I WANT TO COME BACK AS A DOLPHIN

I’m pretty sure I want to be a dolphin in my next life. I observed a pod of dolphin last weekend, skipping across the waves, surfing on the wake of our boat, jumping for joy in tandem. A nice life I think. They are very social creatures and don’t mind at all if someone else is about. They just declare it a party. I like parties.

Apparently, the dolphin regularly escort the Pacific Islander boat from Ventura Harbor to the Channel Islands, taking campers and day visitors to one of its five islands which are now part of the National Park Service. Maybe they want to help get the party started early. And maybe they accomplished just that.

Not that the group I was with has trouble getting anything started. Comprised of hardy adventurists, a group of about 21 of us were headed out to Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the five islands of Channel Islands National Park, for two days of camping, hiking and sea kayaking. And there we were, being entertained by the dolphin, our gear stowed below deck, getting the party started.

The Channel Islands are home to over 2000 species of animals and plants – 145 of them found nowhere else on Earth. We became pretty familiar with one of these protected and unique species, the Island fox, as they were numerous little thieves who had a fondness for smelly hiking socks which our group could supply abundantly. Our hikes and kayak trips gave us plenty of opportunity to see other Island critters too like the Island Blue Jay, sea lions, lots of sea birds and fish. I even had one small brown bug attempt to stow away for a ride to the mainland on my tent only to be summarily removed before packing.

Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the five Park islands and our destination, has a long history of human habitation. Local legend has it that the name came from a priest’s staff accidentally left on the island during the Portola expedition of 1769. A friendly Chumash Indian, one of many living on the Island, found it and returned it, causing the Spanish to name the island “La Isla de Santa Cruz” (Island of the Sacred Cross). Many tribes and clans of American Indians have lived on and traveled between the island and the mainland for over 10,000 years often to mine the extensive chert deposits for tools and ‘shell-bead money’ which was traded among tribes throughout California.

European exploration and ranching has occupied the island in the last 150 years although the first Spanish exploration began around 1542 in the area of Scorpion Ranch. Evidence of ranching is everywhere when you first approach the island. Rusting ranch equipment lines the walk to the Visitor’s Center which is an old adobe ranch house, usually unmanned, but with several very informative displays about the island’s history and wildlife.

The Park brochure says the landscape reflects what Coastal California would have looked like before all the houses and people. Santa Cruz, like a lot of islands, has a high point which is Montanan Ridge, draining water across high plateaus both north and south creating deep canyons. For us hikers, these truly beautiful grassy plateaus were a delight, with views that stretched literally as far as the eye can see.  Although the Island is only about 66,000 acres, quite a few trails, usually old ranch roads, provide foot access to places with names like Smuggler’s Cove and Potato Harbor. These trails are only difficult if you happen to be starting down in one of the canyons – which admittedly pretty much everyone does. Plateau up; harbor down.

We camped in Scorpion Canyon, a mile up from the Pier at Scorpion Anchorage. One of our first house-making tasks was getting our own gear out of the boat and onto the pier. We then formed a human chain to get the gear off the pier and onto the land for the one-mile schlep to our organized campground in Scorpion Canyon. The campground has the ubiquitous composting pit toilets found throughout the National Parks and is one of only two on the Islands that actually provides potable water. Thank goodness. Even though hiking in a mile with your bedroom, kitchen, living room and closet on your back for two days is a mere distraction for this group, if uber heavy water needed to be toted too, this minor distraction would have become much more annoying. None of our favorite gear companies have figured out a way to freeze-dry water yet.

After setting up our tents and settling in, we did what we always do – find some like-minded friend and head off in all directions. I headed straight toward the beach, anxious to get the kayak in the water and explore the shoreline.  The kayaks were all sit-upons with which I had no previous experience. I like them for short shore trips although they are not nearly as sleek and beautiful as sit-in kayaks. Nonetheless, my kayak partner Caroline and I explored much of the coast to the east and west of the Anchorage over the next two days, floating into huge caves under the cliffs and paddling to ‘bird islands’, small rocky escarpments above the water which provide the pelicans, gulls, cormorants, guillemots and murres a solid resting place in a sea of moving water.

Sometimes, Caroline and I dropped our paddles onto our laps and just let the sea float us up and down. Sometimes we caught up with others of our group, grabbing onto other’s kayaks to form a moving conversation. And, naturally, Caroline and I couldn’t resist going through an arch through the cliff as the wave action bobbed us up and down, bringing our heads within a few inches of the arch’s roof. It felt a lot like a Disney ride with no lines. And yes we did it again.

For me, a highlight of the trip was a short 1.2-mile hike up from the campground to Cavern Point to watch Brother Sun dip below the horizon. Something about the humidity maybe – or possibly smoke from California seasonal fires – made Brother Sun a bright orange as he traveled further away from the night. And if I travel with this group, I always know there is at least one other (and often more) person willing to have that same experience. It is always a plus when the people you are with are part of the pleasure of the trip.

Nearly everywhere I go I always think I will visit again. To be honest, though, there are so very many beautiful places on this small planet and I would love to see them all. But perhaps if I get a chance to visit this very special place again I will take it, visiting the even more primitive islands for a few days. The Channel Islands provide the solitude I crave and only are a short distance in time and a world away from the busy bustling city. And frankly I want to play with the dolphin again.

