The Life and Times of the Plume — Page 107

The Beauty Is In The Details — Santa Fe to Taos and Home Again

July 14, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

As a general rule, cities cause me discomfort. I prefer the country, open horizon lines, clean air and antelope herds. I have, in days past, experienced feelings of culture shock while traveling into and out of cities from rather rural homes. Driving into Anchorage, Alaska for provisions from Copper Center used to terrify me. Buzzing over to Los Angeles from the tiny river town of Parker, Arizona made my head hurt. Even now, going to Boise or Salt Lake City is enough to exhaust me on such a deep level that I usually need a day of recovery once I return home.

Cities tend to leave me feeling tired, hyper-stimulated and bewildered. Please believe me when I say I am not anti-city. I think cities can be wonderful places and have explored many with great pleasure, however, I find they sap my strength, tax my mind and weary my senses. With that said, cities are not usually my focus when I travel. Usually my trips involve being outside, hugging trees, catching fish, rowing my raft and riding horses. So, when I travel with M, it’s refreshing to be with someone who is tremendously comfortable in urban places, someone who can safely expose me to experiences I rarely choose to expose myself to. Does that make sense?

She took care of a lot of the driving on this trip, especially when we were in cities, which really helped me to stay sane. Filtering large loads of information at high speeds is not one of my mental talents. If my eyes see something lovely, I focus on it. I refrain from multi-tasking in life and my senses and mind seem to be wired in a similar manner. I take in delicious pieces of the world around me and really focus on every single bite as it passes through my system in full chroma, full texture, full scent, full feel…full fullness. It’s how I operate. Having M by my side keeps me within my filtration comfort zone, she’s sort of my seeing eye dog in big cities. She is a solid thing I can trust to lead me on when I fall victim to my senses or am struggling with complete overload. I realize this makes me sound fragile, and I suppose I am, in some ways.

What to say about Santa Fe — it’s a beautiful old town. There is so much art! There is so much jewelry (I grew desensitized to the beauty of it, actually…)! There is so much strolling to do, drinks to sip, tacos to munch, turquoise to buy. It’s a great city.

Taos is more my style. It’s small, charming, quiet(er) and set against a lovely high desert backdrop of rolling mountains and blue sky. I’d like to do a writing workshop there sometime and am keeping an eye out for opportunities.

The last couple of days of our trip found us storm chasing (more on that in a moment), gallery hopping in Madrid, bracing against gale force winds in a high and winsome desert on sandstone cliffs, beneath gaping arches, in piney forests, under stormy clouds, in the grips of burning sunsets and so on and so forth until the highway spilled us back down into Arizona where the skies are impossibly blue and I caught my flight home to Idaho. Frankly, it was the best time I ever had in a white Miata.

Love you M. Let’s do it all over again, sometime soon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: adventure, new mexico, thank god i'm a country girl, travel

The Beauty Is In The Details — Las Cruces to Albuquerque

July 11, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

Today, someone asked me if New Mexico is beautiful. Of course it is beautiful but I’m not the person to ask because, really, when it comes down to it, I find everywhere to be beautiful. Here’s what I have to specifically say about New Mexico. I live in the high desert of Idaho so the feel of the landscape in New Mexico didn’t thrill my senses — which is to say the terrain there did not move me too far out of the geographical parameters of my ordinary life. That said, there is magic in New Mexico and I believe it stems from the fact that the state has really held on to a deeply reverberating Mexican/American Indian vibe that splatters the world there with color, texture and SPIRIT! New Mexico has spirit. Bombastic spirit. I felt it the moment I saw my first strand of chile peppers hanging from a doorway on an adobe. Wowee! Everything feels a little older, a little more sunbaked, a little more crusty around the edges. The place has patina and I adore patina. Truly. The beauty of New Mexico is in the sun burned, wind kissed, quirky details.

I realize that I haven’t told you what the heck I was doing down in New Mexico in the middle of the summer! Allow me to share the background of this trip. I travel, from time to time, with one of my best friends who is from Arizona. In January we began to talk, in earnest, about taking another trip together this year (we’ve done trips together in the past including Northern Ireland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Idaho Sawtooths by ’73 Volkswagan Bus). We pondered on New Orleans, San Francisco and then decided we needed to go somewhere neither of us had ever experienced and our plans for New Mexico began to grow themselves into fruition. May rolled around and I found I had a plane ticket to Phoenix and M had booked time off. The rest is history.

