how funny it is that we should find ourselves here, again, together, on a tuesday.
on friday after one morning meeting i couldn’t reschedule, i hit the road. last week, as you may recall, already kind of sucked at the time of writing, and as tuesday faded into wednesday and things did not markedly improve and in fact continued mostly to be punctuated by a series of further annoyances, i made the snap decision to spend the weekend in some kind of wilderness.
more about that in the fourth segment but the summary is: it was great. i made it all they way down to the Alvord Desert which in the span of just a couple years has become pretty much my favorite corner of our little big state. it’s still early enough in the year that the playa wasn’t completely full of sprinter van campers or drag racers and it was therefore relatively easy to find a spot out there on the dried up lakebed that was plenty far away from every other thinking thing. the stars out there are pretty incredible.
so that’s kind of the theme this week! in a way having an idea of a theme going in is a departure from some of the 15-week-old structures and guidelines that have curled their little tendrils around this project. i have a feeling this might end up being one of my favorite issues or one of my least favorite. that’s the kind of thing that writers love to say right up front in kind of a half smirking self congratulatory way like “but we all know which one i really believe” and i will certainly cop to spending a fair amount of my life smirking. but i haven’t even written the rest of it yet! so how could i know.
ok here we go.
1. painting
well how about that, some OK looking clouds.
on the 7 ish hour drive from portland to the alvord desert, there are a lot of moments where the composition of the constantly shifting landscape outside the car strikes me for a brief moment. or something about the color of the mountains reminds me of other mountains i’ve had as neighbors in my life. or something about the shadows and light dappling their way across the huge flat dusty expanses out there that makes a little “ping” somewhere in my brain. once you get past a certain point you’re probably the only person for miles on those gravel roads. so there’s no harm in cutting the engine and pulling over and gazing at it for a while, whatever it is, and taking a picture to look at some more later, and then hopping back in and turning the music back up.
this is one of those moments. coming north out of the Alvord once you’re back through the pass you’re snaking your way along Catlow Valley Road for a good hour, hour and a half, with the west edge of the Steens sliding into the scrubland on your right. the way things layer up out there in the distance, the blues and the browns, the mountains so suddenly sharp it makes you pause for breath, is surely worth the trip all on its own.
what hit me here was the way the shadow of that cloud was laying over the ridge in the middle distance - the far mountains and the sky are practically the same shade, fading into each other as all that rain dumps down, but the ridge in front was a dark, dark blue and the contrast was surprising.
sketch, after a photo. you can see on the left, i’m roughly figuring out where that other ridgeline should tick back up skyward before it hits the left edge of the frame. and how much space there should be between the ridgelines. and some idea of a cloud, and a vague impression of a foreground.
blocking out some colors. this was a quick turnaround as far as pieces for this newsletter go. i got back sunday and just finished this one up this morning.
almost done here. the main point of this piece is that blue ridgeline and how it’s sharp against the mountains behind in some places, and how it starts to fade into them in others. but i also spent a fair bit of time figuring out how to paint those hillsides in the middle distance that are half smooth curves, half blocky rock. a constant feature out there.
to get to the final from here, i used a little digital art trick. the whole thing that hit me here was just how blue that middle ridge was compared to everything else around it. and since this is a painting not a photo, i decided to play that up - there’s a blue overlay layer i added to the final that really punches it up and gets it closer to what my eyes were seeing and what the camera could not accurately capture.
i took a lot of photos this trip. hopefully we will see some more studies of them.
2. poem
“river poem” - spring 2021
did you get my message?
it’s twenty yards, a mile across
those rocks on your side -
tumbling shrugging upward, an invitation
to fingers and shoulders more limber than mine
over here i have these fence rails,
fastened together three times now
and at the perfect height for a lazy outstretched heel.
i have the slick whisper of aluminum camp pieces across each other
i have the murmur of a next-door conversation
the sun is down for me now too,
and the creek is muttering to itself - you hear it, too -
i’d invite you over
but the sparrows are too asleep now to carry a word
and the wind is less lighthearted with each breathless rush
if i see you in the morning before i go,
i’ll raise a hand and half a smile and save the rest
for all the summers we have left.
