Day 11 in Alaska

We are now in our 11^th day of a 27 day residency, and we have definitely settled into a routine. We hike up a steep road to a blue bridge that overlooks the West Creek Glacier every morning, accompanied by three or four Alderworks dogs and a can of bear spray. We return to the cabin and work most of the day and then hike to the flats of the Taiya River after dinner. It’s very simple, and one day merges into the next.

Mixing it up some is the North Words Writers Symposium in Skagway this week. Ed is participating. Nancy Lord of “Early Warming” joined us for breakfast this morning, and Susan Orlean of “The Orchid Thief” will be speaking later.

Also adding a new twist to the mix, Allison Nichols, a photographer from New York, arrived at the residency yesterday. She is a delightful hiking companion and an insightful artist, with a gifted swing for throwing sticks to the dogs in the river.

New Work

Here's one of Ed's recent poems:

Declaration of Ambrosius de Tortilla

(Discovered in a 16th Century tomb in southern Spain and translated by Ed Aust)

I, Ambrosius de Tortilla, the bonafide Conquistador of Quesadilla,

do hereby declare on my honor

that the sunburnt sleepers of park benches and stairwells

throughout this sacrosanct kingdom

are from this day exonerated of all debts to society,

forgiven of trespasses and pardoned of imperfections

as surely as my name is noble, my motives sincere,

and my reputation without blemish,

and let it hereby be established

throughout this wide and disordered empire of the forgotten,

downtrodden, misperceived and ill-humored,

that as certain as the black beetle treads unnoticed over

the sleeping chinchilla,

so shall you be recognized as beautiful and glorious in your way,

and let the malignantly unmotivated, discouraged, and jacks of no trades,

the uninsulated nomads of uncertain origins,

be hereby known as legal inheritors of all things remarkable and numinous.

May your names be recorded in the Book of the Distinguished,

your stories recited around campfires,

and your ballads sung by street-corner buskers

throughout this modest realm.

--Ambrosius de Tortilla, 1575

Midnight Sun

Greetings from the land of the midnight sun.
It's odd to go to bed in twilight and to wake up at 3:00 am to the first light of dawn...

New Work

---

One of Ed's recent poems:

After Graduating from College with a Degree in Creative Arts

I was angry at a woman in San Jose

and sick of apartment cockroaches

so I tossed my stuff into the back of a pickup

and left town,

moved in with my parents

and searched for work.

Sometimes you take

what you can get,

like a job at a roller disco

cruising the floor on polyurethane wheels

in a ridiculous orange vest and white slacks,

blowing a whistle at speeding teens

while skating backward

beneath the mirror ball

in a warehouse of clamor.

Some nights I succumbed

to the beat and crowd current,

the sheer illusion of weightlessness,

a dancing fool

drifting like dandelion down

on the concussive wind

of the Commodores
thinking, "I'm too old for this."

Slippery floor, tangled bodies,

ice on swollen wrists.

Fall and rise. Float and crash.

Feet gasping for breath.

After closing, locking up,                                 

crowds and staff gone home,

I would leave that darkened parking lot

and hit the empty highway,

sky black as loneliness

and just as absolute.     

At the Cabin

It’s Saturday. We arrived at Alderworks a week ago. We’re settling into a routine. After breakfast we hike up a steep road to a blue bridge that overlooks a magnificent glacier. It’s so beautiful that it hurts. Every hike is different, different light, different patterns of snow on the peaks. There’s an untouched forest beyond the bridge that looks like it’s straight from a Grimm’s fairy tale, complete with the shadowy possibility of some encounter with bears or wolves.

Then we return to the cabin and write and paint. Ed refines his poetry. I draw a lot, working on ideas for here and also when I return to Oakland and have larger canvases. I have a table in the cabin by a window where I paint for 4 or 6 hours.

I also cook big meals of soup and pasta and quiches with eggs from the chickens here. In the evening we walk down to the flats at the convergence of a couple of rivers, a popular staging area for cruise excursions. There are four dogs here who are always eager to escort us. Once they saw a van full of tourists from a cruise ship and blocked it, barking, on the one lane bridge. I felt very Alaskan. We are not in a van from a cruise ship. We are locals with dogs and bear spray. We have been here one week, and we’ll be here three more.