M is a talented photographer which just makes traveling together even better. We walk around with our enormous cameras, take thousands of pictures, share our shooting secrets with each other, and laugh a lot. I’m always amazed at how different our photography styles are. Even if we are shooting the same landscape or retro neon sign, things turn out so differently. We both tend to simply do exactly what we do. I have always appreciated her eye for what it is, but also love it when I get to compare my perspective directly to hers. If you’d like to take a peek at her work from our New Mexico adventure, you can find her blog posts here.

Have you ever traveled with a best girlfriend?

It’s the best.

Also, we hiked 800ft underground into the Carlsbad Caverns, into that incredible, terrifying, beautiful, nightmarish place. I was practically hypothermic when we came back up to the surface, so clammy and drippy and cold was it down there. Just ask M. I had “white finger” on my right hand — which is what I call it when my fingers turn white and generally quit functioning, not a big deal, it happens sporadically; I get deeply cold quite easily. Robert dreads it.

Back to the caves. I kept expecting a gollum to pop up out of the pools of water beneath the various speleothems we encountered (that’s a fancy word for rock formations found in caverns and caves…good one, huh?). It was quite the experience, not like anything I have ever seen before on the skin of our beautiful, wild Earth. I would highly recommend a visit if you are in the neighborhood. It’s a completely spectacular experience and while there are lights placed around the caves to slightly illuminate the hiking path as well as the ENORMOUS columns, stalagmite and stalactites, I cannot fathom that once upon a time, crews of men and women went under the earth with only headlamps and ropes to explore this phenomenal, dark territory. I just can’t believe it.

My photographs don’t do the caves justice. They are a million times more gorgeous and frightening than I could capture in pictures. The scale, too, is lost in these shots. I really cannot explain to you the monumental size of these rock formations. There were delicate formations, as well, but the big ones were el mondo.

To be continued…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: carlsbad caverns, new mexico, travel

Surviving White Sands

July 9, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could live, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rocks and shifting sands, any such creature, beast, bird, or flower, testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent in all forms of life. Including the human. Even in us.

[Edward Abbey]

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I find the desert beautiful. It can be dismal, boiling, stinging, biting, terrifying and blinding. It can also be lush, gentle, sweet, fragrant and otherworldly. I would know, I lived in the low desert of Arizona for almost four full years and grew acquainted with the nature of the land there to a great degree. I love it and I hate it.

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White Sands is spectacular, a literal sea of white on this windy day wherein the sky meets the earth in a tempered blaze. My eyes hurt to look out at it. It’s like being in a 105F degree snowstorm. At the end of the day I will have tiny signs of snow blindness, M, too, will actually lay on her hotel bed with a wet facecloth across her eyes. Where is this place? Where have we come? What is it? Snow or sand, sun or ice? The very light of the place confuses the senses.

The sand is deep, mystical, pure white. By the time I climb in the car for departure, the fineness of the stuff is clinging to every inch of my skin. It’s in my underwear, my armpits, my eyelids. I’m pregnant with it, carrying a million minute grains, mother to a miniature desert creeping across my skin in moon shaped dunes.

Oh God! What is this place? Creation is too great to fathom at times. I want to blend in, creep across the shifting particles in jerky steps, like the purple lizard I watched take shade beneath the yucca. Was it really purple? I cannot tell the colors here for all the holy light.

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I begin to think about survival. I begin to think about the hero in myself, not just here in the desert, but in life. That small portion of my being that is capable of arriving in the nick of time, broad of heart, self-sacrificing in times of need, jovial, caring, important…where is the hero in me and how do I tend to it?

