My Views of the Colorado Plateau

Mystic Passage


I love the Colorado Plateau and it often serves as my muse for my paintings. The following paintings were all created from pictures I took in my travels around various sections of this high mesa area lapping over the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

My subsequent post will feature some of the photographs of landmarks that were used as inspiration for these paintings.

To the left is Mystic Passage which was inspired by Double Arch at Arches National Park in Utah, USA. and one of the most noteworthy and known areas of the Colorado Plateau.

Trail to Arsenic Springs


It is 24 x 18 mixed media on canvas depiction of the Wild Rivers Park on the Rio Grande Gorge in Northern New Mexico; the eastern edge of the Colorado Plateau. And I was practicing stormy skies and a slightly more subdued palate to indicate less than full sunshine. I needed to practice that for the following painting: Escalante After the Rain, which is inspired by my sister's and my house boat trip on Lake Powell. After heavy rains waterfalls formed on the canyon walls and transformed the canyons.



This is the 24 x 36 inch canvas I was so afraid to attempt. I don't think the photograph of this work does it merit because I have put in metallic silver and gold into the waterfalls and a luminescent paint on the slick rock walls of the canyon in the distance.

While I was doing these two paintings I decided to revisit a painting I had done two years ago of Bowtie Arch at Canyonlands Utah. It was taken from a less than successful photograph that I decided to play with on my computer in Photoshop and then print on watercolor paper and add paint to. It sold at its first public viewing and I have sold numerous prints. It is a somber piece. And I was just curious to see if it could be brightened up in keeping with my new style. This is the result.



I call it Coyote Portal II and it is a 14 x 11 mixed media on canvas board.

The Navajos believe that Coyote came up through a hole in the earth and led the people or Dinah to the earth they now inhabit. Looking at this arch in a side area of Canyonlands, Utah I was reminded of this story.

The lands of the Colorado Plateau are indeed magical and inspire a lot of photographers and artists and writers.

On the Front Lines of a Fire

The big news these days is the fires in Southern California. By some it is considered just the latest in a cycle of western fires that began eleven to 12 years ago because of the combined influence of prolonged drought and overgrowth caused by the National Forest Services' policy of stopping all forest fires. The fuel for the fires this overgrowth created made the fires extremely intense. Some believe that because of the intensity of these fires it is sterilizing the earth, leaving it bear for erosion and ultimately will destroy some 50% of our National Forests.

The above photo is of Questa, New Mexico where I lived. May 5, 1996 I was in the direct path of the Hondo Fire one of the first of the "super fires" the west would come to know intimately. Within an hour after the Hondo Fire started near San Cristobal the neighboring town of Lama was burned through. Some structures remained, but many were destroyed. The fire set a ground speed record of nine miles in an hour without crowning. I stood on my front lawn and watched in horror as it topped the mountain and began its decent down into our valley.

Families up the valley in Red River and portions of the town of Questa, where I lived, were evacuated. Before this incident was over, about 2,000 individuals were displaced or evacuated from their homes for some as much as three weeks, some 10,000 acres burned, and portions of some highways were closed to all but local residents and fire traffic. The summer tourist season, a major source of income for the area was destroyed. For 22 days we stood ready to evacuate at any moment. Our route would have to be up through our fields and over the irrigation ditch because the roads out would be blocked by the fire. We stayed because of our animals and livestock. There was at the time no plans for their evacuation

The fire line was a half mile from my house. Every time the wind shifted at night I or my husband was instantly awake. For that 22 days we got little sleep. All it took was breeze to ignite the smoldering Ponderosas and set the hills on fire again. It has been almost 12 years and the forest has not recovered. All the snow covered area used to be lush forest. Even the Aspens have not reclaimed the land. If it were not for the drought the hillside would wash into the Red River which runs at it foot.

We had national news coverage until they used the word contained. My friends thought we were then safe. I moved the next year to a wider valley and the wet slope of the mountains. I was very specific with my real estate agent: No trees. Listening to the coverage of the Southern California fires I know what lies ahead for them even if their houses survive. Your sense of safety is gone and so is all the attention you got during the emergency. You are left to deal with your post traumatic stress syndrome on your own. It broke up my marriage and it scattered friends far and wide. Just when you need community the most it, like the forest, is devastated.

