flames and ashes

From campfire to the real thing. Visiting my friend Sarah in the heart of an historic conflagration of wildfires (in the sense of number and timing, one hundred and thirty one in Mendocino at last count many of which were literally unattended due to the extent of burning throughout the state). Fire permeated my Anderson Valley time in all senses - the air, ashes falling from the sky, trucks poised for quick escape, loaded with agonizingly sorted items of the heart, ladders leaning up to roofs, helicopters dotting the haze with their teardrop buckets of water, firefighters gathering in the hotels, radios rattling out the latest evacuation areas, and the moment of levity coming in an interview with the local CDF official in Boonville or Navarro. Not to worry he was trying to say. "Do not panic. Just do what you would normally do when you see flames." Sarah and I looked at each other wondering whether there was something we were missing - a clear answer. I mean you know, it is just flames. Somehow that has not moved into my muscle memory category of good instinctive reaction. The interview went on. "Your government will protect you," he stated. Another sure bet, government on our side. We could relax, not fret. They would be there for us. As the newscast continued, you got the feeling this guy began hearing himself finally, and slowly all sense of rational thought dissipated. Heading into town for some live interaction with regular town people seemed the safest choice of all. Saffron has seen it all before; she put our minds temporarily at ease. 

Live Rock

Anchor Bay Again

Old Bones

on the beach

Recalling a Past

In this Cathy built cabin there are spatial parallels with the surrounding second growth forest of redwoods. Like the best of pantomime where the conjured is more real than the body doing the conjuring, the douglas fir lining of this main space reminds me of the circular void left as young redwoods enclose the memory of an ancestor. 

Many of a Thing

Is always nice, Cathy says. Many grilled squash and a moment of overlap - blue sky overtaken by wafting fog. Barbeque chicken by Virginia, a 2004 Zin, pre dinner cheeses, and a creamy hot chocolate during our CIA thriller movie, all mark our first full day at the Gualala cabin. It is a small sized, big spirited place of Cathy's creation, tucked expertly among the second growth redwoods just off the ocean between Gualala and Anchor Bay. Rocks, cliffs and crashing waves define this edge of our country. 

A Little Pac Bell in Anchor Bay

The Giants live on vicariously through their stadium cotton candy. Yes, I am still eating my game night taste sensation. It approached six dollars for these resilient puffs, so I'm determined to get my money's worth. Like one of those second grade assignments where you send your flattened figurine out in the world, collecting virtual "wish you were here" postcards, I'll offer my shrinking spun sugar the best vistas of what's left. Cotton candy and salt mist don't mix. 

Burnt Stumps

Or maybe crisped, then frozen: Vince's homemade charcoal and Virginia's wet suit legs.

The Pacific Rocks

On and on. You can get trapped by high tide in the coves here at Anchor Bay. Specific time matters less than tide rhythms. We got it right, well Virginia did, settling high on the sand. There was a barefoot stretch, however, in the forty something degree ocean water. Within seconds your feet feel like stumps, dead ones. Packed a shade tent, boogie board, wet suits, food, and drawing stuff over to a rock enclave where the waves are manageable. Not for me, only Virginia went in the water. You have to have the right equipment, including feet and hand covers. Cathy and I drew with charcoal and pens.

You Decide

A lack of material continuity illuminates this building's collection of faces. The front facade runs in one direction, the sides in another. In the articulation of parts, one struggles to put it all back together: pieces but no pie. Conscious or not? Compliance with rules or a purposeful destabilizing effect?

Cotton Candy or Fog?

Disgusted by the grape flavor and color (isn't all cotton candy supposed to have a cotton candy taste?) I sacrificed this ball of cotton to Sarah's destructive antics. What was once a dead ringer for evening fog (okay, through a special lens) is compressed into the space of our cup holders. Over the course of the game, darker purple edges formed a crusty new texture. Who knew sugar could spin itself so many disguises.

Napa and the Wine World

If you couldn't see these workers tucked into the working rows, you might think you were looking down on a very neat braiding job, an enlarged head whose dry white scalp is showing through. Grids and stripes proliferate, anticipating bumper crops of juicy grapes. 

Two Drawings One Mountain

Badger Pass: the slope of this mountain extends right through this ski lodge structure (in need and receiving renovation help) so without consciously realizing it both views, the one from the street (on top) and the other from an expansive deck on the side of the building, use the same white space of the page to imply a steep grade. Double duty - that is the overall aspiration. 

