“I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
[Annie Dillard]
Flint and Tinder
April 1, 2016 by
We made it back to Idaho.
March 29, 2016 by
The first time he received a phone call about a smokejumping job we were in a Korean restaurant in Tucson and he stepped out of the establishment to take the call. When he walked back in, he looked extremely serious, sat down at our table for two, and calmly broke the news that he had been invited to rookie training at the North Cascades Smokejumper Base — a dream come true for him. He had spoken of jumping since our initial meeting in New Zealand when I was 18 and he was 21 so I’m sure you can imagine the span of life that had led up to this moment for us! My reaction was to stomp my boots on the tiled floor, smack my palms down on the table top and emit a howl of joy. In the kitchen, I heard some poor cook drop a stack of dishes in surprise to my rather vociferous response! I was thrilled for Robert, thrilled for us, thrilled to the point of goosebumps like I get when we have a dream become a reality.
Since then, we’ve spent six years straddling the states of Washington and Idaho, moving twice a year to chase the fire season and returning to Idaho for the winter months — some of those summer seasons I spent alone in Idaho when housing in Washington didn’t shake out and those were very lonesome times for us.
All the moving has been too much for me and if I can be completely frank, I didn’t think I had another season in me, at least I didn’t think I could move the studio to Washington again this summer.
It’s one thing to move a home and a family but another thing entirely to pick up a studio space and small business twice a year and shuttle it 16 driving hours down the road, set it up again and find your way back to the work like a drunken homing pigeon.
So when Rob called me from Arkansas in early March to tell me he had been offered a position at the McCall Idaho smokejumper base, my reaction was very similar to that first smokejumping phone call he received six years ago. I stomped my boots on the floor of the strawbale house, slapped a palm down on the kitchen island and screamed aloud.
I WAS THRILLED. I was beyond thrilled, really. And I would like to mention (brag) that Rob’s transfer to McCall is a lateral transfer into a permanent position which everyone thinks is easy to do, but it’s really not easy to do. To take a permanent transfer, a base has to be very sure of the quality of person they are hiring. Once they take that person on, they won’t be able to get rid of them (because that’s how the system works). So with that said, I must offer huge thanks to McCall for taking a chance on my man. They won’t be sorry.
My life has been crazy for so many years now and we have worked hard to make do with less than ideal circumstances every single fire season. There has been the yearly added stress of finding last minute housing or studio space in the Methow Valley which is really totally impossible (think housing crisis due to two consecutive years of the valley, quite literally, burning down). In that moment, when he told me he said yes to the job, I had a sense of STABILITY wash over me. Peace. I said a prayer of gratitude, I lived a prayer of gratitude for days, with all of my heart, feeling almost blissed out by the reality of our lives, and I felt my roots thrust themselves downwards, past the volcanic rock of the Snake River Plain, into the hot core of this state we love.
We are thrilled to be back in the beautiful state of Idaho, full-time. We are delighted to really move forward, full steam, with seeking out and purchasing our working ranch property. We are looking forward to meeting a new branch of fire community in McCall. I’m so happy to no longer be seasonally moving my studio.
In the meanwhile, we’re sorting out life plans for the summer, working out some kinks in the still-unfinished Airstream which we will be living in again, trying to figure out how to get my ’71 Ford down from Winthrop and all the other details that come with a new job and relocation. It’s all a glorious pain in the arse! And I don’t even care!
With all that said, here’s to you, Robbie! You’re the best man I know — the man, the legend. I love you. I am proud of you. Let’s keep on grabbing life by the horns.
[Another typical family portrait for us…milliseconds later, I found myself literally log rolling down this cliff face…thanks for that, babe.]
Rags and Riches
March 15, 2016 by
A special, delicate little batch of rings is now available in my shop — sizes run from 6 to 9.
XX
Tiny Gardening
March 14, 2016 by
I guess it’s true that we reap what we sow.
I think I failed to tell you that Robert built me a hotbed on the sunny wall of the strawbale house. I planted it at the end of January, right before we left for New Mexico. It’s been growing beautifully and it’s a delight to have a bounty of fresh, homegrown greens and herbs to tuck into every day.
It’s amazing how much can be grown in a tiny patch of dirt.
Just Like You
March 12, 2016 by
I hit the wall yesterday. I was bleary eyed, I could barely type out single words let alone sentences on the computer, I was 100% ineffective at everything I was hoping to complete. I needed to spend the day in the studio and when noon rolled around I knew there wasn’t a chance I would be remotely effective in that space either so I shut it all down. I stepped out of the house to peer at the sky — it looked capable of anything. I packed a bag with my camera gear, water and two coats in case of rain or cold or both. The dogs eagerly loaded in the truck and we were off.
More often than not, there’s so much to do around here that it can feel difficult to justify days like yesterday and I have to remind myself that going outside is how I sweep out the cobwebs and reverse the muscular atrophy that comes with too much computer work, too much photo editing, too much time spent hunched over in the studio, too much tame living. Going outside is vital to my work. It’s as important as answering emails, submitting images, writing my morning pages and crafting cocktail rings.
I signed another contract for a photography job this week. I was on the fence about it for a long while. I was afraid (I am still afraid) it might be a mistake, an overextension. I like to do my very best, no matter what I’m working on, and I’m afraid of this job and what it might do to my life over the next few months. Fear. Fear. Fear. It will be a lot of work and I need to find a way to do it with joy and HEART, injecting soul and honesty into every image. I talked to Rob about it. I talked to some of my friends about it. I wrestled with it like Jacob and the Angel of the Lord…
In the end, I committed to the work because I didn’t feel like I could say no to it. In this business, there’s soul work and there’s survival work and sometimes the two can operate hand in hand and sometimes they can’t and you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do to get by. I know there’s some romance hanging like a golden sunbeam over what I am doing with my life as a freelance photographer and a metalsmith but the fact is this, these are jobs.
In fact, I think there’s too much glamour attached to the notion of doing full-time creative work, I mean the image of the working artist — it’s not more noble, it’s not more soulful, it’s not more meaningful, it’s not more emotionally and spiritually centering to do art full-time for a living. The work itself can be noble, soulful, meaningful and centering (ANY job can be these things) but doing creative work as a full-time job isn’t going to strip your life of normalcy. You’re still going to be human You’re still going to have your struggles. I’m just trying to be honest about this because sometimes folks get worship-y about the lives of full-time artists. The work is just as messy and complicated and beautiful as having a job out in the real world.
Just like you, there are mornings when I don’t want to do my work. I want to do something else. I want to stay in bed curled up with my animals and read a book instead of facing my inboxes or sitting down in front of a necklace design I managed to bung up when I let myself work too late in the night with muddled eyes. There are times, too, when it’s the joy of my heart to work!
I get tired. I get energized. I get hurt. I get healed. I get empty. I get full.
I’m just like you.
Anyway, the dogs and I went out yesterday, we had some gale force wind blowing in our ears, we found plenty of really cool dead stuff to look at, we watched the hawks hunt, we listened to the canyon wren, we heard the chukar chuckling, we gazed off in the distance and daydreamed, we kept our eyes peeled for antlers, and we walked it out, mile after mile, until the sun went down.
We don’t regret, for a moment, how we spent the day.