GET OUTDOORS THEY SAID

Southern Arizona is full of ghosts and ghost towns, high desert grassy plains (yes really) and relics of old mines. It has mountains, lakes and chaparral, cacti and willows. It is full of history, romance and violence. Hollywood loves its high grassy plains (did you know Oklahoma was filmed down near Patagonia Arizona?) and its craggy mountains (the west slope of the Tucson Mountains formed the background for High Chaparral).  And I live here. Lucky me.

Yesterday was National Get Outdoors Day, with free admission to Parker Canyon Lake, possibly the most remote of the Southern Arizona lakes which are big enough for boating. Yes, there is boating in Southern Arizona. Yesterday, in the spirit of GO Day, my friend Annie and I took a day trip that celebrated just about everything Hollywood likes about a place that most people think of as a barren desert, the Sonoran Desert.

Our first stop was Parker Canyon Lake some 40 miles south of Sonoita, a thriving ranching and horse community on Highway 83, between I-10 and the border. Highway 83 is a fine, well-maintained road as one leaves the interstate, weaving past the Santa Rita Mountains to the West and the Whetstones to the East. Highway 83 continues south from Sonoita but the road gets narrower as it winds through Sonoita and Elgin’s wineries, eventually leaving these pleasant, high-desert rolling hills to become the road you would expect in a no-man’s land of canyon, rock, dust and cattle.

Highway 83 finally winds up to a small village called Lakeside which overlooks the Lake. Parker Canyon is much smaller than Patagonia Lake, its sister lake to the north. Since Parker Canyon allows only low-speed motors, it has become a favorite of flat-water kayakers and paddlers. The lake, which offers hikers a 5-mile trail around it, is large enough to provide a challenging experience but, with the low-wake policy, it is safe enough for even inexperienced paddlers. And it is beautiful, nestled as it is into its small canyon in the foothills of the Huachucas.

To honor Get Outdoors Day, the Forest Service had invited several vendors and organizations to set up near the marina including a traveling exhibit on the reptiles and arachnids of the region. Annie and I got to handle several beautiful and non-venomous snakes of the region. Since I often see snakes on my hikes and backpacks, I like to handle them in safe surroundings in order to reduce my discomfort at seeing them crawling across my trail. After visiting the various booths, we were ready to take off on our short hike.

A warning -the first view of Parker Canyon is deceptive. Looking north where the lake extends beyond its dam, you can’t even see its many fingers. So when someone tells you the trail around it is 5 miles, you are going to be tempted not to believe it. Believe it. And although it is well-marked (mostly), the lowering water volume has left parts of the main trail far away from the actual shore and subsequently many wildcat trails over parched dry lakebed have naturally been created. We sometimes took a trail only to find that it lead to a cliff or a fishing spot. The main trail, if you manage to stay on it, winds up and down with the terrain, often in the trees above the lake and is most certainly at least 5 miles. Of course there were the usual birds and lizards one would expect along the trail, but we also saw unusual plants, huge balls of leaves bundled in spider silk and wild turkeys.

Once back to the marina, we had a choice – return the way we came or head further into the remote high desert to the south and west, eventually arriving in the outskirts of Nogales, the nearest legal border crossing. Border Patrol and Forest Service personnel we spoke to affirmed we could easily make the trip over the primitive roads in YiHa, my trusty truck, but they warned we might encounter undocumented immigrants in this wild country.  We saw an imposing Border Patrol presence and absolutely no undocumenteds.

We followed 44 up and over the mountain finally arriving at an incredibly beautiful high desert plateau with prairie grass as high as my hip. For a few miles, this area is owned by us, the people of the United States, but after a few miles, the plateau becomes range with branded cows and their small calves, black and brown and glossy from the high desert feed. This is country where the road signs point to specific ranches and the roads are numbered rather than named.

Eventually, we come to our first stop, a tiny village named Locheil (named by its Scottish owners) that used to have a border gate and Border Patrol presence until the early 1980s. What is left of this once thriving ranch and mine hub are a few adobe structures, some more modern homes, a well-preserved one-room schoolhouse, and a bright white church high on the hill. No Trespassing signs abound.

Up the road from Locheil is a somewhat dubious monument honoring Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza, said to be the first European to enter this area west of the Rockies in the 1500s. I found the derelict wind mills and some rusting farm equipment behind the monument more interesting but the village is the perfect example of the kind of environment early settlers would have claimed. Desert willow and sand proclaiming the existence of water not too far underground, low trees to provide shade and open areas perfect for a few gardens.

 

Next stop was Duquesne and Washington Camp, two old mining towns which were so close together one resident reportedly declared that when “Duquesne’s tail was stepped on, it was Washington that barked!” Washington itself shows little of its history but is the largest settlement south of Patagonia with a number of more modern structures, some of which are clearly inhabited. In this case, modern encompasses old mobiles and deteriorating tin sheds. We chose not to leave the road on which we were traveling to reach the ghost remnants of Duquesne. However we were lucky to travel past some relatively intact mining structures which are part of the complex just a little ways up the hill from Washington Camp on the road to Nogales, locally and conveniently named Duquesne Road.  A little further beyond the plant and off to the south we could easily see the large Duquesne mining complex in the valley below.

 

Once we were past the Duquesne and Washington ghost towns, we began winding down out of the cooler high country, coming upon the outskirts of Nogales in just a few short miles. We stopped at Tubac (one should always at least consider stopping at Tubac because I have a friend who owns the Deli there and it is a good place to wash the dust of the road from your throat) for a quick snack and cold drinks before hitting I-18 home. We baked in the sun, girding ourselves for the even hotter streets of Tucson.

