The Journals
September 14, 10:12pm
I've kept up all the appearances, I've planned, I've studied, set goals, attended dutifully to debts, and said all the
necessary goodbyes. I've done all that I can to insure my friends and family that I will be okay out here, living out of a van
alone for the next three months. I myself have doubts. I'm not even sure why I've decided to do this, except that I have to do
"something". I could probably trace this whole trip to a singular night in Philadelphia.
I've never been one of those unambiguous souls who sleep easily. Some nights I pass in a surreal half-sleep, attempting to paint
an impossible nose on air, or obsessed over some situation from the day before. Hours pass, and I probably doze-off from time to
time, but in the morning there is only this feeling of fatigue and dissatisfaction. It was on such a night that I lay awake and
listened to a neighbor, from some apartment lower in the adjacent alley, mercilessly beat his wife. The police station was a block
away, the phone not far, but for some reason I didn't call. After that night, Philadelphia changed for me. A routine trip on the
subway broke my heart when a mother screamed in her crying child's face. I saw a man sitting on a bench under a buzzing street lamp, covered in blood. He didn't want any help. Panhandlers took to ringing my door bell. I felt less comfort in the company of friends, everywhere I judged and was judged. In a sudden decision, which shocked even me, I ended a long-standing rom antic relationship. So I've decided to do what many people do when they don't know what's next, I've taken to the road.
I'm driving a 1999 Chevy Astrovan, which lacks utterly the charm of a VW bus, or even the beat-up old panel van I initially
envisioned. Its the kind of vehicle not frequently associated with cross-country pilgrimages, more often seen parked in front
of a modest suburban home with a great lawn. So this is my chariot into the fires of the unknown; a sensible, practical mini-van.
I've decided to name her Micaëla, after the tragic character in Bizet's Carmen. In the opera, Micaëla pleads with Don José, that
he come back home and be sensible, and stop chasing after Carmen.
The weather on this first day out was aptly gloomy, and a vague sense of dread settled in as I left my parents' home. My father
stood at the end of the driveway and waved, and I carried all the worries wrapped up in that wave for the first ninety miles west.
It rained. The tires whined and thumped over patches of alternately grooved and solid pavement, the sound was like a giant artificial
heart with a murmur, and I felt very sad. Was I running away? Could I be so sure that I wasn't? Was I actually going to learn anything
about painting out here? Did it matter? I was just passing through the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel when the doubts fell away. I was
listening to Johnny Cash sing Orange Blossom special, threading my way beneath the mountain, and suddenly everything was perfect,
even my doubt. My stomach fluttered. I commenced to belting out the choruses and the tires slapped time. I emerged from the
tunnel into a grand play of sunshine, with towering cumulous churning across the sky. I'm camped tonight in a little campground
in West VA, tomorrow I hope to make Saint Lewis.
September 16
Kansas, I never knew it was so beautiful. No tree pushes up very far. The entire prairie rests in quiescence beneath a wide open
sky, and what skies. Blue and clear and forever, and when the sun sets, the light lingers for a long time. I made a first attempt
at foraging today, harvested some wild dandy-lion from a field behind a gas station. I will never do that again. First the stuff
was incredibly fibrous, tough to the point of inedibility. I just kept chewing and chewing and chewing, and finally just had to spit
it out. I am sure that it was dandy-lion, and thus sure I didn't poison myself, but it must only be palatable when young. I'm camping
tonight at Milford Dam state park, in a little spot right on the water. I opened up the van and let the crisp, clean wind blow through
her. The place is mostly deserted, except for mosquitoes.
The park is down a whole series of gravel roads, and the signs aren't very clearly marked. It was because of this that I took a turn
down a long, narrow service road that ended in a dead-end and a bawdy surprise. The road ended in a small circular patch of gravel,
not big enough to turn around in. There was a navy-blue Cadillac parked in the right half of the circle. Near the rear passenger side
door sat a pair of women's platform shoes, hot pink and wholly incongruous with the terrain. It was then that I noticed three figures
in the field. A man with a large camera waved his arms wildly. Another man stood at the edge of the field, his back was to me as
though to say, "nothin' going on here, just standin' in the field". Between the two men there was a woman, wholly naked save some
sort of shear scarf. Her pale ass was turned to the camera, and her head turned over her left shoulder. The type of wine-dark red
hair you only get from a bottle spilled over her shoulders and peeked from her sex. She smiled at me. Not wanting to interrupt such
a clearly private affair, I attempted to turn around, but found that the limited space at the end of the road forced me into an
awkward fifteen-point turnabout. Eventually I did manage to get the van turned around, and laughing nervously, headed back to the
main road.
