Webster Art

Silent Running at Darrington

I’ve been hearing about a famous route at Darrington for decades. It is called Silent Running and it’s rated 5.9. I’ve avoided it up until now because I heard it was runnout. After leading the two crux pitches, and following 3 of the others, I have a much better understanding of it. Yes, after one of the nicely bolted 5.9 cruxes, it does have a 40 foot runnout. But if you go left instead of following the seam there are a decent number of normal holds. And if you led the 9 section you won’t fall on the runnout 5.7. And that is the only dangerous section.

The true cruxes are beautifully bolted with nice new shiny 3/8″ inch stainless steel. The bolting was done by our new friend David, and his friend Matt. David followed me and Aaron up the climb, and even led a few of the pitches. We were moving fast with simul belaying. We were in high spirits.

The climbing was as good as it gets. The moves seemed impossibly hard. There were times when I didn’t have a plan at all. I simply placed my feet on imaginary holds and kept moving up.

My fingers were pretty much useless. There was nothing to grab at all.  You could step high, you could step low, you could move right or left, none of it mattered. The only plan was to keep moving up.

A new leader

L. decided to start leading this last Memorial day weekend. Her first lead was up above Penny Lane where she led  a short 5.8 crack left of the long 5.8, to the right of Split B. Next she led a 5.6 down to the right of Neat and Cool.

Next morning she led Laughing Crack. It is a long and lovely 5.7 finger crack on a leaning over slab.

Twenty feet up she realized she wasn’t in the mood and started complaining about how her gear was bad. I had been teaching her what a good cam looked like for the last couple days. We had been placing and replacing cams on the ground while I explained the correct lobe angles.

So there she was, 20 feet up up the cliff. It was difficult to climb back down. She was like the proverbial cat stuck in the tree. It’s easy to climb up, not so easy to come down. She had pretty much mastered cleaning anchors…I’d taught her that 6 times over the previous two days. Her thinking was that she could simply keep going up to the good steel anchor bolts and lower off.

Instead of coming down, which would have been relatively safe, she placed more gear, swore it sucked and climbed higher. At about 60 feet up she was still cursing her gear but by that point her hands were sweating in the 84 degree heat. She was frazzled, out of power, and in panic mode. Sue and I were sweating bullets and thinking worst case scenarios.

The rock always wins when you head up a cliff under prepared. She peeled off and took a  whipper. As she fell, I had enough time to think that this might be the last time I ever saw her in one piece. My wife started crying. However, I’ve caught a lot of falls over the decades and simply locked off my GriGri + belay device, waiting for a piece to stop her. A Metolius yellow 4 cam TCU caught her fall.

She had slid down on her hip, which wouldn’t have been bad. But because she was wearing running shorts she got an ugly road rash. We call that kind of fall a “cheese grater”. More cursing ensued, but she eventually calmed down. After realizing she was perfectly safe, and the gear was good, she got back on the lead and finished out the route. She threaded the anchor and lowered down.

When I cleaned the route, I was surprised to see that 90 percent of her cams were perfectly placed. She had mastered the art of cam placements in the nick of time. I think her trash talk about their quality was simply her tendency toward perfectionism…which she got from me.

Life without Facebook

My last post was written shortly after I got off Facebook. It’s been a month now. I get on about once a day, but only toward the end of the week when I’m communicating with climbing partners. When I’m on it’s just to check messenger, I never look at pictures anymore, or scroll down to look at the feeds of my virtual friends.

I have another friend who did the exact same thing. His work got busy, and he dumped Facebook. I stopped off after work to see him today. It was so refreshing to communicate with a real friend face to face. We used to talk on facebook, or via messenger, or phone. But face to face feels so right.

His girlfriend was there for part of the time and we talked about how humans evolved to need face to face communication. We are still wired that way. It’s not like we’ve evolved past it. Communicating on facebook over pictures, and status updates seems sort of like real life, but it pales in comparison to the real thing.

