A New Year in Anza Borrego

I took off on a January road trip and visited fulltiming friends dry camped in Anza Borrego for the winter. Mild evenings, cool mornings, pleasant days -- not freezing-the-pipes nights like Bishop.  Lotsa fan palms, date palms, teddy bear cactus. A bowl of alkaline earth, circled by mountains.

An Afternoon at The Slabs and Salvation Mountain

Websites to fill you in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_Mountain

Slab City was one of Chris McCandless' stops on his way to Alaska in the movie Into the Wild. We visited the Range Stage where he sings his duet with the young trailer lady. The irrigation canal at the "back" of the grounds was newly earth-worked and fenced. The place did not seem as crowded as I had imagined. We waved at many folks coming out of RVs at the end of the day to sit on folding chairs and chat. 

I had seen many photos of the the heart slope but I was unprepared for the spectacularly colorful interior armature of Leonard Knight's Museum rooms constructed of straw bales, branches, clay and paint, paint. The late afternoon light lit up the branching ceiling structures, falling through small irregularly spaced windows -- although the word "irregular" is impertinent here, for the regulation is evident, but it is not derived from an engineer's blueprint but rather seems to mimic the fractal growth patterns found in nature. The colors glow and reflect into one another like sunlight refracts through stained-glass windows in old churches. The interior spaces are very small and close, but while looking up into their ceilings, the armatures appear to extend into a greater space than is actually present. I was reminded of the Watts Towers, cathedrals, playground jungle-gyms, color-coded illustrations of neurons in the brain, the painting classroom at Immaculate Heart College with its banners, puppets, blocks, and Mary's Day parades, and the boxfulls of photographs I have taken and continue to take of trees and thickets, thickets. He painted no figures -- it's all words and flowers and waters (the blue and white striped areas are the Sea of Galilee).

Alas, I came too late to meet the artist himself. Here is some of his work:

Winter Colors

Dry and cold, late autumn and early winter in Owens Valley. Donkeys, mules and horses stand in the sticks, nosing up to the fence when I stop to take pictures. 

Winter colors rarely appear in postcards. Stripped of the stuff of vacation fantasies, the armature of winter stands stark, leaning into shadows, then catches for a moment the late horizontal sunlight as it strikes across the valley before dropping behind the ridge. What lies underneath, what remains, what still contains the power to surge into summer.

Christmas in Bishop

Lights on my trailer, the darker it gets, the brighter they burn.

Baby in a Sock? Found this odd creature in a basket at the Cobwebs Antique Shoppe where I was hunting for an angel ornament to give to my bowling partner, Carol. It seemed very weird to me at first--kind of a gnomic figure from Scandinavia, or a representation of Jizo, a bodhisatva who especially protects the souls of children. Googling around in the Cloud, I found sets of these molded heavy glass lights from the 20s era for sale on eBay. Here there is a toddler with a Japanese haircut that resembles the Baby in a Sock, but I prefer to keep the windows open on what else it could be.

My most fabulous present ever! Barbara Cortese, who sewed my parasol curtains last July, sneaked some scraps of that yardage and stitched them into a lap quilt with bright orange fleece on the backside. I have been bragging it around at the Senior Center and in the trailer park. I am going to get new cushions for my dinette in that aqua color framing the edges. 

The Senior Center offers a gift-wrapping service during the two weeks before Christmas. I volunteered several afternoons for this fund-raiser, and had many happy chats with its main organizers, Rachel and Betty. I went to free Christmas Day Dinner at this worthy establishment which serves about 600 Xmas dinners every year to anyone who sits down.

Local Color:  Santa and sleigh hooked up to motorcycle reindeer.

Thanksgiving

November I moved into J Diamond Mobile Ranch in Bishop. I am hooked up at a site by the canal, another branch of Bishop Creek that runs across the trailer part, down through an adjacent motel, under 395, and flows inside Bishop City Park, before hooking up to the canal that runs past Shady Rest, and finally joins the Owens River east of town. My neighbors in the park feed the wild but resident ducks, so they have ceased migrating.

I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a young couple who have recently settled into Bishop from Arkansas, leaving all family behind for an adventure in California. She cooked a turkey in a crockpot, and dinner was very good and fun. They have a sweet old dog that's a spittin' image of my childhood family dog. The young woman told me that although small and unimposing, Flash had once treed a bear in Arkansas. I was impressed.

Since I took these photos, the wind has blown all the colored leaves out of the trees and we are wintry, cold and grey. I am becoming more fascinated with pools of water seen through winter thickets and have started winter-colors paintings. Here's some of the photos:

A Fishing Story

Drove down to the Lone Pine zone to visit a couple of road buddies (we met and became friends in Horton Creek, summer of 2010) dry camping in the Alabama Hills behind The Face in the Rocks (see photo--note the lips behind the teeth). They had spotted trout in the creek nearby and felt we should hook up.

