Watch This Space!

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Today I have come to the conclusion that I will continue to live the ongoing half-life for some time to come so I will take a sabbatical from this blog to the end of October or longer. I wanted so badly to show you the photos of the new place but do not wish to impose on Gayle and her computer any more than I have to. The three of us are getting along remarkably well considering that we were bought together in the course of fate and an otherwise standard real estate transaction but we are all looking forward to the day when we can re-establish two separate nests once more. We are all living and working in the rug canyons between piles of full moving boxes, both theirs and mine. It sort of reminds me of once living in the Katlady's boarding house in a huge brick Victorian ... well, except that she had no intention of moving anywhere at the time.

Wayne is doing the classic frantic rush to get the heavy and nasty jobs done at their new place before his surgery next week and Gayle is doing the related fruitless fretting and damage control. The good news is that I have convinced Gayle to start a blog about their new start-from-bare-earth homestead. She writes very well and will have plenty of stories about their shoe-string adventures as they develop. All I have to do now is remind her to take her camera along, right Mushy?

As with our long down times at the ranch, my imagination has been in high idle with all the possibilities and potential here. All must be planned around the recent market tank and a new tight budget in mind now. Lots of bang-for-the-buck projects on the slate so watch this space come November! Red's uber-geek son promised to come through for me with something reliable in the way of a computer system and then I will be back in full blog force! Hopefully he will also be able to retrieve all the cool unpublished photos which I had taken previously on the ranch. .


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Leaving the Creek Behind

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The idea of leaving our creek behind brings some rueful moments with it, even aside from the name of our journal becoming largely irrelevant at that point.

Although it is dry for most of its life, that one percent when the creek runs fully is a marvel to behold. You can wade through the sage brush and descend to sit on its banks, listening to the rise and fall of the waters as they find new pockets in the sandy banks to tease and roust and to watch any number of curious things being rolled along noisily in the shallow but rowdy currents. And you imagine for a moment what it would be like if this creek was forever so alive. Trout? Silent wading anglers? Being able to launch an inner tube and drift lazily down to its end? Utterly pleasant fantasies for a cool and breezy afternoon with the sun dappling warmly down on your arms through the chattering leaves of the tall cottonwoods. Peaceful. Joyous. So deeply invigorating.

But the creek soon spends its small allotment of rain waters and withers into a silent white sandy ribbon once more.
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I came across this above photo again this morning and smiled. The old storefront architecture had helped inspire my original plan for the new Rat Town facades and the theme echoed my fondness for the totally incongruous and outrageous. Before I found this photo, I had already planned on hanging faux store placards announcing guided fishing tours and water skis for rent in the midst of our dusty desert canyon. Come to think of it, I might still do so when we relocate up top. Maybe I'll even stock a cattle watering trough with a few goldfish and call it a resort. Well? Why not?!
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As the Road Turns

.We took a drive 'up top' last Sunday through our connecting canyon which is Mark's confessed favorite pure leisure drive. In this photo (if you click and enlarge it), you can almost see where we would previously drive straight ahead instead of taking a new curve off to the right. If you attempted that now, you would plunge over a cut a dozen feet deep, probably taking out a high pressure gas pipeline in the process. Ill-advised.

In case you missed the heads up, I am about to get metaphorically obnoxious here so return your tray to the upright position and extinguish all smoking guns.

Just like that road, we have found that what seemed like the clear and obvious path of our plans out here can change in a matter of months or even from hour to hour. The Rock of Damocles was a minor concern but what a gas field rep said yesterday was not. What he learned yesterday was that the five mile road to our Rat Town was not classified as a road used by several gas field operators. What that meant, ominously, was that if the creek gnawed further into the hard rock of the mesa walls in a few places and washed out this elevated road, it could be officially abandoned ... and not replaced. As you might imagine, this was not joyous news to these two people living at the very end of it. The alternative routes are just as seasonally affected (or more so) and would add at least an hour to our established and already prolonged access to civilization.

Now I am wondering if the delay in receiving our pre-fab new buildings was not but more benevolent works of ethereal allies. Having pragmatically ignored such synchronicity in the past to my detriment, I am inclined to have the new buildings delivered 'up top', far removed from these crumbling roads and the The Rock of Damocles . This is where the oddball and the engineer often clash with a brilliant display of sparks, where the unseen and intuitive collide with calculable hard data modeling.

Tomorrow, I would like for the two of us to journey up top once more, to revisit that area which we had both considered a good future home site last August and then compare it with the other possibilities Mark has come across since then. It may well help decide if we should change our time-line abruptly now or remain in the Rat under the Rock until further notice.