We spend all those hours peering at these little glass screens, typing cute remarks about photos or politics. And it feels like human communication…but really all you are doing is typing while starting at glass. You don’t get to hear their voices, smell their scent, see the real colors of their eyes, and there expressions as you talk. At the end of the day, it doesn’t work for me. I prefer to have a few real friends, who actually like me enough to see me in person, than 100 facebook ghosts seen on a glass screen.

Despite my avoidance of facebook, I do like to write, mostly to clear my head, but also as a way to have a record of what I was doing, long after I forget about the little day to day details.

I went to Vantage and met Dave D, Roy, JoJo, Ingrid, Vlad and Des. Dave, Roy and I climbed all the moderate cracks, including Pony Keg, Air Guitar, Crossing the threshold, Whipsaw and Tangled up in Blue. I led everything but crossing. Dave was warming up after some time off, and Roy is still learning crack climbing. Sunday I led Steel Grill after following Ride ’em cowboy. Steel Grill wore me out. I had to pull on a cam at the crux. After that I was weak as a puppy. But it was a super fun weekend. At one point I was sitting on the ledge looking out over the lovely afternoon light on the valley down below.

“There’s no place I’d rather be.”

“I hear that,” Dave replied.

Facebook time out

When I was on vacation last month I enjoyed being off the grid. It was super nice to live in the moment and forget about the world outside our little climbing and painting bubble down in Utah.

After I returned, I tried to improve the paintings I did down there. But it turns out I couldn’t do much for them in the studio. I seem to be an on location painter, period. I tried to breath more life into them…but the oxygen they need is down in Moab, not in my studio. I did at least try not to make them worse. And I only worked on one of them, but eventually gave it up as a lost cause. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the painting, I tend to do that. I’ve had paintings  sell that I thought were broken.

But finally I posted them up to Facebook to see what my friends thought of my work. But after posting them, I got to thinking about why it even mattered to me what my friends thought. And that made me realize I needed a break from Facebook. I haven’t been on for a week, and intend to stay off for a while.

I like to thing that my art is an activity that transcends time. One of the reasons I love making art is that I am creating something that lives all on it’s own. A good piece of art, whether it is a book, a song, or a painting, has a life of it’s own. We are creating beauty where beauty did not exist before.

There is a reason why drawings still survive from the 1500’s and earlier. Everyone who sees them recognizes the beauty, and treasures them. Now this is not to say my art is that good. But perhaps someday it will be, if I keep learning and improving.

I have one of my great aunts paintings on my mantel. She painted it around 1910, and it has been handed down through the family. I love the way art lives on it’s own merits. If it’s pretty, people will hang onto it because it adds beauty to their lives. If the art is bad, it gets thrown away, and that is as it should be.

I also have tons of old photos that have come down through the family, including some of my great aunt, the painter. But the funny thing is, I have no use for them. They don’t add any beauty to my life. Her painting however is lovely. Art is cool, and I feel very lucky to be a painter.

I have all my recent paintings up on my landscapes page on my main website: my landscape painting page

I have a lot of administrative work to do this quarter. We are planning more changes in our program. They will be good changes, and will help our students get jobs, but it’s a lot of extra work above and beyond my normal full time teaching job. Still, I shouldn’t complain, I’m happy to be working. It’s fun learning new things.

Indian Creek climbing and painting

Indian Creek, Moab

I’ve been back from climbing at Indian Creek for 10 days. Daphney and I had a great time.  We spent the first day with

Craig, who was on his way home from working in San Diego. That first day we climbed at the Donnelly crag. I tried to lead a 120 foot route called “Generic Crack”. The rack is one red, 9 yellows, two blues and a 4. I was fresh off a 24 hour drive on two hours of sleep…I bailed early. Craig and Daphney both led it clean. We also did the Cave route…or rather, they led it, while I took pictures. It was all reds, which is my worst size. My hands don’t fit in red cracks.  I found out later that, for guys with big hands, learning to master reds is the hardest thing to learn at the creek.

