Three Treasures, Independence Creek Campground

The Grave of a Beloved Cat

I met a fellow fulltimer in Independence Creek Campground who calls himself Calamity Chris. Retired from a career as a chef at a restaurant in Death Valley, he lives in a big 'ole 5th wheel trailer surrounded by an array of solar panels of mixed size, age and amperage, set up to feed a battery bank that powers his 36" hi-def TV. Honey Bunny was his companion for many years. So far, no one has disturbed this grave, and campers leave small mementoes on the stones, such as coins, toys, wildflowers.

Indian Grinding Stones

According to Calamity Chris, Independence Creek campground was built on a shelf of dirt bulldozed over an ancient Indian gathering site just west of what is now the town of Independence. Indian Tribes in the EA normally lived in small bands, hunting and gathering, but gathered at turns of the season to trade, socialize, party, exchange information and grind pine nuts. He says he was digging a levelling sink (depression dug in a campground site for a trailer tire to sink into) there once and dug up an Indian metate -- says there's lots of Indian artifacts buried in the Eastern Sierra, obscured by DWP maintenance practices. This may be true, may be a myth.

Iron Staircase Over Barbed Wire Fence

Between the Campground and the town are several interconnected footpaths lined with washstones. According to a jogger from the town, most of them developed from local custom, and recently were renovated and extended by a local Boy Scout as part of a service project for earning Life Scoutship. Some of the paths branch out to the Independence Museum and a local park, at least one of them climbs up the alluvial plain, following the creek into Onion Valley. During a self-guided tour one morning, I found this staircase over a fence, but don't know the story of its construction.

Rusty TinCansters

Tree trunks look like torsos to me and I suspect that's where my anthropomorphization of rusty, flattened cans begins: reinforcing bands in the tin cylinder look like ribs, the almost severed circular lid flips up to form a head, the bottom kicks out and down to suggest feet or legs.

I have always picked them up to fondle and admire, but regretfully denied myself the pleasure of taking them home. It's trash, and I can't, I reasoned, fill up my increasingly smaller living quarters with trash. But one cold dawn at the Pleasant Valley reservoir parking lot, waiting for my fishing buddy to figure out my phone message and meet me at the dam and not the gas station, I pocketed an exquisite, one-of-a-kind, gold and silver (tin and rust) masterpiece -- which when painted became a bluish Clam Samurai the First, a charming little five-by-seven painting that later fell unseen out of the back of my truck in some other parking lot and was lost, or perhaps reclaimed by its plane of origin. I was unexpectedly overwhelmed by anguish that found solace only in repainting Clammie and giving myself Poet's Permission to henceforth gather up whatever crusty old cans call out to me and paint as many Tin Cansters as I like. Here's the first batch:

 

TinCan Dumps, speculation on 20th century Eastern Sierra town middens

I have been rotating through three of the six County Campgrounds in the unevenly enforced restlessness of the County Fulltimer Anti-Resident 15-Day Maximum rule, and in search of inspirational treasure, have discovered the existence of Old Can and Bottle Mines adjacent to their flat-dirt hospitality. 

 

Just south of Baker Creek Campground I found a pavement of broken glass spread over an area of undulating dunes, planted with cans in a sort of English Garden lawn-and-pansies way. No whole bottles -- most of the glass in an similar state of shardliness, and the cans likewise disintegrating in a uniform patina of rust. In places, the rust heap and shard slurry appears to lie in a nest of cinders.  I surmise that the even size of glass pieces results from bottles having got shot to bits until there no longer exists anything large enough to aim at. 

Similar Can Dumps can be found around all the towns, and I wonder if the County Campgrounds were nestled in the ground of informal municipal dumps by design -- nobody wanted the land for anything else. Or, did the dumps accummulate around the campgrounds? The presence of cinders suggests that cans were burnt in fire rings and dumped nearby; the flattened, burnt look a result of Good Camping Practice in days of yore before recycling and dumpsters. Or perhaps they hearken back to when trash was routinely incinerated in California, before the advent of landfills. The Lone Pine Campground Can Dumps also contain cushion springs from automobiles, the occaisional chassis and fender, and scrunched up fencing material, suggesting a wider donor mix than mere tourists. Heavier iron and steel parts may have already been gleaned for sale as scrap. 

I remember a car decorator in Berkeley who would glue whatever you wanted onto the car body of your choice. Many cars had monster-dinosaur themes, or hot pink Barbie scenes; one was covered with PC green motherboards, another shingled in shiny-side-up CD disks to look like carp scales. Perhaps I could get an old van cloaked with rusty cans and "stealth" camp anywhere in Owens Valley without a ranger prodding me to move along. Just pull off a county road, back into a sand wash and deflate the tires. Stay put long enough and you may become a subject in another artist's painting or photo essay.

Solo Show at Maturango Museum

 

My name in lights!

