Active, Adventurous, and Beautiful

Compass at the Dee Wright Observatory, McKenzie Pass, Oregon

I've returned from a week long trip through the geological wonders of Central Oregon. This is the third time I've taken this trip, and the second outing with students in tow.

For those of you who grew up with a public school education the idea of setting out with your teacher for a week long camping trip probably seems incomprehensible. The organization, money requirements, and liability complications would render such a trip impossible. Yet, I would argue, that it is just such thoughts and limitations that have neutered our public schools in the past three decades. Ultimately, I believe our inability as adults to free ourselves from such fears will contribute greatly to a dramatically diminished economic and cultural output in America.

The fact of the matter is, there is no better way to instill in a child the magnificent power of nature than to let them experience it first hand. Hiking to the top of cinder cone volcanoes in 98 degree weather only to descend through a 6000' lava cave that is 40 degrees on the same afternoon does more to nurture a child's imagination than any classroom demonstration or diagram. In order for education to be lasting and meaningful to a child, it must be composed of experiences that inspire and enliven— it must be active, adventurous, and beautiful— in short, it must be all the things that we believe our children to be.

Lonely in the Snow

Winter Phoenix, 2009

acrylic, toner, and graphite on cheesecloth wrapped panel

6" x 6"

I didn't grow up with snow. Only in recent years have I had the opportunity to traipse about on mountainsides amidst snow flurries and I find the experience, for lack of a better word, chilling. Something about the silence of the snow enthralls me, but keeps me on edge. I cannot shake the awareness that this simple solidification of water has the power to bury the trees and smooth out cliff faces. 

My voice seems an ineffective tool against so much mass and, as I stand next to 100 foot tall conifers that have seen the first fifteen feet entombed for the season, I'm reminded of just how small a man is in the face of nature's simplest processes. 

* * * * *

I photographed this tree as it fought against the diminishing horizon line outside of Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. While it may have seemed lonely in the snow, there was something defiant in its shape. Perhaps experience had taught it that winter was transitory, and survival the norm.

May Day; Subtly

May 1, 2005

I've tried to use words to convey the differing qualities of place, but my handling of them is rarely nimble enough to convey the great discrepancies between my life in California and my life in Oregon. 

It would be better to just let two May Day images, separated by 819.6 miles and four years, impart whatever analogies they will.

May 1, 2009

Walk It Out

February 18, 2005

Ironically, I devoted far more time to walking and hiking while living in the LA area than I do now while living in the splendid Pacific Northwest. I attribute this to the fact that I'm far busier here with creative pursuits than I was in LA. In Portland I must juggle my studio practice with small film production, so very little time remains for traipsing about the hillsides outside my home. 

Eventually, this will have to change, as most of my ideation process derives from interactions outside of my normal context, and nature tends to be the most fruitful ground for generating new imagery and inspirations.

Ruby Red

February 1, 2005

There's little truth to the color in this image. That table top is bright red. The printer itself more gray than blue. I always appreciated how my sterile-toned electronics looked on that table, and I believe that it somehow influenced the color scheme in our bathroom at that house. The main portion of the bath was painted grey, while the little toilet room was a blistering tomato red. When the door between these two spaces was left open that tiny side room emitted this lively ruby glow that never failed to elevate the spirits. 

* * * * *

Painting a room gray is a luxury you don't have in the Pacific Northwest. Gray is the most common state of each day, and you don't want it encroaching on the miniscule amount of space you can actually control.

Shadows

January 20, 2005

Just outside the hydrogen peroxide closet you could open a window to look down on the play yard at my first school. I always found this vantage point to be unnerving, and yet I often found myself standing there admiring the way the harsh California sunshine would carve crisp shadows out of the cement. 

* * * * *

As a teacher, I confess that I periodically miss that predictable sunshine. It made teaching about light and time so much easier. In Oregon it is much trickier to use the colors of sunrise and sunset as a teaching aide, because so often the entire sky is nothing by an endless sea of gray cloud and drizzle. Likewise, building a sundial in the Willamette Valley can be an almost comical exercise in futility nine months out of the year— the very same nine months that school is traditionally in session. On the flip side however, my current students never have to stay inside for recess because of astronomical pollutant levels and it's unlikely that they'll ever sit on the highway watching ash settle on the windshield with the silence of snow.*

*Although, if I recall correctly, 1980 did provide a very dramatic dispersion of ash in Oregon.