A little Detroit in San Francisco

They evened the series up tonight, the Tigers did. And a full moon rose above the bay. Cotton candy, candied almonds and seeing my old friend Sarah. An all around day of fun: the new Jewish Museum downtown, a wonderful middle eastern lunch, and the Tigers eating the Giants for dinner. More fleece and down coats here in the stadium by the bay. 

Clean Slate

Gregg's new office spot. Just at the outset of construction, the rawness, the space of the blank white sheet is like sunrise. A morning with unlimited potential for the day. He is launched and soaring, and his new space provides a palpable gust. Fly on Gregg.

Flat and Deep

Skinny and lean. An unfinished version of the in-your-face bark texture, its flatness against the deeper reaches of the river. Had to go back to the Modoc Forest for this example. 

The Rotating Body

Revelations these days come fewer and simpler. Observations that seem obvious, that I may even be self conscious to make, offer deeper lessons. Perhaps it is again that state of motion, the increased receptivity to seeing things around that nurtures the urge to articulate. Whatever, I'll take it. On Friday cruising around the city on foot, with camera and pen in hand, I reconsider what binds things, places, moments that intrigue me. 

The simplest are the most complex. Intersections for example, define the merging of opposites. What hit me was the union of tools and concept lately - that my camera, the fact that its lens and screen can move independently, nudge my eye toward a straight on view of the world. In architectural terms, this straight on view (where you look through your lens at a right angle to your subject) is called a plan or section, an orthographic projection. It preserves accuracy, measurability. 

These thoughts provoke less an instinct to represent or formalize this interaction and more an urge to suppose that being moved to think about things in this way is a quality of beauty. A flurry in mind and body marking achievement, causing someone to shift along a spectrum.

I ate dinner at Annmarie's last night in the home they rent from Alva Noe. What he writes about hit home. "Perception is not something that happens to us or in us. It is something we do." The inside flap cover goes on..."In Action in Perception (his book), Noe argues that perceptual consciousness depends on capacities for action and thought - that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. 

....the content of perception is not like the contents of a picture: the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration - exercise of practical bodily knowledge."

But back to the rotating body and finding a frame. 

Drawings that combine multiple view points, collisions between the slice or measured view and the perspective, these continue to fascinate. In terms of framing, Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and Henri Cartier-Bresson, two of my favorite photographers were purists: what you see through your lens is what you get. The frame at the instant of the photograph is not cropped or altered. Something appealing about that to me. 

Farmers Market

Here at the bok choy - baby bok choy intersection we have a microcosm. 

As beautiful as this convergence is, the lines and rows of endless fresh, affordable produce collected beneath Bernal Hill exceeds it. This place invigorates the soul. 

Leila took me there this morning.

In addition to the babies above and spinach, I also got some "Pride of Basra" quarter sized round dates on a stem. They remind me of those Mourad, a graduate school colleague, used to bring back to the International House from Algeria. 

Little Cat Feet

or a giant cotton ball

LUNCH

Across the street from EHDD she told me the tacos were the best. It is not 25th and Mission but I took her advice and more. How many should I order? One. As I watched her construct my taco, I paused at the small diameter of my single taco. I asked again, are you sure this will be enough? Yes, there is much more to come. At the check out he asked me what I wanted to drink. Water. Tap or bottled he asked, pointing to the water and cups behind me. The total for my lunch with perfect proportions and distinctly discernible individual ingredients was $2.98. I loved the whole thing. Even the tables and chairs.

House and Meadow

Near the place we stayed in Yosemite was this small house sitting on the edge of a meadow. I rode my rented bike to it and ate my lunch across the street where I could be like the house and survey my surroundings. Out of the oil pastel groove now, and remembering how the medium affects the message, or perhaps even more importantly, the observation itself. Eating the other half of my breakfast bagel, I studied the sweep of the open field, the strong but leaky edge of its definition. I needed a big luscious stick of something to make my version of the clearing in one fell swoop. Oils seemed just right but my colors are limited. 

SF Feeling Like Home

Funny how trips within trips exaggerate the elasticity of time. I've been gone for almost a month now and coming back to George's house tonight from Yosemite feels as close to home since we drove down my dusty Toma Road. Party because it is a place I know well and feel welcome, but also because it marks a return. It is a complex equation: a parenthetical operation embedded inside another. 