My Special Place

Whether you Multiply, BlogSpot, 360 or Xanga you understand what it means to have a safe space to unburden yourself, express yourself, vent, whine, crow, or just post silly stuff.

We are all very different people and we are not likely to find everything we want at the same spot in Blog land. Yes we all met on Y!360. Some just stumbled into there, some deliberately came, some got forced there by family and friends. We have all been more or less happy, sought our own comfort level. And now change is being forced upon us or at least it seems as if it has been forced upon us.

I wrote the following poem before all this hubbub. I wrote it after I opened my Blogger site. I wrote it after I realized that Mash was about as far from what I wanted as FaceBook.

Blogging in view of others is a bit foreign for me even after a year.I used to fill hand bound journals year after year. I have boxes of them. Want to know what my thoughts were in 1965. Give me a moment and I can find that for you.

My Special Place

A new blog
Spot
Built on lessons
Learned
From before

And yet
Strange
Seemingly empty
Like the pages
Of a journal
But somehow
Welcoming

After working
So hard
To fill friends
List
Find
Blogs to visit

Then knowing
It wasn't
My aim
I wanted
This emptiness

Weeks
Of blogs
Without comment
Knowing
It is for me
I blog

This
Special
Empty place
A depository
For my
Thoughts

September 2007

And on a lighter note this little poem written from my cubicle at the fair.

The Borg

Don't look now
The Borg have arrived
People everywhere
With Bionic
Ear implants

Battery chargers
On their waists
BlackBerry command center
Permanently attached
To their hands
Borgs
Coming and Going
Communicating to
The hive
Tuned out
Dialed in
Not here

Outer space
Ether nerds
Who wants to be
So connected
To the mother ship
Beam me up

October 2007

Hope you are all where you want to be. And remember to always give yourself permission to change your mind. But don't let anyone change it for you. I just bought the most beautiful, totally empty journal to write poetry in.

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

With Halloween approaching a friend posted a ghost story challenge I began delving into my resource of strange happenings in my life. I am not sure I would openly declare that I believe in ghosts like seen in movies like Ghost Busters. Or even like those represented in Amityville Horror or Poltergeist I or II. But then how to you represent on the screen the chill that run down your spin when you encounter something eerie but unexplained and unexplainable.

And that is the difficulty with writing a ghost story; how to depict the feeling without making everyone break out laughing.

I think we have all, if we are tuned into our feelings at all, walked into a house we feel immediately uncomfortable in. For me that was first the McCann house on the hill. Ann, the daughter, was a friend of mine and I was invited into the noteworthy house behind the mountain. It had been built by a man for his opera singer wife. One room was especially for her practice. It was huge with balcony and a whole wall of glass looking out over the valley. When first I tried to walk in this room I was stopped literally at the door.

No hands holding me back, but a definite feeling of not being wanted. I had to make a conscious choice to lift first one foot than the other over the threshold. Ann, sitting at her easel across the room, was laughing. Evidently about one of ten people had that response upon first entering the room where the soprano had died after a long battle with cancer.

I have became very aware of houses that have a friendly feel and those that do not. But the McCann house was not my first experience with sensitivity to the dead or the dying. Early on, my mother told me, I had an uncanny knack of telling people they were going to die. I saw something dark behind their eyes. I soon learned adults did that welcome those pronouncements. I think it is a family trait because Mother never told me I was wrong just that it was not polite to blurt it out.

My niece at three claimed to have had several bedside chats with her grandfather in the weeks after his death. Mother called me on the night of the day she died and left me a message saying that she loved me. It was Thanksgiving and I had been out to dinner and played the phone message with its time signature when I came back home. I looked at the clock and decided it was too late to call her back. And it was literally to late. Hours later my sister would call to say Mom was dead. It was only later when my sister and I compared times that I realized Mom was dead when she left the message.

