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We were just teens when a friend was accepted to Notre Dame it was agreed that if I would help him move, he would pay for my flight back. As it turned out, when sessions ended I often helped him drive one way or another for a number of years. Criss-crossing the country we saw some incredible things, visited historic places and spent time in National Parks and Monuments. Driving the open road is an incredible experience when you have lived in the same house for most of your life and without the pressures of jobs or school it seems the very definition of freedom.

Now that I am of a certain age, I feel that longing again, to see places far away, places I have heard about and longed to see for myself. As I walked my morning walk this morning it came to me that I want to spend time "riding the planet." That is, specifically, to experience and enjoy the Earth's beautiful places as it spins through space as you might ride a roller coaster or a theme park ride, for the sheer enjoyment of it, not to get somewhere but "to be" somewhere.

That's me, in this image from some number of years ago. We had gone to Alaska to see the Northern Lights. Mushing sled dogs was just an added bonus. I have spent far too many years now with my nose to the grindstone, missing so many important and real things, doing things I thought were important, and maybe they were, but I don't know if it matters now. I want to ride the planet while I can.

I confess that the challenges of my personal life affect my writing here. No life is untouched by adversity in one way or another, in varying degrees. The moment's adversities belong to people I care about and even though the burden may be theirs, still I feel the weight of it. Writing anything of consequence feels superficial to me lately. Still, art transcends in ways that are helpful to me, the busyness of a task, the check-in with my inner direction, the thought of what lies before me superseding all the worry of what may lie ahead. And when I look at an image like this, Crest and Gaps, I am transported back to a dazzlingly beautiful day in which I walked in mountain meadows with some of my favorite people.

Having been raised in a cookie-cutter neighborhood laced by asphalt ribbons and water-less concrete "rivers," choked with traffic and smog, where the only wild things were bugs and birds. I marvel to this day at places like this. God's creation. The bright air, sweet with the smell of summer, seems pristine and never before breathed. What a magnificent grandness there is to these sleeping volcanic mountains with their gleaming glacier garlands and milky cobble-lined rivers with forested sideburns hosting an orchestra of life, from maidenhair to grizzly bear. How can this possibly be real? I am struck with awe and gratitude for it. It is the real work of art here.

And so this is my world. I carry these places in my heart along with my worries. That may be the only balance there is.

Back then you'd find something soft like a sleeping bag to lean against, arm hanging over the side, fingers feeling the 45 mile-an-hour wind, nothing between you and the towering trees, a warm yellow sun in a big wide sky or a crescent moon hanging in the inky night. Everything in the back of the truck would levitate for a few seconds when you hit a big bump. On long trips you'd lie on your back while the low hum of tires on the road lulled you to sleep until it was your turn to drive. Murphy, the old Irish Setter, would hang his head in your lap until that unhappy moment when he barfed, without fail, every trip. In the cab, brother and sister-in-law talked low, the baby sleeping between them, the radio buzzed with rock 'n' roll until we rolled clear into country music territory. The world seemed free in the bed of the pick up rolling along the two-lane to the places we needed to see or be in.

Later, Susan and I would be towing a water trailer with another old truck, watering beans in the field. When the trailer was empty there was something magic about riding back home on the tailgate. The uneven dirt road made the truck rise and fall like a boat riding ocean swells. Work would be done, the sweat of the day released by the breeze of the truck's motion, the lulling of the soft ups and downs of a dusty dirt road in the late afternoon was a small sensory reward at the end of the day.

When the boys came along, there would be cool evenings eating popcorn, watching movies in the bed of a newer truck at the Sky Drive-In. After a long summer day, the cool breeze would waft across the rows of cars and trucks and you could feel the release of the day's tensions melt away. The buzzing drive-in speakers, people laughing or gasping to the fun or drama on the screen, children playing outside their cars while their parents cuddled inside, friends calling out to one another, our boys, and sometimes their friends, having fun until sleep absolutely overtook them, those were some nights. Then when the movie ended, motors would start, headlights come on and dust would swirl as vehicles, like cows being let out to pasture, would make their way to the exits and then toward home in the quiet night.

We had just crested a hill and were coming down a steep two-track trail that topped a ridge line, the sides falling away at sharp angles when the jeep driver came to a halt. Before us a dozen bison were grazing around the rutted tracks. The driver inched forward hoping to move them along but they didn't notice. Backing up seemed a dicey proposition and an alternate route meant miles of backtracking, putting us off a planned rendezvous. They may seem bucolic but their man-crushing size, hooking horns and an unbelievable gallop of 35 miles-per-hour makes them an approach-with-caution sort of beast. So we were content for some number of minutes to sit and watch them move along the track for a time.