And our route, particularly this short cut on Priest something road with its sinuous twists through dried out hills, provokes another level of "path" awareness. As in life itself, the view ahead is sometimes clear, you can actually see it, anticipate your place. Other times the way disappears, seemingly connected, but you can never really know. Is it segments or is it a line?

Visual Notes of High Country

It is still a blur, a fly through nature's most spectacular sculpture. Today we were above it all at Glacier Point. It is the spot from which they used to launch the falling fires, yelling "firefall" as the embers plummeted to Curry Village below. You can see the entire valley from there and lording over it all is Half Dome, hunkered down among other humps. Two streaming waterfalls etch lines down to the Merced River. 

I had a moment of reflection and irritation inspired by battery death at the highest level, elevation wise I mean. I was at Glacier Point, the ultimate vista machine, and my camera batteries died. Normally I carry extra but I had transferred them for my canyon ride and forgot to switch back. For several minutes I was practically paralyzed. Could I still see with naked eyes? I had my pen and sketchbook, but the team was waiting. What is experience? Is it the record that inspires memory or is it only the minutes of real time? Since time was limited I deferred pondering these and other questions of the sensorial until I was sitting in front of a grey box rather than the entire Yosemite Valley. Then I borrowed Katherine's camera.

Olmstead Point

A near far juxtaposition: the massive cracks between sheets of rock render them as tiling patterns. On the next plane, the cracks blend into a hard baldness as the king of hunching shoulders, Half Dome, peeks above. Soft green of redwoods closes the curtain.

Canyon Ride

Early Intake

This is a place I headed on my bike ride this morning. An unexpected pleasure of continuing to draw rather than attend meetings in El Portal. Rented a Trek for the day and discussed a ride with the rec folks here at Evergreen. The guide asked how I was with hills. Fine I said. I like hills. And he even mentioned that it was a canyon I would be descending. Twelve miles seemed viable so I headed out with the other half of my salmon bagel from breakfast, some water, my camera and drawing stuff. It was all downhill from there. 

Tacking between thrill and terror (not unlike Wren's motorcycle inspired days in Santorini), I flew, then braked off and on for miles. My gravity fueled power cut a vertical swath toward the Tuolumne River. The road's edge is close and the drop far so I hug the mountain despite increasing my risk of a head-on. Crystal blue sky behind tall redwoods extend the vertical pull. I thought to myself this is one of the most breathtaking rides I've taken. 

Then I started remembering. I have to go home, back, upward. How far had I come already?This is the effortless part. I wanted to keep going, but I had to make it back. I turned around, and started up. My bike was not very nuanced in gear shifting. Felt like there were a few missing between the easiest and the next easiest. Add a little odd clicking and it wasn't long before visions of parching in high altitude, using up the available oxygen, took hold. Turned out the actual distance fell far short of the psychological distance. I was home in two hours, sore but back.

Lembert Dome

Here in Yosemite, well there at Lembert Dome, a place I could have stayed for quite some time. But time is of the essence here and since Yosemite is the same area as Rhode Island, we are driving quite a bit, trying to cover as much of the high country as possible. I suppose a glance is better than not seeing at all, but sometimes the sensation of of the ultimate tease is more than one can bare. Not complaining though as drawing, high speed drawing continues. 

On this sheer face of rock, the gradual increase in steepness enables you to climb further than you might think. It reminds me of the same allure Lake Michigan offers as you swim out further and further, into deeper and deeper, bluer and bluer water, where the bottom disappears and infinity inspires terror. 

In Motion

This is where I started. Talking about how moving gets me drawing. I didn't mean drawing motion, but just the act of travel, setting out. Drawing while moving though is something I've tried to write about before - the way it forms a hinge between the focused or sustained and the cursory glance needing memory for details. Some things pass quickly: gates, cows, electrical poles; while others appear unchanged: sky and land intersection, the double yellow line. 

Preparing for my working trip to Yosemite, reading the text so far, I am particularly taken by the language of Charles Palmer, a historian, who recounts the evolution of the high meadow roads. Most fascinating was the consciousness in the early 1920's of Steven Mather to open Yosemite to autotourism. Not only did he intend to make the spectacular place accessible to more people, he initiated a class shift: more people of less means could get there. The roads are designed as visual programs, vistas from the car - windshield tourism. Iconic views were purposely framed as these great smoothings carve through mountains, cut broad transects through disparate terrain. They in essence provide an extended view in motion. 