Yosemite’s Gates

ED AUST

Yosemite’s gates are sealed for good,

all visitors barred.

East of the park at Tioga Pass,

six cherubs block the entrance,

each with a flaming longsword

carved of glacier quartz.

At Hetch Hetchy on the western side,

seventy bison clog the road,

shaggy heads low and silent,

daring to be challenged.

At Big Oak Flat a granite boulder,

round as the moon over Half Dome,

rolled down a cliff on Christmas Eve

and plugs the asphalt passage.

Don’t even bother with the Arch Rock entrance

on El Portal Road at Foresta

where a great woolly mammoth

rubs its sweeping tusks

against the granite blocks,

having emerged, they say,

from a Badger Pass blizzard.

South Entrance appears deceptively open

though witnesses tell of the presence of ghosts

in the shape of leaping bighorns.

As for the thousands stuck inside,

news is sparse; electricity is out,

the trails are full of bears.

This much we know: a woman gave birth

to a child who floats when given the breast

and who laughs at the sight of the moon.

Meet Dorothy and Jeff, Visionaries of Alderworks

This is Dorothy and Jeff, visionaries and hosts of Alderworks. To read their story, go to alderworksalaska.com. Jeff moved to the area and started a newspaper when he was 21, and he continues to spearhead the North Words Writers’ Symposium which will be gathering in Skagway next week. Dorothy is a Skagway native, third generation, and is the queen of the gardens and animals here. We are so grateful for their warmth and hospitality and Alaskan grit, and when Ed and I need to talk with someone besides each other, Dorothy and Jeff always have good stories to tell.

The main purpose of a residency is to work without distraction. The main challenge of a residency is working without distractions. I have no excuse to not paint. There are no errands to run, no bills to pay, no meetings to attend, no dinners to host. To text or email here, I have to walk to a bench across the grounds where everyone can see that Carol is on her phone again, so I don’t do that a whole lot. We can’t access movies or TV programs or NPR. All we can do is paint and write and hike and read, which is fine when I’m feeling confident. It’s fine when I’m in Oakland where people might say, “You’re Carol Aust! I love your work.” But here, people don’t know me or Oakland, and my reputation is only as good as what I paint here, and at the moment I don’t like my paintings very much. I would much rather watch a movie or play the piano or cook dinner for 20 or even run to Target, but those aren’t options here.

When we interviewed for this residency, we suggested coming for two weeks. Jeff was reluctant. “It takes people a couple of weeks just to settle in,” he explained. I’ve made a calendar for myself and counted the panels I brought. It works out to 8 ½ panels a week for four weeks. I have lots of time to make lots of bad art, and maybe some gems will happen, too.

Through the Gates at Alderworks

When you go through the gates at Alderworks, you enter Jim and Dorothy’s vision of a utopia in process. Their barn-like home is the first building, set apart by a yard decorated with wood sculptures and metal barrel hoops and rusting bits of vintage machinery among the plants. A horse pasture with two horses plus pens for pigs, geese, ducks, and chickens separate their area from the 3 residency cabins, art studio, and various out buildings. A pile of lumber, palettes of river rock, and a back hoe for the new studio that’s under construction let you know that this dream is in process, as well as by the gardens of sapling trees and tiny plants. There’s a beautiful vegetable garden with raised beds and a greenhouse, all maintained by a young man named Justin. Everything is surrounded and embraced by a forest of spruce and alder with tall snowy peaks beyond.

Our cabin is the largest of the residency cabins. Log walls, wood stove, claw foot tub, big iron bed, it’s cozy and comfortable. It has two rooms, so Ed has claimed a small table in the bedroom where he can write in silence. His goal is to select and refine a collection of his poems and short prose writings for a book. Here’s one:

Poem Found Scrawled on the Simple Man’s Bathroom Wall

On certain nights in winter

when the moon is new,

I remove my clothes,

leap out my upstairs window

and fly above the rooftops,

studying the constellations

for signs of things to come.