 

On short day-trips like these, I sometimes feel smug that Arizona has so much to offer. But in reality everywhere I have lived, from Missouri to Colorado to Texas to Arizona to New Zealand or Montana, has similar day trips into history and great beauty. Get Outdoor Day was just a reason to go but the adventure of a back road, witnessing wild creatures, traveling under a canopy of trees can be experienced any day, any place. YiHa has nearly 140,000 miles on her and I’m convinced she loves bouncing down primitive roads as much as I do so we'll meet you down the road.

SLEEPING ON THE GROUND AT SIXTY

I turned 61 this morning. The larks, woodpeckers, threshers and quail in the lush wash behind my house were the first to offer their birthday greeting. Last year I was in Yellowstone for the summer working for a Park concessionaire. This year I am unable to work for the pay package which offers lower wages and beautiful views. Since returning from Yellowstone some seven months ago, I have been reorganizing myself in order to be able to get back into the woods and on this birthday am hoping to celebrate my 62^nd back in the woods.

In many ways, it’s been a difficult year. It is so very easy to get used to stepping across your threshold into fresh air, stunning views and entertaining animals. My little wash behind the house is so tame compared to rutting bull elk or encroaching grizzlies. Once in a while a bobcat quicksteps across my back patio or a snake slithers through the cactus along my back wall. But I really do miss the feeling of literally gorging on wilderness.

One of the ways I have kept myself from packing a bag and heading north is hiking, camping and their combination-backpacking. I have been backpacking since my early twenties with just a few years off here and there to accommodate motherhood or injury or illness. But backpacking has been my particular escape this year as I mourn the loss of what feels to me like my real ‘home’.

As I get older, backpacking becomes more difficult. A sprain is likely to take months instead of weeks to heal. The weight feels heavier than it did 40 years ago, the pack belt more likely to chafe. But the need for the wilderness only seems to grow stronger-perhaps fueled by many adult years living in the city, with just the one 5-month break and a few months living in a farmhouse in New Zealand.

For an outdoor girl like me, my hikes, campouts and backpacks have been my salvation and my playtime. I belong to a group of likeminded folk, eager to get out in the woods or the desert. Our members are greatly varied in age, political viewpoint, professions and skills but we pretty much all agree we must “take only memories; leave only footprints”. A good group indeed.

I actually am what we call an ‘organizer’ for the group which gives me the right to post activities I would like instead of waiting for someone else to put something together. A few weekends ago, I herded eight other backpackers down from the summit of Mount Lemmon at 9000 foot elevation (where we parked), down the Samaniego Ridge trail to Shovel Springs at 7500 feet and on down to Walnut Springs at 7300 feet. The first day we hiked nearly ten miles altogether, although we were able to stash our packs about 4 miles down the trail in a delightfully shady glen near the trail near the junction to Shovel Spring.

The Samaniego Trail suffered greatly from the 2003 Aspen fire and in the intervening years the underbrush returned in force due to the loss of forest canopy, increased sunlight and greatly reduced foot traffic. It took years for the trail to be cleared and even now, 12 years later, the trail can be a bit brushy past the junction to Shovel Springs. On the trail to Walnut Spring and back, we were happy to find fairly well-marked trail even though creeping or downed vegetation slowed our speed in some spots. I have loved this kind of trail-finding since my rather rough and tumble childhood – scrapes and scratches and bruises have always evidenced what for me has been a really good time.

By the time you reach your sixties, though, that kind of evidence takes longer to heal. Skin becomes less elastic and thinner. Bones become more easily and more permanently bruised, leaving deeply dark spots that are reminders well beyond the fall on the rock. Hiking poles become a must and the Cadillac kind, with springs to cushion a misstep, become a necessity rather than a luxury.

Unless I am seriously hurt (which is very rare), the night on the ground sleeping only with my sleeping pad and bag under the stars (we call that ‘cowboy camping’) makes everything – the brushy trail, the scratches, the pine needles stuck in my underwear – worth it. Nothing can compare to a canopy of stars and the melody of the wind through the treetops as a lullaby.

But where the going down is easy and the down means an elevation loss of 2500 feet, the return almost always proves more challenging for an almost 60-year-old with asthma and bad knees. I am always the tortoise and not the hare on these hikes but our group defaults to allowing for the slowest rather than the speediest. Hence, my group has quite a few backpackers that are even older than me. It’s nice to not be the last one up but when you are the organizer, it’s your job to make sure that the last one makes it to the parking lot – a wonderful excuse to sit and rest, watching the sun dapple the trail while you wait for your few remaining packers to catch up.

I believe I will be backpacking as long as my bones can stand the weight (I have made great strides at ‘light packing’ lately) and my body can take the stress. For me, the journey IS the destination. Mother Nature abounds all around in the woods and the desert if I just open my eyes to the beauty and my ears to the symphony of wild places. It is Mother Nature’s way of saying Happy Birthday to me every time I arrive in her embrace.

WE BUILD; WE FIGHT - A SEABEE'S MEMORIAM

My Dad tried to be a good dad when he thought about it. I remember him mowing the tall grass in the back yard into a geometric pattern, making a ‘game’ board for us to play the Fox and the Chicken. He was always the Fox at first.  I remember him alternatively preparing spaghetti and a dish he called SOS (chipped beef in a white sauce on toast from his days in the Navy) the entire week of my whole young life that Mom was in hospital. I remember him walking my sister and me down to school bus stop on super cold Missouri winter mornings bundling us up in blankets so we wouldn’t get frostbite.

