By the numbers: 42 pages of a new Travel Journal. 2 States and 1 Canadian Province, 6 plein air paintings, 2 digital portraits of the NBA CHAMPION DENVER NUGGETS!, 1 Wedding, 2 hotels, 1 cliffside cabin, 2 nights car sleeping, 2 couches, 2 guestrooms, 1 former roommate, 2 of my Dad’s fraternity brothers, 1 Aunt, 4 National Park Passport stamps, 3 ferries. 29 Books. Days 41-44: Travel Journal Pages 1-9, Hood River, OR and Alex and Peter’s Wedding The whole reason for this trip was to end up in Hood River by May 13th. My cousin, Alex, was getting married on the cliffs high above the Columbia River in the shadows of the Cascades. After a leisurely morning, sharing coffee on the porch and giving final ear scritches to Tuna Turner, I followed Chelsea to another adorable neighborhood in Portland to pick up her friend, Tiffany, an effervescent widow who is in her late 40’s, a painter, and a birthday twin to Chelsea. I followed them along I-84 to a Mexican restaurant in White Salmon on the Washington side of the Columbia across from Hood River. We had a lovely lunch, complete with massive margaritas, octopus soup, and a birthday serenade for Chelsea. I left them to check in at a spa and I went into Hood River to get a manicure and pedicure next to the Safeway. I needed to shift gears into family and wedding mode, and I would spend much of the next few days shuttling family members from the Portland airport to The Westcliff Lodge. After I checked into the Lodge, all I wanted to do was crash, so I wasn’t especially enthusiastic when my Aunt Cath invited me to join her and the Gravleys (my Uncle Adam, his brother Eric, and Eric’s family) to Ferment Brewery low on the Banks of the River. But I summoned my reserves of friendliness and prepared myself for what I knew would be lovely, but what felt deep in my bones that I didn’t want to do. I was so tired! The Columbia River in Hood River has 2 beaches: one for the wind surfers and one for the kite surfers. They are separated by a jetty, and you can rent equipment for either sport from companies by the river, but you have to stick to the correct beach. It’s Sharks vs Jets and never the twain shall meet. Ferment was busy, but I got a chance to get to know Arden and Azella, Eric’s daughters who are 9 and 11 years old, respectively. Back when I was 11 years old, my sister and I spent a week on the Olympic Peninsula with Alex’s family, and that is when I met Uncle Eric. Childhood is peppered with celebrity guest appearances—the people who show up briefly but make a big impact—and Uncle Eric was one of those. He was fun, novel, and best of all, not our parents. He was probably in his early thirties but was game to play and build sandcastles. We did a Ranger Walk on the beach, and Eric, my cousins, Emma, and I were tasked with inventing a new animal and building it out of things we found on the beach, and Eric helped us to create a “Frog Dog” out of sand and driftwood. He earned the nickname “Frog Dog” that day and 25 years later, I was cementing my own celebrity status with his daughters. They were the only kids at the wedding, and I spent the weekend painting with them, dancing, and turning cartwheels. I was baffled by my allure to them, as were my family members who rarely see me as being playful, but Arden and Azella were two of the highlights and I hope I’ll get to see them again before the next wedding in 25 years. It is the nature of family events to have too much to do, including errands and catching up with people you rarely get to see, that downtime is never truly restorative. As a result, the majority of the entries for the weekend of Alex’s wedding were actually written more than a month later and are desaturated by time and distance. I summarized the experience with bullet points and photographs, so the order of events may be unreliable, but our embellishments often reveal what is important to us. My bullet points are brief, but evocative:
If I’ve learned anything about storytelling from my Grandfather, it is that the facts don’t really matter, but there is a grain of truth behind every legend. What I know is that Alex and Peter’s wedding was one of the best thought out and most true to the couple ceremonies I’ve ever witnessed. Every person I met felt honored to be there and blended beautifully with all the other groups and individuals collected there. Beautiful place. Beautiful people. I think about it a lot. Days 45-51: Travel Journal pages 10-19, Kalaloch and Olympic National Park, WA “It’s true what they say, that you can’t go home,” I wrote in the first entry from the Olympic coast 5 days after the wedding. Emma and I arrived in Kalaloch on Sunday, May 14th, which was Mom’s Birthday/Mother’s Day, and we would spend the week as just the Green Women in a place that had been a landmark of our childhood. We stayed in Cabin 6 overlooking Kalaloch Creek, and the rocks that appear at low tide and watched as a gorgeous sunset turned from hazey