I have lived in several occupied houses. Mostly those have been inviting spirits. And by spirits I mean a sense of warmth or hostility or just a presence. The house I live in now is very clean but the ghost story that follows in the next post is about the house on Orchard Road. It was definitely a house with a bad aura. And the scariest of all my experiences with the other side. It was not an easy story to write.

The House on Orchard Street

The dream began with waking up. There had been a sound. Not a loud sound but one of those you cannot identify. But you one you are positive you should not have heard. One that makes you sit bolt upright in bed and strain to hear it again.

I placed a hand on the body beside me to wake him. Strange noises require verification. But the surface under my hand was not warm or comforting. The skin was cool and damp and sticky. I pivoted and rose to my knees to get a better look in the moonlight washed room. Instead of Dwight there was a woman in my bed.

Her chest oozed a dark liquid from countless darker slits. And the air tasted of copper and smelled like the horse barn after the mare had foaled. Slowly on hands and knees I began backing off the bed. Straightened a leg out when I reached the edge and eased my body erect. The second foot met with something soft and yielding. Squishy.

I looked down and saw a younger version of the body in bed. This one clad in a pink flannel nightgown pushed up above her hips. The pale exposed legs and hips were a sharp contrast to the crimson rug beneath her. I bent to touch her hair matted with blood. It was then I began to scream. I was getting better. The first time I had started screaming when I touched the blood soaked shoulder.

“Hey, baby,” Dwight said, hugging me tight to him. “Wake up now.”

By the time I had totally come awake we were in the brightly lit kitchen. Vicki, the owner of the house stood at the archway to the living room. Her face full of terror.

“It was just a nightmare,” my boyfriend explained to both her and me. I pulled away from him and looked at my hands, then my bare feet. No blood. But something inside of me expect to find it. I was not entirely sure Dwight was right in his assessment.

“Hey, four in the morning is not too early for breakfast,” Vicki pronounced with artificial cheerfulness. As she walked to the refrigerator she looked nervously over her shoulder toward the bedroom Dwight and I occupied.

“Hell, breakfast is late,” he said.

We were the night crew of Grand Junction, Colorado. Dwight played drums in a country western band, Vicki was a cocktail waitress in the same lounge where Dwight’s band played from time to time and I tended bar. Four in the morning commonly saw us at the all night dinner finishing up breakfast before heading home. But Sunday had been our collective day off. The band was leaving for an extended road tour and the farewell party had begun early and ended early when we ran out of booze

It was 1979. Not the best of years. I was running from repressed memories, myself, and my parents’ opinions about what I should be doing with my life. Junction was a perfect place to get lost. It was in the middle of an oil shale boom and money, booze, speed and cocaine were all too easy to come by. None of that has anything to do with my recurring dream unless you subscribe to the theory that people on the edge are more available to the other side.

The next time I had the dream Vicki and I were alone in the house on Orchard Street. Dwight was in Cheyenne or Casper or Laramie. I kept losing track. If this was Tuesday it had to be Casper. But I was not sure it was Tuesday. Another band was playing at The Crossroads. Vicki and I got home early for night people.

Once again it was the sound that woke me up. I was getting closer to identifying it. A thwack then a sucking sound. Repeated. The body beside me was no less bloody, but it was warmer as if I was getting closer to the actual event.

I had mastered the technique of stepping around the body on the floor. No screams. At least not until I tripped over the dead dog in the hall. That was the night I knew one thing for sure; Vicki was terrified of her house. She would not enter the kitchen even though I knelt on the floor screaming. No one to hold me and wake me up. I got used to that. Every time I had the dream there were more details, more bodies it seemed. I had begun keeping notes when my hand would stop shaking enough to allow me to hold a pen. Even stopped mentioning the dream to Dwight when he would call from Fargo, or Minot, or Boise.

There was no question, from before I moved in, the house was haunted. Only my term then was occupied. Vicki had invited me over in the day time for a tour of her haunted house on Orchard Street. There was this old couple whose voices rose from the basement when the house was quiet. And a cold dark corner where the old cistern was. She thought there was a body there. Vicki talked of Indian burial grounds out behind the horse barn and the old hand dug well.

“You should fill that in.”