Dad took my sister and me on a couple hikes – one down along the Missouri River and the other through the closed golf course of our country club. I fell down a hill and gashed my knee and Dad wrapped my bloody knee in a dirty oil rag from the trunk of the car. Mom was not pleased.

Dad worked as a journeyman electrical lineman for the local electric utility, a couple of those years spent as the night ‘troubleshooter’. We grew up with hard-drinking, hard-gambling guys with nicknames like Shorty and Red. We grew up with Mom, us girls in tow, picking up the paycheck on Friday so Dad’s earnings would make it into the bank account instead of on a game table or a bar bill. My Mom mostly raised us. Dad honestly wasn’t around too much.

My father was raised in a family where the ‘future’ only existed as some fuzzy concept for somebody else. He was born shortly before the Great Depression and his father, a railroad man, died on the rail yard when Dad was 11. This was long before any public welfare system; any food or clothing my grandmother was able to provide to her fatherless brood of seven was through church and charity.

My Dad told me he was playing baseball in a sand lot when he heard about Pearl Harbor. Whether through patriotism or a sense of adventure, he wanted to sign up right away but wasn’t quite old enough. As soon as he graduated from high school (the only of his siblings to do so), he enlisted in the Navy.

My Dad served in the brand new SeaBees established in WWII to build air strips and Quonset huts in the jungle, clear minefields, build roads….any construction required in the Pacific Theater in a war that was being played out on sea and on land in very different battle fields than ever before. The Pacific Theater was brutal and hot and sweaty and dirty. And very, very exotic and far away from the poor white trash Kansas home in which my Dad grew up.

For my Dad, the reality of war was very different than the one portrayed on enlistment posters. My Dad was a sensitive man, aware that whoever he killed or witnessed killing may have been the enemy but was also someone’s brother, son, or father. He saw things so terrible that anything that vaguely looked like a gun – including pop guns and water pistols – were taboo in our house. Once he told me probably the single most horrific thing he saw during the War was the beheaded body of a Japanese soldier. Dad told me the Aussies sometimes did this because the body had to be intact to enter the Japanese equivalent of heaven. A final brutal act intended to demoralize and terrorize the enemy.

Dad was a hugely intelligent man with a complex and rather tortured personality.  I remember Dad being really moody at times and often quick of temper. But it wasn’t until I was much older, until friends and family members were coming back from that war they called Viet Nam, that I was able to put name to his torture. At some point I knew he suffered from ‘shell shock’, the term they used for PTS before the events of Viet Nam made this a disorder and methods for treating it began evolving.

Memorial Day is tomorrow. Origins of the event vary widely among historians. Civil War historian David Blight believes Memorial Day as we now know it had its origins as a one-time celebration to honor Union prisoners of war that had been buried en masse without ceremony in the South. On May 1, 1865, over ten thousand mostly black residents of Charleston gathered to clean up and decorate the forgotten field of the Union prisoners’ burial ground. This astonishing event was covered by the New York Tribune and other national papers. For those attending, it was their way of saying thank you to these fallen soldiers for their recent freedom from slavery.

It took years for my Dad to come to terms with his own war experiences. I’m not sure he ever completely did. I know my nephew, who came back from Iraq a few years ago disabled and unemployable, will spend the rest of his life living with the trauma, physical and mental, of the explosion and subsequent firefight that disabled him. That’s what soldiers do. Soldiers are not extraordinary people at the start; they become extraordinary people because of the extraordinary pressures and horrors of war.

In a way, Dad lived the SeaBee slogan “We Build, We Fight” until he died. He built all kinds of things in his working life and he spent his whole life fighting really hard to heal himself of the effects of War on his spirit. On Memorial Day, it is appropriate to honor our fallen. We ask them to kill others so that we may live in peace and security, far away from the horrid mess of battle. They responded to the call of duty. It is our duty to properly remember their response to that call.

YOU GOTTA’ HAVE ART

I can picture our very early foremothers and fathers picking up a piece of charcoal (this is after they found fire of course) and thinking “Ugh…what do to cave walls?” I can picture them trying to describe their journey’s circuitous path by drawing a map in the dirt with a stick. I can picture them drawing what looked like a rudimentary tent for a mountain, delighted with the ability of others to instantly understand that one tent meant that mountain and two tents meant the one with two summits.

At some point, we humans began drawing even more intricate figures. We drew figures of pregnant goddesses, lightning bolts, stick figures that may have been ‘aliens’ or indigenous peoples. By the time of the Pharaohs, our ability to depict our reality had become incredibly intricate and we used a vast array of materials. At some point, drawing for recordation or clarification morphed into our need to adorn ourselves and our walls with figures and pigments that were purely ornamental. And we called this ‘art’.

I do not have a creative bone in my body. I’m pretty sure I was reading a book somewhere and forgot to show up when God allotted the creative gene. Nonetheless, I love all kinds of visual art. I take photos in order to capture my memories and sometimes I even frame them. But generally, I am relegated to admiring, and sometimes purchasing, art from others.

I started collecting art even in college. I bought a watercolor from one roommate and a hand-woven basket from another. I lived with a photographer for a time. His beautiful black and white ‘available light’ photographs filled my apartment walls – until I found out he felt his nude models would be more comfortable if he were nude, too.

As a young adult, my then husband and I started going to ‘free dinner’ art sales held by Park West, a gallery in Michigan with an aggressive marketing strategy. My husband and I were pretty broke but we managed to buy a few serigraphs and lithographs for our walls by people we had never heard of but whose images we fell in love with.  It made us feel sophisticated and besides, we just liked the art.