pearl to fiery red. Kalaloch has all of the hallmarks it had from when I was a kid with some aesthetic updates. The Lodge feels much smaller (though I am taller) and the gift shop feels more grown up having replaced the polished rock station with Pendleton blankets and rain jackets. The phone booths are still there and the mercantile has been renovated, but the seagulls have been replaced with swallows and crows. Emma and I walked down to the rocks at low tide and were disappointed that the tide pools are mostly mussels and barnacles. There were a few snails and anemones, but they used to be teeming with orange and purple sea stars. We wandered along the beach through the mist before turning around and walking back through the campground. I saw a whale spout and crest; they were on their way north, migrating from Baja to the Arctic for the summer. Mostly, we all needed to take time to let down. Emma was jetlagged, Mom overworked and overwhelmed, and I’d been on the road for nearly 2 months. We read and watched people on the beach from Adirondack chairs high up on the bluff outside our cabin. Even though Kalaloch is a time machine without wifi and limited cell service, I kept thinking of my childhood with fond detachment and I kept waiting for a wave of nostalgia. It wouldn’t hit until one point when I stepped out of the wind on the beach into the protection of the bluff and the sun warmed driftwood smell hit my nose. Suddenly, I was 9 years old again, sunburned, sticky with saltwater and happy. Emma and I would drive to Ruby Beach for another low tide walk through the mist, and at first we were disappointed because the sea stacks that used to have crowded tide pools were similarly populated like the Kalaloch rocks. But when we turned down the coast to check out the lower rocks along the southern part of the beach, we finally found the orange, red, and violet sea stars piled on top of each other and tucked into the seams of the rocks. It was a relief. Later, we would drive out to Cape Flattery, the Northwesternmost point of the contiguous United States and on the Makah Tribe Reservation. In October, I went to the Southernmost point in Key West, and in March 2022, I went to South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii. I’m slowly ticking off the checklist of the perimeters of my country. We had Indian Tacos after a beautiful 2 mile hike to an outcropping of rock over turbulent turquoise water contrasted with vivid green moss and red lichen. We ended the day at the Forks Library where we worked on planning our New Zealand and Australia trip in July and August before driving back to Kalaloch to make dinner. We would close out the week with a visit to the Hoh Rainforest, and we left Kalaloch before noon but weren’t allowed into the park until 2 pm because they have metered parking (i.e. 1 car in 1 car out). I’d thrown my back out while walking on the beach, and I lay in bed as it spasms and seized, but I felt better the more I moved, so I risked the drive and hike in the hopes it would continue to improve. The Hoh is a place I must have visited but had no memory of beyond hanging mosses and colossal cedar trees. There are a few short loops and an 18 mile out and back to a glacier high in the Olympic Mountains which is another trip for another time. Emma and I stopped at the visitor center where I got my stamp and I asked a Ranger about the different ferns (sword fern vs. lady fern) and then we walked along the Hoh River trail to access the mineral-rich glacial melt water. It was not especially wet and we saw no banana slugs (which can live up to 7 years!), but I felt the tension in my back ease with every step through the 5000 year old forest. Days 52-61: Travel Journal Pages 20-21- Seattle and Bainbridge Island, WA Nine days and only a page and a half written here. This is a symptom of burnout, and finally having a home base where I could unpack most of my car and shut down for a while after 8 weeks on the move. I stayed with Aunt Cath and Uncle Adam in their home in Lake Forest Park for 4 weeks, and I would take 2-3 day trips out to visit friends and join my dad for a memorial service at his alma mater in Tacoma. I find I am especially susceptible to inertia, and when I get too settled, I stagnate. On the flip side, when I move too much, I get overwhelmed by the things I've done and the things I need to do. Somewhere around Hood River, I stopped sharing stories on Instagram and posting to my website. I still took pictures to share my sketches, so people could still keep track of me, but the slog of keeping up to date while moving on became untenable. The two entries I wrote during this time were from Third Place Books where I spent hours doing the administrative parts of being an Itinerant Illustrator (AD emails, portfolio updates, paying bills, etc.) and from the deck of a ferry Edmonds to Kingston. At Third Place, I wrote about long conversations with Cath about