Everything in its right place
out on the land that never stops giving even when it takes
everything
you have to be out there
in the sharp light
mournful wind
and guilesome stone.
November 14, 2015 by
All in a good days work!
November 7, 2015 by
We fished the gorge today! It is unlike anywhere I’ve ever fished. Out of some of the clearest waters I’ve ever seen I pulled the darkest rainbow trout — almost black behind their long streaks of blush. Just beautiful.
For dinner? I made an incredible pheasant and winter squash curry (wild shot and garden grown).
While driving home, we explored a little more, exclaiming to ourselves, “Idaho’s the best.”
It’s good to be home.
Lastly, look at that grumpy llama.
October 21, 2015 by
As I left, I changed my mind
turned around, reached for my camera
swept through the doorway
across the gravel
(and the tornado of dove feathers there from the
hawk kill
two days ago)
down to the river where the
sky gently burnished the
whitewater orange in the
rage of light that comes on
so gently
at the end of day.
These Halcyon Days (In No Particular Order)
October 17, 2015 by
We’re feeling rich on everything right now, fat on life, wealthy with time.
With the end of the fire season, we rolled out of the Methow Valley of Washington and moved back to Idaho for the winter! We arrived at the strawbale house two days ago with the Airstream and raft in tow.
The house itself is nearly unpacked, it feels huge to me. Our bedroom up in the loft boasts more square footage than the entire Airstream. This is a one room house and only about 800 square feet or so but the spaciousness is luxurious! Mostly, I like that we don’t feel a need to fill it up. The scant amount of furniture we had in the Airstream is now the furniture we have in the house. We bought a couple of tables from a thrift store to use in what will be my studio work space. But besides that, the house feels like the inside of a drum into which a few seeds have fallen — it’s so easy for us to shake and bounce around. I like how the space holds a touch of an echo. I’d like to keep it that way. The way the light flows through, in and then out again, feels clean, resonant and sacred.
It’s amazing what I grew accustomed to this summer. You know, it was basically a communal living situation for us on base. We had the Airstream (which is still unfinished and the further completion of it will be attended to this winter in a serious way) but we shared a public bathroom and mess hall with everyone who lived on base. I should add, sometimes there were people OTHER than smokejumpers living on base. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night or arrived home late from the studio to find a handful of crews sleeping on the lawn in front of my Airstream or behind it, or beside it — they too, used the facilities as I did. I got used to a lot of things this summer and some of those life details I liked and some of those life details I tolerated, but I learned about myself and others and friendship and humanity. It was a great time.
Here, at the strawbale house, it is a heavenly novelty to have a kitchen of my own, pots and pans of my own, a full pantry for food storage instead of a single kitchen cupboard and a shelf in a walk-in fridge. It’s a novelty to not have to carry a basket of shower implements across a football field length of dewy grass to a public washroom on the other side of the base every morning. I don’t share laundry machines with anyone. I don’t keep my towel in a locker. I can walk around in my undies all day long if I want and how about having my own WIFI connection in my living space so I can actually sit down, any time of day, not just while I am at the studio, and answer the emails that have been rolling in (and mostly unanswered) since the start of August.
How about that?!!
I am slowly righting this ship of life and it’s nice to see things so orderly again…which isn’t saying much because I am generally a very untidy and disorderly person and many of you would be driven fairly insane by the delicious wake of glorious chaos I leave most everywhere I go. All this is to say, I loved living on base with Robbie in our Airstream this summer. Now, I’m thrilled to have a place of my own again.
The studio is almost set up. I’m already romanced dumb by the pounding of the whitewater on the river below the house. It has been sunny and hot and I’ve grown some new freckles on my nose. I’ll keep setting life in order here and in the meanwhile, we are packing and preparing for my elk hunt which will commence in a handful of days in the very wildly beating heart of Idaho.
I love this life of ours.
I hope this season you are making your way through is rich as the red leaves on the trees.