 

Friends from Los Angeles and Emeryville, left to right:
Jerry Lerma, Jim Chandler, myself, Janet Nippell, Bonnie Barrett, Kate Thornton, Steve Skaar and Vickie Sowell

It was wonderful to see old friends sitting together in a restaurant booth, sorting out previous acquaintance, chatting and chuckling, making plans to lunch sometime. I wished I could join in them all. I don't get much good company in the campgrounds where I am living now. I miss everyone!

By the time we posed for this photo, I was so wired up in being extroverted that I was almost numb, but happy. I felt I had babbled into a microphone during my Keynote (the Mac Powerpoint) slide show presentation, but Gallery Coordinator Andrea Pelch told me she thought it went very well, that I was coherent, interesting and poised. Friends and members of the museum were enthusiastic and generous — buying several paintings that night.

Check out: www.maturango.org

I got to see my best paintings of Eastern Sierra subjects, done up in my watercolor wash and pencil graphic style, all together, framed and accessible, and had a chance to talk about them. It left me with a sense of fullness, of something accomplished, and also of closure. I still have many subjects from the area to realize in this style, but I may have to consider that I have come to a point of completion about my sojourn in the Eastern Sierra. Drought conditions are changing the landscape to resemble areas of the lower Mojave, and the mystery I have found in the waters that flow out of the mountains is literally sinking out of sight.

Meanwhile, for a change of pace, I have been splashing about in my acrylics supplies -- look for a blog on the Rusty Tin Cansters, soon!

Winter Campgrounds and 3 Paintings

Portagee Joe Campground

Just west of Lone Pine off the Whitney Portal Road. A small creek, actually an irrigation ditch trickles down the middle of the sandy sites. Here I met Sue, newly launched on a slow camping loop through the western states, setting out in winter from Montana in a vintage trailer that had belonged to her parents. Mouldering quietly out in a back yard for many years until she began her solid and pretty restoration. She shared her trailer and I shared my paintings. The next morning she knocked on my door carrying a book of photos of her daughter with the first grandchild, a very sweet  girl baby who had survived brain damage during childbirth. She lived for only six months, fragile and much loved. Sue asked me would I accept a commission to make a color painting of a favorite black and white photo of her daughter and the baby girl, and I gave it my best quick sketch in acrylic. She liked it a lot and paid me fifty dollars for a morning's work!  I had hoped to visit more with Sue, but she had to cut her Eastern Sierra sojourn short and return to Montana to see her doctor. I pray she will be restored to good health and that I will see her again in January. If so I will post pics of her vintage trailer--it's a beauty.

And here are two photos from the area west of Lone Pine, Lone Pine Peak and a path through the big rocks in the Alabama Hills.

Independence Creek Campground

Hard freeze Dec 3-9 made Independence Creek ice up, blocking the waters which then flooded the north side of the campground and produced the ad hoc Independence Ice Rink.  Every day Water and Power guys drive into the campground, circumambulate the ice flood, speak loudly and gesticulate, and then drive off. I hope they are not planning something drastic with a bulldozer. I have already had to move my campsite once due to having gone to sleep in an empty campground, but woken up surrounded by deer hunters next morning, their huge trucks, troop tents, toybox trailers, auxiliary ATVs, noisy gasoline generators, and finally, dead, skinned deer hanging from the trees.  Mercury still plunging towards zero at night. I am grateful for a just-in-time early Christmas present from Kate: a new comforter, very poofy and warm!

Sheltered inside my Santa Fe Treehouse on Tires, I painted these two winter tree pix.

Owens River Willow Gnawed by Beavers.

Although one fisherman I talked to said it's not beavers, it's the range cows that chew willow wood to groom their teeth and to lick the aspirin compounds out of it.  Looks like beaver action to me, but black cows and their calves do roam the bottom lands. Shortly after I took this picture last fall, the trunk cracked apart and fell into the river.

A Year Spent at Leisure in the Shelter of the Crazy Trees--wintertime

Without planning it, I've been producing a series of paintings that contain three cottonwood trunks and a white trailer very much like my own. Rather more pasted than parked into the scene like a settling dirigible. The Crazy Trees have become the guardians of a feeling of sanctuary, not because they are kindly (they are not, they are crotchety) but because nobody else will park near them, since old, overgrown, diseased and damaged cottonwoods tend to drop branches, or even split down the middle and fall over.

Well that's all the news that's fit to paint, Cheers from Inna keeping it warm on on 395.

Borrego or Bust

In early October, I hitched up my Santa Fe cigarbox trailer to my Tacoma pickup and drove blue highways to Borrego Springs, accompanied by stalwart old friend and sister-by-proclamation Kate Thornton. She met up with me in Barstow and we lumbered slowly down 247, The Old Woman Highway, to Yucca Valley where she treated me to steak dinner and amenity-rich ovenight stay in a motel. Next day we drove south 40 mph against a stormy, rainy headwind along the western shore of Salton Sea and west into Anza Borrego. Ocotillo and creosote all around us green from the late monsoons.

