040 tuesday october 26
lake crescent / mystery poem / one-mistake breakfast burrito / vacation planning
we’re back. tuesday’s here again.
do you ever think about how much of your life is events, and how much is the path that runs in between events? this occurs to me every so often, usually on tuesday mornings when i’m thinking about how my past week went and what’s worth talking about. what might be interesting to share.
this past week i can think of two major events and maybe a half dozen minor events that i would consider worthy of the descriptor. but if you zoom in further onto the path, of course there are also little jigs and jogs that you could call events if you wanted to. for a lot of us a lot of that path is taken up by work, but things happen at work (unfortunately.) chores. driving around. cooking food. eating food. reading a book. things do happen during some of these stretches i guess.
some people i know seem to have paths that stop very often. or maybe that climb a lot of hills, or make a lot of sharp turns. they seem to be driven to punctuate the in-between stretches with as many stopping points as possible. i think about this sometimes and i also wonder how much they think about it. how much of it is conscious. how much the dinners, meetings, gatherings, nights out, nights in, conferences, and coffee dates start to flatten into themselves and become just more trail. to them.
and when we all get to the end of whatever journeys we are on, if you’re the type of person who thinks it might be valuable in some way to look back on the route you took to get there, which trail would you have preferred to have walked? i have no idea.
the major events i alluded to above. one: a contractor my firm works with called the office at 4pm and offered up some tickets to the season opener of the Portland Trail Blazers. i snagged them and the seats happened to be literally courtside. two: i took a little road trip up around the olympic peninsula.
the half dozen minor events i will leave as unmarked bends in the path.
let’s get into it.
1. painting
i am going to stop making assertions and assumptions about what i’m going to be painting the next week. so far i think i’m 0/40 on those.
the pacific northwest in general and the olympic peninsula in particular is always beautiful, no matter the time of the year. but when things start to get gray and drizzly it does something to the colors that makes things extra striking. for some reason. up there this past weekend, a lot of the deciduous trees (not sure which ones - ask an actual tree guy) were orange and yellow and rusty brown in a way that really set them off against the dark, cool, wet greens and grays and blues that made up, well, just about everything else.
it was striking. and the weather was pretty consistently bad, in that way that makes you feel nice and cozy in your car or your tent but also reminds you of all those old cliches about the ferocity of nature etc.
anyway i stopped by lake crescent, which is great, if you haven’t been. the shapes reminded me of some of the shapes i grew up with in alaska. particularly how the slopes meet the water and how the distance meets the mountains back there.
sketch. i guess these aren’t always the most useful. but they do show what i am thinking about, or what i consider to be the most important. mountain shapes, sense of layering, big sky and water, and those lines of clouds.
layering in some colors
getting in the tones of the water and cleaning up the mountains just a little bit. the water was not really smooth so the reflections are pretty blurred but you still see the dark tones of the mountains in the water.
here’s an interesting step. i flipped the canvas horizontally and forgot to unflip it. flipping things like this every so often is good practice, i think, especially if you are like me and have a tendency for things to slope a certain direction or for your brushstrokes to fall along similar lines. if you go back and look at some of the more "illustration-y” things i’ve done for this newsletter you will probably see some of the verticals leaning over to the right.
final touches. you can see those yellow, orange trees on the far shorelines. i could have pushed the saturation more but i think they fit a little better like this.
2. poem
“mystery poem” - fall 2021
someone asked me,
who is this about? i never knowlife is full of little mysteries
and if you come across one,
you should leave another for someone else
how do you think it got to be this way?
this weekend i finished up the last page of the first notebook i started writing these little poems in. time for a new notebook! a good time to stop and reflect, probably. but i probably won’t do that. just an interesting milestone is all.
3. one-mistake breakfast burrito
i forgot the beans.
4. vacation planning
a lot of them just dried up and disappeared out there. not much reason to stick around and plenty of reason to leave, and even if you didn't leave your kids probably did. it was already happening it just got more dramatic is all.
you’ll still see them as you ride by, on your way from station to station. nobody in them these days, no glass in the windows, but that paint will last for decades. all that metal, somebody made that. somebody bent it into shape and painted it and now it’ll be sitting there on a lightly poisonous footprint for many more years.
a lot of the roads they kept, or are in the process of keeping, or are trying to keep. or they might come back later and re-surface them a bit, to make them a little easier on bike tires. fewer wide spots in them these days though but they do still connect all the ranger stations out here. some of those stations are nicer than these little towns ever were, too. just a question of priority.
it’s not really encouraged to quit pedaling and coast down off the shoulder onto the shadow of one of those old streets, still a little asphalt or concrete but mostly gravel and weeds by now. it’s not really discouraged either. mostly there’s no one way to feel about it and everyone has different opinions. the next group along might give you a whoop or a holler, or might shake their heads as they cruise by. they might not even see you.
you wouldn’t be the first to lean your rig up against one of those peeling walls and brush carefully through one of those leaning doorways. not by a long shot. there’s graffiti all over the inside walls, of course. decades’ worth of human marks in this crumbling human place. probably not much else left inside. the old aluminum will still be there, you’re not sure if it’s ironic or what that the newer drink bottles will have long since melted back into the earth. if it’s not ironic it’s something.
nobody really knew what to do with all these places and it was never really a priority. as fast as you sometimes feel whipping down those ancient valley curves it’s slow these days to move things from place to place and a lot of thought goes into it when it does happen. and moving stuff out of a place is just less important than moving things in, that hasn’t changed. you heard maybe once they finish the big ranger station up on the point, there’ll be some more attention paid to re wilding this place in maybe a more intentional type of way. but you’ve also been hearing that for years.
you’ve got a couple more weeks ahead of you before you hit the coast, the northest-eastest part of this peninsula. there’s no real hurry, there’s work to be done everywhere, still, and always, but all of it is still happening without you and when you get to where you’re going, or get back to where you came from, you’ll be plenty able to start pitching in again. you can take an afternoon to tiptoe respectfully around the ghosts of these old places for hours and if it comes to it, you could pitch your tent up here too. you and your friends did that all the time, years ago, back when it was a little edgier maybe than it is now. maybe.
your bags are pretty full already but you certainly have room to wedge a little something in there. a half-fist size chunk of concrete, most of the cement worn away by years of winter storms, the big aggregate chunks pretty shiny by now. a little scrap of cedar siding, just a whisper of white paint still hiding in the crevices.
something to talk about at the next stop with whoever happens to be there. something to show everyone else in the building whenever you end up back in the city. if you end up back that way at all.
well, i think that will do it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.