So Many Memories In One Picture...

Several months ago a video popped up on my friend's Facebook page and it took me back, back to the summer of 1983.

I was seventeen-years old.

It was quite a summer, and this picture sums up a lot of what happened.

It's amazing how so much has changed since then.

If you take just the buildings, that theater--the place where I watched Star Wars: A New Hope, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi--is gone. In its place is a shiny high-rise office building. Across the street, just right of that big white building is the future home of where I go to work every workday.  The building won't be built for another decade or so.

Next, there's the gal taking a picture with the only camera that could give you an instant picture. Those old Polaroids were great! Of course, they took terrible photos, but quality really wasn't the point of the Instamatics. Whoever she is, she has classic 80s hair, too.

I remember the logo for one of our local television station. They were an NBC affiliate at the time--they've since changed to CBS.

And there's the river running down the street. That has only happened once in my lifetime. We had such a snowy winter that winter that the record snowfall turned into flooding, mudslides, and a wave of volunteerism that made the state famous for a reason other than the obvious. It was so bad that they turned a major downtown road in Salt Lake City into a river. That was pretty cool.

I tried looking for the video to see if I could link it on this blog post. I couldn't. It had some great pictures of my neighbors back in the day but for some reason I took a screenshot of the girl taking a Polaroid picture standing beside the Centre Theater where Return of the Jedi was showing as a river of high spring run-off raced by.

There's a lot of memories in that one picture.

More Water Than '83

Some of you remember the spring of 1983 in northern Utah. I am one of those people.

Many people had memories of the flooding but for me, I won't forget the day of the Farmington Mudslides. My friend and I had just gone for a run (if I remember correctly...) and we were hanging out at Rose Acre Place (more info here) when my friend's older sister ran into his room and told us to get out of the house. Rose Acre Place sits right by a river and we thought the river was cresting. Had it done that, the house could have been destroyed.

The river wasn't the problem. The problem occurred in another, smaller canyon, Rudd Canyon, and the problem wasn't a cresting river, but a river of mud.

After my friend's sister told us to leave, I hoped on my bike and rode home. By the time I got to the base of our hill, I looked up 1st East and saw people running down the road and helicopters flying overhead. When I got home I turned on the TV and saw the devastation of the mudslide. Several homes of people I knew were gone, some displaced off their foundations and at least one rock home was completely destroyed (in the picture you can see a home where my sister actually lived for a short time years after the flood--it's the home with the round spot near the roof).

Yesterday I heard on the news that there's more water in the mountains right now than there was during the same time of year in 1983. I think we're going to have a very interesting runoff season...