I Love Your Soul
I rarely do portrait sessions but I should do more since I tend to really enjoy the work. Here are some favorites from a shoot I did a couple of nights ago for an interior designer friend of mine, here in the valley. She’s a real beaut and tremendously talented, to boot.
We fished the Methow River early in the day yesterday and it was like no other day we have spent on the river here. We launched the boat around 6AM and immediately caught cutthroat. I think we were somewhat shocked by our success because this is a difficult river to fish. We usually catch a few fish each and have long, dry stretches of quiet, dead water.
Yesterday, all day long, the river was fishing hot!!! Or maybe I was offering up perfect presentations. Or maybe those fish simply loved all the hoppers I brought home with me from a fly shop in Missoula. I don’t know. I felt touched by the very hand of God, and if you recall, Jesus was a fisherman, too…and I’m pretty sure that when he wasn’t using nets he had a fly rod in his hands.
And so it went.
The fishing was good.
The fishing was good yesterday, but even when the fishing isn’t good, the fishing is still good.
Even when you’ve lost all your best flys to lunkers and trees, it’s still good.
Even when you realize you forgot your spool of tippet and you have to tie onto your leader, it’s still good.
Even when it pours for seven hours and you can’t feel your feet, it’s still good.
Even when you manage to make two bird nests of your line in a span of three minutes, it’s still good.
Even when you’re hungry and your stomach is gnawing on itself, it’s still good.
Even when everything you catch is six inches long, it’s still good.
Even when you snap a rod tip, it’s still good.
Even when your birddog falls out of the boat and terrifies you by swimming towards you and eventually gets sucked under the boat in a line of thick whitewater, it’s still good.
Even when you don’t catch a single fish, it’s still good.
It’s always and forever good.
That’s why we do it.
Because it’s good, and because it lets us sidle up to nature, watch the hawks, eagles and osprey, feel the sun and wind and rain on our faces, watch the moose swim through deep water, see the white-tailed deer bounding, and of course, if we work hard, we get to gently handle something that is royal and pure and glorious and worthy of a good fight.
I caught a cutthroat, yesterday, that made my arm ache and gave me a bruise on my stomach where I wedged the butt of my fly rod while I was walking that thin line of letting him run and reeling him in — it hurts a little when I laugh and the memory of him flashing silver in deep water each time he turned his back to me and made a run for freedom will hold strong in my mind and heart for a good long while.
Robert, well, he caught the king of the river and we all bowed down.
Robbie came home from Oregon yesterday, mid-afternoon, gave me a hug and then worked the rest of the day. I feel like I haven’t seen him for such a long while. I was gladly toiling in the garden, pulling fat carrots from the soil, picking onions, collecting squash and tearing up all the lettuce that has bolted for the sky. I took the harvest into the mess hall kitchen and began to clean it and scrub it all at the sink, exposing the bright and gleaming skin that home grown veggies have beneath all that righteous dirt.
One half of the mess hall is currently the sew shop* — rows of industrial sewing machines line one wall and the hum of solid kevlar stitches landing in tight succession is the music I make lunch to lately.
There I was, scrubbing carrots, when I heard the fellas put on some Bob Dylan. One by one, they all began singing along to the music, while snipping threads, setting grommets, loading bobbins and pushing thick cordura past sharp needles. I stopped what I was doing, looked over at them, and simply enjoyed the sight of them being together, being manly, being quirky, being sweet, being capable, being themselves.
And my heart felt so full.
I thought to myself, “Run. RUN and get your camera.” But I knew the moment wouldn’t last forever, and so much of the beauty was locked up in the feeling of it, so I stayed and simply enjoyed it for what it was; I witnessed brotherhood, from the fringes, and didn’t feel left out for a single moment.
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I’m thinking a lot lately about what to give and what to keep. What to catch and what to set free. What to hold onto and what to release. I’m thinking about how to share my life and my work and my learnings in a honest and open way while still retaining some special little secret things for the most special people in my life.
There’s a line here, scratched in the dirt, painted on asphalt, and to one side of it is “too little” and to the other side is “too much” and I keep on walking it. I keep on moving forward and my feet keep falling where they may, where they might.
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I made a fabulous pesto for seashell noodles last night with sides of roasted squash and greens. Everything came from the garden. I felt rich.
Fresh Garden Pesto (roughly): olive oil, walnuts, lemon basil, pepper, salt, garlic and a smattering of romano-esque sheep cheese.
Dig it?
