A car comes to a stop near the water’s edge. A man and a woman sit inside and the driver’s face is faintly illuminated by the dashboard. They’ve paused to watch the last light of day. A bright bar of light fits between the horizon and the otherwise cloudy and darkening sky which makes it appear as if the sunlight has pried open a heavy lid and is pouring its final energy into the gathering void.
The woman remarks that she wishes she could stall in this golden light for as long as possible. She says it’s always the same feeling she gets from looking at certain family photos from when she was a child; says she always likes to let her mind idle there but rarely gets her fill. They were both silent for a period of time and then the man remarks that no one can ever live in any moment forever. He adds that our precious time in this coil races out from under us without our realizing the proportionality of it and that if we did, we lose our minds living in the pure vigilance of it.
She turns to him, one side of her face the same glowing pink as carried upon the underside of the cloud layer. She says she realizes that; anyone would. But that her mind always returns to the moments that are most filled with light. These are places where she knows that thoughts cannot chase their tail like a dog.
The boldest of this warm light has dissipated to a fragile blue and the gray sky begins to show the reflective light of the city to the east. They put the car into drive and head towards it.
The expansiveness of the world squeezes down into the space illuminated by their headlights.
It's interesting to think that there was a time in the recent past when a photograph was not so ubiquitous. A time when we did not all possess a small computer in our pockets that is capable of snapping a fairly high resolution photograph without really needing to even consider exposure, available light or focus. I can't say that this easy access has resulted in raising the bar of craft; it would seem that it has just produced more documentation, useful or otherwise. There are those that do produce amazing imagery with these devices and I will say that the camera is one of a handful of things that I like about a cell phone. The rest of it I think is driving us someplace undesirable.
When I was a teen, I skated with my friends almost every day. Now and again someone would remember to borrow their parents camera, usually an instamatic, and capture some sketchy images, usually poorly composed- cropping off the top of rider's heads or focusing solely on proving for posterity's sake, that the trick was pulled off, or least attempted. This resulted in plenty of butt shots, that to the trained eye, would detail just the trick being executed, and not much more beyond the rider's backside. My friend Brian Fountaine was Spokane's skate scene exception to this. He was able to scrabble together an SLR camera with a lens adapter that enabled a wide angle shot. For a period of time, he documented our scene with well thought out composition and care. The scarcity of documentation from that time and place make these shots all the more valuable. Thanks for taking and sharing these pictures Brian
Riders in order of appearance: Chris Manaras, Fran Dreis, Ted Mathesius, Brian Fountaine, Brian Bauer, Matt Sellars, Tola Rogalski.
So much to pick up and see. The death site of so many of the desert’s creatures. A splay of feathers, tiny bleached bones in the palm of my hand, scats comprised mostly of hair. The sun’s light through a yellow glass shard. Peer down and see the fragment of an arrow point. A resting point to knap an edge or an errant shaft missing its mark? Then Nicole notices what appears to be a disturbed ring of stones. Maybe a cache, no ash present. The air is thick with smoke; a metallic sky. But late and early, the world will be within a film of copper light which falls on the water like a heavy metal. Later as the moon arcs through the sky, it will indicate moving waters, silent at this distance and looking for all the world like a golden gateway to another world. Rocks clink underfoot as we go overland to the rumor of a canyon and in the midday heat, all the immediate world undergoes the rhythm of the dog’s panting. Two tunnels speak water out across the desert. The moving water is haunting in the moonlight and it reminds me that summer nears its close.
Half in, half out of wilderness. I cannot shake the sense of winter here, though the temperature is in the high 80's today. But the season is short and the people and animals work to cling to the landscape. The ground is rocky, the wind is strong, and the ice pushes all gaps further apart. In contrast to all this insistent wilderness, fences lace over the countryside in established rhythms. I imagine wire cutters in hand, the satisfying sproing! of the barbed wire as it gives up its taut purchase on the rolling earth. I saw a dead coyote yesterday on the roadside. Trickster usually moves faster than that. Maybe the bag of tricks empties quicker just clinging to the landscape. Later, in the day, we visit stone teepee rings left by...? The Blackfoot? The Crow? They are old. I imagine the tallow and hide smell of their interiors. A world of wood smoke, sun bleach and exhalation. A contrast to the bright hunting grounds. A tower of thunderheads pile up over the Crazy Mountains and I line up the teepee circles with them. A scene ephemeral but subsequent daily as the afternoon light tips into evening. Before roads. Before cows. Before power lines. Before.
Cut bank; stratum falling into the moving waters. The river becomes unpredictable, turns back and forth on itself. Gopher running for its life across the road in front of the car. I swerve to miss but it doesn’t always work.
Grass-wind-flowing patterns mesmerize. I can’t shake the thought that there is nowhere to hide out here. Fence psychology at play. My mind is fighting with it. Still, the order imposed upon this stubborn place is comforting. Some lingering and gripping fear of starvation in my DNA is put at ease by the sight of it. Sweet clover makes a carpet of yellow that lifts the surface of the ground up 18 inches and allows it to pulsate against the hard ridge lines.