That was Saturday. Sunday we went back to Donnelly and climbed a few things we hadn’t got to the day before. She was super tired from on sighting 5.11’s the day before with Craig. We decided to take a rest afternoon. I offered to teach her how to oil paint.

We each did a nice painting of this rode side buttress in the afternoon light. It was her first oil painting ever and she did a fabulous job! We both started with  monochrome wash using Raw Umber. It’s a lot like using pencil, except it’s oil paint. You simply have to do a value study. I got bored with mine and broke out the color to make what you see here. The light was flat…no cast shadows, so the painting turned out almost abstract. Normally I hate painting in flat light, but something about this little painting works.

That night…might have been Sunday or Monday, it poured. We woke up to soaked sandstone and decided it was a good day to drive to town for some shopping and showers. We stopped by to see a hay bale house she had helped to build a couple years ago. It was a standard Ranch style house, one story, but the interior was all done by hand using hay and mixes of special mud.  The floor was not concrete, it was mud mixed with hay. You aren’t supposed to ever mop it. The owner can’t hang pictures on the walls with nails because the walls are hay bales covered with 2 inches of adobe plaster. I heard that this style of home construction can outlast standard buildings.

We still had time to kill before some of her other friends got off work so we hiked up to the North Fork of Mill Creek where there is a cool waterfall. There were some folks with a couple slack lines, but we ignored them as we set up our easels to paint. I decided to do this one with palette knife.  It was once again flat light, even raining a little bit but we found an overhang under which to paint. I was fully expecting this one to bomb. I still don’t know what to think of it, but it feels very fresh and lively. I use instagram to reach out to other like minded artists. When I posted this little waterfall, I was shocked to see it rack up more “likes” than any other painting I’ve ever posted.

 

We hung out with Ranger  M and his girlfriend J when we were in town on a rain day. My favorite route was “where’s carruthers”. It’s a 10+ left of Scarface that I led clean after following on top rope. As Daphney said, “Learning to accept top ropes when they are offered is part of how you become a creek climber”.

I did 4 paintings down there, all in a three day period where the rains came in at night. We drove to town, and I painted a waterfall up a canyon outside of Moab. When we woke up, I was ready to climb, but she said the rock needed another day. When I found out Delicate Arch was half an hour away, she went hiking and I went painting. I did two paintings that day.

I’ve had  the first one on my easel for the last few days. I’m trying to bring it to life. A lot of people liked it, perhaps more than any other painting I’ve done plein air. But I didn’t like it. I felt it was weak in many places. I’ve been slowly building in beauty, but it’s such a delicate process. The light is extremely tricky. It’s all reflected reds and tans. I’m trying to work from the photos I took as I did the plein air work…but I really miss the real light. Cameras don’t capture what I need, so my colors end up being guesses. Still, I was guessing on location, and it’s good practice to work in the studio.

Daphney gave me some great advice for the creek that applies to painting as well. “Forget about all your preconceived notions of how to define sucess. Do the best you can, and if it can’t be perfect, it’s fine to fail. You learn stuff either way, and it’s all fun. We are out here in this beautiful place, living the life we dreamed of. Who cares if the route was climbed perfectly, or if the painting is magnificent. Life is about learning and growing.”

Another cool route was mudslide 10+ over at Optimat0r wall. I followed D up Soulfire 5.11+: 130 feet of reds, capped by 3 greens near the anchor. I did quite well, only hung 3 times. I can’t wait to go back. It is the best crack climbing area I’ve ever seen.

Crossed over to the dark side

Ever since 1976, practically a lifetime ago, Sue and I have been trying to master telemark skiing. We used to do it on cross country skinny skis with 3 pin bindings. It got harder and harder as we got older, natural I guess, since it is such a difficult and dynamic turn. It’s like doing squats, except while hurtling down the ski slope.

There used to be a mindset among my generation during the 80’s when we were young. We shunned the downhill ski areas. They were too crowded and too expensive. We would skin up into the mountains where it was free. There were no crowds, no chair lifts, and we prided ourselves on our hardiness. The only reasonably light ski back then was the cross country ski. We’d buy the ones with metal edges. They were light on the uphill, challenging on the downhill, but that was all part of the fun.