I've never been to the upper meadows part of Yosemite so reading this, considering roads as a design project in and of themselves is (perhaps naively so) eye opening. So I am ready to hit it, the road, once again.

Montana Archives

Drafting with soft charcoal may sound like mixing oil and water, but that technique swept me up while making this drawing from Maire's window in Bozeman. It is Vince's homemade charcoal as well - very smooth and soft. Though I think of it more as a tonal medium, here I see blades of grass better. It is at once precise and expressive. 

California

I cannot stop eating these strawberries we purchased hours ago outside Davis on the last stretch into town. A small road side stand. I have not tasted a strawberry like this since Vico Equense near Naples, the only rival I can recollect. And they were wild. Sitting on top of 20th at Noe in San Francisco, trying to outpace the fast rot these fragile tasty gems suffer. I think I'm ahead right now.

Feel like I can let go of the reverse thinking now, trying to choreograph the chronology. Can now just filter through images and reflect. The many stripes of our country, its landscape, the up close ecologies. 

The Yosemite Guidelines team leaves early Sunday morning for a week of traveling the upper meadows, high roads, completing the second phase of A Sense of Place, National Park Service work. I feel lucky once again to be a part.

Big Vista Farms

Goat Milk

Good stuff. Fresh from the morning squeeze, the milk tastes nothing like the aromas, the not so nuanced background flavor of something tinged, edgy that you find in cheese. The milk freezes well and can be drunk all winter. When it freezes it turns sort of yellowish.

Davis Creek, still border lands

Flat on my back. That is how I ended up, walking briskly across Deborah's field, the seemingly endless stretch in Davis Creek, still at the edge of the Monoc Forest where it meets Goose Lake. Leila met Deb at the Chamber of Commerce when we made that office our home for most of one afternoon, dodging freezing rain. A prevalent trend or is this cold cloud just hovering above us? I know now, it is not, but sometimes you take it personally. 

Deb walks like she knows what she is doing. And she does. Alone, on land as far as the eye can see she owns horses, dogs, sheep, cows, and goats. Mostly her place is all about goats and their sweet, slightly tangy and earthy milk. I had never tasted fresh goat milk. She lives on it and so do her animals. The baby calf is less than a week old and I have the thrill of giving it a bottle. Not unlike a baby bottle scaled up by a factor of three or so, I tilt it upright and she slurps the half gallon of goat milk (yep, cows can grow up on goat milk) in minutes. She tries for your hand as a second alternative for food. Her blue tongue is tough but soft but I keep thinking she might decide to nibble any minute.

Anyway, as we crisscrossed Deb's land to check out the cows, the nesting sand hill crane, and the accompanying pelicans, her pack of cow dogs in their racing frenzy lifted me right off my feet. I went horizontal for a second then crashed flat down on my back. Knocked the wind out of me, but other than that and a few sore neck muscles this morning, I am fine. 

Finding a Frame

In certain landscapes, particular formal conundrums materialize as I draw. In this Monoc Forest, the intersection of the vertical and horizontal, how that is manifest in an image circles round my brain. It is the sheer steepness of the land, the up close bark of fat trees, and the deep vistas of rushing creeks. Back to that juxtaposition of the flat, the elevation and the perspective, the implication of deeper space. What obsessed me making this drawing was finding a frame, the role that the edge plays in either exaggerating that horizontal vertical intersection, or massaging it into a more normalized view. Matisse's images of Nice are the source of inspiration.

More Camping Revelations

Another Pine Creek spot. Another strange twist of messages.

Back to camping. For novices like me it is the little things that stick with you.

Digging a hole for my own toilet for example.

Making my foot into a careful backhoe, plowing it all under. Seems so "green" you know, almost virtuous: no water, no utilities, no waste. But is it really?

Another matter of scale and proportion. Two people on six hundred acres - no problem.

Two million, maybe not. We'd run out of top soil fast.

Glad the Romans came along when they did.

I've not done any tallies, but despite the rising price of gas, the cost to come across the country and take three weeks doing it is surprisingly low. Well at least the way we've done it. Hotels for less than $50 per night (and only when absolutely necessary - four total), a manual Volvo getting a whopping 35 miles to the gallon, and cooking all our own meals except a few here and there. A block of ice last forever in my Coleman cooler - a beautiful traveling refrigerator. My kind of trip - rough guess, less than $500 each for everything: food, lodging, transportation.