This is where we left Dad's ashes, on a bluff just above where he'd been born, in a cabin beside a weeping willow tree across from the Stillwater River near Columbus, Montana. A fitting place of rest: wildflowers, native grasses, ponderosa pines, silence.
It had stormed the night before. My sister and I drove through lightning-lit pitch blackness, impenetrable sheets of rain, and four inches of standing water in the middle of a super-cell on I-90 to get to our Grandmother's funeral. We started in Butte. It took us hours to get to Columbus just from Big Timber, a journey that should have taken about a half-hour. Harrowing, white-knuckle, driving-at-20-mph, and then dawn, over a fresh landscape, scrubbed and sparkling.
And there, after the graveside ceremony with all its trappings for our Gramma, we took Dad to the Stillwater.
This shot was taken with a Pentax K-1000 back in 90-something. That was a great old camera. I now use a Nikon D-40 SLR. I don't miss the film as much as I thought I would, but I'm looking forward to making my first pinhole camera, exposing film that is probably 20 years old. We'll see...