I remember I used to go exploring the thin woods that surrounded my suburban childhood. Every now and again I'd happen upon the
rusted out remains of an old car. For some reason, they always seemed to have an assortment of old socks, pants, shoes and underwear
scattered around the interior, like some frantic orgy had happened there years before. Digging through the scraps of soiled cloth I
used to reconstruct these sordid scenes, complete with witches, Satanists, and perverts. Usually I would reach a point of revulsion
and terror so extreme that I would have to flee the scene, praying that I wasn't followed. I felt that I had just stumbled upon the
prelude to one of those strange arboreal rights, practiced in wooded areas everywhere, just out of sight. I wonder if the Cadillac is
now sitting empty in the Kansas woods, the seats cracked, the windows broken, the wheels gone, and just barely visible through the
rotting leaves on the floor, a pair of hot-pink platform shoes.
September 17
Outside of Milford the prairies go flat. The wind averages gusts of about 40 miles per hour, sending curtains of dust across the
highway. I should note that the first time an Easterner sees a real tumbleweed it's a big deal. We only know them from movies, so
in a sense tumbleweeds seem like set-pieces left over from old westerns. I-70 is dusty, straight and desolate. The eyes glaze and
the hands sweat. Occasionally one passes an old church, painted in austere white with black trim. Other than churches and gas stations
the road is liberally peppered with Adult Novelty shops. I continue to be haunted by the scene in the woods the day before: the
strange smile, the pale skin, the dark red hair. The loneliness is setting in. Its late in the year and I'd really like to spend
some serious time in the Rocky Mountains, so I've decided to hot foot it to Gunnison, CO before I break out the paints.
September 18
Continuing west on I-70, just past a little town called Genoa, there is a decidedly strange piece of Americana called the Tower
Museum. Built in the twenties by Charles W. Gregory, some walls are made of petrified wood roughly mortared, some in rocks of every
shape and texture. The whole thing looks as though it could fall over at any moment, and its filled with cast off bits of flea-market
Americana. You've got your old ivory combs and pitted straight razors, WW II gas masks, even a two-headed calf. The place feels as
though it is held together by shear magnetism, like there is a lode stone beneath it that has attracted all the scrap metal and rock
and farm equipment in a thousand mile radius and deposited it there in a random pile. I stopped there initially to use the bathroom
(an old outhouse that threatened to blow over), but ended up wandering around the place for quite a while. I pulled into the town of
Gunnison, CO this evening after crossing Monarch Pass, utterly wasted by the road.
September 20
These first days have been very instructional. I camp every night. I love it now, but the fun won't last. I have yet to master
the art of a good cooking fire, and today I knocked a whole griddle full of half-cooked pancakes into the fire. The simplest
operations become very complex. I've got to learn to just appreciate each moment I'm out here, and not worry if my sluggish
camp skills eat into my painting time. There is no surer way to perpetuate some problem than by rushing. I must take my time.
Try to understand things.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is incredible, blues and blacks straight out of night, stretched out nude in the daylight.
The entire canyon is composed of a gray rock called gneiss and threaded with schist. The crumbly amalgam of the walls is said
to be a climber's nightmare. They say that it's very inhospitable inside the gorge, lined with poison ivy and nearly too
narrow to walk through in places. Never have I seen such complex blues and blacks. The crickets sing all day beneath the
boulders, they don't even bother to stop chirping when you walk past. I did some drawing in the morning and painted in the
afternoon. All the preparations for the trip kept me from steady practice, so it was very difficult day. I struggled much
with things that are normally easy, and felt kind of hollowed-out by day's end. I managed to avoid sunburn, but not tourists.
I am now featured like a piece of wildlife in many a stranger's snapshots. I thought about charging a quarter per picture,
or maybe even a whole dollar. I must cultivate some signal that says to people, "I am very busy here, please let me be".
It is nice that people are interested in what I'm doing, so I always try to be nice. But sometimes, when the light is
changing, and I'm struggling like mad just to get something down, I just don't care about your nephew's taxidermy business,
or how well your grandson draws SpongeBob.
September 22
Crested Butte, CO has proved to be a wonderful place to get a little of the comforts of indoors living. I'm staying at a big
youth hostel here which is mostly deserted. I have a whole room to myself. I attempted to update the online version of this
travelogue at the public library, but couldn't seem to get it to work. The computer would not allow me to post entries for some
reason, told me I did not have "permissions to complete this operation".
Here I am nine days out, far enough from home to be what they call "committed" to the trip, and all the efforts to reach back
to the past just feel hollow. Perhaps the blog will have to wait. There is a kind of cycle to being alone. First you feel very
elated, finally you are the master of your days, the king of the world. Next comes this overwhelming desire to share experiences
with people, you smile at everyone, laugh easily, and god-forbid you should enter into a casual conversation, because it will
get very deep for you, very fast, and your hapless victim will leave with an ache in their soul. Beyond this point the true
loneliness of the road sets in. Your experiences confront you, but you are a stranger, and you have no good words for them
anyway. After this awkward period of silence, where entire days pass without words, you open your mouth, you speak, and it sounds
different. The throat croaks, babble escapes. It is around this point when you become comfortable with your solitude. You miss
home, and people that you love, but you don't cling to them anymore. Sitting in the library, cursing the computer terminal and
its infernal "permissions", I realized I was clinging. I was attempting to justify my traveling with some concrete result.