There were a lot of things she should do with the house and her life. She was getting a messy divorce, fighting for custody of her pyromaniac son, and drunk too much in my humble opinion. But I agreed with her on the voices in the basement. I would hear them just before I fell asleep on those nights when I did not have the dream. I decided they were guardians and would listen for their voices after the lights went out.

The old couple was silent that last night in the house. I was alone. Vicki had gone to the hotel with the bass player in the current band playing at the club. Dwight was in Sioux City or Omaha.

I walked through what I had begun to call my role in this macabre play until I reached the kitchen and the two dead boys with their throats cut. I thought I felt someone staring at me. I looked up to see this man with a large butcher knife in his hand. The blood dripped off the tip.

I turned and ran back to the bedroom, swept my car keys off the chair, and climbed out the bedroom window. The was cold on my bare feet hurt. Fortunately, I had been sleeping in my clothes. I tried to orient myself in the total dark before heading across the pasture toward the horse barn. Somewhere between me and my car was the old hand dug well with the rotting wooden cover. But where? Suddenly the moon peaked out behind a cloud and I saw the wooden planks just steps before me. I took a leap and gasped with relief when my feet hit solid ground. I sprinted toward the car as a splintering noise rose behind me followed by a primal scream.

"Get me out of here you bitch."

I pulled open the Pinto’s door and looked behind to see a figure drenched in the white moonlight stomping on something at the edge of the well. I fell into the seat and prayed the car would start without a problem. It did. I drove to the all night dinner and ignored the no shirt, no shoes, no service sign. The waitress wordlessly brought coffee and vanished in the empty spaces.

A quick look at my reflection in the dark window glass affirmed I was not looking my best. I had that faraway stare of an addict or alcoholic or . . .

“Someone has just seen a ghost?” Roger said as he sat down in the booth, across from me. He was a deputy sheriff. Bartenders always know the law on a first name basis.

“No, just this horrid dream I cannot seem to stop having.” I attempted to lift the coffee mug without shaking. “Anyone every killed at Vicki’s house?”

“Why do you ask?”

I am a visual person and at that moment I didn’t really know if I could explain myself without breaking down into tears. I felt as if I had just escaped with my life but was not sure from what. It all seemed so much more real than any dream I had ever had. Including the one of the rattlesnakes when I was seven. So I opened up a napkin and got out my pen and began sketching the layout of Vicki’s house and putting in crime scene type outlines of the positions of all the bodies. Roger grew oppressively quiet as I sketched. Finished I turned it around and slid it across the table to him.

“Don’t go home,” he said as he folded it up without further examination and stood.

“Where’s Vicki?”

“Out for the night. Probably the Best Western.” It was where all the bands passing though town stayed. No further explanation required. It was the 70's.

A couple hours later dawn was coming up and turning the Gunnison River red. The shakes had been replaced by a profound fatigue but I didn’t know if I ever wanted to sleep again. To that end I had scored some speed from one of the Interstate truckers that always stopped in at the diner. I had just pocketed my stash when Roger re-entered. I got up and followed him to his squad car.

“I took the liberty of packing your stuff. Open your trunk”

I obeyed and he transferred the few suitcases and a couple boxes to the Pinto. The air was cold. I extracted one of the jackets in the boxes and a pair of shoes.

“FYI about 15 years ago we found the body of a woman and three of her kids. We never found the oldest girl or who had brutally murdered them.

“It was her boyfriend. He fell into the old well back by the barn.”

“Where can we reach you?” he asked, accepting my information as if I were a witness to the crime. And on some level I was.

“Don’t know, but when I get there I will call and let you know.” I closed the trunk and walked to the driver side door and got in. The speed and all the coffee was doing its trick. My skin itched. It was time to move. Roger closed my door.

“Oh, and Rog. Check the old cistern in the basement. I think you will find more bodies there. Not connected to this I think. The previous owners maybe. Vicki said the disappeared before the hippies moved in and made it a commune.”

I started the car and began driving away from Grand Junction. I drove all that day. Over the continental divide, through the sprawling city of Denver and into the plains of Kansas where I could see for hundreds of miles in all directions. I stopped at a Motel 6 and slept the sleep of the dead. No dreams. The next day I headed into Kansas City and called my folks.

