Shady Rest Trailer Paradise

After a pleasant visit to Venice Beach area in Los Angeles, house-sitting and gallery-cruising for two weeks, I returned to Bishop and moved my trailer into Shady Rest Trailer Paradise in the northeast corner of Bishop, between City Park and the Canal. I have a concrete slab for a front porch and am hooked up to electricity, cold city water and sewer, with showerhouse privileges and a small storage shed. It's the Ritz!

A  major amenity is Winford Flud, general manager and Vietnam Vet (for real), pictured here watering flowers. He has planted flowers all over the park and keeps the place green. He encourages potted gardens and tomatoes, corn, lettuce and cucumbers  flourish amongst aluminum sidings. One afternoon when he returned from a fishing expedition (note sunburned legs) he fried up the new trout with all the other trout stashed in his freezer and handed it out to everyone in the trailer park. It was delicious. He told me he'd teach me to fish for trout if I bought a fishing license. I told him that if I sold a painting I'd buy a fishing license ($50). 

Winford scrounged me a small fridge, a fan, extension cords, and some frames to fix up for my paintings from his extensive holdings in converted container storage lockers down by the airport.  I bought parts at ACE and he fixed my interior water plumbing, gratis. He runs his giant TV and air conditioning all day for anyone who cares to walk in and sit for awhile. When the temp bakes up over 100, I look for a movie in his cabinets and flop on his couch drinking his gatorade. We share watermelons.  

Typical conversation-in-passing:

Winford;   HEY. YOU. whattayathinkyerdoin'?

Inna:  laundry.

Winford:  goddam.

Owens Valley is very green this summer, hot and green and the canal is running high from the last snow melting fast. I like to walk along the canal in the evening when fish jump, air cools down, and sunset colors sky and hills.

NEWS FLASH: Apparently I have in fact sold a painting at the ESLT fundraiser art show in Mammoth, so I may have a fishing blog soon. . . .Next blog will be about the paintings.

Tossup and Seven-come-11 Throwing Blank, Round Dice.

Thickets bristle from rooted centers. Spikey, thatched, like bottle brushes or porcupines, but instead of sea urchin forms, I saw kimonos and reed-capes hatch across my page, throwing down round blank dice at the edge of an autumn field.

Painting about Kanzan and Jittoku (Japanese), or Han Shan and Shih-te (Chinese); they are characters from the Buddhist tradition.  

Read more at:

http://www.coldbacon.com/hanshan.html

http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm

Remember drapery?

Flowing swirls and tucks, swathing bodies, piling up on chairs and floors?  Cottonwood bark sheathes white cottonwood core wood in rough draperies, flowing along branches and around burls.

Prismacolor pencil on watercolor underpainting. Easy to scratch up on a dinky, wobbling table in a tight-squeeze trailer dinette, jolting in blustery late winter weather.

Having fun!

Fixing My Trailer with Big Jim

Jim is a nice guy trying to recover from his most recent nasty divorce by camping out on LA Department of Water and Power land, picking up odd jobs and putting bicycles together out of dump junk and spare parts. Last winter when it was freezing I bought him some propane and gave him an old tent, and he figured he owed me. So he stayed a few days with me in Pleasant Valley campground, fixing lots of stuff on my scrappy old trailer, showing me how to scour the dump (photo) for parts, and being a fun companion. 

A buddy of his gave us some venison and he cooked it in the coals of our campfire, telling me rambling stories about great road meals: once he traveled with a woman who pinched an entire prime rib roast from a market, wrapped it up tightly in 25 feet of barbed wire borrowed from a fence, and just tossed it onto a big log in the middle of a campfire -- said it was the best roast beef he has ever eaten.  We scrounged for free firewood  from the constantly rotting and renewing willow and cottonwood forests in all the pasturelands. He grabs huge half-rotted willow logs and then smashes them up on the roadway to break them into pieces small enough to stuff into my crate. (photos)  He has a slingshot and one night chased a racoon around my trailer for awhile until it swam the river. He slept out on riverside grass wrapped in three sleeping bags stuffed inside each other with a thick fuzzy little girl's hat on his balding head.

