Sixty-four years ago, Hightower Lookout stood above Spalding Bay in the Grand Teton National Park. Today, the tower is gone but Mt. Moran, the bay, and the wind rustling through the trees still persist as they did in the summer of '44. A few weeks ago, Armand's daughter Ann and her husband Tomas, followed a map that Armand had drawn in his diary (now printed on their t-shirts), to scatter some of Armand's ashes so he too, may forever persist.
Thanks to his meticulous notes, sketches and uncanny ability to archive every detail, we may be able to assist park historians with some of the missing details of its early occupants. We have documents to prove that isolation and/or the tedious gazing required of fire look-out guards, often drove them daft. Yet still eloquent, Armand proclaimed to his bride of four years:
PAEAN TO AUGUST THE EIGHTH
by Armand Edwards Singer.
Four years ago to a day our Father and Mothers sanctioned upon this continent a new idea, a marriage conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that two can live more cheaply than one, or, at least, more pleasurably. It is not for us the living victims to say how wisely they have judged nor to ask their occult design in permitting this union of two characters intellectually so egotistic, albeit not totally dissimilar in temperament and Weltanschauung.
Rather is it our bounden duty to sing hosannas and give thanks that the occasional trials and petty tribulations of wedlock were allowed to become realities. Immeasurably worse the alternative!
Yet, 'midst the pealing of bells and shouting of sonorous hallelujahs must be sounded the tocsin of warning. Never let us forget that union without justice, matrimony not founded upon the egality of the sexes and based not upon love of the couple, for the couple, and by the couple, shall inevitably perish from this earth.
That was written on June 28, 1944. Armand and his bride spent another sixty years together "with occasional trials and petty tribulations of wedlock".
Thanks to his meticulous notes, sketches and uncanny ability to archive every detail, we may be able to assist park historians with some of the missing details of its early occupants. We have documents to prove that isolation and/or the tedious gazing required of fire look-out guards, often drove them daft. Yet still eloquent, Armand proclaimed to his bride of four years:
PAEAN TO AUGUST THE EIGHTH
by Armand Edwards Singer.
Four years ago to a day our Father and Mothers sanctioned upon this continent a new idea, a marriage conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that two can live more cheaply than one, or, at least, more pleasurably. It is not for us the living victims to say how wisely they have judged nor to ask their occult design in permitting this union of two characters intellectually so egotistic, albeit not totally dissimilar in temperament and Weltanschauung.
Rather is it our bounden duty to sing hosannas and give thanks that the occasional trials and petty tribulations of wedlock were allowed to become realities. Immeasurably worse the alternative!
Yet, 'midst the pealing of bells and shouting of sonorous hallelujahs must be sounded the tocsin of warning. Never let us forget that union without justice, matrimony not founded upon the egality of the sexes and based not upon love of the couple, for the couple, and by the couple, shall inevitably perish from this earth.
That was written on June 28, 1944. Armand and his bride spent another sixty years together "with occasional trials and petty tribulations of wedlock".
Photo: Courtesy of Tomas Hill.