They seemed to move silently and in slow motion. Their hides looked worn and dusty, their eyes dark and unengaged, our presence entirely uninteresting to them. Beyond them, our trail dropped away so steeply we couldn't see it so we waited even longer. Growing impatient the driver backed up a few feet and then launched forward with a noisy start and then stopped quickly. Nothing. He did it again. Some reconfiguration of the large brown animals occurred. On the third or fourth try they suddenly bolted. With seemingly impossible speed they launched uphill towards the jeep. We barely had time to be afraid before they passed us on both sides in a ground-shaking, dust-clouding blur and vanished from sight. They were gone and we were free to move on.

Tarnish and texture, I add these elements to some of my work. I find that it gives an aged appearance. It makes them seem more realistic, more lived-in, more distressed . It's not a coincidence, that in the moments of my real life when I feel distressed I feel tarnished and textured, the textures seem cumulative in the form of worry lines and ever graying hair. Life has its moments of drama that change me, and it shows. My world is no longer shiny and new. That doesn't mean I have given up, I still find wonder in the most marvelous places (and I am better at finding it now than I ever have been). But I also recognize that life changes despite my feelings about it. Growing accustomed to these changes is what I am learning now. And I'm getting average marks, I'd say.

I ran into an old friend recently. We talked about our shiny and new days and the days that have followed for each of us. He asked me if I was happy and I said that I struggle with balance, with keeping myself right side up when I feel so upside down sometimes. But we both know that life is sometimes spent upside down and that we can still be okay even if we are. My friend Esther would tell me that acknowledging it is sometimes all that is needed. So I tell myself, "Oh, here I am, feeling upside down again." And then I carry on, noting that I will eventually be right side up. And knowing that it doesn't have to stay one way or the other makes it a little easier each time.

In places like this you feel your heart beating in your chest. In places like this the constant wind burns your face, if the sun doesn't do it first. In places like this the Earth comes in just a few colors, gold, blue, brown. In places like this the silence can be immense. It becomes your secret companion. In places like this the rest of the world melts away, there is only breath, and sky and land and wind. In places like this I feel free, with my two feet on the ground, I am the horizon, breathing the sky and wind.

Ancient art

Jim had sandy brown hair and a hint of what once was quite a freckly face. His build was slight and he was probably close to six feet tall. He wore blue jeans and a blue chambray work shirt and snake boots. Jeff was more like me, short, roly-poly. He preferred light blue jump suits. His hair was sort of slicked back and he had 1970s shaped side burns. He was a fan of snuff and his cheek was always a little round, his teeth a little stained. Back in those days Jeff worked for me as a typesetter and Jim was a client, the editor of a magazine about treasure hunting.

Jeff had suggested we go on an adventure, he knew a place in the Coachella Valley, an arid region in the southernmost part of California. It was, he said, rich in petroglyphs, abandoned mines and was a good, secluded desert campsite where we could seek whatever treasures interested us. So we loaded up our vehicles and took I10 east and somewhere between Chiriaco Summit and the Arizona border we took a right onto a dirt road and drove caravan style for many miles, trailed by one of those incredibly long and large dust trails. We eventually came to the mouth of a canyon and followed it up quite a ways. The walls became higher and closer together and eventually we came to thickets of dense brush. The campground came within view, large stands of palm trees indicated that water was close to the surface and maybe there was even a cool spring.

Jim had all the latest treasure-hunting gadgets, a special shovel for not disturbing the ground, a number of metal detectors, heavy mine sweeping ones and light over-your-head-use ones, earphones for detecting the subtlest pings. He and Jeff divided these up and headed off to the nearest mine shaft. I took my camera and a sketch pad. I wanted to shoot and draw some of the hundreds of petroglyphs I had seen in the canyon on the drive in. Indian rock art has always been interesting to me. I have often mused about the people who created the petroglyphs, what their lives were like, if they were happy. It made me happy to look at the pictures. I examined each picture in detail and drew the ones I was most captivated with. I scaled the rocky sides of the canyon as high as twenty feet to see some. Some of the figures were clearly animals like deer, others clearly men and women (with obvious protuberances) and others looked, well, like extra terrestrials having a vague human form but an other-worldly appearance. I enjoyed the solitude of the canyon like it was my own private museum and I just meandered at will hoping to take in each and every creation.