Haiku By Way of Explanation

The season turns and I'm called back to work. I've started scheduling meetings and shaking hands. The phone increasingly intrudes upon the daytime hours. After many afternoons of sorting, my files are now in order. Among the stacks of lesson plans, student work, and handouts, I ran across a rumpled sheet of copy paper with a few mediocre haiku dated 4/13/2006. 

Footpaths for people

converge at a driftwood sign,

pointing towards stables.

I remember this day well. My camp name was Pine, and I had led a handful of 6th graders into the scrubby woods that competed with the coastal dunes along the Pacific Ocean outside of Lincoln City, Oregon. None of these students came from my class. They were public school students enjoying a week of outdoor education. I was charged with teaching poetry in the wilds. Haiku made sense: simple syllabic structure, short length, an obvious connection with the natural world. But in other ways, haiku did not make sense. How does one teach subtlety to a twelve-year-old? How do you explain time and it's passing in seventeen syllables. I can demonstrate the form, but I can't impart the art.

Many paths crossing,

but few footprints step away

toward the gray mountain.

Reading over these haiku now I realize that many aspects of my life will mimic the structure of this poetic style. The structure of my days will seem simple, but there must be an underlying subtlety if they are to be successful. I must be obsessively cognizant of the present moment. There will have to be a distillation of personal experience.

I suppose this is all a round-about way of saying that you'll be hearing from me less frequently now. As a chill creeps into the mornings I will be afforded less time to sit and reflect. In no way does this mean I'm abandoning my posts; it simply means that their frequency must fall victim to a greater good. I must attempt to inspire more 6th graders now, and that task can occasionally take all the subtlety I can muster.

Rockin

There are some things that humanity has historically been unable to resist. Gold. Silver. Puns. So I’ll just succumb and state that the Rice NW Museum of Rocks and Minerals is a real gem.*

On my second visit I was no less impressed with their vast collection of bewildering specimens from the clutches of the earth. Minerals that look as downy as cotton, as soft as ermine, as poisonously pigmented as American Apparel, fill case after glass-fronted display case in the untouched rambling 50’s ranch home of former logging baron Richard Rice.** A boulder sized thunder egg with an opal center greets visitors to the NW Mineral Gallery and one room in the main house cycles through different UV lights to demonstrate the hidden phosphorescence of some otherwise banal looking rocks. In the basement you’ll not only find the sweetest linoleum floor ever laid, but a fantastic collection of petrified wood (including petrified pine cones). I posted a few more pics on flickr should you care to explore why mineralogy has informed every hipster painter in the Pacific Northwest for the past five years.

If you have a weakness for small scale museums of oddities and obsessions then I highly recommend that you check out hiddenportland.com which has put together a charming little brochure of the finest rarely visited haunts of PDX.

*I’m not the only punny one. Check out this article where they manage to get in, “It will rock your mind and salt your appetite.” Why would they write that? And how could they follow it with the fact that the museum is only “a stone’s throw off Highway 26”? Funny how puns are only funny when you’re the one making them.

**Fact check please. I believe this to be true from some informative labels I read on my first visit but I was also monitoring twelve children during that visit and must admit the possibility that this may have weakened my recall.

The Company Shoots

My weekend consisted of three days filming with The Company in the foothills of the Oregon coastal range. Thus far, The Company consists of only four diverse dreamers harboring the vision of a full length movie. Nevertheless, I suspect it will bloom into many more folks than that by the time we’re through. Grandiose labors of love tend to attract other dreamers. The various trials and tribulations, from the screenwriter’s perspective, can be followed at I’m Not Arguing That With You.

For my part I was asked to get lost. I lay down in spider webs and organic detritus. Dirt was kicked upon me by those closest to me. I was made to cry.

And this was just the test footage.

Absence

After feebly attempting to coerce comments out of you and coming up with so little response you may have believed you’d been party to my leaving the blogosphere for good. No such luck! I have been absent, to be sure, but for many a good reason which I will present in brief:

1. I had to produce nine painted paper-mache Commedia dell’Arte masks.*

2. I was uncovering the mysteries of “layer styles” in Photoshop in order to finish my assignments for the dubiously named Photoshop Expert class I was taking. To date, I would characterize myself as more of a Photoshop user than expert.

