of the windows and eating them on the spot and although she doesn’t quite believe him you can tell she’s been thinking about it by how much she’s smoking. She’s already made us roll the window up part way.

Dad is in his glory, driving real slow so we can see everything. Telling us everything he knows about each new animal we come across. Most of it was facts gleaned from Disney movies and watching Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom, but it was God’s own truth to me. If he would have told us that the birds riding on the backs of the buffalo were specially trained by Norwegian bird herders I would have believed it to my dying day. He didn’t but he might have said that to mom just to see her reaction.

It was hot and sweaty, those Fords didn’t have air in those days and mom’s smoking and the windows being partially rolled up brought out any latent tendencies to car sickness and sis was the first casualty. Dad got the car stopped quick enough that she was able to be as sick as she wanted to be outside, there wasn’t going to be any of those stains on the upholstery. All the while mom kept a sharp look out  for bears just in case. The good part of that was mom got convinced to let us have the windows all the way down if we promised to roll them up again at the first sign of danger and she was running out of cigarettes.

Meanwhile I was in my glory. I had the 35mm camera dad had given me and it had an entire roll of Kodachrome slide film in it and I could shoot what ever I wanted to. 36 pictures to spend. I was going to use one to show my sister throwing up but I thought you can see that anytime so I was only going to shoot what would appear in National Geographic and it would have my name on it and I would get famous and go to Africa to shoot lions and tigers, (yeah I know there’s no tigers in Africa, I know it now) and each picture would be perfect.

We were now kind of in a hurry to get to the lodge before all the rooms were gone. We’d had to sleep in the car once before on the way because dad wouldn’t stop driving and by the time mom yelled enough all the rooms were gone and we had to sleep in a parking lot next to a bunch of trucks that kept their motors running all night. We were not sleeping in the car when there were bears around so if you don’t get us a room I will kill you and the bears can damn well eat you. That was kind of what the conversation sounded like between mom and dad so we were heading in pretty fast.

It was then that I saw my first buffalo, in fact, three or four of them and I yelled louder than mom for dad to stop quick, because it looked like sis was going to throw up again. She wasn’t but I couldn’t let my first chance at being famous go by without some kind of attempt to get the picture. While dad made sure she threw up outside whether she wanted to or not, I was able to get my first ever real picture of wild animals. That was it, I was going to be famous. I guarded that camera with my life. There was going to be 35 more images in there that would be the best pictures ever taken. They would be more important for me than bear repellant spray would have been to mom.

The trip went on, adventures were had, cross words were spoken, we saw bears and it was mildly disappointing because they didn’t kill and eat anybody, I filled up my roll of Kodachrome and it wasn’t long before we headed back home. Above is the first picture of the buffalo I would have taken if this trip had actually taken place. It didn’t of course, we didn’t take trips like that, but I’m sure that everything I remember would have happened exactly as described had it actually happened. We went places, I took pictures, just not at Yellowstone, at least not then.

The image above was taken last year at Yellowstone and through the magic of Photoshop it was processed in such a way that it looks exactly like one of the Kodachrome slides that I did take back then. The only difference is 60 plus years and some imagination.  Mom and Dad are gone now but I bet if you could ask them about this trip they’d say yeah that could have happened. Mom did smoke like a chimney and yelled a lot, and Dad would drive way too long and maybe sis didn’t get carsick all that often but everything mentioned did happen at one time or another, just not there and not then. But after all, what are memories but things you want to remember. Is there a rule that they have to be real.