art, family, and finding ways to occupy ourselves after leaving teaching. On the Ferry, I wrote about listening to a man riffing on his guitar while sitting in the sun. It was the perfect soundtrack to watching sailboats and cargo ships as they crossed the Sound. What I didn’t write about was an afternoon in Fremont where I would spend an afternoon painting the Bridge Troll and enjoying the scent of the Theo’s Chocolate factory that made the whole neighborhood smell like a brownie. I didn’t write about watching playoff hockey or basketball with Cath and Adam, nor did I write about my visit with my old roommate, Zoe Peake. I have to remember these things from photos, sketches, and notes on my #WanderingAddison spreadsheet of logistics. Visiting with Zoe was cathartic. We were only roommates for one year in high school, and the last time I’d seen her was during another epic road trip after we graduated when we picked her up in Hill Country and drove along the Gulf Coast before dropping her off on St. Simons Georgia. She was with me during my first trip to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina. We hadn’t kept in touch but were aware of each other through social media, so when she saw me start moving up the coast, she invited me to stay with her when I got to Washington. I spent 2 nights with her in an apartment where she was pet sitting and we caught up on 17 years of history. I slept on a couch with two cats who would find their way onto my chest during the night and make me feel like I was drowning in fur. Zoe and I talked about adolescence and living unconventional lives and we bonded over reading aggressive amounts of romance novels. This is the fourth time this has happened over the past year where women have covertly confided that they enjoy reading what has been stigmatized as smut, but once they find another “intelligent” woman who is also a fan, it opens the floodgates of recommendations. Zoe would join me on the ferry back to Seattle where we would meet up with Hannah and Erin Duff, two more classmates from FVS, for a walk around the Arboretum and Lake Washington. Erin has become an expert gardener and she was excited to learn that Zoe had bought a house with an established garden in Bremerton. We stood by the water across from U Dub and watched as crows harassed a juvenile bald eagle, before walking back to our cars and wishing each other a good life with hopes to see each other soon. Days 62-64: Travel Journal Pages 22-30- North Cascades National Park, WA North Cascades National Park has been a National Park since the 1960s and it reminds me a lot of Glacier meets Shenandoah. It's about 2 hours away from Seattle, almost to the Canadian border and it follows the Skagit River through gorges and canyons penned in by jagged mountains and a few remaining glaciers. Several dams on the river created Ross and Diablo Lakes which are an opaque turquoise due to all of the suspended sediment from the melting glaciers. I made it to the Park just before 1 pm and got recommendations for hikes and places to paint. I did a few loops up and down the canyon before returning to the Diablo Lake overlook where I painted on the edge of a cliff for about 2 hours. I really liked my drawing and ruined it with watercolor and impatience, but I learned a lot and it was good to have completed something. I didn’t arrive with much of a plan or interesting food. Maybe I’d hit up the general store in Newhalem, the hydroelectric company town, or drive the whole of Highway 20 through the park. Maybe I’d draw. Maybe I’d hike up above the tree line… It’s possible I miss out when I travel like this, deciding what to do just before I do it, but sometimes I end up doing things I could never have planned for. When I woke up the next day, I drove up the newly opened Washington Pass to draw Liberty Mountain. It felt good to be at elevation and I focused on drawing with purple and black ballpoint, seeing all the details I could through the crystal clear air. Earlier, I took a short hike across the suspension bridge over the Skagit and took time to read signs along the trail that pointed out relics from many forest fires and how some cedar trees behave like chimneys and can burn from the inside and still survive. There was another plaque that showed a row of cedars all in a row that had been saplings on the same nurse log. I loved learning about that. I ended up at the Mazama Public House east of the park, and I shared a table with a couple from Tacoma. They were retired former biologists and teachers, and the husband eagerly shared with me a large head-sized puffball mushroom he’d found on the side of the road. I didn’t ask for their names, but we shared a meal and excellent conversation before I turned around and went back to my campground on the other side of the pass. The next day I would hike 2 miles straight up to Pyramid Lake. I knew it would be brutal, so I waited until the last day because I was