MPB 35-09-04 - January, 1984

 

January, 1984 - Ain't technology great?  We jump ahead almost three years, but based on the photo, it looks like we went back a decade.  No, that's not true.  Photography two decades back put this to shame.  In fact, my great grandfather was a professional photographer, and I have some of his photos that make this look like something the bird pecked out for The Flintstones.  Most of the photos from my college years look like this.  I received a very nice 110 camera for Christmas in 1981, a second straight year for photography as a theme.  The camera had a telephoto switch and I'm sure I used it in this case.  The original photo is currently in use as a bookmark, and I run across it occasionally.  It doesn't look anything like this, being scanned and processed to attempt to make out some detail that might unlock the location.

The barn in question is actually still in question.  I know it was taken outside of Oxford, Ohio, but that opens up a chunk of SW Ohio and SE Indiana.  My friends and I were road-tripping, this time for a long weekend at Hueston Woods State Park.  Two cabins, food via care packages from our families, lots of card games and zero incidents of personality crisis.  Except for an incident with the Oxford police on Saturday night, it was a great weekend.

That said, my young life was in turmoil.  I was fairly sure that my relationship at the time was heading for an end, and that weighed heavily on my mind.  To combat this, I'd grab the keys and drive, which allowed me to think things through.  I was driving and thinking a lot on this weekend.  Sometimes more than once a day.  Mostly I was by myself, but I remember Rick going with me on one backroads jaunt.  On the occasion that I took this photo, I was alone.  My memory of it is fuzzy, but I swear it involved a late afternoon left out of the Hueston Woods driveway, which would put me on SR 732.  I had dropped some friends off at the lodge where they were going swimming, and only had an hour or so to drive, so based on Google Maps, this was likely off of 732, 177 or Oxford-Germantown Road.

I've been back to look for this, but I apparently caught it just before the end.  My wife went to grad school at Miami, so I had plenty of opportunities to hunt for it, or even anything that suggested it.  I always came up empty.