
My event, while prominently advertised in the street signage out front, turns out to be a small party bolstered by Heather, my family members, some museum researchers, a couple interested in the solar printing process in particular, the Doctor Kearney Middle School principal Wes, and Matt from the Alaska Highway News.
Intimate.
That said, everyone there seemed keenly engaged in the subject and offered much in terms of feedback, more info on the Doc and the region in general. I do a PowerPoint talk showing some of the original photographs and explain how I create the prints.
There is a lot of interest is a drawing that an American soldier did of my father, since Tamara, a museum research volunteer, is looking for material on William Barnett, an artist who was there on the Alaska Highway project in the 1940s. We email my sister and yes Bill Barnett was a friend of my mother's at the time so he likely did the drawing.

Which brings me to another subject, that of memory. I have been listening to Malcolm Gladwell's excellent podcast Revisionist History, (thank you Anna) and the one I heard today is Free Brian Williams. It concerns memory, and a study that examines the way we all remember significant events and how these memories drift over time, varying often dramatically from person to person and gaining embellishment as they are retold. I am sure that my Fort St. John adventure will work its way into various pockets of my brain and will not always be remembered as clearly as it supposedly is now. Maybe I will conflate the PRIDE festival with my talk, or suggest that we went horseback riding at Wes's ranch.
So that's why I write this.