Carrasco Studio

EXcellent TEXas EXcursion....Mural making, Big Bend, Dinosaurs and Donald Judd

Bear with me.  This will have to be a wide and spacious entry since it is about Texas.

First of all, my friend (since we were 14!) Alan had me fly down to Austin to paint a mural on his 5' x 9' entry wall.  He initially wanted something abstract with a nude, but it turned out that he wanted something impressionist (he's an engineer and doesn't do artspeak)and he chickened out on the nude.  so we regrouped, walked around his property.....

.....went over to the Llano river..... clear clear water running over granite in streams....

and I sketched and pondered and came up with a plan he liked.  It also had to have bluebonnets (mandatory in Texas murals) and three "Queen" butterflies....one for Alan, one for me, and one for his 102 year mother. (also a friend of mine) 

In five days I was done, and like God, I rested.  Alan supplied me with Shiner beer and Texas Bar Bee Que (part of my contract) and at night we killed scorpions on his big back porch (a plague for new construction in Hill Country)...20 scorpions in five days.  Also, a pack of coyotes on the trail of something tasty came howling by my window at   2 pm one night.  I thought I was surrounded by wolves.  Nature rules at Alan's place.

Then my friend Norma Jean came down from her home in San Angelo to pick me up and return to Austin to get Phil at the airport.  Norma has been my friend for 45 years...we were roomates in Peace Corps, and I was there when her twins were born.  We went to her daughter Natasha's place and stayed the night, left early the next morning for Terlingua, down on the Texas Mexican border at the west entrance of Big Bend National Park.....600 miles of Mostlly Flat.....through Fredricksburg (adorable), to Fort Stockton on the killer highway 10, Marathon and dropping down through Alpine and on to Terlingua just at sunset.

We checked into the El Dorado Hotel...a homey place that Willie Nelson would have liked....and went out to watch the sunset over the mountains with liquid refreshments and lawn chairs.

Later we went into the bar to listen to music, have a delicious burger, and later View Art.

The next day we drove up to stay in Big Bend National Park (60 miles) with our friends Larry and Gary.  The room was small so it was quite cosy.  Gary and Norma drug their sleeping bags out to sleep on the porch, and Larry, Phil and I snored in harmonic chords.  D-flat, I believe.

Big Bend is an extinct volcano, and you can see Mexico through the awesome notch in the crater.  It has javelinas, skunks, bears and the largest community of mountain lions in the USA.  Uneasy lies the back of the neck of those who sketch alone in Big Bend.  I was always on the alert in the midst of such stunning natural beauty.

The next day we hiked 2.5 miles into the desert to see dinosaur bones.  I blanked out the location name because people steal the fossils and sell them for money.  It was hot, very interesting and full of what Phil called " all those goddamn plants with stickers." Our friends Gary and Larry are men of wide ranging interests, so I learned a lot about the wild life, the history of the area both geologic and human, and the plants.  I LOVED the hike and I did pretty well on my new hip.

People ask me how I found time to do these journal drawings.  Well, I memorized what I could and then spent a lot of time drawing in the back seat of Norma's KingKab on the long stretches.  Texas roads are usually very straight and smooth.  Washington roads are curvey and bumpy....if I drew in the car here I would throw up.

After  Big Bend we drove to Marathon and on to Marfa.  I wanted to see Donald Judd's installations.  He was from New York and is a famous minimalist/conceptualist sculpter (think I got that right). He also started the Chinati foundation there.

It was not Phil and Norma's thing.  Lots of comments about concrete and aluminum packing cases.  However, I enjoyed it.  Very peaceful, and there were lots of dead birds (flew into the plate glass) around the perimeter of the buildings housing the aluminum cubes, and some fantastic grasshoppers.  Shadows and highlights kept moving with the changing light.

After Chinati, we drove through charming Ft. Davis and up to the McDonald Observatory.  Phil and I decided we wanted to come back to that for a whole day of exploring....many wonderful huge telescopes and night skies to see.  I bought myself a sky chart in the gift shop, but it won't do me much good in cloudy Seattle.

We ended up in San Angelo where Norma and her husband Donald were wonderful hosts. Norma has a Huge Garden where she grows heritage veggies and flowers and takes her produce to the farmer's market. I picked peppers for her and Phil helped her cover her tender plants from a threatening frost.  Norma also took me for a massage from her favorite masseus.  His technique was one inch away from Rolfing but I was brave and felt wonderful afterward.

