Technical — Camera: Unrecorded | Film: Kodacolor II | Scanned with Epson Perfection V750 Pro, edited in Photoshop | For this image, I have resisted my usual search for perfection in restoration, leaving most of the flaws the negative had accrued through age. Most of the work was concentrated on colour correction. Dust and scratches that obscured Jan’s youthful beauty were removed. No faux film hipster filter needed when you have a genuine hippy photo to work with.

Notes: I met Jan at the Calgary Youth Hostel, where she was working in the summer of 1973. By late fall, I’d returned to the west coast, quit my job at a lock factory, packed up my most important belongings, including a sheaf of poetry and Brother portable typewriter, and moved to Calgary, where my muse and I shared an apartment on 12th Ave. SW.

It’s a long story, but in late winter I moved into the lower floor of a house on 16th Ave. SW with another writer. We both worked together at Laughing Rooster Books, a source of occult and anarchist literature. He was writing a novel; I started work on a play script (which I never finished). My roommate, Stephen, convinced me that no serious writer could afford to dilute his attentions maintaining a relationship. He may have been right, but the woman in the upstairs apartment caught my eye.

In the spring of 1974, a trio of women, including my lifetime friend Lynn Hirshman, came into the store for a deck of tarot cards (Example top left in photo. And the pillow book? The classic Integral Yoga Hatha by Sri Swami Satchidananda). Lynn invited me up to “The Meadow,” a remote commune of sorts, in the Purcell Mountains of Southeastern British Columbia. Meanwhile, June, the “Upstairs Maid” as she’d introduced herself, had landed a job at a ranch in the Columbia Valley, about 40 kilometres away, as the crow flies.

As spring turned to summer, I went back to Calgary to pick up my dog, Morgana, a Samoyed who would soon, that winter, be hauling supplies up to the Meadow on a sled. A visit with Jan was bittersweet. I told her about this idyllic mountain redoubt and must have given her directions, because shortly after, she found her way to Shangri-La. While I was away in the city, the recalcitrant ranch hand had retired her spurs and moved to the Meadow.

The photo above was made at a tipi warming party that first summer of love. The sun, diffused by canvas, lit Jan’s lovely Germanic features. She looks radiant, possibly warmed by a glass of wine or two. The etherial light at the periphery comes via a light leak at the end of the roll of Kodacolor film, which now looks near the end of its useful life.

So I’m glad I’ve gotten around to scanning this image. In fact, I’ve printed it to 9″x 15″ on matte, rag paper to great effect. It strikes me now, after 46-years, that this photograph is the visual analogue to the poem I wrote for Jan, a year earlier.