Michael Comeau was devastated when he dropped his camera in a creek during a summer trip to the Adirondacks.
“I was standing on this little bridge taking pictures. I kind of fumbled my tripod and my camera fell in the water,” he remembered.
“I jumped in and I couldn’t find it. I looked for it for about a half hour… It wasn’t that expensive, but at the time, I was unemployed and didn’t have money for another camera, so I was very upset. I was pissed off about losing all the pictures and everything.”
Comeau thought he had lost a summer’s worth of photos, but little did he know that John Noerr, a teacher based in Poultney, Vt., would find his camera three years later.
Noerr was on a walk with his son when he spotted a mud-covered camera at the bottom of a small stream. Upon closer inspection, he realized that, remarkably, the memory card appeared to be intact. He brought it home and cleaned it meticulously, using a sewing needle to prod out dirt and chunks of caked mud.
“Opening the card was fascinating,” Noerr said. “The very first picture, I imagined that it was the first picture that he took. All the way to last picture. That was of rushing water.”
One image showed a picture of an ailing woman. Noerr guessed correctly that it was one of the last photos taken of this friend or family member (the photo was of Comeau’s late mother), and that the photograph probably meant a lot to someone.
“That was a driving force,” Noerr explained when asked why he tried so hard to return the camera. “She was obviously sick in late or mid-stage cancer. She looked sick or dying. When my father and I looked at it, we said, ‘I’ve got to find this guy.'”
From there it became a full-fledged investigation; Noerr was determined to figure out who the camera belonged to. He searched through each of the 581 photos stored on the memory card, looking for clues.
“Some of the pictures had enough information in them that I was able to put them in a place, put a dot on a map and say, ‘This is where the camera taker stood.’ I was able to build up enough places… I started to create an image in my mind of where the person lived.”
Noerr deduced that the pictures were taken in the Adirondacks and in Brooklyn. He saw one picture of the front stoop of a house numbered 327. In another, he saw a sign for 3rd street and a corner of a unique-looking building.
Using Google Earth Street View, he was finally able to figure out which specific building was in the photo. Then he contacted the building’s owner, and, eventually, used Facebook to contact the family who lived there.
“I thought it was a miracle,” said Comeau. “I had wondered what happened to that camera. Is it floating out there somewhere?”
Well, almost. It was sitting at the bottom of a creek, just waiting for someone like Noerr to notice.
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