Over the years, my artistic tastes and knowledge matured as did Park West’s marketing strategies. As they built a solid clientele, they made their events more exclusive and even halted their ‘land auctions’ completely for a time as they opened satellite galleries and moved their collecting events to the  cruise ships. With the business generated by the cruise ships and with their enormous ‘mother’ gallery in Southfield Michigan, Park West is now the largest gallery in the world.

I no longer attend free dinners to buy art. As one of their long-standing collectors, every six months or so I am invited to an entire weekend of art collecting in some flash Arizona location that provides ample opportunity for relaxing and enjoying the company of other art collectors.  I can’t always go, but when I do, I get to talk and learn about art and artists from other collectors.  But the main attractions of these weekend events is getting to meet the very artists whose work I already or will collect. Last weekend I attended one of these collecting events at the historical, gorgeous and luxurious Wigwam Resort near Goodyear, Arizona.

‘Provenance”, or the history of a thing whether it is wine or artifacts or art, provides the ‘story’ of the piece. Of course with art it is helpful to know where it was purchased, how the art came to that gallery or seller and approximately the date the art was completed. But honestly, there is no better provenance than all those things and the story of its creation directly from the artist who created it.

Imagine Picasso sharing with you over dinner how he eventually sank into depression after his friend Casagemas committed suicide, settling into his rather morose “Blue Period’, painting an entire series of monochromatic blue and green canvases with dark subjects like prostitutes and beggars. Imagine Vermeer relating the story of how his painting the innocent Dutch girl with the pearl earring came to be. Stories are important. But stories directly from the artists? That would be Provenance on steroids.

This past weekend, my friend  Margaret and I met three internationally regarded artists. All three, joyous and fun for the most part, had their own stories to tell about the original pieces that were available to us that weekend.

Peter Max, an immigrant from Berlin and undoubtedly the most well-known pop artist in the world, related his need to reach out to his community of friends to save Lady Liberty from her structural deterioration and to the families of the first responders of 9/11. He told of the constancy of yoga in his life and its impact on his art. He talked about his association with the Beatles and told stories of his long friendship with Andy Warhol.

Marcus Glenn, showing musicians in a way that virtually flows across the canvas and an artist I have collected for several years, shared his joy and astonishment at being selected the Grammy Artist for 2014. He spoke of his amazement at being gathered into the fold of the enormously famous and talented musicians at the Grammies.  He reminded us he couldn’t get very uppity about that because his wife Yolanda would be quick to remind him that he was still just Marcus Glenn, a working-class kid from Detroit.

Victor Spahn, a Russian immigrant now living in Paris, whose art depicts movement in sports and dance in ways no other artist has accomplished, shared a clip he filmed on his phone camera of his friend, a world famous opera singer, as she played and sang on the piano in his living room. He spoke of his painting technique which gives impression of movement on a flat canvas. He shared his love of cars and his enchantment at being allowed to be the official painter for various car manufacturers including Lexus. He confessed he loved American cars and told us he had a Smart Car for driving around in Paris.

Living room talk. Kitchen table conversations. Bar confessions. Meeting and learning about your artists has a lasting impression on the way you view the art hanging in your home. I can hear that smoky note of the blues singer in Glenn’s work, the pound of the hooves of the horse in Spahn's horse race. I can feel my heart quicken as I glance at the image of the Statue of Liberty and know that Max actually made it possible for my children and grandchildren to see that very Lady in person.

Before they leave, you get to stand next to these great artists to have your picture taken with them, giving you time to tell Max you love the joy in his work and you now understand, because you are also a devotee of yoga, how it came to be there; to get a ‘snog’ by Marcus Glenn who you have told with shining eyes that his work moves the music within you; and to get a warm hug from the boyish Spahn who has appreciated your interest in how he has been able to get the mud from the track up into the canvas.

Provenance my friends. Can’t get better than that.

SAMPLING SEDUCTIVE SEDONA

Sedona – the sensuous center of Arizona vortexes and sweeping scenes of lush red-walled canyons and natural arches. I’ve been to Sedona many times in my years living in Arizona – visiting Sedona’s seductive spas, art galleries, eateries and vortexes. This time I was intent on ignoring the sensuous pleasures of Sedona to focus on sampling Sedona’s wonderful hiking opportunities and the tasty beers of Oak Creek Brewery.

I’ve hiked Sedona before. One of my favorite spots before a damaging flood in September 2009 was Red Rocks State Park, where a short hike along Oak Creek would deliver me to a field of impossibly balanced stone towers constructed with magnetically charged rocks and pebbles. It was magic. The last time I was there, those rock towers had been swept away by the flood but I could see that the Park’s many visitors were beginning the slow process of rebuilding the hundreds of cairns, returning the field once more into a place that could easily cause the child in you to envision tiny mystical people. Magic reborn.

If it weren’t for Sedona’s magnetic rock, Sedona might still be here but it wouldn’t be Sedona.  The red in the rock is its higher than average iron content, which not only causes the rock to be magnetic (hence the small rock towers everywhere) but is also purported to be able to effect brainwave EEGs (Sedona Anomalies). These electric anomalies, called vortexes where they are most strongly felt, are said to have healing properties and provide the perfect environment for meditation.

