reincarnation!!

after a lonesome and spider-filled 2 months…. the miracle i’ve been praying for has finally happened…

a new cling has arrived in my cabin!!

i mean… pardon me….. his name is slink.

he’s young.

he’s spry.

he’s sleek and sassy.

i love him already.  (okay, i’m easy… but still).  the first interaction was startling – i caught him snoozing on my sweatshirt stack, and he wasn’t expecting to meet me so suddenly.  but saturday morning he was sitting on my windowsill, sunning his back against the morning light, and quietly waiting to lock eyes when i emerged from bed.  it was a beautiful and long moment.  we sized each other up, made introductions, established our lifelong friendship, and i even gave him “the talk” about mr. roadrunner outside.

it pretty much feels like a total rebirth.

and it was a timely one, because it’s been a totally nutty past couple weeks!  (hence the lack of posts, which i’m so sorry for!!)  in this time between the holidays, which is already an infamously slippery slope, we’ve had a lot of moving and installing of pieces to do (which has kept us out of full-time creating mode), and on top of it, two of the closest people in my life have come out to visit.  it has truly been some of my most treasured time out here, but also made me realize that my departure from j-tree is suddenly looming on a very tangible horizon.

still not sure where that horizon is… but all too swiftly (almost in the span of a single night), it went from being a notion i was very openly avoiding, to something i actually have to deal with.

which ultimately is okay, because it wont ever really be a goodbye anyway.  but that’s not even worth discussing now….

slink and i have a december desert to love, creating to do, adventure to unfold.  and things to update you on!  let’s see here….

two weeks ago, steve and john and i spent a day in the low desert, retrieving a bunch of steve’s work from a gallery.  i’m talking a giant trailer and suburban full of pieces, including a tryptic with three 10 or 12 foot masts.  steve and john did most of the heavy lifting while i stood around, loosened bolts, laid down protective carpet, and cheered.  luckily, steve has acrobatic skills as well as all other imaginable talents, and he was, without hesitation, hanging off the top of the masts, fireman’s-pole-style… hammering out the 40 pound kinetic mounts, and hauling them down on his own. 

to top things off, ruth had packed us a ziploc full of their famous (and by famous, i mean secret and legendary family recipe, passed down through generations) peanut brittle.

now let’s take a nice pregnant pause here.

this stuff may be…. MAY BE….. one of the very best things i’ve ever eaten.

i kid you not. 

i may have mentioned my unbridled obsession with peanut butter.  peanut brittle is an old, old fashioned traditional recipe, arguably the first type of candy ever made…. apparently appeared in cookbooks back in the nineteenth century.  i was fortunate to gain an appreciation for the art of peanut brittle making as a kid, since my grandmother and her sister have famous family recipes as well, and still make it for us around christmastime (along with my other favorite treater… popcorn balls).

i was thrilled, upon googling peanut brittle history, to find that the candy has been linked to a “lumberjack folk hero” named tony beaver (perhaps a distant relative of my grandmother’s family, the weavers?!!).  apparently, in a stroke of genius, tony beaver uses peanuts and molasses to stop a major flood, creating peanut brittle in the process, which he then delivers as a special treat to the town he has just saved.

i’m just saying…. he could very well be my great, great, great, grandfather.  and either way, i think in order to get the recipe from steve and ruth, i’ll have to at least pretend so.

my god is that stuff heavenly.  but moving onwards…. 

the other episode of heavy-lifting excitement around here was the day steve rented a forklift.  we’re going to be installing two large pieces down in manhatthan beach on friday, and so two weeks prior, we dismantled them from their locations around the property, and loaded them onto the trailer.  i won’t lie, i was initially hoping to get a shot behind that forklift wheel.  but after watching steve maneuver that thing flawlessly around the sandy, sloping property, i was intimidated enough that i was content climbing ladders, rigging straps, and walking alongside… keeping the 600-pound pieces of metal balanced while he drove them to their resting place.  ruth helped as much, if not more, than i did.  it was an exciting day all around, and while we lost two amazing and enormous pieces, we got to replace them with new ones we’d retrieved from the gallery, and perhaps more excitedly, shift older pieces around the property to new locations and watch them come to life in a whole new setting.

steve designs his pieces to interact with the landscape in such beautiful ways, but it’s so fascinating to see how that happens, and to see how a piece can shift and change so dramatically depending on where it’s placed.  perhaps most exciting and rewarding was the shifting of the new birdhouse, which is finally in a location where it looks awesome, and we all love it (including the birds, which have been making many rental visits, pooping on the roof, and fighting for tenant occupancy as steve takes pictures).