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*The North Cascades Smokejumper Base was built in 1939 — the first base in the program. The buildings are historic, somewhat primitive and unevenly distributed between beautiful lawns, gardens, aspen groves, elms, ponderosa pines and locust trees on the edge of the airstrip. It’s a beautiful base. The buildings with air conditioning are the office and the mess hall.
When the weather is hot, the sewing machines are moved into the air conditioned space of the mess hall. Actually, I think they sew in the mess hall in the winter, too, when the weather is cold and the loft is hard to heat.
Did you know that smokejumpers are master seamstresses? They draft their own patterns, sew their own packs, travel bags, jump suits, and patch their own chutes…among other things.
I’m sitting here, in my studio, at my desk, trying to decide what to tell you. It is cool outside, and even cooler inside this log house. The dogs are laying in the dirt and pine duff outside the door and the breeze is blowing in and rattling all the beautiful things that create my space here. I have been away for almost 30 days (I was home for only one day between trips). I have been in tremendously wild places. When I was driving my truck up the Methow Valley from Pateros two nights ago, when my foot was tired on the gas pedal and my eyes were full of grit, when I was braking hard to miss deer and imagining the trout treading water in the dark river to my right…I realized I was coming home; I realized I was reluctantly coming home to the Methow Valley.
When I left Montana three days ago, a beautiful Montana dulled by a thick blanket of forest fire smoke, a wild Montana I rode through on the back of a horse, the spacious Montana I saw 80 miles of from the back of a golden haflinger, I told my friends, “There is nothing for me in Washington.”
They laughed.
I think they thought I was making a melodramatic joke, of sorts. But I wasn’t. I keep thinking to myself, “We need to get back to Idaho.” I keep wondering what will take us back to Idaho. I keep wondering, “How long will it take?” I continue to remind myself to be present, to love all that there is to love here, and there is terribly much to love about the Methow Valley. Terribly much. I am spoilt to live here. I truly am.
It’s a difficult thing to explain, but I will try. Washington is a wonderful state, but it simply doesn’t hold me quite like Idaho and Montana do. It’s perhaps an issue of cultural discombobulation for me. The closer I get to the ocean, to the coast, to the mighty cities there — the greater my sense of dissolution. I can’t wrap my mind around the reality of huge populations of people who are without space (the kind of space I need). It’s all too overlapping. The stifled feel of it pours over the Mountains here and dissipates, slowly, until the heart of the interior chokes it out with its wide openness and stamping hooves.
I remind myself, the way we receive the space around us is a personal thing. I need more than the average human…I am more easily infringed upon than the average human. I always stand in a way that offers great space to the people around me.
What will take me back? What will take me back to Idaho and the space there and the emptiness there and the way those two things sustain me, cradle me, inform my work, inspire the shutters on my cameras, settle my bones in their sockets, tether my soul?
I am not unhappy here. I am happy here. Here in Washington. But the sense that the grass is greener on the other side of the state line, for me, grows stronger with every day.
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Yesterday, after an eternity of laundry loads, after cleaning the Airstream from top to bottom, after running the dogs, before dinner, before editing photographs late into the night, before I sipped on that delicious gin and tonic with garden cucumbers…Tater and I took a cruise in the ’71 and it was beautiful. I’ve been meaning to take a self-portrait of myself, driving the Ford down a dirt road, from a wide distance, for ages now. I’ll make similar pictures again, in the future, until I think I have captured it perfectly — the feel of homecoming, wandering, twilight, freedom, diamonds of dust and the nature of being on the road, headed to nowhere, headed to everywhere.
Headed to everywhere.
I suppose this is how I see him. Exactly. Rugged, capable beauty in a wild shower of flame and sparks. Or perhaps this is my perspective of us; the earnest but volatile nature of who we are independently and corporately. We are a pair of glorious, clashing and blending flames.
We just spent a full week together, which is something that NEVER happens during the fire season. I came home from Alaska and we galloped to Pocatello to close on our house, pack up our life and stuff it in a storage unit. We sold or gave away over half of what we owned and once the money was in the bank from the sale of our home, we drove and fished our way across Idaho until we parted ways in Spokane. He headed back to Winthrop and work while I buzzed over to Montana to stage for a backcountry trip. When we crossed over the Idaho-Washington state line we looked over at each other and said, “We have to get back. We have to get back to Idaho.“
I miss him. I miss dreaming aloud with him. I miss the tangible flame that has burned between us for over 11 years now. Godspeed, babe (and soft landings), until our soul bones rest side by side once more.