going to sweat profusely and didn’t want to stink up my car which I had to sleep in for two nights. I drove the 2 hours back to Cath and Adam’s for a quick shower before driving down to Tacoma to meet my dad who had flown in from Maryland the night before. Days 65-76: Travel Journal Pages 31-42, Tacoma, Seattle, Whidbey Island, WA, and Vancouver, BC. Dad came to Washington for two weekends, which was one of my main reasons for staying in the PNW for so long. It’s rare that I get one-on-one time with him, and he was there to attend the memorial service for one of his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers and then his 40th Reunion for the University of Puget Sound. I was glad to have the chance to be his wingman and catch up with his brothers, most of whom I hadn’t seen since I was a child. We sat around a firepit and discussed the reasons for why fraternities should continue to exist and why they maybe shouldn’t. Greek life wasn’t part of my college experience apart from being allowed to live in the SAE house for two years after they got kicked off campus, but this group of men has been my father’s consistent community for four decades. They were there for his triumphs, mistakes, and many of his best stories. I was glad to be present for them all while they honored their Brother, Scott, with a White Rose Ceremony in the Puget Sound Chapel. Later in the week, Dad and I would drive out to Whidbey Island north of Seattle to visit with his Brother, Nick. We took a ferry and had mussels and a lamb burger in Coupeville before driving to to Ebey’s Landing, a National Historic preserve, complete with blockhouses which were small fortifications that look like elevated log cabins meant to protect settlers from Native attacks. Then we drove north to Nick’s. Nick and his wife Kathy have a lovely beach house and awesome dogs on the northwest side of the island, just north of the Naval Air Force base and just south of Deception Pass State Park. Their home overlooks a private beach complete with soft sand and relentless Tomcat flyovers making regular maneuvers. Nick is really similar to my dad in that he is quiet and attentive, but also a little awkward. When we arrived, I excused myself to walk the beach while Dad and Nick caught up and established a rhythm. I have a default setting to make people feel comfortable, but my inclination seemed forced, so I stepped away to reset and when I returned, we all sat on the deck and shared easy conversation while we watched the tide come in and the San Juan Islands emerge and disappear in the haze. The next morning, Dad and went for a hike around Deception Pass State Park which is known for a high trestle bridge, rocky beaches and trails. We parked, climbed up to the bridge and then another half mile to the summit of Goose Rock. The weather was fair but we worked up a sweat before wandering down to the beach where we sat on a drift log and watched the rock collectors search for jaspers and agates to tumble. The rest of the day would be spent driving up to Vancouver where we would walk around Stanley Park (the same Stanley of Cup fame). The park is on the tip of the Vancouver Peninsula and is home to rose gardens and totem poles. The Vancouver totems are different from the ones I saw in Sitka last July. They are more ornate with a wider variety of full figures. We walked along the water to a lighthouse that looked out on the bay where cruise ships docked, rowers rowed, and seaplanes landed. It’s gorgeous here. We checked into the hotel and decompressed for 1.5 hrs before calling an Uber to take us to Gas Town to see the steam clock (a clock that runs on steam, obviously). We planned to walk to Chinatown for some dinner, but we ended up walking through one of the most sprawling and crowded homeless camps I’d ever seen. Everything in Chinatown was closed after 8 pm, so we ended up at a bar where we watched the Stanley Cup playoffs and ate peri peri boneless wings. We ended the night by walking back to our hotel along the water. We ate gelato and failed to find a Mountie hat. It was a good day. We did find a Mountie hat the next morning (my father’s shiteating grin was worth the search) before driving back down to the border which would take us an hour to get through. We parted ways in Seattle for the night while he drove down to Tacoma for his reunion, and I watched the Denver Nuggets in the NBA playoffs with Cath and Adam. I’d meet up with him again in Tacoma for a BBQ before I checked out Point Defiance and the Rose Garden, and then again at Four Generals Brewery in Renton, a project of one of his other Brothers that uses a reverse osmosis system to mimic the mineral content of the water in German cities in the brewing process. Dad and I sat at the bar and had a fascinating conversation with the bartender about the state of healthcare in the military. My dad worked for the VA, and she used to be a therapist on base, and I had lots of questions.