A Vision Of Trout — And An Orvis Partnership
May 9, 2015 by
I cannot believe my ears and mind were able to isolate the sound in the first place. It’s a miracle that I heard it. I was running on a single track, my footsteps driving me forward through the woods in rhythmic, soft thumps. The wind was in the scrub maple and aspen, the dogs were crashing through underbrush on the hunt for voles, chipmunks and grouse. In the swirling ocean of sound around me, I heard a still, small noise — the soft licking tone of a trout nose breaking the surface of water. I stopped as soon as I heard it, my upper body and knees objecting to inertia, and I slowly turned my head to the right, to look down into the clear, cold waters of City Creek. My eyes adjusted to the play of shadow and light on the surface of the water and there, in the rapidly moving translucence strewn with twigs and last summers leaves, I saw the speckled back of a native cutthroat trout, busy with the calm and stabilizing flutter of fins and tail; treading space and time.
I gasped aloud to myself! It was a nice little fish, I estimate it was eight inches in length which sounds like nothing to write home about, I know, but allow me to tell you about City Creek. City Creek is a spring creek that flows, year round, off the West Bench of the Portneuf Valley. It runs cold, clear and bright, as spring creeks do. At its widest, it might measure four feet in width. While there are some deeper pools on it’s course, it is, for the most part, roughly three inches deep. It is precious to me because Robert and I are the sole owners of water rights to this creek and its waters have fed and grown our property here in Pocatello since it was first established as a fruit orchard 117 years ago. Our water rights are historic and deeded to our property. Water rights in the West are a holy thing, people use to kill each other over water here and there’s still a lot of fighting that goes on regarding every drop that comes out of the sky and off the mountains in the interior West. The water is our lifeblood, our livelihood, the thing that dictates the quality of our existence in many ways; it’s also the stuff we stalk in search of some of the most beautiful critters on God’s green earth: trout.
Beyond the actual implications of basically owning the water in City Creek, I view this water as one of the crown jewels of our home. The West bench rises up from our property here in Pocatello and I view the mountains I see out the front windows of my home as my front yard — a space I play in every single day and take great delight in exploring. To have seen, for the first time in my seven years of life in this valley, a native trout in what I consider to be my creek, was nothing short of a miracle. A miracle!
Furthermore, just past our home, City Creek plunges off a nine foot tall cement wall that was installed in 1965 to help control flooding in the heart of Oldtown. This is the other reason why seeing this fish shocked me out of my skin — it’s old stock. I consider it impossible for any fish to have recently made its way up City Creek from the Portneuf River!
As I stood there on the bank of my creek and looked down into the water at my miracle trout, I heard him rise to kiss the air a few more times and marveled at the music of the sound that plucks at the heartstrings of fly fishermen and fisherwomen around the world. Is there any music quite like trout rising up against the thinness of the sky to simply touch the air with a blunt nose or slurp a bug off the seam that stitches the heavens to the waters? I think not. It’s a sound I live for, it’s a sound that drives me mad, it’s a sound that calms the senses. I crouched down and stayed there, watching my fish skitter about the shallows, until he hit a splashy pocket of water beside a large stone and was carried away by the current, down the mountain, closer to the sea. I sighed aloud, stayed there a while longer, in the absence of time, in the shade of the woods, on the edge of a trout home, on the narrow and rippling shoreline of a speckled life lesson.
Eventually, I picked myself up off the creek bank and kept on running up the trail, passing in and out of light and shadows, feeling my skin warm in the sunshine as the wind combed my hair. I was thinking hard about that trout and pulling forth the life lessons and truths from his appearance in my life that afternoon. I thought about how steadily that fish approached life no matter the strength of the current or the depth of the water. He simply navigated, to the very best of his abilities, the waters he found himself in. I thought about persistence, longevity, survival, simplicity, legacy and as always, the notion of home.
My feet carried me higher up the mountain, into the arms of the wind and the warm spice of the juniper stands. I felt my mind relax as I fell into the space and calm that comes to me when I run big distances — the place where the world around me seems to pause and pulse with delicate details and infinite opportunity, the place I physically, emotionally and mentally break free of my shackles. I covered many miles, pushed up and over switchbacks built of mafic rubble, entered deeper into the sunshine and bluebird sky, and somewhere along the way I felt my true, free-self, gently press up against the smooth surface of the world around me and I know I made that same music the trout makes when it reaches up to touch the sky.
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I’m pairing up with Orvis for the next while to help them celebrate women and men who love the outdoors. They are currently holding a photo contest with plenty of great, quality prizes. You can enter images in the contest with your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter accounts using the hashtags #orvis and #findyourpause .
The photo contest is for USA-icans only and is open until May 20th — so hurry up, submit a few photos and get inspired for the summer months and that good old outdoor living.