next came patagonia photo shoot day.  absurd!!  climbing with todd one day, i was fortunate enough to meet a friend of his who he’d been eagerly telling me about, greg epperson.  greg is a world-renowned climbing photographer, who also does a ton of freelancing for patagonia, as well as others, and happens to be an incredible woodworker and artist in general.  such a thoughtful and kind guy.  he lives in a striking, minimalist house he designed and built himself, right on the edge of the park boundary.  it’s interior is pouring with light, is structured using clean, subtly-angled lines, and has no doors… only open flow of rooms and spaces.  his photos are innnnncredible.  take a look for yourself.  it’d be a dream come true to be capable enough to climb in some of those places, and get to have him photograph.  the only thing better than experiencing those moments would be experiencing them and also getting to capture and preserve one of those split-seconds so brilliantly.

anyway, we were climbing one day, and as i was describing the work steve & i are doing, greg got excited about the idea of coming out to the studio to see it and shoot photos.  so he shows up one afternoon, makes sure steve and i are wearing some nice bright patagonia clothing, and lets the shutter go for a few hours as we weld, plasma cut, and grind away.  (steve, of course, let’s me get all the attention and do most of the work).  a smiling greg shot about 750 photos, pared it down to about 100 that he sent patagonia, and passed along his two favorites to us.  sounds like he’s hoping to come by again sometime soon, but it was a pretty interesting experience, regardless of what comes of it!  and if a welding picture, or a picture of steve, showed up in the patagonia catalogue one of these days…. it sure wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world....

..photos by greg epperson..

aside from all the excitement in the studio, we’re slowly but surely working on some new pieces, which has – as always – been a damn amazing process, and i can’t wait to see where they go.

and geez… having two amazing visitors in the span of 9 days has been truly unbelievable.  it’s one thing to be out here experiencing what i feel like has been some of the most defining (if not the most defining) periods in my life.  in such a short amount of time, this place, and of course these people, have come to mean so…. so much to me.  to be able to share that with people who are such an important part of your life is just the best feeling ever.  i really have no words.

as usual there have been too many good moments to list them all….. smoky woodstove days and nights… epic dinners, talks, moments, absolutely everything with steve and ruth… desert sunrises and sunsets from bed, from the studio, from the top of ryan mountain… a couple nights of bbq ribs and shots of patron (ruth was the first to order) at pappy’s… the purchasing of hambam’s… the stirring of peanut brittle, and the over-cooking of lentil soup…. even an insanely epic multi-pitch climb up the longest route in the park as it snowed (yes, it snowed!!  heavily!!)…

but one of my favorites was the morning adam and i spent in wonder valley, an area here which i’ve become entirely captivated by.  for me it epitomizes in many ways what’s so powerful about the desert… and what only setting foot in that landscape could possibly convey.  it’s a section of the high desert, east of joshua tree, east of 29 palms (where the marine base is), out where you truly feel like the end of the world might lie.  back in ’38, the government enacted the small-tract homestead act, selling 5-acre plots of land to homesteaders, in order to encourage a boom in desert population and entice weekenders seeking refuge from the city sprawl.  it worked, and parcels of land sold by the thousands, especially after the war, with tiny one-room cabins springing up literally overnight on postage-stamp properties as far as the horizon could see.

but the mass movement was doomed from the start, as it was nearly impossible for the desert to sustain infrastructure, electricity, and water services with that type of capacity.  by ’76 the homesteading had stopped entirely, and houses were abandoned by the hundreds.  what remains is a windswept panorama that is already other-worldly – a flat barren expanse flanked by a horizon of deep purple foreboding mountains – and is now littered with remnants and ruins of one-room cabins across every line of vision.  but amidst all the debris, what seems like a small but resilient fringe culture has emerged and endured… embodying some combination of grit and diversity, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and pure human willpower.

few landscapes i’ve witnessed have so evocatively reflected the dimensions of human struggle against the natural landscape, the illusions and dreams of more than a generation of americans, and the raw power of nature when it has no sympathy.

it is impossible not to allow the stripped and barren landscape to alter one’s sense of self, and place in the world in a similar way.  never have i felt such a constant and palpable sense that i am human.  against that backdrop, play the concerns of this crazy time we are living in – the economic rollercoaster, the endless political insanity, the social conventions, even the altruistic instincts to be somebody who solves problems, fights injustice, does something… fucking anything…. to make an impact.  those things are all intimately a part of who i am and what i think about on a daily… on a momentary… basis.  but there are moments between moments here, where i realize that all of it…. all of it… falls away…. in greater perspective.  those are the moments that often move me to tears for nothing more than the beauty of this place, the beauty of our existence, and how i am overwhelmingly thankful for who i am, and for the people i love.