0 Comments
By the numbers: 20 pages and one completed Travel Journal. 2 States, 4 plein air paintings, 1 hotel, 1 Railroad Resort, 3 nights car sleeping, 1 friend and former colleague (and bird, lizard, dog and cat), 1 “Camp Friend”, 1 National Park Passport stamp, 1 Art and State History Museum, and 2 artists studios. 9 Books. Day 31: Travel Journal Pages 220-222- Big Sur, Monterrey, and Heywood, CA Before this trip, my experience with California was limited to a few Alcatraz swims with the high school team I coached, and one conference in San Diego early in my career that resulted in one of the most egregious hangovers of my life. Yet, California exists as a mythic force in Americana and seeing things like the Hollywood sign or driving along The 101 or Pacific Coast Highway seem like hallmarks of the “American Experience” because they are present in the backdrops of so many TV shows and movies. When I left Santa Maria and made my way up the coast to see my friend/former classmate/former colleague, Cheye, I knew I needed to see Big Sur. The drive to Big Sur was nice and quiet. It took me through farmland and the Superbloom, but fires and landslides had closed so much of the Pacific Coast Highway that I had to approach from the north. The drive was the experience for the day, and while it was too misty to see the sweeping vistas well, the views still had an epic moodiness that made the trip worthwhile. I pulled off the road several times to watch as massive waves pounded the cliffs hundreds of feet below, while hillsides behind me were blanketed in gold flowers and orange poppies. The mists and pops of saturated color against the gray reminded me of Iceland, save for the massive swells of turquoise and frothing white. I’ll need to find a way to return here. I stopped briefly in Monterrey to walk the beach and kill some time before getting to Cheye’s apartment in Heywood, near Oakland. I’d spend the next four nights taking up Cheye’s living room floor while steadily working to win over a bird named Mango, a skeptical little dog named Chubbs, and Terryanne, Cheye’s wonderfully wary and introverted fiancee. There was also a cat and a lizard who were unfazed by my presence. Day 32: Travel Journal Pages 223-226 Haywood and Oakland, CA A common theme of this trip is reconnecting and picking up where I left off with people who were important to me for a time, but for whom time and distance have been significant barriers to maintaining a friendship. Cheye is one of those friends who fell off the map when she moved to California, but we had been young teachers together and wasted vast amounts of each others’ time when we should have been grading. It’s not always easy to tell how well work friendships will translate out in the real world, but we soon found out that the shared experience of teaching wasn't the only thing that bonded us. I woke up just before 7 am to visit with her since she didn’t teach class before lunch. We talked about anything and everything that has happened since moving to California including her coming out as a lesbian and getting engaged. COVID was a common topic, and Mango, the cockatiel, flew around the apartment and kept chirping and landing on Cheye’s head, while Chubbs, the antisocial mutt, slept against my thigh. Later in the morning, we drove to Foundation Art Space in Oakland, where Cheye is setting up a darkroom studio. The space itself is full of all kinds of studios including spaces for painters, fashion designers, and printmakers, and it is piled high with dusty equipment and supplies. The rent for an 8 x 10 foot space is between $450-$500 a month. Cheye noticed a better space on the same floor as the sink, so after checking to see if it was available, we spent the next half hour moving her equipment and gallons of water out of her old space and into the new one. We drove to the Diamond District for some veggie pizza before going to Head Royce, Cheye’s school. It was the first time I’d been back on a non-college campus since I left teaching, and I got the experience of feeling equally alien and native. It was fun to talk shop with other art teachers, but I struggled not to insert myself into casual conversations with students who had no clue what I was doing there. I don’t miss it. After Head Royce, I went back to my car to find an angry orange parking violation notice under my wiper. It immediately went into the travel journal and I drove to the Oakland Public Library to write for a while. Days 33-34: Travel Journal Pages 227-231, Marin Headlands, San Francisco, and Oakland, CA A month into this trip, and I’m starting to feel the wear and tear of itinerancy, though I wouldn’t trade a day of it. Keeping the balance sheet of Input vs. Output, whether it is money, introversion vs. extroversion, or experience vs. synthesis, saturates and overwhelms me more some days than it does others. I wrote in my journal that I was worn out and didn’t want to do much aside from drawing and listening to my book. Both Terryanne and Cheye had work, so I cleared out and was grateful to have two days where I could embrace Bay Area traffic to get through a few audiobooks and act on my own whims. I drove to The Marin Headlands to hike and paint. I found some peace just sitting on the hard sand of Rodeo Beach, painting the rocks and surfers before climbing around the hills to find the graffitied battlements. At times, I struggled to really relax because there