When we had kids, they followed us up on their skinny skis, but they never really mastered the telemark turn. It requires a lot of practice. As they became adults, with money of their own, they looked at the learning curve in telemarking and went straight to Randonee skis. These are also called AT (All Terrain) skis. You can still skin up into the backcountry, but on the way down you lock your heels, just like a downhill ski binding.

Because they both have great jobs in the medical field, they were able buy downhill tickets and quickly mastered the difficult skiing conditions found in the backcountry. Whenever we took them out into the mountains (usually Paradise at Mt. Rainier), they would leave us in the dust.

5 years ago we bought new telemark gear, the first in 30 years. We thought it would be the ticket to skiing better. It did help a lot. When I bought my yearly downhill ticket I could ski all day on my telegear. That never used to happen on my skinny skis.

But I still can’t even begin to keep up with my kids. The teleturn requires so much practice that it is basically impossible to master without a season pass. And even then it’s not a super fast turn like you can do on downhill skis.

Long story short, Sue and I pulled some money out of savings and invested in new backcountry AT gear. They feature pivoting toes for skinning up, and  lock down heels on the bindings for skiing down.

I feel a bit guilty for giving up on my dream of being a great telemarker. There is an old saying about skiing: “Free the heel, free the mind”. It’s a bumper sticker seen at ski areas. Supposedly telemark skiing with it’s free floating heel is more of a zen experience. It is lovely turn, no doubt. But at our advanced state of decrepitude, I think we need all the help we can get.

There is another old saying in regards to telemark skiing. When you give up on telemark skiing, and buy skis with lock down heels, you have “crossed over to the dark side”. Still, now that I’m on the dark side maybe I have a chance of keeping up with my daughter. I just need to ride the chair a few times to get the hang of downhill skiing again.

Who knows, perhaps there’s hope for us old duffers. Sue got Black Diamond Helios skis, with the Dynafit speed Radical binding, while I got the Blizzard 95 Zero G skis, with the Dynafit TLT Radical ST 2.0 Binding. I’m dreading looking at my credit card balance after these purchases. But, these skis should be the last skis we ever buy, so it may be money well invested. We’ve skied on them once, in the rain, $40 lift tickets and they worked fabulous. It’s like having brand new downhill skis, which we haven’t had in 35 years. The bindings released correctly twice when I fell. I like the theory behind these Dynafit bindings. I did some research and they’ve been around since the late 80’s. They started as a modification of the Ramer binding, which was my downhill binding up until last week. Ramers had a “tuning fork” that would pivot on some pins. In  a fall, the tuning fork would flex enough to open, releasing the boot from the ski. These Dynafit bindings have a mechanism that reflects that heritage.

Adding a logo in a WordPress custom theme

Add a logo image function to your custom theme

Geek alert! This post is for the students in my WordPress class. There is nothing here worth reading if you are looking for stories about climbing or painting. Read More

Self Portrait at 63

Staring at Mirrors

I finished another self portrait today.

I will post in order, first to last, along with a few notes about my thinking.

I started in pencil, made sure it was accurate, then sprayed it with fix. This pencil drawing was about 4 hours of work.  I intentionally made the eyes oversized. Several months ago I watched a movie called “Big Eyes”. Read More

Self Portrait March 2017

Another Self Portrait

I started another self portrait a few days ago. Pencil seemed like a good starting medium, but I got lost in the details and forgot it was going to all be covered up with oil paint. In hindsight I should have just done a nice pencil drawing and called it good. I’ve got some lovely Rives cold press 80# Illustration board that makes awesome pencil drawings. But I started this on gesso covered board, so an oil painting it will be.

I posted the pencil version on instagram  and my friend Kristi said I should leave some of the pencil showing, for an unfinished look. I’m not sure if that will happen, but I do like the look of the hair in pencil contrasted with the skin tones. I mean, if I wanted it photographic, I’ve got cameras for that. I’m trying to create art, but art is so hard to define.  It means different things to everyone.

