Once again it's time to head up to the Russian River and some vacation fun with the most awesome toy ever to be placed in the hands of a young boy: mud. This is probably around 1950, so my brother is about 13 and I'm about 4 as we put the finishing touches on our impregnable shoreline fortress. Well actually, even more fun was in store when the River Queen motor launch (think Disneyland Jungle Ride boats) came along and its mini-tsunamis destroyed the ever-loving heck out of it. This shot also reveals the limitations of snapshot cameras everyone had to put up with back then, even a comparatively good one like my sister's Kodak Duaflex: we're not really that close but we're still out of focus, and the slow shutter speed meant additional blurriness from just the jiggle of pressing down the shutter release. But with the standard 3x3 print you got back from the drug store, you probably wouldn't notice. Interesting that, proportionally speaking, my gut is roughly in the same state today. View full size.