Although I experience the magnetism in the rock and my inner child enjoys building stone towers, I can’t honestly say I have ever felt a vortex. I meditate, and sometimes even well, but even though several of my friends have ‘felt the charge’, I never have. I sit quietly, in muktasana (seated posture) with my hands in chin mudra (index and thumb joined in a circle on my knees with palms up) and wait for the charge, and wait, and wait and then……..nada.  My monkey mind keeps asking all sorts of questions – how does this work, exactly? I wonder if I am an upflow or an inflow vortex person (if you clicked on the link above you would know what that was already). Are my palms really feeling warmer? That bird song is nice – wonder which bird it is. I’m feeling like Indian food. Where is good Indian food around here?

To the point, if you are in Sedona, you should visit a vortex. Period. Even if, like me, you wind up only feeling the wind on your face and keeping your monkey mind busy.  It’s a thing. Like going to New York City and visiting Lady Liberty. And on this trip, we could hike AND visit vortexes since some of the most stunning places in Sedona are conveniently vortex sites.

We all have friends that we choose to do different things with.  My usual Sedona friends have been more the pedi/mani artsy kind. This time I took four of my dedicated hiking friends with me, staying at Diamond Resorts Sedona Summit, a lovely property in West Sedona on 89A at the intersection with the Red Rock Loop Road to Red Rocks State Park.

Sometimes you just have to call out the experts. The two friends who I drove up with and I were intent on starting our Sedona sojourn by taking a short hike before we settled in to our suite. The greater Sedona area has an excellent web of hiking trailheads leading from its main and side roads, including the in-town trails where the Coconino Forest sneaks right onto 89A west at the Adobe Jack Trailhead, just a short distance from the “Y”. (The Y is the major intersection between West and North 89a and Highway 179.)

This is where my friends and I started our hiking vacation with a pleasant hour hiking the loop around the Adobe Jack, Coyote and Crusty Trails in a light sprinkle. It was lovely. These women would gladly exchange a little moisture to spot an unusual flower, bush, rock formation or animal along the trail. I think I’m in love with them.

The next day, joined by two more hiking buddies, the group decided to hike in Dry Creek Basin, which is an absolute hiker’s heaven just beyond the edges of West Sedona. We missed the unpaved road to the Devil’s Bridge Trailhead but found ourselves a few miles further along on the paved Long Canyon Road which had an actual paved parking lot and trailhead to the Bridge. Missing the unpaved road probably put a couple miles or so onto our hike but if a destination is too close, this group doesn’t feel like we’ve been anywhere.  Yes, I definitely think I’m in love with them.

Devil’s Bridge is a very popular hiking destination in Sedona and rightfully so. The hike from the jeep trail is a little less than a mile and as you approach, you have to climb up to the Bridge but the path is well marked and in good condition.  The Bridge itself is large enough and wide enough for mothers to feel safe about letting their kids jump or balance on one foot for family photo ops. Not this mother you understand but I did witness this. We spent an agreeable half hour before retracing our steps to Long Canyon Road.

Our original idea was to drive up the unpaved road after visiting the Bridge to a place delightfully called Secret Canyon. Its secrets are still secret since we determined that the unpaved road was a bit too bumpy and the time it would take to slowly drive the rest of the way over that rocky road we deemed would take too much time from other planned hikes. We turned our attentions to Fay Canyon and the promise of another arch and the crème de la crème of hiking attractions - a set of ruins. We like ruins; we like to poke around and take pictures of ourselves through tiny rock windows or peeking over rock walls.

We spotted the arch up and along the walls of the canyon but since one of our party was in the middle of a family crisis, we chose to avoid long or difficult hikes up the steep hill to get to it, staying closer to actual phone service. We followed the lush and beautiful Fay Canyon Trail back to where an enormous rock fall had closed off the rest of the canyon.

Though we did not proceed around the rock fall, a few of us bouldered up the rocks to see if it was possible. Fay Canyon is very, very lush and from the top of the rock fall I was able to take gorgeous pictures that put me nostalgic about old Tarzan movies. I wanted to be Jane. Not that I lusted over Johnny Weissmuller. My lust was more primal – I have always liked real estate and I wanted his treehouse. The canyon past the rock fall is now on our list of places to go because most likely we would find very few people there. Solitude is seriously attractive to avid hikers and backpackers.

Later that evening we visited Tlaquepaque, a gorgeous shopping and dining area near the Y. We wanted to stop in at the Oak Creek Brewery restaurant but it was chockablock full. I’m fonder of tap rooms than crowded busy restaurants and got the directions to Oak Creek’s small pub and tap room in an ‘industrial’ area of Sedona behind West Sedona’s main drag. While the others sampled the tasty food, my friend Melissa and I shared a generous sampling tray (10 2-oz glasses) of microbrews. We liked the Amber Ale and I think I liked the King Crimson a lot (it was one of the last of the 10 we tried and I’m a little fuzzy on the details). The tap room is very basic but has an excellent outdoor patio which is very relaxing and surprisingly quiet. It appears to offer live music during the evening, too.

The next day was Easter Sunday and three of us awoke at an ungodly hour to attend services at the church we thought might have the best view. (I know, kind of self-serving and I would apologize but the picture I took across the altar to the gorgeous morning sun on the red Rocks east of Sedona got over 30 Facebook ‘likes’. ) After some breakfast back at the resort, we all hiked the very urban and doable 3.6-mile Airport Loop Trail which is called that because it circumnavigates the Sedona Airport. The Airport sits atop Airport Mesa (which makes me wonder what the mesa was called before it became an airport – but then again, maybe the ETs who were attracted to the vortexes made it their landing zone as well). Actually this is a pretty satisfying hike with 360 degree views of Sedona if it’s not summer (not much shade) and you have never really been to Sedona.

