When we set the date for Scott and Lindsey to have their engagement shoot in late March, I was worried about the weather. (I’m the half of this team that worries about things like that. I also worry about file naming conventions being followed, and a hundred other obnoxiously petty details.) Scott and Lindsey were coming from out of town for their shoot, and had a limited amount of time in Santa Cruz. The weather had been rainy and cold at least part of every day for weeks. If it rained, where would we shoot?
This question led us to the Felton Covered Bridge, the tallest covered bridge in the country. You can read more about the Felton Covered Bridge by clicking here. That wikipedia entry, in turn, led me to read about other covered bridges, which led me down a pathway of my personal history I’d almost forgotten about. This story has nothing to do with Scott and Lindsey and their engagement shoot, but it will give you something to read while you wait for over 30 photos to load.
The summer I turned seventeen, before I went off to college in the cold northeast, I worked at a bookstore in the mall. That summer, a book called The Bridges of Madison County by Robert J. Waller was all the rage. Here is a description of the book from Library Journal, found at Amazon:
This is the story of four days that change forever the lives of two lonely people. Robert Kincaid is a roving photographer for National Geographic and Francesca Johnson is a housewife whose marriage suffers from a lack of romance. Francesca’s family is out of town when Kincaid arrives on the scene, and the pair are instantly attracted. They soon become lovers, and Kincaid asks Francesca to run away with him, but she refuses. Francesca stays loyal to her family, and memories of Kincaid are all that remain. Contrived, unrealistic dialog detracts from a well-plotted, quick, and pleasant read.
All summer long, people came in asking about that book, wanting to talk about it, sighing when they remembered parts of it, and wondering what we, the bookstore employees, loved most about it. The Bridges of Madison County seemed to have a strong effect on a lot of people, and they were urgent in their enthusiasm for it, their desire to make me understand how they felt. You’ve read it, haven’t you? they’d say. What?! You haven’t? Ohhhh, you are missing out! Read it tonight!!
My bookstore coworkers had read the book, and they all despised it. They despised it with vigor and glee. Everyone added to an ongoing list of what they hated about it, with page numbers and quotations. A copy of The Bridges of Madison County was passed from one employee to another, and each person was welcome to add his or her own annotations in the margins. I can’t remember if I actually participated in this bonding-through-shared-scorn; I was probably too young and naive to rip the text apart with convincing brutality. I do recall being absolutely slayed by the extreme harshness of their criticism when I overheard them talking about it and read their marginal notes. They were so funny! And clever! Would college make me like that, I wondered? Would it teach me to find The Bridges of Madison County intellectually revolting, rather than simply romantic (and extremely cheesy)?
College would, and college did. But the romantic could not be squashed for good, and with every engagement shoot like this one, it grows back a little bit more.
And so we’re back to our covered bridge in Felton. We checked it out in advance, did some testing with lights, but in the end we only had to use the covered bridge for the second half of our shoot. The first half happened at Natural Bridges State Park, and we got our best shots there before the rain began to fall. Scott and Lindsey were great creative collaborators, willing to do the hiking/jumping/making silly faces that often goes into a Red Bat shoot. Plus they were (and still are) truly in love, which is just how we like our couples to be.