3. I was planning a graduation ceremony.

4. For nine days I was part of a class road trip in which I guided eight adolescents down the state of Oregon and into the Bay Area.

5. I only just returned from a three-day teacher retreat on the Salmon River.

6. I was finishing a web site for a client that had to go live before any other computer-related activities could take place (such as writing this for you to read).

My hope is that these will all serve as adequate excuses for my absence. I wouldn’t want to set a bad example and have you decide to disappear for the next few months. After all, this summer has big things in store for me and mine— it would be a shame for you to miss out.

* With the help of family and friends who were guilted into service by a desperate and sniveling moi.

Slush

I returned to Timberline last weekend and spent one day being abused by the slopes and the second day contemplating their rough beauty within the lodge. There were times that first day, while sliding through the driving snow, that I felt horribly lost— there were no landmarks and there was no horizon. The sky and ground were equally cold, hard, and grey.



Whiteout. That’s how my students referred to it.

* * * *

From within the lodge it seems less menacing. Around you people laugh and chatter, oblivious to the fact that the snow presses twenty feet up every side of the lodge. The windows on the first two levels are darkened by the wall of snow, its wooly grey giving way to blue as it thins towards the third floor and the wan daylight begins to sift through. People sit by the highest bank of windows and watch as the weather is thwarted by thick glass and thicker walls.



From this vantage all the flurry is just confection. A television dribbles out the news as pop songs bounce against the timbers. A few sniffling skiers sit at the bar getting sloshed.



It seems less menacing but I can’t concentrate. The wind is still blowing. The trees are bent under a terrible weight. The white noise doesn’t warm me.

Were I to stay longer I don’t think the snow would stop. It would rise like a slow tide over the lodge and all the trees. The white would consume everything on land until there was no land left— just a vast emptiness between heaven and earth: a whiteout.

Timberline

I’ve often been told that Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. In fact, this was a common conversation thread throughout my years at Portland’s one and only craft college. It would begin with my telling a stranger I was getting a degree in craft.

There would be silence.

Then there could be a range of clunky questions seeking clarification, or there would be the question about Timberline.

“No.” I’d say, “I have not visited Timberline. Yet.”
And that would inadvertently derail that conversation.

After being an Oregonian for over a decade I finally wandered through Timberline Lodge. It contains many remarkable evidences of hand work; with the wrought iron hardware and massive hewn beams being the standouts. Over one doorway I spied a butterfly tenon larger than both my fists put together. Carved rams support chunky oak slab table tops and telephone pole beams are cut short and topped with friendly carved animals. A handmade cohesiveness provides harmony as well as quirky surprises on each floor of the lodge. In one side hallway I came across a simple wooden bench with protruding iron handles on one side and a single heavy metal wheel on the other so that the bench could be wheeled about if a new location was desired. I could not find another one. This singular bench made me wonder when we might again build buildings that would be erected to not just serve a function to the public but would also honor the ingenuity of a hand laborer.

As I see it, Timberline’s crafted beauty isn’t nearly as important as the sentiment that wrought it. In the bleakest of times for America a president saw fit to think outside of advisors, analysts, and political tradition to empower the impoverished. Among the hundreds of people working to fashion Timberline there were many who discovered previously hidden talents and were awarded not just a check, but with the feeling that their labor mattered. Simply stated, the New Deal valued its citizenry and unlocked their potential.

Critics of FDR’s plan proselytized the end of capitalism with the advent of the New Deal but I think of it as a very heart felt attempt to counteract an international crisis of economy and the subsequent feelings of worthlessness that it engendered.

Ultimately, government should not be just a gnarled web of mandates and bureaucracy; it should inspire and support the dreams of its populace. As a democratic population we should not allow our government to operate solely as a short-sided arm of disaster relief for the victims of its own inefficiency. FDR was not the primary culprit of a national economic downturn and many of his solutions to it live on today— can we have much faith that our current president will leave us with a similar legacy?

*Feeling it imprudent to take a camera on the slopes I turned to Flickr for an image. Fellow photographer Sherri Jackson graciously provided the picture above. It manages to capture not just the fantastic scale of the woodwork and masonry, but also reveals a bit of the impeccably considered lighting that exists throughout the lodge. Much thanks to Sherri.