I arrived and found many mottled green fin-wavers holding steady in the stream, and tossed in my line. Since I had brought the bucket but forgot the net, when a thrashing rainbow had swallowed my worm, my friend dove for the bucket to scoop it up and in that fumbling catch the stringer, stashed in the bucket, splashed deep into the creek. I returned to my truck to get my net and a short bungee cord. We rigged a stick-and-bungee-hook recovery device and, after about fifty tries, she fished out the stringer. Then she informed me that the stringer was not the only item of mine lost in the creek -- my dimestore spectacles had also sunk out of sight, without which I can't see the tiny trout hooks to bait them. 

So I switched to power bait, a smelly cookie dough stuff easy to smoosh onto a hook by feel alone, but my friend was despondent over the loss of the glasses, which no amount of bungee dredging could salvage. Meanwhile, I had kissed off the cheaters because the power bait was working real well and I was busy reeling 'em in. When I was just one trout short of my limit, a young man who had been lure fishing (as soon as they feel a nibble on the line, they whip the pole up and backwards so as to yank the fish out of the pools, no reeling-in) from the bridge nearby yanked something shiny out of the water onto the shady bank, and called out: "Hey, are these your glasses?"  And indeed they were.

True story!  I have witnesses!

I spent a few end-of-the-summer days in the newly refurbished BLM campground, Tuttle Creek, on the way to Mt. Whitney. Didn't catch any fish there but had good times with friends. Living in a tent in the sand, at the foot of the mountains and surrounded by space and sagebrush, made me remember what it was I came out here for and why the place has such a hold on me. 

The amenities of town life are good, but I need to return to camping in the near future, as soon as I outfit for solar power (and some other drycamp needs), the cost of which explains why I have taken a new job: Part-time assistant to the manager of J Diamond  RV Ranch, another trailer park in Bishop, of the same vintage as Shady Rest but larger, busier, and slightly more elevated in tone. I get free rent and a small stipend to answer the phone, collect fees and direct guests to their lots and hook-ups, three days of the week. Easy.

Winter has arrived with snow in the mountains, cold days and freezing nights.  Fishing season closes soon. Cooped up inside my trailer, Mr. Heater keeps me toasty, and now I have electric light.  It's time to paint again.

Local Color, Bishop

This ramp and sign are at the corner of Hanby and West Line Street in Bishop. There are no sidewalks on Hanby Street. No comment on the comment.

Good Housekeeping

Goodhousekeeping Blog

This trailer park was built in the 1950s as a fisherman's park -- complete with a little brick "hut" dedicated to fish cleaning. Two sinks, fillet boards, light bulbs, stacks of old newspapers. Bring your own knife and plastic bags. 

I inherited three tubs of tomato and squash plants from two vegetable-and-pot-growing buddies (one of them has a prescription) who left Shady Rest and moved out of town to Benton. Scraggly, the left-behind tubs are farmed by ants who use them to pasture aphids. I have gotten gorgeous yellow squash flowers (no squashes) and delicious sweet tomatoes. The two buddies pulled out after a full-throated, foul-mouthed shouting match with the trailer park owner, over a shed. Since most residents have a storage shed in their trailer spaces, the buddies demanded to also be allowed to install one. I didn't understand what the fuss was about until their new shed arrived on a flatbed truck; bigger than my trailer, with a floor, windows and a double-plated door -- a proper cabin -- put to use as a sunlamp-powered greenhouse for cannabis plants. 

Winford feeds cats, racoons and skunks ("aren't they pretty?") outdoors on his screened front porch, or decking area, running the length of this single-wide trailer. Recently there was a midnight shoot-out between the racoons and the skunks. Hard to say who finally held the floor, but for the next seven days Winford's deck reeked from skunk spray. He stamped around the porch swearing he'd never feed them ungrateful critters again. It seems to me the cats won--now they get fed indoors. 

Upgrades to trailer sanctuary:

New Curtains! thanks to dear friend Barbara Cortese, who helped me pick out the fun Japanese parasol retro motif fabric and sew them together, complete with lining! -- in a marathon session at her home during my birthday visit there in July. Thank you, Barbara.

Shiny new screen in my screen door, thanks to Winford's expertise.

"Shed" for my painting frames and materials. the vertical file inherited from Inkworks Press, from the old pre-digital copy camera dark room. An antique!

It feels like it's been a short summer. The trees are beginning to turn at the higher lakes, and noontimes are cooler.   hope to have pictures of fall color for my next blog.

Fishing Update: Grand Total Trout caught and et: 15