We also went to the water lily garden and of course I went nuts.  I met the man, Mr. Landon, who set it up, and he is very concerned that this national treasure (most complete collection in the USA) is going to be closed by the Texas Legislature.....they have decided that any water plant not native to Texas has to be destroyed.  If you love waterlilies and want to save this contained  collection, contact http//www.internationalwaterlilycollection.com. Mr. Landon said that years ago he planted several species in the Concho river, but the turtles thought they were lunch and ate them all up overnight.  In short, the lilies are not invasive.

After three days in San Angelo, we returned to Austin and stopped by Alan's to pick up my paints and luggage. In Austin,   Natasha arranged for us to meet her twin brother Bernabe and his lovely wife Lauren at a Taco Express (fabulous food and atmosphere).

Me, Phil, Norma, Madeline, Brandon and Natasha and Donald.

And Lauren and Bernabe.

And then we went to the Capitol Building and also to the highlight of Phil's trip, Lance Armstrong's bicycle shop.  Then we flew home.  Jinglejanglejingle.  Git along, dawgies.

Oh yeah.  I forgot to mention.  I made Alan a paint shirt like mine.

 

 

 

 

Green Oceans

I was raised in a small town in a valley between these hills.

And this is the ending triplet stanza for a sestina I wrote about going home for a visit.

Wind parts the grasses, revealing the lines of crumbling foundations.
A dust devil swirls and ripples the wheat, like the stir of inventions
  still turning and flashing, the green fields of my mind..

 

 When I went back this June, I  almost unnerved by the silence and the empty sweep of clouds and wind over the land. I belong in the Palouse, I was born and raised there, but at the same time...never at home in this vastness and quiet.

I want a simple life...to be able to walk in safety to the grocery and the library and to have enough land to root around in.  But not this simple. I like having real water ocean nearby, not an ocean of grain.

Hike to the end of the World

Well, the farthest end of the continental US.  In snowy weather.  With cougar tracks outside our cabin in the morning.

One of my best friends, Norma Jean from Texas, came up to see me for a week, and we took off to the Olympic Penninsula for three days.  We stayed in a cabin at the Lost Resort at Lake Ozette......way way out there toward the end of land......and, we were the only guests there.  There was us, the Lost Resort owner, Rob Snyder (who has a lodge that has a bath, a bathroom , stocks 99 different kinds of beer and has  three very nice little cabins as well as lots of camp sites, and a few neighbors and a Forest Ranger. (who has a cute little black spitz dog).

We went to bed with the full moon shining in our windows and woke to snow.  Lots of snow.

I did one watercolor while I was waiting for the snow to stop

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Charlie's Cats/Watercolor Illustrations

My great grandfather Charlie McCabe was a businessman.  Not especially successful, but a businessman just the same.  When he came to America as a boy of twelve and was sent to log in Maine in the winter, he vowed that he would find a better way to make a living, and all his life he tried his hand at business....a stationery store, a candy story, bartering and selling cows and horses and milk and butter. None of these ventures made him any money, but he did have a few successes.  One of these involved mules, dynamite and cats.

When Charlie was in The Dalles one winter in the early 1870's, he got word that the town of Boise was suffering from a plague of mice and rats.  Prospectors coming in from the Idaho mountains brought stories of grain devoured and children being bitten in their beds, and the people of Boise were wringing their hands because they hadn't  the cats to catch the rats.  And, the prospectors of the area needed dynamite as well.

So, Charlie packed up 25 mules with a cat slung in a bag on the right and left of each mule's pack.  The cat bags had  gathered tops, so the unhappy cats were kept in place along with the sticks of dynamite gathered in the mule's middle pack.  Charlie also brought along cat food....smoked salmon, jerky and the like....and some sort of leather leashes for walking the cats during the evening campouts.  It must have been a noisy affair, miserable cats, restive mules and Charlie singing Irish ballads (he was high spirited and like his descendants, given to the drink) as they scrambled along the high reaches above the Columbia River.

He arrived in Boise in about a week and a half, his pack train intact...... with the exception of one unfortunate mule and two cats.  On the third day of traveling, one mule made a stumble and fell off a high cliff into the rocks far below and blew up  dynamite, mule, and the cats in an impressive boom that echoed up and down the Columbia. After Charlie counted his losses, I assume he sobered up and picked his way to Boise with more circumspection.

The pack train arrived in Boise without more incident, and people  were thrilled with the cats.  They paid him five bucks apiece for the cats, a fortune in those days.  I assume Charlie also got rid of the dynamite and loaded up his mules with something from Boise for the return trip to the port below The Dalles.  Then he came back to Pomeroy with his money and started another business and fathered another child.  My own grandad was the oldest of  Charlie's five children.

To this day, my father said, the cats of Boise remain, by and large, the descendants of Charlie McCabe's cats.