In the dump we found replacement louvres for the windows, a grill to use cooking on the fire, a broiler pan for my dinky trailer oven, a picture frame, and a huge stash of perfectly OK canned food in one of the trailers -- lots of canned fish especially.  He checked out the wrecked bicycles, and found the stripped-out and smashed van of someone he had known on the street:  "Cat Lady." He said the civil authorities took her away to an "institution."  She was old and had 22 cats in that van. He warned me not to open the doors, but I did anyway and the stench was sickening.  I found an 18ft aluminum boat with just one dinged side that I really wanted to take home -- but he said it was beyond his powers to fix. We have a tentative plan to visit the Motherlode RV Dump in Benton out on Hiway 6 and find me a new rock shield--if he doesn't move to Gardnerville in the warming weather.

The river is rising as the Big Snows melt. I now have two of my recent paintings hanging in the Inyo Council for the Arts Gallery on Main Street (395 thru town). I hope to move back into Horton Creek for May, back home to the wind, the rats and the fabulous views.  

Happy Easter!

NEW PAINTINGS: Winter Trees, Mostly Cottonwoods

New paint-drawings done end of February into March, mostly while camped in Baker Creek Campground west of Big Pine. Cottonwood trunks stand shabbily in clouds of sucker shoots stripped of leaves, or carrying a few dried ochre leaves from the fall when they were deep yellow. New shoots sprout and slowly turn colors of magenta, brick, purple, graygreen. Now April and these gray trees are sprouting clouds of soft pale greens. 

(double-click to enlarge)

Early Spring

Spring in the Owen's Valley brought record snowfall to Mammoth Mountain (pushing on to 600 inches this winter) and a brush fire in the canyon west of Big Pine, where I was camped at Baker Creek county campground. I was evacuated (ma'am, you have 15 minutes, do you need any help?) to Pleasant Valley (see photos from last Nov) to get whooped by winds again. So GLAAAAAD to be living in a nice wind-proof trailer. Here's some photos, the red-birch drawing was done in chocolate syrup on paper plate. The gray willow thrashy trunk is a foretaste of the painting/drawings I have been doing and will post soon. The blond cow is unusual, most cows and calves in the pastures around here are black or brick colored. The pond is bucolic. Sunny weather is now forecast for the rest of March and I will be working on my trailer while it lasts ... everything moves outside while we pull extract the icebox and re-insulate -- right now it still has the original insulation from the 1960's: cardboard. Happy spring!

Watershed Wastrel?

Riparian waters are the cradle of life on this planet; we are slowly coming to understand their role in the renewal of all the natural resources we exploit. Western civilisation, the "first world" has focused on end results—unmitigated development of human ingenuity—and has let the sources of life get depleted, wasted, destroyed. As if we wouldn't need them anymore.

Water from the Western Sierra watershed flows down into the Sacramento River delta and waters Sacramento, the central valley and the Bay Area. Water from the Eastern Sierra watershed flows into the basin between the Sierra and the White and Inyo Mountains, and from there is conveyed by aqueduct to water the Los Angeles Greater Metropolitan Area.

All the Federal Bureau of Land Management campgrounds and most of Inyo County's campgrounds are situated beside creeks that drop out of the Sierra side of Owens Valley, Round Valley, and Long Valley. So, I have considered re-titling this blog: "Watershed Wastrel."

But, since all Californians are watershed wastrels, it seems too generic.

Well anyways here's some water pictures....

Ash Wednesday

Remember that from dust you were made, and unto dust you shall return.

_from the service for Impostion of Ashes

By the age of retirement a woman 

should have little in hand, a lot to forgive,

and memories, overwhelming memories.

How else shall I account for my present

condition? Aching gritty joints, floppy flesh,

colorless hair littering floors and solitary

pillow. Now are the days of roots exposed,

grey bark flaking and cold limbs cracking 

off into background loam and leaves.

Lying awake in winter with eyes closed, 

dreaming under the sign of Ashes,

a parade of images more alluring than any

fantasy of future virility and triumph

compels my attention and before me returns

into a luminous warm dark, beckoning.