Gradually I am losing the desire to prove anything. I only want to be here, in all this wild beauty, and celebrate it.
My painting practice has been run through the ringer. I'm surrounded by unfamiliar violets and blues, everything is enormous,
and the stones of each mountain ring with a different color. There is no time, yet I cannot make myself hurry. I must stop
planning and conniving and orchestrating effects. Stop trying to prove something.
September 23
Painting went better today, I'm not pleased with the result, but my thoughts ceased to chatter and disturb me all day long.
The higher elevation lack of humidity creates very different color. I'm used to the muggy atmosphere of the old east coast
cities. Shadows have a great Ultramarine coolness to them, and color shifts much less toward neutral as it recedes. It's
interesting to note that the sunset happens earlier than elsewhere, being as the entire town is surrounded by mountains.
There is a long dusk, with a lavender cast. The scenery is ridiculously grandiose. It seems somehow wrong to make small
paintings of it, as if you are shrinking it inappropriately.
September 25
Hiked up to the summit of Mount Crested Butte. It was a long hike, equally divided between service roads and switch-backed
paths. It terminated in a nervy scramble over loose, ponderous, and jagged boulders. The view was sublime. It was an
abnormally hazy day and everything at that elevation was bathed in a lavender haze. I did a quick sketch from the summit,
being well buffeted by cold winds. I nearly got stuck in the dark up there, underestimating the time I needed to get back
down. I got back to Micaela just as the last sunlight drifted from the peaks.
September 26
Camping in Rocky Mountain national park, next to a little stand of aspens with coarse, elk-mauled trunks. I can hear the
elk bugling a little ways off. For quite a while I wasn't sure what the sound was, only that it was ghostly. The elks' call
is diaphanous, a thing all of air and steam, which seems wholly incongruous to their bulk and physical presence.
I painted today up above tree line off of Trail Ridge Road. It was freezing up there. It was difficult to find shelter from
the wind. As it happened, the wind was blowing from the same direction as the sun, so if I wanted out of the wind I had to be
in the shade. I tightened up my face mask, screwed down my hat, and perched myself on a little outcropping shielded from the
wind and tourists. I felt like I was the only one there for a while. About halfway through my painting I heard a trickling
sound somewhat like a mountain stream. Thinking this odd I looked around for its source, and discovered, to my horror, a
stream of steaming urine coming down from above. It piddled and splashed on the rocks two feet from me and I had to duck for
cover. I cleared my throat loudly, but the wind must have been in the pisser's ears because the stream kept going for a while.
As I got back to painting I heard laughter from the rocks above.
(As an aside to these journals, I should note that upon returning home to my family and sharing my sketches with them,
my father saw this sketch and immediately exclaimed, "Its Longs Peak!". After rifling through box of old Black and White
photos he produced a snap shot taken from nearly the exact same spot 30 years ago, when he was on a cross-country
road-trip of his own.)
September 29
Solitude is a cold night, with the moon the white of a fingernail, and elk bugling in the distance, with steely mountains
grimly mustached in clouds; a dim lantern, cooling embers, a belly just a little too full, and both ears idling. I just spent
a few days visiting V_ in Boulder, laughing, eating, drinking, and generally being sociable. After a night of carousing downtown
we hiked to lunch at the Chautauqua Dining Hall; quite a hike, and quite a lunch. At one point I found myself so giddy from the
great food and companions that I couldn't stop laughing. It is good to have something to gauge your solitude by now and again.
Struggling with a terrible and ill-fated attraction for V_, which I have resolved to keep to myself. I have not even come to
terms with being alone yet, and everywhere I look for a way around it. But as I pen these words I think about risk, I think
about spending one experience entire, and letting life reel out from it, I think about the dream I had before I left.
V_ and I are sitting outside, across from each other, we are looking into each other's eyes. She is a child, then a woman,
then a crone. Every stage slowly blending into the next, and I love her. I am joyful. We say nothing, there is just this gentle
feeling all around us. I awoke with feelings I did not have a place for, and still don't.
September 30
Sat in my van before daybreak in complete darkness, I imagined that I was in the belly of some vast ocean going vessel.
The only sound other than the slight hum of my ears on idle was the bugling of an elk herd twenty feet from my camp. It is a
beautiful sound, and a lonely one. I closed my eyes and imagined they were sea creatures, a little deeper and I could feel
the van rocking on the waves. The aspens have turned yellow amongst the evergreens and come out from them bright and flat
like fire…
Tomorrow morning I need to look at some sketches by Constable, and see just how he put them together. I feel that I am taking
a lot more time than necessary in getting down the essentials. I'm finally adjusting to the light,
and sleeping like I mean it.
next up:
Thunderstorms, Horizontal Lightning and Demons,Demons,Demons