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.