                                                                     

Against the silence of the elms

I feel the world’s radio waves

pass through my chest,

tickling my lungs with their

lovely static.

I am a simple man, yet

over and over I peruse my life

and find myself wanting.

Above satellite dishes and

abandoned drive-ins

I swim through ozone

dreaming of better days.

I am a simple man.

I enjoy simple pleasures:

a cool baseball nested in my palm,

an old cat brushing my ankle,

the minty taste of stars

dissolving on my tongue.

I forgive everyone for everything

from my safe, high distance.

I like to lose myself

in the indomitable violet sky,

an ascending balloon swallowed

by the absence of light.

I paint in the front room, moving between a window and the kitchen table, depending on the light. More about my work later.

Getting to Alderworks

The Alderworks Residency at which we're staying is 9 miles north of Skagway, Alaska, 3 miles from the site of the former gold rush town of Dyea. Getting here is complicated, but it is also part of the magic of this place.

We flew out from Oakland on Friday morning, changed planes in Seattle, and landed in Juneau in the afternoon. At 5:00 am the next morning we set out for an Alaskan ferry to Skagway. We sailed 7 hours past magnificent peaks and glaciers and fjords. I had planned to start my creative processes on board, sketching and photographing for future paintings, but after pacing the deck for a while, I stretched out on a bench and slept. Maybe that was more important than drawings.

We docked next to two towering cruise ships and were greeted warmly by Annie, the daughter of our hosts, Jeff and Dorothy Brady. We wedged our suitcases into a large SUV with a canoe lashed to the roof, dodged tourists as Annie gave us a driving tour of the six blocks of town, stocked up at the local market and natural food stores, and headed north to Alderworks. We could see bald eagles as we skirted the Taiya Inlet and went over a couple one lane bridges. As we drove through the gate and the electric bear fence, we were greeted by four large friendly dogs. And here was our cabin, familiar from photos online but much larger than we expected. We felt instantly at home.

Packing for a Residency

How do you pack for a four week residency? Fortunately Ed was going too, so I could fill two checked bags, but I packed and repacked our bags, weighing them several times so they wouldn’t exceed the 50 pound limit. Other artists told me they took unstretched canvas or paper, but I packed 35 wood panels, mostly unsupported pieces of door skin. Most of my paint I brought in recycled plastic film cannisters plus sketchbooks and pencils and conte sticks. When I packed all of it I wondered if I would be able to use it all, but it was so exciting to unpack and to realize all I have to do here is paint. What a luxury! I remember when I was 21 and traveled around Southeast Alaska with a duffle bag of day camp supplies.

Alderworks Residency, Skagway, Alaska

My husband, Ed, and I are spending four weeks at the Alderworks Artist and Writer Residency nine miles north of Skagway, Alaska, from May 18 to June 14. This is a dream we’ve had for so many years, something we fantasized about when we had sleepless nights with new babies or sat in traffic on the way home from soul-sucking jobs. And here we are!

I first came to Southeast Alaska when I was a junior in college. I spent a summer leading day camps in small homesteading communities and logging camps, and I was swept away by the people and the natural beauty. The boats and mountains and wildlife that I saw here at 21 have crept into my paintings over the decades. I brought Ed 10 years after that first trip, and he interviewed at a small college as we flirted with the idea of moving up here. 3 years ago we brought our daughter, also a junior in college. I’ve never been able to forget the blue and white peaks rising out of the water or the spruce and hemlock forests.

So it was natural to search for a residency here and then apply and then tell Jeff Brady and his daughter, Annie, our Alaska stories when we interviewed for the May slot. We also spoke with them about our hopes for painting for me and writing for Ed at Alderworks.  We are very grateful to Jeff and his wife, Dorothy, for inviting us to come here to work for four weeks.

Although there is very limited internet here at Alderworks, I will try to keep a blog of our residency. I am learning so much already about what to pack for 4 weeks of painting and how to structure my days. I’m so grateful to the other artists who have shared with me their residency experiences.

So the first photo I have to share is of Ed and me at 6:30 am at the airport with five bags, two of which were over 45 pounds. The wood panels, paint, sketchbooks and Ed’s laptop left little room for clothes!