July 3, 2008 Fire season begins with smoke in the air, smudging the crystal clear blue with a gritty yellow and gray glaze. The locals tell us that the fire is on the reservation and it started with a lightning strike last night. We travel on the back roads through rolling wheat fields. We stop to water our dog at an old but still active Grange Hall in the minute town of Farmer, Washington. We notice the smoke on the horizon and we follow it steadily for miles. In the lower picture you can see a small cluster of erratics; stones that dropped out of glaciers long ago.
We arrive back in time in the tiny town of Bridgeport to visit the uncles and the aunts and the cousins and the second cousins. We hear news of the impending death of one of us. Todo Brown married my father’s brother Russ. He died tragically young in a logging accident years ago. But his wife Todo remained with us, unmarried and very much part of the family. I saw her at Cherie’s wedding lat summer, looking very thin, very gaunt. I wondered. And now I hear news that she may not make it the summer. Lung cancer, brain cancer. It was the cigarettes I suppose. But she has always been here with us. How can people just die?
Our family is growing faster than it is shrinking. But for me- the core family of my life is shrinking, almost one a year lately. We get our turn on this planet. What a crazy twist in our lives that we still cannot predict our given time. Even the best science and technology is not able to help us out with that the biggest mystery of them all.
This is a strange little watercolor to indulge my fascination with roses and my barely controlled need to acquire far too many of the time consuming and high maintenance flowers. ” Oh, but they give back so much! They are so worth the investment!” I say to convince myself that 24 rose bushes are not quite enough. Buying two more cannot qualify me as obsessive.
Lets just say that I have enough time up to my elbows in roses that my sister and brother-in-law gave me long white deerskin rose gloves to keep the thorns at bay. I thought they were kind of surreal so I painted them disembodied, dancing through the rose bushes with a mind of their own.
Mayan Calendar With Panther and Bees started out as a quick mandala study, intended for a birthday card for my sister, Sandy. I visited Tulum, Mexico this April and I became fascinated with the Mayan culture, especially the current Mayan society and how it relates strongly to the past. In spite of this sense of continuity with the past, the Mayan culture is very much of this time. They practice sustainable hospitality, sustainable energy, recycling – they are the essence of the practical application of the green movement.
It is often small moments that define my impression of an area, of a people. One afternoon I saw massive sculptures of bees decorating the entries of the ruins at Tulum. The same day we talked to people who practice bee keeping to this day and see themselves as part of a long unbroken line of Mayan peasants or farmers who kept bees since the beginning of time. I purchased bee salve for arthritis in my hands, with assurances that ancient Mayan medicine has special cures for any disease.
Triangle Lake, Midweek, Midsummer (for Peter, for all the paddles)
Some summer lakes, if you go there, if you do not postmark a card or photograph or sketch, will slide away; no memory but the faint unstitching in the ear where jet skis ripped the water’s belly open like a four-stroke knife gutting a rainbow trout.
Fumes of gasoline over any urban pond may tremble in the back breeze of recall, but here find Avery, who was afraid of being towed on a blue rubber raft; Keenzie, whose father threatened her with cold beer until she jumped screaming from the dock; Annabelle, the narrow black Lab you were told would jump, didn’t, and licked your hand; Simon, the wide black Lab who carried an open Coke bottle on board his master’s fishing boat, carefully, head up, Simon, the Coke dog.
Fourteen years ago, seven years ago, last year, yesterday, today we paddle to a far shore wild with alarmist kingfishers flashing blue white crested shadows over open water. Flat perch shadow dart beneath the lily pads— we nose our yellow craft up to the Ruined Dock of Our Former Love, as we call it, recalling a bar of melted chocolate and all the sweet body parts it sweetened; long swims with children now grown; night watches for the beaver family— quiet paddle back flashlight in the bow.
One Thursday afternoon in June— lamb chops and tabouli red Nehalem wine— we were close then in our double camp chair, elbows touching. 8:04 pm, 74°, extravagant gold light on that far shore, dark green smell of night water rising from concentric circles of silver running out from the jet skier towing the screaming children in the blue raft . Avery, who was afraid, watches from the dock and cries. Simon is gone; Keenzie is gone; Annabelle lifts one last leg against the steel dumpster, and Annabelle is gone.
We watch together until ghost fingers of cold creep down from the mountains behind and warn us it’s time to leave.
After our final grades were filed, Peter and I took “un breve vacatione,” as the Italian movie is called. On Friday, we had a picnic at Fern Ridge. We sat at a picnic table at water’s edge and looked out over the reeds to the distant hills as the wind-driven waves slapped in. The clouds scudded by and covered the sun until the bright disc of the sun shown through like a Polarized fried egg in the sky.
The Drowned Forest of Crane Prairie Rez, Cormorant Apartment Buildings, and Peter in His Pongo 120 Kayak
Saturday, we went to Cultus Lake and had a five hour, against the 12 mph hour wind paddle. We had planned on a picnic, but the mosquitoes near the shore kept us out on the breezy water. We had dinner safely inside the lodge restaurant and rented a cabin with a fireplace. At midnight, the smoke alarm woke us out of a “dead” sleep, telling us a back draft down the open chnimney had filled the room with dangerous levels of smoke.
