where's the picture?

The roll of film upon which I had taken the picture of the falling tree and leaping Jörg went undeveloped for a long time. I finally developed it when I was living in a large closet in a house in Roser Park in Saint Petersburg. I developed the film in the kitchen sink with a little plastic film developing tank and some chemicals I had left over from school. But I had neither an enlarger, nor the money to buy one. I found a slide projector for cheap at a second hand store. I had a few plastic slide mounts also from school, so I cut up the negatives and mounted a few so I could put them in the slide projector. I found a couple of glass baking dishes big enough for an eight by ten, which I could use for developer and fixer. I cleaned out an old plastic kitty litter pan for the stop bath. I filled the bathtub up part way for rinsing. I set up the makeshift trays along one wall, and did some experiments to figure out how far away from the the adjacent wall I'd have to put the slide projector for an eight by ten print. It wasn't too far away, but the bulb was far too bright to make a decent enlarger. Also, I think the fan in the projector caused it to vibrate slightly, which wouldn't help the sharpness. It was pretty hot and I had everything closed off in my closet room and no proper ventilation, so it became pretty miserable in there pretty fast. I set up the projector with the negative in the slide mount, turned it on, and put push pins on the wall where the corners of the image were. Then, since I didn't have a red light, I'd turn off the projector and the other light, and pin the unexposed paper to the wall in complete darkness, using the previous pins as guides, and turn on the slide projector for about half a second to expose the paper. I'd take the paper down and feel for the developer tray and just guess how long it should develop, move it to the stop bath, then on to the fixer. Only then could I turn the light on to see if my guesses at exposure and development time had been close. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. I ended up with a few semi-decent prints after a few hours of sweating in the stifling chemical laden air. I got a pretty bad headache from it, and the prints weren't that great, so I ended up not doing it again. But one of the prints was a slightly blurry, sort of washed out version of the falling tree and leaping Jörg picture. I kept the negatives and the print for a while, and when I started working at a place with a flatbed scanner, I scanned it and printed out some not very good laser printer copies of it which I sent to Jörg and Paul. When I was getting ready to go visit Jörg in France, I had the print and the negatives with me in my luggage to bring along. My luggage was stolen from my car in Greenwich Village before I even got to the airport, so the negatives and print were lost to me. Somewhere, there might be a low quality scan of the image, on a floppy disk or a backup tape, but I don't know where. There might be an old laser printer copy somewhere too. I suppose it's even possible that I might have kept one of the reject prints I made, but if that's the case, I don't know where I would have put it. Maybe some day I'll see that picture again, but I doubt it. For now it has to be just part of a story. Like the picture of Jörg and Paul drying off in the freezing cold after swimming in the lake behind Greta Binford's place.