While we were on top of the Mesa, we stopped at the Airport Vortex, a rather disappointing affair near the Masonic Lodge Memorial Cross but with terrific views to the north and west. Of course I tried meditating to see if I could be one with all things vortex and of course I failed. All that meditating did, however, cause me a great thirst which we satisfied at the 3-year-old Mesa Grill quite close to the actual airport runway. It felt, well, swanky being so close to the airplanes flying in and out of sexy little Sedona.

After two of our group left for Tucson, three of us returned to Fay Canyon to find the ruins which Melissa had discovered are right underneath the arch (the internet is so wonderful). We hiked back to the rocky scree-filled route to the arch, entranced by the delicate play of sunshine and shade on the arch. We stayed around to play around under the arch and in the ruins trying to figure out how the Mother made the arch and when, why and how her human species took up residence there.

Finally, heading back to the car, not really ready to call it quits for the day, we decided to hike one more trail. (I swear the Dry Creek Area is like a smorgasbord - you just have to have one more.) The parking lot to Fay is shared by a series of interconnecting trails, including the Aerie Trail. Aerie is aptly named because after wandering through the flats, it climbs slowly to traverse a ridgeline from which we could see stunning views of the rocks and sweeping views of Dry Creek Basin as the sun set behind us, relaxing on comfortably large rocks to watch the red rocks glow in the fading light.

The next morning, even after three days of hiking, we were reluctant to just drive home. Each way out of Sedona heads right through more abundant hiking opportunities. We exited Sedona via Hwy 179, stopping to hike the 4.3-mile Courthouse Butte Loop Trail. At the base of prominent Courthouse Butte, the trail is relatively flat and offers a lot of interesting washes and rock features which beg to be photographed. Be warned, however, the heat bouncing off the red rock can be brutal in the summer. Even in April we could feel the heat. The Butte is also a vortex site and whether you are a vortex devotee or a hiker, Courthouse Butte can deliver.

I can now attest that whether you are craving adventure or relaxation, Sedona is a good place to look. No matter if you have a few days or a few weeks, it’s worth your time to sample seductive Sedona.

New Frontiers!?

It's been awhile since I last posted but the need to take up the pen (of course that is a euphemism since I am writing this on a computer) is getting strong again. This blog started out to be about adventure and here I am ready to relate to you why I feel like the last few months have been an adventure even though I haven't done anything remarkably 'adventurous'.

This morning I started the day by seeking knowledge - how to remove reeking cat spray from inside the closet of a rental I have. Unfortunately, Ace Hardware isn’t open at 7am as I had hoped and after sitting in my truck YiHa a few minutes, sorting out what I would do with the half hour I had before I had to be somewhere else, I realized I had enough time for an outside meditation.

I like outside meditation.  I try to meditate at least a few minutes on every hike or backpack or schlep out to the wild. But this meditation would be different. The venue would be the labyrinth behind my church.

OK, I’m coming out of the closet. I admit to being an irregular church goer. Sometimes I’m kind of embarrassed to admit I actually attend church but this morning was beautiful and the mountains behind my church are beautiful and my church family is beautiful and they often think beautiful thoughts. So, lucky me, church can be a really good place to be on a Sunday – or any day actually. Sometimes it occurs to me that this Sunday thing is one of the downfalls of organized religion – it doesn’t happen often on other days so it's easy to forget.

My church (St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church if you really want to know) has a labyrinth. I know because I have sometimes helped to keep it tidy. A labyrinth is a special place which can be a focal point or even a playground for your spiritual self. It is a maze, usually built with stones that one proceeds through step by step, moving further into meditation with each step. The maze itself, however, winds further away from the center before heading back into the center – an appropriate allegory for our spiritual lives. One’s slow, repetitive and thoughtful steps through the maze are a metaphor for the journey for your soul. At its best, a labyrinth can be a tool to calm the mind so that Spirit can get through the obstacles our busy thoughts put it through.

But I have this monkey mind you see. I would love to say that I can easily find my ‘meditation seat’ and let my mind wander off to play with Spirit. More often though my mind starts making lists or gets riled up about what some ‘stupid pundit’ said on Fox News or wonders if some animal will think I'm a tasty morsel. To calm my monkey mind, I often use mantras – very short phrases that are used when one breathes in and out. One of my favorite is “I know your greatness (on the in-breath) and I feel your love (on the out-breath)”. I tried it today but my monkey mind wanted to listen to the birds or take a peek at the cute Sheriff who I finally realized stopped by my church’s somewhat secluded Sunday School classroom bathroom to use the always open facilities (my monkey mind was ALL OVER that one).

My monkey mind just wouldn’t come to center like it is supposed to.  That’s the trouble with monkey minds; they don’t – mind that is. My monkey mind was particularly adventurous this morning. Aware that my monkey mind was in complete control, I decided to tire it with what I hoped would be a particularly difficult task. Sometimes this helps; a worn out monkey mind is not as agile.

I find a Yoga breathing technique called ‘alternate nostril breathing’ to be quite useful, especially when I need centering or I’m all stuffed up with allergies. I thought it might be interesting to see how my monkey mind handled my pilgrimage through the labyrinth while employing a form of alternate nostril breathing. Instead of 'breathe in-breathe out', this Yoga technique entails breathing OUT first followed by the breath IN. Try it. It's a head trip to keep it going. Exactly opposite what we have learned since we screamed our first breaths at the mean person in the white coat who forced us to leave that incredibly comfortable womb.

