Little Adventures

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Passport to Adventure

When we first began making "match shots," I bought a 28-90mm zoom lens for my camera, and a copy of the Chester County Atlas for our inspiration.

Chester County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, has many an interesting nook and cranny, and the hundred year old drawings in our atlas led us to them. Of course we had our disappointments, finding a ruin instead of a house or a grand old store buried beneath a grotesque modern facade, or worst of all, finding nothing at all. Hit or miss though, the search for the match to an old drawing was always interesting.

First, we would poke through the atlas and find a drawing we liked, then using the old maps, we would try to figure out where to find our view. Sometimes it was easy to find an exact location, and other times all we could come up with was a rough idea of where to look. In those latter cases, we would drive to the right general area and ask directions from the locals. I always carried a couple of finished match shots with me to show to the people we met. On seeing these, people usually became very interested in what we were doing and were eager to help in any way that they could.

As we drove about on the back roads of Chester County, suddenly a house, a barn, or maybe just a peculiarly shaped chimney would match the drawing. Then, in a flood of realization, everything would snap into place, and we would know just where the artist must have stood as he made his drawing. If he stood on the public road, getting the match shot was no more harrowing than standing in the middle of the highway and carefully taking a picture. But other times, the artist stood in a pasture, sat in the hayloft of a barn, or worked from the roof of a store. These tougher drawings led to much meeting of people, and this was great fun, as we were often treated like royalty on account of our peculiar hobby.

In 1982, Pam and I flew to rainy Seattle for my sister Molly's wedding and a three week drive through the western hinterland. Before we left, I combed the University of Delaware's library in search of an old guide book to the region. What I finally found was something even better… a three volume set called Picturesque America, which had dozens and dozens of drawings of scenic and historic places as they appeared 100 years ago. I got busy with my camera, and when we flew west, we took along a deck of "possibles" and a map marked to show where to look for them. During the next three weeks, these led us to crawl out to the edge of the Half Dome at Yosemite Park, hold conference with the Mormons of Salt Lake City, and risk the wrath of geysers at Yellowstone. This was all very exciting, so we decided to make match shots a part of all our future trips.

The next year Pam and I returned to Britain, armed with a 3-inch thick deck of possibles and excited to see how we would fare on this, our first hunting expedition abroad. We revisited the Crystal Palace grounds in Sydenham to match the dinosaurs that live in a swampy lake there, we scrambled down the cliffs at Land’s End in Cornwall to get just the right angle for a match of a rock formation, and we hiked a mile to record the arches of Fountains Abbey, which are shown above. We had a very interesting and different vacation, since we were visiting places which were popular 100 years ago, and many of these places are not nearly so popular today. Our hobby was truly a passport to adventure, and so it has remained for over fifteen years.