were signs everywhere I parked saying that the area was a smash and grab hotspot for break-ins. Cheye and Terryanne had each told me their own break-in stories, and I felt a similar anxiety that I’d had in New Orleans. I’d have preferred my old ignorance. In spite of all this I felt that if I ever had reason to settle in the Bay Area for a while, I’d feel good about being able to find places like the grassy headlands to escape to. After painting, I drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and hiked in heavy rain up to some of the higher view points where I took a few soaked selfies and enjoyed looking at the locks on the chain link fences, a trope stolen from a bridge in Paris and the bane of every other bridge’s existence. Crashing thunder hastened my descent and I drove across the bridge before a quick walk around the Presidio, a Park Stamp, and a slow return around the bay back to Cheye’s. Lots of harbor seals and wild flowers. A good day. I spent the next day at The Oakland Museum of California, an art, history, and natural history museum all for the price of one. I sat and journaled in an Eames recliner while facing a massive painting of the Sierras from the 1800s, and I was reminded of the Thomas Morans in DC of western canyons that I make semi-annual pilgrimages to see. Familiar spaces in unfamiliar places. The art museum focused on California with an emphasis on Bay Area artists and featured 1950’s drag costumes along with Hockneys, Dorothea Langs, and Ansel Adamses. I ended up spending the whole day wandering between the three museums and a special exhibit on Angela Davis, the Civil Rights Activist and first woman to end up on the FBIs 10 most wanted list. The history wing begins by telling the story of the Tribes in each region of California, and like the Alaska State museum, it doesn’t pull any punches. The museum uses the term “Genocide” to describe the attempted eradication of native peoples by the U.S. Government and it talks about colorism, and the preference of white San Franciscans for “white” Spaniards vs. “dark” Mexicans when romanticizing “Old California''. One of the highlights of the art wing was a collection of photos and paintings by Hing Liu, who was trained to create hero portraits for the Communist Party in China, but shifted to creating striking massive portraits of real life using historic photos from the Chinese diaspora. I ended the night playing Zoom trivia with some of Cheye’s friends and Terryanne told me about her tattoos. I left feeling comfortable that my presence was a net positive, rather than a negative. Day 35: Travel Journal Pages 132-233- Fort Bragg Glass Beach, and Dunsmuir, CA. When moving from place to place, timing is often tricky to get right. I need to plan my moseying to accommodate peoples’ work days or when I’m able to check into a hotel or campsite. I needed to clear out of Cheye’s when she and Terryanne went to work, and I couldn’t check into my campsite at the Railroad Resort near Mt. Shasta until after 4 PM, so I swung wide along the coast for a stop at Fort Bragg. Terryanne told me about the Glass Beach, a relic from when the military base there used to toss its trash into the sea. The accumulated glass has been tumbled and tossed into a remarkable beach of multicolored gemstones, all because of litter. I’m a sucker for beach glass, always have been, and it suits my magpie tendencies to collect it wherever I find it. Two years ago, I sat on a beach in Varenna, Italy, a small town on Lake Cuomo, and for two days I dug through the sand filling a water bottle with tiny chips of glass. I spent two days doing this, and I ended up with a heavy bottle full of the pieces dropped into the lake from generations of tourists and rich Italians blithely tossing their empties off their boats and into the water. Oddly, I wasn’t tempted by the Fort Bragg glass, and I happily left it for others. Instead, I sat high above the surf on the cliffs and watched the ground squirrels run between the rocks. I would have loved to paint the high stacks of rocks that were capped with red and green scrubby bushes, but it was windy and wet. Overall, it was a half-hour stop on a three hour detour that was totally worth it since it sent me through tiny windy highways deep in massive redwood forests. When I turned inland towards Shasta, I got on the Interstate for the first time in over a week and as I gained elevation, it got colder and rainier. I never ended up seeing the Peak itself, and when I finally exited in Dunsmuir to get to the Railroad Resort, a kooky campsite and hotel where you can stay in an old caboose for the night, it was a complete downpour. I ate dinner in the hotel restaurant that was in a passenger car from the 1940s. I sat at the bar and wrote up the day in my travel journal while a truly abysmal troubadour murdered Bowie. It was one of the few times my friendly stranger mojo wasn’t working until a local named Sam who was a week out from open heart surgery sat down next to me and ordered a Cinco de Mayo margarita. We talked for a bit about Colorado and being nomadic. He’d lived in Woodland Park and Denver 30 years ago but moved when the hippies started becoming yuppies, so he relocated to Dunsmuir to find what he’d loved about “Old Colorado”. I wished him a lovely night and then walked back to my soggy campsite where I would test out a car mattress I’ve had for a few years but never got a chance to use. It was