3. a nice sandwich
sometimes it’s nice to pull the car over to the side over in a wide patch of gravel and set the brake and swing a foot out and pop the hatch and dig around in your camping box for your knife and cutting board and dig around in your cooler for all your sandwich fixings and carefully balance everything on a beer box, a sleeping bag, a rolled up tent, and then assemble yourself a nice sandwich. and then turn around and squint off into the horizon either up the road or down it and take a big bite with a crunch in it and just kind of let those vibes swirl around for a few minutes until the wind picks up a little bit and is that another engine in the distance?
i go in and out of being a lunch sandwich guy. sometimes they are in heavy rotation. going vegan made it a little trickier, but largely thanks to one particular product, i am happy to report that sandwiches are back.
this stuff is fucking incredible! i can’t believe it. it’s so good. most of their stuff is good but they really knocked it out of the park on this one. it’s so good that i absolutely refuse to look at the nutrition information. and i never will!
but check this out:
lightly toast some bread
mayo on the insides of both slices
dijon mustard on one slice
lay down red onion slices
lay down pickle slices
put your vegan lunch meat on there in little rolls or folds (for the texture)
if you have a ripe avocado slice some up and lay it on the meat
lay down a slice of pepper jack
scrunch on some lettuce in approximately the right shape
you can lay down another slice of pepper jack if you want but it might be overkill
put your other bread on top, and voila
4. the desert
this weekend’s trip was another one of what i have taken to referring to as my “trips out to the desert.” the desert in this case being an extremely broad largely imprecise potentially reductive term i use for “anything east of the Cascades.”
i do love it out there, which is something i’m not sure how i feel about yet. i always told myself i left Colorado after college in large part because it was too brown, too dusty, the water-borne anxiety of the coming decades too close to the surface for me to ever truly feel comfortable in that state. and i think all that is actually pretty true. mostly i do not like being hot. mostly it is much more comfortable on a very fundamental level to be living in a place where water falls out of the sky pretty regularly, and things are green.
part of it, i think, is the relative emptiness. it’s gotten hard to take a casual camping trip anywhere near Portland and feel truly alone - and being alone in some kind of large beautiful expanse is a feeling i am no longer pretending isn’t a constant tug somewhere in my chest. there are places out there, in the desert, where as i said above, you’re the only thinking thing within a dozen miles. and so the thoughts that swirl and float around everywhere have nowhere else to go - they are attracted to the sparkling light of your brain, and they do not have to diffuse themselves among dozens of other similar vessels. you get access to the raw feed. you are tapped into the mainframe.
in my little book of poem fragments there is a piece i wrote down a year ago now that is the kind of thing that’s so obvious to say or think that i have not found a gap in some other poem structure to fit it in.
i’m going into the woods again
to see what kind of shapes there are -
to fill my brain with a different kind of quiet.
anyway. other people write about the woods and the desert in ways that are probably more compelling. if you’re reading this there’s a good chance you also read Chuck’s newsletter (i hear he has a book you can buy too) and that is a great place to read the thoughts of a man who has spent a lot more time than i have examining his relationship to the wild parts of our planet.
i’m going to end this week on a sillier note. this is not a music newsletter (again, more interesting people than me write about it better, blah blah blah) but one thing those landscapes out there always make me want to do is blast The War on Drugs. sure, all their songs basically sound the same! sure, it’s an obvious choice! but if there is a band more tailor-made for driving into or out of the dusty brown mountain ranges that streak up and down this big wide part of our continent, i have not found it.
i tried to capture the specific vibe this band gives me a little while ago via a series of tweets:
the vibe is: Canadian guy who loves his woman but is filled with a yearning to spend his days in the dust digging up dinosaur bones - and well, at a certain point, that yearning is gonna win out.
is it gauche to link your own tweets in your own newsletter? maybe. but if there’s one thing i know about myself it’s that i do find myself to be very funny sometimes and i have no problem patting myself on the back for a joke i made seven months ago that, uh, 11 people liked.
so two pieces of advice this week: next time you’re driving anywhere near some mountains, consider putting some of their music on.
and next time you find yourself falling for a man who loves the war on drugs, well, don’t say i didn’t warn you.
i’m calling it now: my prediction up top was way off! this is a perfectly fine newsletter but i don’t think it’s the best of the 15. whoops!
okay, that’s it for now. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.