I finally heard from Vicki a couple months after my departure. Her son had burnt down the house and she was fighting for a settlement from the insurance company. Roger contacted me to say they had found the murderer’s body in the well and the two skeletons in the cistern in the basement

Dwight continued for a while to call from Des Moines or Provo or Colby. I met him once in Minot for a weekend. A couple weeks later, Bobby, the lead singer in the band, called to tell me Dwight had died of a drug overdose. I never got the name of the town. Wherever it was he died, it was too close to the edge, and I had decided to stay as far away from the edges of life as possible.

Note: The above story is largely true. I have taken a couple liberties with names and condensed the time line just a bit to make the story march. I lived in the house on Orchard Street for about six months. The dream was my reason for moving out in the middle of the night.

Back to the Colorado Plateau

Rather than focus on one of the National and State Parks that abound in the Colorado Plateau area I figured I would just highlight some of the natural land features. For those of us familiar with this area of the country there really is no such thing as a bad view. And the effect of wind, rain and time have created some fantastic formations.

The one to the right is of Navajo Sandstone - it's the white stuff. Usually when people think of sandstone they are apt to think of the red stuff like found in the Grand Canyon. The following rather typical "wedding cake" formation is of the red sandstone.

The hints of sage green in the middle ground are vegetation very much like that in the foreground; rabbit bush, snake weed, gamma grass. Livestock has to walk a long way to get a meal and even further for water.

This photo was taken working up and over one of those wedding cake formation ridges. It was 11 miles of this sort of switchbacks. No guard rails. You can see the switch from the Navajo sandstone to the red and the vast emptiness of the land beyond. Those lines are roads. It is not unusual to be able to see 100 miles or more on a clear day. And the days are seldom not clear.

The View from the top. I really had to stop for air. I don't think I took any deep breaths on the way up and I had a feeling the way down was not going to be any easier.

Looking off toward Monument Valley in the far distance. The fence is to keep sheep and cattle off the road. This is part of the Navajo Indian Reservation.

Some formations are up like the ones we have just seen and some are down. This is one of the many natural bridges at Natural Bridges Park in the southern corner of Utah. It is carved out of the Navajo Sandstone laid down by ancient seas. The hallows in the rock catch not only rain but condensation and seeps from springs. The vegetation grows where it can get roots into the cracks that capture moisture. The black vertical streaks on the rocks are called desert lacquer.

What about drought didn't you understand?

This picture was taken on Lake Powell in October of last year. The lake was at that time 120 feet low.

The Colorado River watershed has been suffering an extended drought. This effects the water levels on Lake Powell and Lake Mead but not as much as the electrical and water use of San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Despite warnings for the last five years from the four states involved in the Colorado River drainage basin there has been no conservation of electricity or water downstream from the four corners area. When Glen Canyon Dam which impounds the water of Lake Powell was built there were promises of sharing water with the Navajo and Ute reservations. Promises that have not come to fruition. Nor has the Navajo Reservation been able to benefit from the power generated by water release.

vast majority of the power generated. Lake Mead and Hoover Dam feeds the power needs of Water is released from Glen Canyon Dam per the needs of Los Angeles which currently gets theLas Vegas. Could some one please turn a light off?

One is reminded of Sodom and Gomorrah when shown night time images of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Nothing to do with the sin and sex but just with the waste. Las Vegas boasts of recycled water in its fountains but I would hazard a guess that with the heat and single digit humidity that the evaporation rate nears 50%. It is currently paying its residents to take up grass and put down gravel but would not consider turning off a fountain.

The only people to benefit from the massive release of water due to gluttonous use of electricity is Phoenix, once a desert it has built a canal system to take water from the Colorado to water over 150 golf courses, fill swimming pools, and landscape its yards.

I listen to the news about the severe situation in Georgia and wonder how long they ignored the lowering of their main water supply before this crisis. We need a conservation plan not just for water but for electricity. And beyond just replacing light bulbs. Just because we can light the night does not mean we should.