I have seen more Pronghorn bands than ever before. The female’s markings blend into the background more evenly. The males have a black band under their chin and of course the hook of their phenolic horns. They are impossible to get close to; always disappearing into draws like cloud shadows.
Skunks waddle into ditches leaving their spritz upon the air; smells to me like the potential of long summer evenings, but only at a distance. Up close, the sulfuric composition of their scent elicits a flight response. A long billed curlew scolds me from beyond a fence line. It appears to have young nearby and my presence has it agitated. A dark spinning cloud cell above the Crazy Mountains moved over our way and dumped heavy gray rain for two hours. Afterwards, I walk with the dog along the highway. Cows stare at us. Drivers stare at us and then wave. Or stop and ask if all is well. Walking is not a thing here. I understand. Anyone on foot who is not working, appears from the cab of a pickup either stranded or involved in an extreme quest. Or both.
Ranch gates with roads leading to unseen houses and outbuildings. I think of the generations who have lived and worked these places. They fall into legend. It's all opaque to me, as I'm sure it is to the Appsáalooke, whose hunting and sacred grounds now sit behind these fences and gates. The work appears endless. Goddamned machinery always breaking down. Cows getting stuck everywhere. Hands cracked and bleeding. But it is open to the sky and one cannot ask for better work than that.
I see piles of picked rock. All the rock that destroys farm implements; all the geography that inhibits herd and machinery movement. Eventually it all gets planed out over generations of battered hands in the dirt. The last ice age pushed it all here and humans have pulled it out of the ground. The ridiculous cows replaced the buffalo. The ground is not picky and discerns not over hooves and shit that all do the same work. I think of the mammoths, over dressed for the age they obsolesced into. The last of the mega fauna crushing the ground and turning over the vegetation; life rent anew by the grazing of beasts.
I slow down to pass through Judith Gap before I drop down towards Harlowton. To the east a line of clouds shifts into purple light and curves around over the Big Snowy’s. The sun has dropped behind the Little Belts and all color begins to drop towards blue, just as water does at depth. Back in Two Dot, a deer paces the car, cuts across the driveway ahead of me and leaps the fence; its white tail disappearing into the depth.
Always remember the light of morning. It has none of the burden of other light. It is almost more promise than one can bear.
Always remember the light of midday. It is the light in the center of the map, with the sound of the engine cooling, tick tick tick.
Always remember the light before sunset. It has distilled the day and pulled off the trick of selling it back to you as a staple of your youth.
Always remember the light of the moon on the land. It contains your earliest memories; the love for you heard in the voices of your parents.
It is the distance you feel from home while being a foreigner in distant lands.
Remember all these qualities of light. They are better than any painting, words that can be written or high lonesome notes that can be hit. They weigh not a thing and contain the entirety of your time here.
I look down into the dust and volcanic ash at a piece of bone. It looks like the vertebra of a deer sized creature, but carried to this spot by what? There are no other bones nearby. It has sat under thousands of arcs of the sun, moon and passing rains. Water has seeped into it and frozen; pushing the fine grooves upon its surface further apart until it will become dust amongst the gravel on an ancient flood plain. I speculate it was brought here by a coyote. Gangs of them roam the open areas in the night calling to each other. I can only echo locate them in the inky darkness but their communications are as mysterious to me as the provenance of this bone next to my foot. But this ossified structure too moved over the the earth with stealth and speed when it was contained in the mortal coil of some arid creature seeking to eat, while not being eaten.
A vast array of broken glass glitters in the sun at the base of a basalt cliff. The glass is mixed in plastic shotgun shells, their primary colors have become subtle pastels. I remove the color from context to where it becomes only an element under the spell of an oxidizing sun. It is a miracle of reflected light now, if I can pause to embrace it that way. I look up from the ground; my eye follows the mosaic of scree up through sagebrush to the crest of the rocks above. Their profile is like the spiny rolling back of a sea creature locked into a lava flow three thousand feet thick.
The earth builds itself up while the floods carve away at the surface and we occupy the thinnest margin of blue air between the two. For all of our accomplishing narrative, we’d do well to acknowledge that we are of this place.
The thunderheads were now even more inaccessible than before. The clouds seemed to look down upon a human race squared off in a war with or upon nature with the most elegant indifference, just as the continuum of the hydrologic cycle has risen and evaporated over every species that ever has or will ever exist upon this planet.
Remote and guessing patches for mutating software; a thickness between you and the dexterity of your everyday tasks. Is the moment pivotal or merely the heavy mast threatening to plunge through the hull and invite the rush of all time?vanished with an unmistakable trace
A vision of timelessness, or maybe it is all time-fullness, creeps around my mood both as a comfort and a stifling insistence that wants us to just go... we've jumped and landed elsewhere. The motion of the pedals being the more immediate and accessible form of succor, I begin the transit back to base.