All in all, we were happy the next day to move on to Crane Prairie Rez , which was mirror-calm and bird-rich. The herons gronked in and out of their heronry, cormorants looked out from their apartment buildings in the Drowned Forest with mild interest as we paddled by, and three bald eagles fought each other in the sky right over our head.
We picnicked on a point under a huge old Ponderosa Pine, and for some reason, there were no mosquitoes. We DID see a black and white spotted lizard and two green and white striped garter snakes and enormous breeder trouts in the crystal clear waters of Quinn Creek.
Our destination – the diatom pits, a mining operation near George, WA. Not far from the famed ampitheater and Cave B. However, visualize a dirt road to nowhere though endless sagebrush, generally headed for the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River far below. The DANGER, NO TRESPASSING, OPEN PITS signs start a half mile before the road curves into a few utterly featureless buildings. The buildings and the heavy equipment are shrouded with white. The open pits and tailings are endlessly white, towering over our parked cars. When we arrive the day is clear and sunny. Instantly, before we get out of our cars, the wind blasts down the powdery white road, covering us, our cars, and filling the Forester with fine white grit. The rock hounds suit up with white paper masks and jump out to search for common opal. The opal is mixed in with the diatoms somehow and they litter the tailings with chunks of rock larger than a brown bag full of groceries. We have special permission to take the opal – a form of recycling for the mining company.
The whiteness pervaded everything. The scene eerily like the initial scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I did not dare take my camera out of the case so I pulled out my black sketchbook to record the wild scene. The hounders had no trouble getting enough opal for the day and we left after only a half hour of digging. I was happy to see that there were conditions even too hard core for them. I was beginning to question their sanity.
We finished out our day at the PetrifiedWoodState Park at the Vantage Columbia River Bridge crossing. We ate our smoked turkey salads, dining comfortably on a picnic table with green grass and graceful trees to provide cool and shade. We were too dirty to enter the museum so we headed home. Driving west on I 90 the cloud formations looked like a fleet of circular flying saucers. I have never seen clouds like that before. Maybe the opal myths are true. Legend has it that there is something spooky about opals. Not just anyone gets to have them. We came away with our share but I think the opals had some resistance that day.
May 31, 2008 Dream Journal: “Daddy Shows Us the House Where He Grew Up”
I am riding with Daddy and two of my sisters, Toren and Keesha, in the dry desert backcountry of Idaho. He drives on a dirt road deep into country and finally parks in a gravel pit.
“Where are we, Daddy?”
“I want to show the house where I grew up.”
The immediate area rose and fell in a rough series of dark sand hills or windrows—not like dunes but more like tailings from a mine. The tailings scattered back under pine trees where I could see old homesteads and shacks and people here and there.
A small stream of clear water ran through the trees and over the black sand gullies at our feet. Daddy and others bent to drink, but I was leery of drinking from any open running water that ran out of human habitation and mine tailings.
Daddy led us into the area, and we three girls explored happily. I could tell he was looking for something hidden in the depths of his childhood memory.
A line of three identical box houses appeared—company housing—and fell apart in a rapid time lapse.
As we clambered about, we came upon a rambling, old, wooden boarding house and entered, out footsteps echoing. People came and went dressed in country clothes.
An old woman came to greet us, and she seemed to know Daddy, but he didn’t know her.
“Are these your girls?” she asked kindly.
“Yes,” he said.
I jumped in and said, “I’m Sandy, this is Keesha, and Toren, and we have another sister and a brother at home.”
“Oh my,” she said, smiling at Daddy, “Such a lot of girls!”
But he was thinking, “Is this the place? __________________________________________________________________ My Notes: I felt the old woman in the dream was a pioneer ancestor—Daddy’s great grandmother, as he didn’t recognize her, and this must have been the 1870’s or 80’s, and while I thought it was Idaho, I think it may have been on Grandma Petersen/Price’s side of the family in Longmont, Colorado. __________________________________________________________________ How does this relate to this picture?
I began by drawing a deep spring with roots deep in the earth and a long flight of stairs underground that the women had to climb down to fill their pots with water. Then I drew the pot, and then the woman appeared holding the pot, looking out across the landscape. In the landscape she saw the animals.
I thought she was also a deep ancestral figure, prefiguring the dream ancestor by perhaps millennia.
Iguanas seem to be everyone’s pet in Mexico. This guy had the run of the restaurant and Ricardo, the bar tender let him take dainty bites from the wedding center piece.
At another tiny bar, deep in the jungle next to a beautiful fresh water cenote, the proprietor kept a 3′, bright green iguana on the bar for the delight of the customers. Never mind that the iguana received better tips than the rather taciturn bar tender. In Mexico, not everyone could speak English but most everyone would smile. At the Tulum ruins, an man did nothing but pose with a 5′ iguana and pass the hat to the French tourists for taking his photo. He had enough money in the hat to feed his family or buy a large round of michiladas for his friends.
Tulum, Tulum. In the jungle, on the Carribean, an hour and a half south of the big city Cancun. For me a week in Tulum means that I will remain connected and engaged there for the rest of my life. Many years ago in my mid 20’s, a psychic told me that I experienced a past life as a Mayan artist and priestess. I neither believed or disbelieved it but my sense of connection with Mexico has run like an underground river through my psyche since my first visit to Mexico when I was 16. Here are the images I managed to produce during my full time in Tulum – more to follow.
