7.26.2012… cloudless, windless

It is a dry year. All the ranchers agree. They measure rain in tenths of inches and report each one that arrives. Surprisingly in this time of drought, the grass along the little fishing stream in the Castles was some of the tallest I have ever seen. Big Grass. Standing where it reached my chest, I spread my arms and brushed the seed tassels with my fingers. It was a fluid plain all around me, rolling in an unpredictable tide. I wanted to stand still and become part of the grass, but my fishing teacher had moved on and disappeared as the grass closed over his head. I followed, but first reached down and plucked one blade to bring home for drawing. Rufus returned with 8 brook trout and I returned with one blade of grass exactly 7 feet tall.

7.25.2012... cloudless, windless

I worked all morning in the studio yesterday, but didn’t resist the call to go with Rufus and Sharon fishing for brookies. We drove up the Castle Town road and stopped at Zikmund’s. Vickie was mowing and Roger was haying, like every other rancher, but they gladly gave permission to fish. We walked to the stream and I became Rufus’ student. This is how you hold the pole…don’t let go of the line…let the fly float… those bookies will be in the shade… you’ve got to fool the fish. He continued to unfold the mysteries of fishing and I remained his clumsy mostly attentive student. My eyes were on the rippling live water, a transparent skin defined by the rocks and grasses it rolls over. It would be enough just to watch, but today I am with a devoted fisherman who learned from his daddy in South Carolina more than 60 years ago. He encouraged me, he encouraged the fish, but it was Rufus who reeled in dinner. Rufus fought them out of the water and I clutched them in the canvas creel carried over my shoulder with the brookies fighting against my hip, hoping for escape. “We are fighting for sport, but the fish are fighting for life"... wisdom passed on from Rufus’ daddy.

7.24.2012… half cloud cover, moderate/slight wind

I read Jim Harrison’s River Sequence I – VII aloud, and while I read River III the fully-fledged idea of quitting my job now and living cheaply here in Montana to focus on my work, kept me from hearing the words. I read it again. The need behind his words, the desire to be devoted to ones work, had by-passed all logical thinking and appeared as a plan to make it happen. I don’t want “the corpse of the spirit to gradually become water and wait for another.” I want to both see the clouds and trees and fish and hills, and to learn the light yet firm hold that allows nothing to get away. Seeing teaches me to hold my heart in the same way, or is it the other way around, or are seeing and holding lightly the same thing? Jim Harrison’s poem was not a sign. It was not a message from the universe. Nor was my plan a good one. But I can taste a need to be in a place conducive to not letting another one get away.

7.23.2012... quarter cloud cover, slight wind

I woke this morning just at sunrise and was startled out of my bed by a giant flock of birds in the yard. I’ve tried all morning to identify them as something other than starlings, but the traveling hoard suggests otherwise. Even before fully waking I registered them as being too many… Hitchcockish. There’s been another bird in the yard that I have been stalking. I think it may be a Brewer’s blackbird. There have been goldfinches as well. But now it is the hot middle of the afternoon, the insect hours: flies, bees, ants, butterflies. The hay in my neighbor’s field was raked and baled this morning. It is a mark of summer passing. I could make the comparison of a drawing being rolled and delivered for exhibition. Larry McMurtry compared herding words to herding cattle…I guess there is a metaphor in everything.

7.22.2012... quarter cloud cover, slight wind

Outside alone in the early morning I heard the sandhill cranes calling for the first time since being back. I also noticed two flickers had taken up residence on the west end of the roof and I think I heard owls as they finish their night of hunting… just the first flush of settling in on my own. Yesterday I saw mourning doves in Harlo and instantly knew what they were. Was it because I was there to pay last respects to a local cowboy? The birds traverse my consciousness here in Montana.

7.21.2012… few clouds, no wind

I am still neck deep in West of 98, considering many points of view as to what is the WEST. Larry McMurtry fights the myth of a pastoral West… no William Jackson, John Hiller, or Ansel Adams views. Are we really a nation of tourists? Does that mean we don’t ever really know where we are, that we are more concerned about the take away photograph than actually being somewhere? Jim Barnes suspects that many do know where they are and I am equally as hopeful that many of us do feel cool water in our mouths in contrast to the heat on our skin, that we do notice the intersection of a 3 minute rain storm with a damsel fly trying to get in the window screen, or that after spotting lightning we count seconds to miles before the accompanying boom. Rebecca Solnit has taught me to be realistic and hopeful, to actually see rather than buy the postcard or the disparaging misanthropy.

7.20.2012… nearly total cloud cover, no wind

I was awake briefly before sunrise, the horizon brilliant red. I sat up to see it and smiled at its proud party hue, but it was easy to lie back down and close my eyes. Yesterday was hot; with sweat running down my arms I sought the path of cooling fans and fought the urge to sleep. Even now under this high dome of clouds I could lay down in the grass and close my eyes. Sleep is often the first response to being in Two Dot, the seduction of high elevation, warm days, and an open sky.