There's a new gallery in Borrego Springs: The Borrego Art Institute. A mid-century modern style building all boarded up and wasting away on Christmas Circle was rescued by inspired and diligent local volunteers and contributors and presented to the Mojave in splendid restoration and repurposition. They had posted a Prospectus to Artists -- bring 5 pieces to the gallery between Oct 5 and 10, and get a jury pass/fail on the spot for inclusion in Flora and Fauna show. I unloaded my entries and I passed muster! Our show reception was busy and colorful and I managed to find a buyer for one of my series of small owls.

Check it out:  http://www.borregoartinstitute.org/ (this show is now archived)

BUSTED: HOMESICK

I had planned to remain in Borrego Springs dry camped at Peg Leg 10 miles from town, possibly until December, but after two weeks there, I knew I couldn't stick it out. The valley is a rocky sandbox bounded by low mountains, containing sculpted mud playgrounds for off-road vehicle fans and creosote plains for winter RV parking for snow-birds. A haven for restless people; but even as a restless person myself, I was homesick.

I felt no spiritual connection to anything in Anza Borrego.

Spiritual reality is not airy-fairy, wispy, dreamy, moody or intellectual. It is physical, or rather, our spiritual being is usually manifest to us as physical experience in the material world. A good spirit can be an experience of nourishment, affection, communion. A sensual closeness with stones, plants, air, spatial arrangement, the tilt of the land, the color of the light. In Borrego I felt my roots withdraw from the ground; I was truncated, clumsy, burdened.  Local food tasted metallic. It was either too windy or too quiet to breathe.  No streams, lakes, river, ditches, or canals.  I could not paint, I could not write. I had felt similarly oppressed in Death Valley -- now I think I can guess why: no water. Eastern Sierra waters flow out of the mountains down the escarpment into the valley, and as dry as it has been these past two years of dry winters, there is still water streaming out of the mountains into the land. I wonder if this watershed is what founds and informs my sense of feeling "at home" in that country, and appears in my paintings as a harbinger of spiritual feeling, or longing for home.

I drove away through Joshua Tree and Kate met me again in Yucca Valley and escorted me again, returning on 395 under a light storm through the Johnson and Lucerne Valleys, past Barstow to Kramer Junction, then on through the tailings piles of Red Mountain and Johannesburg, past black and red volcanic forms in the Coso Range and past the salt and soda of dry Owens Lake, Cartago, Olancha and finally Lone Pine. I resumed photographing and painting the next day.

I will be spending the winter again in Owens Valley campgrounds, keeping faith with the series of paintings I began 3 years ago, camped at Independence Creek.

More later .... I have new paintings to post as soon as I declare them ready, and a solo show opening at Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest in January 2014.

Power and Paintings

 POWER

Have you ever driven to two hardware stores just to match and a buy a few right-sized screws or one more butt splicer?  Done did that DIY Duh Dance more that once this summer -- but on August 21, 2013, I crimped up the last in-line fuse on a red wire and called the intrepid Winford over to spot me while I piled the ring terminals on my battery posts. Good thing he was there -- I couldn't get all the terminals to fit on the positive post, due to a heavy ground lug. He boosted me over the finish line by finding an adaptor to extend the positive terminal capacity, and yeehaw woohoo! All the lights went on -- I am charging my house battery by the free energy of sunlight! 

And can charge the cellphone, the camera, and the laptop, play the radio, juice the speakers, etc.  Under the plastic horse below is my "Widget Board" where the battery snoop, the solar charge controller, the switch to the cig-socket bank, and the inverter switch are all at-hand. The second photo is of the battery, cables, inverter and fuses stashed under my dinette seat where I sit to eat, paint, read and write:

Now I can see by the light of the sun when only the stars are shining. I will be leaving my job at the trailer park and returning to sage brush and silence at the end of September. Where I can recharge my soul-batteries, walk and breathe and sleep, and where poems and paintings appear in my mind commanding my happy attention.

PAINTINGS 

This summer my air conditioner kept me comfortable inside my trailer for painting, instead of running off to fish in lakes at cooler elevations. A good match for the season, since the fishing in Bishop Canyon lakes this year has been frustrating, almost futile, due to lack of water. I have stashed my rods and tackle box for another place, another time ...

 Thunderstorm in a canyon

 Bishop Canal, autumn

Water trees in a waterless year

Red Horse and Rider

G'bye Bishop, next post from somewhere else. Dear reader, please say a prayer for me for a safe transition!

Art Discovery

Google Images Introduces:

a new-to-me painter, Hans Hartung. I used a search string something like "scribbles" or "abstract drawing" (can't remember exactly) and discovered works by this early 20th century European abstract painter in the hits window. If I have seen these images before in art books years ago, they escaped my notice. 

Reeds, hair and grasses, life forms found everywhere in nature, most often noticed by photographers such as Harry Callahan and Eliot Porter. Sometimes labeled a calligraphic style built on processions of lines, repeating lines with leaning and curling, bundling into components related to the mass; linear forms similar to the warp and woof woven patterns I hear in compositions by Philip Glass and Arvo Part.

I think my use of lines in images I nevertheless call "paintings" participates in this formal tradition. I have just finished a new painting built up on linear forms exposed by winter's annual dessication -- my subject was a marshy area in the pastures of Round Valley last winter.