I will return in a few days with the results of our exploratory trip. Rat Town might well arise three hundred feet above my lofty dreams of just last month, then again, it might not. So many logistical, natural and human factors to weigh in so little time.
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Whimsical Dreams and Schemes

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Wow! The image below has been circulating like a wild fire in So. California. I saw it over at Goddess's place (she's in my links!) and also received two higher resolution versions from the Katlady and my brother all within hours. I am truly smitten with this image and not in the least offended that I was a 'must copy' on it. It doesn't look like a photo-shop wonder either but a genuine 3D project since it incorporates our beloved shipping containers (I'll do a post just on that some day, too). There was an eccentric structural genius at work here. Better still, the designer has displayed a certain defiance and disdain of decorum acceptable to even middle class society. In other words, I am absolutely in LOVE with it. Given the chance to tour a Guggenheim exhibit or this place, you know what my choice would be. Can't you just see this arrangement creeping up the back wall of our mesa behind the Rat? Don't kid yourself, the Anasazi would have done the same thing at Mesa Verde if they had access to cheap rat trailers, shipping containers, scrap iron, cranes and welding equipment.
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This got me to thinking about our delayed Rat Town project again. The thaw and the muddy state of the roads have postponed the delivery of our two 14'x36' buildings indefinitely and I won't say that the delay has not discouraged me somewhat. My antidote is to dream on, as it always has been. I have forever created complex micro worlds in the process of waiting on promises and prospects, most of which never materialized. It eventually became the creative thought process which mattered most; a realized, completed project became almost anticlimactic after a few decades of dreams lost.
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And so I dredged up a front-on view of the Rat (above) to impose my imagination upon, the two new buildings already in place in my visions. Not two overgrown and glorified potting sheds but two edifices to meld into my eccentric and whimsical 'big picture'. Yes, a very curious outpost in the middle of no man's land, something that will make the rare lost traveler grin and wonder.
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It took considerable time to browse the Net for inspiration but I finally found some images which I could electronically beat into submission to form my otherwise very loose master plan (above). Since Slim and cowboy company liked the idea of an Old West Saloon, this was the grit around which my outrageous pearl would form.

The new buildings will stack up at a right angle to the Rat's front facade to form one continuous road face. We did not resurface the front face of the Rat and will not until we see where this wild hair of a plan is going. Ideally, the road-facing side of each new building will sport two or more distinct pseudo store fronts . What you see above is strictly a concept, much the way concept cars never meet the road in production numbers but it gives you a very rough idea at least.

It was an idea fermenting well before our arrival and, unfortunately, the many wonderful antique architectural details that I had been scrounging up in the Midwest were left behind thanks to the nature of those people to take advantage of our time and logistics predicament (oh no, no residual animosity, of course, but may they drown and then rot in Hell, the whole bloody lot of them). You just don't mess with my dreams.

What items we were able to salvage will not produce the vignette above but it is a start at least. It will be many, many years before we can find more architectural touches to complete a whimsical Old Western facade to our liking but the quest will keep me invigorated and inclined to venture into civilization more than once a year. The thrill, the lust of the hunt has not been officially abandoned yet.
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Wish Lists and Daydreams ...

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Okay, I admit it, I am wandering away from the journal for the moment. We found a phone message today from Slim (our favorite cowboy and grazing tenant) that he is heading this way from Colorado tomorrow and will bunk in with us. TWO visitors in the same month?! Yeowee! He'll flip when he sees that he gets a real bed this time instead of an old canvas army cot. In the meantime, the clean-up and food planning thoughts along with some symptoms of a possible cold/flu ailment coming on have thrown me off track with the blog so I am posting some terrible scans of old pen and inks that I had done quite some time ago. I came across them tonight while looking for something else.

I have been looking at these mesas lately with a growing desire to consign them to black on white paper someday. Goddess' comment about her things to do "Before I die" list has stirred up these inclinations. I remember my mother mentioning her wish that I would take up the pen and brush again. This was just a day before she died unexpectedly and so her comment bore a very permanent weight to it.

I had worked from my own photographs propped on my cherry and butternut art table back then since I always felt too conspicuous and too shy to ever sketch and ink on site. Now even that art table is gone for good after this last move. It had survived my many relocations for almost 30 years. I wish I could rant and vent some angst here but I won't.
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You should see FOUR drawings. If you don't, hit "Reload" or "Refresh". It's just the usual Blogger quirks.
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This was a photo taken near the Thames. A group of schoolboys in kilts heading home in the afternoon. What stuck me so deeply was the cheerful man trying very hard to console a young boy about something which had brought him to sobbing tears. What? I will always wonder. c.'77
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Of course I had to capture the defiant Boudica in her chariot below Big Ben. c.'77
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The portrait of an old New England barn for a neighbor's friend. c.'80
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Despite my eyes already starting to fail, I was able to provide another building portrait 20 years later. This was my last pen and ink. c.'97

Will my eyes still allow me to take up the tiny pen again? I don't know but it's high on my "Before I die" wish list. In the meantime, we will have a year or two of work left on this homestead which will eventually include a place for me to work on what I enjoy once more.
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