1982 United States

About this footage

A grandmother runs her fingers through a child's hair in a San Antonio backyard, and the Texas reels keep coming back to that yard. Girls climb a tree, a baby pulls up grass and a woman carries a laundry basket past an infant in a seat. Inside, women hold the baby on the couch while a father rests on the sofa. Out on the street, a girl waves at the camera with a baby beside her.

In Carmel, California, the camera walks downtown among shoppers, antique shop windows and classic cars on tree-lined streets. The filmer stopped at the Court of the Fountains and its Spanish colonial courtyard, at the Carmel Mission Basilica with its stone cross and dome, and at parked cars with plates from four states. A town map and hand-drawn cartoons appear too, one of them about fire and Christmas. The Alaska reels mostly stay on the water: paddlers in life jackets run rapids past a boulder, two bearded men paddle a kayak beside a boat, brash ice drifts in a fjord, and the camera pans slowly across a tidewater glacier. On a gravel forest road, husky teams stand in harness with uniformed handlers and a man in a campaign hat.

Useful for stories on Texas family life in the early 1980s, small-town tourism on the California coast, or wilderness travel in Alaska.