tricky moving things around in the back of my Subaru to make room for the bed to inflate without getting soaked, and the final result was a cramped night while the rain battered the metal roof. I set the car alarm off twice and raced to shut it off before I woke up the whole campsite. It was rough. Days 36-37: Travel Journals Pages 233-236, Nehalem State Park, Oregon Coast Planning for this trip started in March and was reverse engineered from a single fixed point: a wedding in Hood River Oregon on May 13th. One of the first people I reached out to was a friend in Portland who had been asking me to stay with her for years, and I felt like it would work for me to stay there the week leading up to the wedding. I also knew that my friend Chelsea, whom I had met six years ago at the Illustration Academy in Kansas City and had one of those intense summer friendships with, was also turning 40 that week and might have had plans. She responded that she would love to see me and I was welcome to be there for anything she had going on and we would play it by ear. I penciled her in on my spreadsheet and then we both went about our lives. While I was circumnavigating the country, Chelsea was traveling around Europe with her mother and we were both vaguely aware of each other’s meanderings through Instagram stories. After an awkward string of texts with Cheye the week before when we worked out that I was planning to stay with her for 4 nights when we’d left that part vague, I figured I should confirm my plans with Chelsea before I kept moving north. She left my messages on “read” for a few days and I started to get anxious. When I finally got a response, she told me she had just broken up with her boyfriend who was still living with her, but crashing on the couch, the guest bed and occasionally in her room, but that she was looking forward to seeing me but everything was a little up in the air. Worse comes to worse, I could stay in “The Ambo”, an ambulance she had converted into a camper a few years back. I responded that if she wasn’t up for company, I’d happily find a Plan B, but that I wanted to see her even if it was just for a night. She left me on “read” for another day, so I started making plans. My sister had camped along the Oregon coast a few years back so I texted her for a few recommendations. I booked two nights at a campground at Nehalem State Park in Manzanita, and a night in a motel in town. I’d stay with Chelsea in Portland for one night before clearing out and driving to Hood River for the wedding. I texted her my plans and I could feel her relief from hundreds of miles away. I drove for 7.5 hours through “bite the back of your hand” beauty in Northern California and out to the Tillamook Coast. I've never been to a prettier beach; the Oregon coast has the cliffs and temperate rainforests that you find in Washington combined with the soft white dunes and grasses that are common in The Outer Banks. Add to that the light and sunset you usually find in New Mexico and I was in love. I don’t know whether it was the lack of expectation, kismet, or the gorgeous weather I had the entire time I was there, but I was genuinely enchanted. The high cloud cover filtered rays of sun and turned the surf pearlescent and luminous. I slept in my car again with a much more comfortable configuration, and I managed to set my car alarm off once more. I spent the next day painting and catching up on work at a Starbucks across from the Tillamook factory. I was glad to have a few days to be in time-killing mode before Alex’s wedding. I read a few books, worked on my road trip playlists, and drove into town a few times to mail my ballot for the Colorado Springs mayoral runoff election and get coffee. My grandmother has been mailing ballots to me all over the country for the past year, complete with printed emails and literature from her neighbors about who to vote for. I love automatic mail-in voting! Days 38-40: Travel Journal Pages 236- 240, Cannon Beach and Portland, Oregon Chelsea decided a night on the coast was just what the doctor ordered to distract her from her break-up, so she packed her dogs up and made her way to her friend’s house in Manzanita. I spent the morning painting Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach and eating spicy Cheez-Its. Most of the paintings I’ve done on this trip have been better for the experience rather than the outcome. I had a mentor who recommended I use the paintings to both document my trip and also as a means to fund future travels. Mostly I’ve been giving them away. I’m not a perfectionist, but like many artists, I still question the merit of my work. I never trust that it’s worth more than a few likes on social media, even when somebody hands me a check or shares a picture of my work hanging on their wall. I know it’s irrational and counterproductive. But it's true. I joined Chelsea at her friend’s house where I met her dogs Bernie and Tuna Turner. We took them out for a hike to an overlook that was accessed by a locals trail on one of the coastal overlooks and were joined by Chelsea’s friend Lindsey and her dog, Oliver. We drank wine while watching the sun descend and I marveled at the difference between the places I discover on my own and the places that are revealed to me when I have a playmate. We stayed up there until the dogs started to fight so we packed up and moved down to the beach. Chelsea and Lindsey were two of three