Later in the day I met up with Jim and Jeff and we had lunch. They had found nothing of value or interest to them. We wandered about some afterwards, exploring some of the upper areas of the canyon and then we packed up and headed home.

I came back to the canyon again, this time with Susan and the boys and we spent the night. The museum was still there just as I had left it. There are too few places left that are undisturbed by time or man. I remember sitting in the canyon and listening for the sound of children playing or cavorting. Not my children, but the children of the past as they played amongst each other or scratched their own drawings upon the rock as their parents hunted or wove or cooked near the spring. I thought that Indian children must have been as noisy as my own children. Their sound may be gone but their drawings are not. And we are the richer for it.

I only really know my grandfathers from stories about them, mostly unhappy stories of men with short fuses, penchants for liquor and coping skills that involved the use of fists. I'm sure they must have had some good qualities they passed along to my parents but they have not been enumerated to me. They both died when I was quite young. I only have one possession that came from one of them, the pocket watch pictured here, which was actually a gift from my grandmother long after her husband had passed. But I really like the idea of having a "granddad." Someone who is older, gentle, patient and generous of spirit, someone likely to share small trinkets any boy (or girl, for that matter) might treasure. I assembled these items for the purpose of creating what might be found in my "granddad's valise."

The valise itself came from an old man in Las Vegas, a former business associate when I was in business with my brothers. He cast it off when he moved away. It bears stickers from ocean liners long gone. The skeleton key was found here in our apartment. We have many doors that once held locks requiring such a key. I haven't yet tried it in all. For the moment it remains unreconciled. Susan carved the bird, I LOVE it, she is as much an artist as I am though she doesn't recognize it in herself. The corn cob pipe is mine, I used it once or twice for fun. I like to smoke a pipe around Christmas but have a lovely wooden one Susan got me that I am most fond of for that purpose. I'm not sure where the pocket knife came from, I've had it for a long, long time.

I'm not delusional, my grandfathers faced challenges and reacted the ways they did, but my work here is not about what they did or didn't do. It's more about creating the sense of what a loving grandfather might want to share with a grandchild. Time, hobbies, skills, mysteries, adventure, habits. Any of these might do. If they couldn't give them to me, well, in this image, I can give them to myself. And to you, if you feel you need them too.

The truth is I don't think I am particularly good at doing what a rose does...unfolding, opening to life. Does the rose feel as anxious as I do about what lies ahead? I could certainly learn something from the rose, who musters all its might and bursts slowly into bloom in a glorious, almost moment by moment, exhibition until, at last,the blossom fades, withers and dies. I don't have the confidence of the rose whose absolute beauty is indwelling from the very start. But then I forget that the rose itself is not all its being, it is but one physical aspect of the larger (thornier) plant including its dangerous stems and woody base, its branching roots sipping water and tasting soil.

Maybe I am more like the rose than I suspect, prickly, sometimes hurtful and always eating and drinking, smelling good once in a while and then throwing off the occasional bloom of wonderment just to keep it interesting. Maybe. No matter, the blossom of the rose is undeniably lovely, its folds always seem like a promise to me, each a work of art. It is the unfolding I must master, the patience and grace and letting-it-be-ness. Then I might be beautiful too.

The Colorado Lagoon is a wetlands that once drained into Alamitos Bay. It's surrounded on three sides by residential developments but on the north side opens to Recreation Park's golf course. I was driving by yesterday morning and noticed a thick layer of ground fog had settled in over the golf course and had drifted across the Lagoon. So I pulled my car over and walked onto the soft sand still wet from the high tide. I never know what my quarry will be at such times, a rickety old fence that ran down to the water line, a snowy egret across the Lagoon stalking its next meal, the fog itself a white gauzy blanket with tall trees sprouting from it or some young men fishing from the pontoon bridge across the Lagoon.

Of course, I shot it all.

But the young men fishing spoke to me. That is, the subject spoke to me, the young men themselves were quite absorbed in their work. I observed that they were completely silent. They did not exchange words with one another, rarely looked away from their lines, they would cast, tug their lines with short, definitive motions, reel slowly, tug some more, reel slowly and then cast again. Occasionally, one or the other would break from this routine to fetch fresh bait or fiddle with gear. But mostly it was cast, tug reel, cast, tug, reel.

The fog drifting across the small lake made the scene seem surreal between the absolute silence and their earnestness for their work. Had they suddenly unfurled large feathery wings, they might have been angels, afloat on clouds, plucking souls from the darkness below. I watched them work until I became conscious of the time and then headed for home with my own catch of the day