I began by stepping forward on my breath out and then drawing up my left-behind leg square with my leading leg on my breath in. Then, as my body was letting go of its breath, I would lead with this same left-behind leg repeating the process. Monkey minds have to be quite quiet when doing this because otherwise not only will you screw up but there may be risk of serious falls.

The whole point of this exercise was to provide my mind with a completely different experience and see what happened. Would I experience any insights worthy of my time at the labyrinth? The other day I posted on Facebook that I have decided to live my life in a way that makes the phrase “adventure of a lifetime” redundant. I’ve been pondering exactly how to do this lately and it seemed likely my monkey mind might like to think about that during my labyrinth meditation. I was ready for this.

Now, I’ve had a couple very nice adventures since my last writing.  I’ve made a promise to myself to start writing again and I’m sure I’ll write about that wonderful hiking trip Sedona or that terrific weekend of cross-country skiing in Glacier and Whitefish Montana or that incredible New Year’s Eve in tangy Terlingua Texas soon. But I’ve also been working very hard on completely orienting my life in the direction of CHANGE. CHANGE is a big scary word sometimes but I kind of like it and I’m a bit of a planner so I’ve been taking ‘steps’. My monkey mind has found this inner discussion fascinating and wanted to think about change this morning instead of calming down to sit in the dark corners of my mind so Spirit could visit.

My monkey mind sometimes acts as my Greek chorus – laughing at my ‘certainties’ and providing witty and sardonic commentary on my most important questions. My question this morning – what exactly does “New Frontier” mean? You know, the Star Trek thing “where no (wo)man has been before”. Does it have to involve travel or bear spray? If your life takes off in a 90 or 180 degree angle, can you classify that as adventure? I looked up adventure in the dictionary (I still have one of those really old dictionaries one turns pages to find the word they are looking for). “Adventure” according to Webster, is “an exciting or dangerous experience”. I would suggest that this covers a whole LOT of circumstances, including change.

Running away to Yellowstone is undeniably adventurous - much like running away to the circus. I’m pretty sure I could get most of my readers to agree with that.  Spending a year to reorient my finances so in the near future I can work and live in National Parks and still have a very nice townhome in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills to come home to might not be considered very adventurous. But I can attest that changing your life in order to change your life is an adventure. Hence the title of this post “The New Frontier”.

Moving to Yellowstone felt very much like stepping on a cliff and hoping that the winds would provide enough loft to sail.  Changing my life so that I can take the radical step of working seasonally at National Parks seems an adventure of a more tedious nature – more like going back to school than setting off for a distant planet. Yet, it definitely feels like a cliff and I am learning new things every day as I adjust my life and my finances to suit my goal of living off the meager dregs of pay meted out by the concessionaires for the Park Service. Let’s face it – they don’t have to pay a lot because they have the most priceless employee benefit known on the planet – you get to wake up to and live in beauty EVERY DAY.

So I am, as I have explained to my friends, turning every asset I have into a ‘profit center’. I have listed my beloved townhome with VRBO.com (Vacation Rentals by Owner) and have successfully begun to host 'guests'. I have sold stock and acquired and renovated two rental houses to provide additional income. And to help through the transition, I now work as a contract bookkeeper for three non-profits and still act as CFO for our real estate development partnerships. I've been busy.

Honestly, I don’t mind being paid wages that barely provide a sustainable life in order to live in incredibly beautiful places but I don’t really want to LIVE just a sustainable life. I haven’t seen Indonesia or India or the Acropolis yet and I can’t get there by walking. Traveling around the globe takes some money – maybe not much if you travel light but at least some.

So I am learning how to remediate cat spray in a bedroom closet. Or that you can buy replacement hinges for your garage door but they come in a bunch of different designs so guessing from memory may mean a second trip. Or that ants really love dog food the previous tenants left under a refrigerator. Lots of different things. I am also learning that when you really want something, obstacles can be overcome and thinking of them as mini-adventures is the most pleasant way to get through it.

Just in case you think my life is boring, while I am working on freeing my financial life in order to run back into the woods, I also am researching and writing a love story about two neighborhood children who, during and after WWII, wind up courting via the military mail of the Pacific theater and then getting married and raising five wonderful kids (one of whom is me). I am learning to live with the decision of my son to go a direction that frankly left me gobsmacked when he called to tell me about it (definitely I’ll be writing more on that one after he actually takes that giant first step). I am living a somewhat itinerant life, moving from one house to the next as my ‘profit centers’ are rented or remodeled. I have rented and remodeled an office tastefully and beautifully so it is now a real pleasure to work in. I am working on my own website.

Life IS an adventure and as long as I can wake up in the morning with enthusiasm and the knowledge I will go to bed knowing more than I began, I’m satisfied with my ‘adventure’ for now. OK, all those long weekend trips to really cool or wild places help of course. And it helps to know with certainty that I am working on getting back to my wilderness, to those trails I didn’t get to because of Yellowstone’s summer fires and the new ones I’ve never encountered. But for now tramping into totally new life paths and learning lots of new things along the way will have to suffice. I’m convinced it is possible to find adventure every single day if you look for it.

That’s not exactly right. It is possible to find adventure every single day if you are open to the possibilities of it. And maybe it means trying old things in brand new ways. Sometimes it requires one to step away from one's comfortable aerie in the hills. If you think about it, on Star Trek, discovering New Frontiers was always about the journey anyway - rarely about the destination.