Frozen In Time

This doesn’t come close to being a find of any type of archaeological proportions, but in a city so often faulted for covering up its history, I can’t help but feeling somewhat similar to what I imagine a palentologist might feel discovering  preserved footprints of some ancient creature.

In this case it’s the pawprints of some dog (or maybe even a coyote, perhaps?) that happened to trek out from the apron of our driveway across the still drying concrete that had been poured to pave the street we live on. Here’s a a pair of side-by-side prints:

dprints.jpg

The year: 1925. That’s right, 82 years ago. Our house had been standing some nine years already when the city got around to covering up the dirt road that had existed for who knows how long before that.

I didn’t just now discover them. I first saw them perhaps a year or so ago, and since then I’ve attempted photos that never quite showed the worn impressions satisfactorily. I even once tried to take a molding of one with silly putty but that failed miserably too. So yesterday I just said screw it, and snapped several shots. The one after the jump shot from the center of the street has red circles that indicate the progression of the prints as they move away from our garage, disappearing across the center line.

 dogprints.jpg

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Will

Will Campbell arrived in town via the maternity ward at Good Sam Hospital way back in OneNineSixFour and has never stopped calling Los Angeles home. Presently he lives in Silver Lake with his wife Susan, their cat Rocky, dogs Terra and Hazel, and a red-eared slider turtle named Mater. Blogging since 2001, Will's web endeavors extend back to 1995 with laonstage.com, a comprehensive theater site that was well received but ever-short on capital (or a business model). The pinnacle of his online success (which speaks volumes) arrived in 1997, when much to his surprise, a hobby site he'd built called VisuaL.A. was named "best website" in Los Angeles magazine's annual "Best of L.A." issue. He enjoys experiencing (and writing about) pretty much anything creative, explorational and/or adventurous, loves his ebike, is a better tennis player than he is horr golfer, and a lover of all creatures great and small -- emphasis on "all."