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Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

[Ayn Rand:: Atlas Shrugged]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: best friends, desert, new mexico, roadtrip, white sands national monument

Home Away From Home

July 7, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

I sit perched in the Airstream doorway in the Methow Valley as I write this. I look out past the buildings at the smokejumper base, towards the Mazama Corridor and the mountains beyond. It’s beautiful. It’s a home away from our home in Idaho and I’m always surprised at how good it feels to turn off the Columbia River and make my way up the highway towards Twisp and Winthrop. There are places here that I belong to now; a coffee shop, a sandy bend in the river with a tiny cove I use as a kayaking take-out, a deep pool on the Twisp River I love to wade and fish in the evenings, the hill I like to stand astride for sunsets, the secret spots I carry my camera and sketchbook to when I feel like being alone and being at rest. The cashiers at the grocery store and I pick up our conversations where we left them off, last fall. The cooks at Glover Street Market know I’ll want the spring rolls before I even place my order and maybe a green goddess juice to go with. Each of these places, each of these belongings press down on a single, pure, resonating ivory key in the the black and white of my heart. So it’s funny to make this confession: I don’t always think I would like to live here year round.

The Methow Valley is dear to me, I consider it one of my homes, but I cannot imagine buying a house here and settling in for a decade or two. Isn’t that strange?

How I feel about the Methow is flittering, abstract and at times, contradictory. I like, very much, many things about it, but there are other details surrounding valley life I struggle to tolerate. I blame it on my extremely wild, rural childhood which has caused me to have a rare perspective regarding space and and especially high standards with respect to freedom and wilderness.

It’s hard to tame something that has grown up wild, everyone knows this. At times, during my childhood, adolescence and even parts of my adult life, I have been downright feral! My issue with the spectacular Methow Valley comes down to human population and density. The valley feels cluttered to me. Narrow and full. Brimming, at times, with people, livestock, habitualized mule deer and fancy fly fishermen taking up all the good water. To contradict myself in a terrible manner, one of the things I love most about the valley is the people! The community! I cherish our immediate fire family, the incredibly rich and diverse artist community and also the general population of the entire valley which is so special and unique. What irks me is the very thing I love! Perhaps it’s because I love it so truly that I am irked, or maybe I am irked because I love it so truly, or maybe I’m just a fickle puss in need of a good pinch on the bottom. Whatever the case may be, I flip flop like a pancake every other day of the week when Robbie and I speak aloud of the future of our little family, the future of our jobs, where we want to go and what we want to be.

It’s a tricky thing to figure out, you know? We only live once.

Anyhow, I had a regular, good old time in the valley and stayed on with Robert in our delightful little Airstream for nearly a week while he began work. I watched him do his refresher work (which is rather vigorous) and jump out of an airplane a few times (always exhilarating), visited with some of the other fire wives who I am blessed to call my friends, dropped work at a gallery or two and generally ran around the valley doing all my favorite things while cruising in the best-good-old-’71-Ford-pick-up-truck that ever was. It was a restful time for me after being with my side of the family in Canada which always tends to be a little non-stop chaotic. I read a few books which was a complete joy — I’ve really been at the mercy of my work these past six months and reading has become a luxury I cannot always afford, to the great detriment of my happiness. I spent a couple of days at the lake, suffered a rotten little sun burn and then piled everything in the truck and headed home to Idaho for a couple of days before departing on yet another trip (details and photographs forthcoming).

I thought a lot about the life details I’ll miss this summer while I am at home in Idaho, holding the fort:

-swimming in cold, clear rivers and lakes

-5 minute drives to great fishing holes

-really big ponderosa pines (I love the excellent company of quiet giants)

-seeing Robbie more regularly when he is working base 8s and his job is more like a 9-5 giving us dinners together and breakfasts, too

– La Fonda tacos…oh gosh

-Bruce Springsteen’s V8 purr

-the fluttery, papery flight of the poorwills in the headlights of my truck at night

-wild, wild thunderstorms rattling the windows at the Little Cabin In The Woods

-smoked out sunsets over the Cascades

-gin and tonics with the girls…movies in the bunkhouse with all the fellas…night bicycle rides on the airstrip

-early morning veggie deliveries from John Button

-late night star watching through the crowns of the douglas firs

Oh…I could go on and on.

It’s good to be home in Idaho this summer, in my own house, with my full studio building, but I would be an awful liar if I didn’t confess my heart is divided in more ways than one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: home, methow valley, summer, travel, washington

While in the Canadian Rockies

July 3, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

[John Muir]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: canada, explore, home, rocky mountains, trave