women I met from Portland who were ex girlfriends of musicians from indie bands I’d listened to in college. They were full of stories, and some regrets, and I was a little in love with both of them by the time the sun set. They are both older than me and reminders that a life well-lived isn’t always simple or pretty. The next day, Chelsea and I had brunch in Manzanita and I painted Short Sands (her favorite beach for surfing) while she worked on email. I followed her into Portland later that evening and met her Ex. He’s a fisherman in Alaska and was leaving town at the end of the month. Chelsea lives in a beautiful Craftsman in Southeast Portland, that she bought in foreclosure a few years back, and her home is covered in handmade art and homemade bongs and penises. Chelsea recently bought a building and opened a gallery called “The Purple Door” a few blocks from her house and down the street from her favorite local bar where everyone knows her name. We walked around town and she introduced me to her friends and shared the gallery space. No one was a stranger to her and she rolled her eyes at me when I called her a “Pillar of the Community.” I often don’t feel like a main character in the story of my life. I’m stoic and undramatic, and while I am likable and interesting in my own way, I probably wouldn’t pick up my own memoir at the bookstore. Yet, spending time around people like Chesea—of which there are few, she is truly a diamond in the rough— reminds me of a concept of “The Neutral Mask”. In his book, “Understanding Comics”, Scott McCloud talks about the idea of a neutral mask being a universal stand-in that allows an audience to see themselves in the place of the main character. This is achieved through having limited detail or a bland personality, thus allowing the reader to insert themself into the role of the protagonist. The more colorful and interesting characters are reserved as side characters. This idea is seen over and over in some of the most successful movies of the last few decades which are led by cartoons, masked heroes, or dull protagonists with standout sidekicks, i.e. Luke Skywalker vs. Han Solo, or Will Turner vs. Jack Sparrow. The characters we love the most are rarely the ones we identify closely with. I am the Neutral Mask and Chelsea is the Jack Sparrow of my story. I’m fine with this. I like collecting sparrows. We would end the night after crawling to a few different bars where Chelsea made friends with strangers and I explained my wanderings over and over again to every new audience. The common refrain was “don’t be an asshole and try to see how long you can get away with it” when I described how I was living my life. By the end of the night, I felt I’d successfully distracted Chelsea from her breakup and she was eager for me to return to Portland soon so she could share more of her life and friends with me. I fell into bed unsure if I could keep up with her for long, but glad to have had the time exploring her city with her. ![]()
Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time." -Jean-Michel Basquiat
Maybe it’s a sign of my impending middle-age, but I don’t typically start posts with quotes; I prefer to find my own words. Yet, I’d like to add that the road trip playlist decorates both time and space. All my life, songs have become inextricably linked with moving landscapes and I can go back to different albums and see the mountains or the prairie in my mind’s eye because the songs followed me around the world. I am transported back to my adolescence driving between Kansas City and Denver, or to the summer I spent living in Amsterdam finding solace in familiar songs even when I felt lonely and out of my depth, or strutting through Harvard Square while listening to Daft Punk shortly before slipping on a leaf and rolling my ankle. Since 2014, I have collected “Those Songs” that have followed me throughout the year. I find them in cafes and between sets at concerts. They are in the background of TV shows or rediscovered when shuffled through the random rips and downloads I’ve been collecting since I was 14. They are the ear worms that hook me during a hike and lock into something emotional that name feelings that I wasn’t always aware of. Shazam is my Virgil helping me identify the artists and the songs that add texture to my experience. I begin and end my playlists in June. I suppose this is a holdover from being a student and then a teacher, but endings and beginnings will probably always be associated with the American academic school year. This timeline also has the benefit of early summer concerts that provide a solid foundation of songs that play on repeat during summer road trips. Over the years, these playlists have become time capsules of both my tastes and my travels and listening to them is like visiting with old friends and sharing memories. June is done, and so is the playlist for 2022-2023. It began in Alaska after I left Fountain Valley and was gathered across 34 states and 2 countries. It has been to the southernmost point in the Lower 48 (Key West) and the northwesternmost point (Olympic Peninsula) and all the miles in between. It is eclectic, it is random, and it was me last year. I know posts like these are self-indulgent, but if you are reading this, then chances are you like to indulge me too. So here it is. Enjoy! |
Addison GreenThe day-to-days of an Itinerant Illustrator Archives
May 2024
Categories |