Walking the perimeters again. Spinning like wet paint out from the center to find the edge on one of those spiral paintings. So I rode my bike up to my favorite viewpoint. I fixed my gaze on a set of distant thunderheads. Their contours were so well defined, and somewhere I heard that means that the electrons are moving against each in a maximal way. But maybe that was multiple memories overlapping and forming new conclusions, like the spinning painting. I cleared my head of the possible reasons why and let my vision drift deep into the cloud world; so billowy and gaseous. Light seemed to emanate from impossible sources. It was a wonderful place to travel to but I had to guard against this sense of isolation even in that refuge. In the way that yesterday is like today and tomorrow, the expectation of the same, I suddenly saw the clouds as familiar and alien. Like looking at images that ride waves all the way from Mars and I want to hike out to distant points, peer down deep red sand gorges and feel its ancient and brittle twilight. I'm afraid I'd look for familiarity but only find the hostility of a red planet and long dry river beds.
Night has fallen and I am laying down in the forest. All is silent aside from the eddying of water through rocks in the river. Part of my mind remains at attention, but I drift off to sleep regardless. After a period of time, I am awakened by a high pitched humming sound. It sounds like the whirring of insect wings. I shift and the sound momentarily stops. When it starts again, I perceive that this insect has lit upon another tree nearby. I am aware that the sound has stirred my sleep- but again I drift towards slumber. In passage, I imagine the insect- a world unto itself; part of an ongoing mysterious night universe. I imagine its wings flooding out darkly from under a carapace as it flies looping circles in the still forest air. I try to imagine how it sees its habitat- and then I am asleep.
Another lapse of time has occurred when I wake again. The full moon has crested the ridge on the opposite bank of the river and it has flooded the trees with light. But it is of such a softness, that I imagine all the moonlit areas to be composed of some sort of velvet that can emit its own luminescence. Perhaps the shadows are made of something indefinably hard- but this of course is nonsense, for they move with imperceptible weightlessness. As I stir out of dozing, I recall the insect. Was it endemic? Is it here in previously unseen multitudes to break down the healthy forest? My mind switches back and forth between the absolute serenity of the night and an image in my head of great fire. All the creatures in this world run before its unforgiving speed towards the river as burning trees crash all around me. Embers fall like bombs ahead of the fire, allowing it leapfrog itself with total certainty.
The time we have come to know demands that we cannot be lulled into thinking that nothing is amiss in our world. At times, it is hard to separate out the silent night from images of human migration. A cocktail of necessity, hunger, hope and fear. Images of oil fields afire- columns of black smoke against an azure desert sky. I watch the passage of time for a bit as the moonlight revolves through ponderosas. Sleep eventually returns.
In the early morning hours, I awake once more. The moon has passed over the narrow slot of sky in the canyon and the stars are again visible. The stars always pull me out for the wide view. Our entire history is contained within them and they have gazed down upon it with absolute indifference. My attention is drawn towards a sound upslope from me. My eyes have adjusted back to this darkness and I realize it is an elk. Somehow she moves her five hundred pounds through the trees matching silence with near silence. She stops once to sniff the air before moving up out of sight.
I run down through the backyard chasing fireflies. The moon has sailed back out of the thunderheads in the south and the ground has just enough definition to avoid the tall prickly pear. I’ve never seen these creatures before and they are surreal. There is no sound to the distant lightening flashes now and seeing the insects light the world around them in the most succinct and delicate ways is capturing our attention now. It is worth chasing, for we know it is fleeting. This light that allows us to contain it for only a moment is the illumination that holds strongest to our memory.
The halo of red brake lights cast a glow over the sagebrush. The sound of the motor chocked off the canyon walls as I shut it off. Silence and darkness fell over the interior of the cab. It was only for a moment though as my eyes adjusted to the electricity of the stars wheeling overhead. These far points of light are the landscape we trade our terrestrial one for at sundown here. They are a blaze of interchanging bodies that writhe over this rumpled hat of dark rock. I wake deep in the night and the inky lanterned display has been traded for the silver light of the moon. An owl murmurs in a distant cliff face. At this late hour another set of eyes scans this land where it spills out of the canyon. The muted tones of the valley floor suggest something fleeting and nearly lost to us daily. To encounter your own shadow in moonlight is like seeing a secret part of your being. The whisper of summer night air is punctuated by circumnavigating groups of coyotes and large fluttering moths.
After completing a piece for the Bellevue Art Museum's Biennial "Knock On Wood" (more on that later), I spent a good deal of time trying to decide which direction to take my work. Whenever I hit a point like this I've found it helpful to create multiples of objects. Things like pouring slipcast into molds or glueing wood strips into bent laminations of master frames are always helpful. Lots of parts and pieces without a lot of anxiety about the direction. It has occurred to me that this new direction of late has a lot of gestural shapes coming out of it. Like drawing in wood, and the shapes themselves have a liveliness to their flexibility- literally, which gives them energy I suppose. Not being one to be willfully tied down to a theme until I absolutely have to be, Energy seems like an excellent broad tent from which to work under. Stay tuned.