Anyway, I’m happy with the progress, and look forward to spending more time on it. I’m still hammering out the color scheme. For example, what color is reflected light on skin? I’m using two lights: a shop trouble light (incandescent) for the main, and a much smaller fluorescent trouble light for the fill light.

I honestly can not see the hue. I keep guessing at violets and greens, but nothing rings true. They say any hue will work if the value is correct. And it’s true that if I flatten it to black and white the values look accurate…but that doesn’t help as I agonize over paint colors at my palette.

It’s lovely to have the spare time to paint. This quarter has been too much work and not enough play, up until this week.

Lisa and I did our usual birthday ski Tuesday. We went to Crystal this year where I tried out some borrowed downhill skis. My normal tele boots didn’t fit them so I tried out some boots from the early eighties and they were horrible. Now I realize I need to invest in new boots that will work for modern downhill skis. But I can’t afford both downhill boots and backcountry boots…assuming I want to ski randonee style (AT) in the backcountry.

At Crystal I quickly shed the downhill gear and went back to my telemark set up. That was awesome in the deep powder and I made it all day in those. But it’s all about the boots. My tele boots are only a few years old and they work great, very supportive in deep snow. My son said he would help me look for modern downhill boots when they go on sale this spring.

The girl from Venice Beach – 1973

The girl from Venice Beach – 1973

I found a hand typed letter in some old drawings last week (February, 2017). It’s a forgotten love story about one of my old girlfriends. I’ve tried to retain some of the voice of that 17 year old, while rewriting some parts to make them more lucid. And yes, this really happened.

November, 1973, somewhere near LA:

Fuck it was cold that morning. I was awakened from my slumber by a sound that scorched my heart. Teijsha, god, my beautiful Teijsha crying out in mock anger as Todd did something outrageous to her lovely young body in the early morning light.

Half asleep, my mind drifted back over the last couple weeks:

Teijsha and I running, clutching our packs and sleeping bags, tripping over our soaked ponchos, kissing and hugging, laughing and smiling, giggling and hoping: shit, that damn 16 wheeler truck better be going as far as Eureka…because once we get our stuff inside that 1000 mile high tractor and get ourselves up the ladder and shut the door, we’re not going to get out just because he’s only going as far as podunk, which is halfway to Eureka and has the tiniest amount of traffic between here and wherever we are.

Goodbye to a 1000 experiences, lifetimes, climaxes, smiles, frowns and grins…Teijsha and I stoned out of our minds on mescaline, walking into Ruth’s Anaheim laundromat, skipping to the bulletin board, giggling at the thumbtacks, later camping in a small patch of trees inside the cloverleaf on-ramp to Interstate 5, looking up through the branches to the dark sky as we made love with diesel trucks roaring by on the road. And then falling asleep with Teijsha snuggled warm and happy beside me. We were 17, in love, and the world was our oyster.

The dream faded away as I woke up fully, sickened by the sound of Teijsha and Todd making love in the kitchen not less than twenty feet away.

I tried to cover my ears, and when that didn’t work, I crawled down to the  bottom of my sleeping bag, not an easy task in a 1968 surplus military down sleeping bag. I could still hear them so I grunted, and then coughed loudly. Teijsha must have recognized the noise as me because the sounds got quieter.

I went back to sleep for a while and dreamed about the folks back home in far away Olympia. I was wakened again by the sound of Todd and Teijsha going outdoors. They had to step over me  as they walked through the kitchen of the house where some kind folks had invited us to spend the night.

I sat up and looked over at our traveling buddy Myron, who was bunking down with me below the silverware drawers. He had finally woken up and was blinking over at me through a stupendous hangover.

Myron: “Well, which way did it go?”

Me: “You owe me 10 cents.”

Myron: “It went, you mean.”

Me: “Yeah”

Myron: “Ah well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles eh Mark?”

Me: “Yeah.”

I was feeling pretty shitty about the whole thing so I got up, grabbed my patched blue jeans, pulled them on with a shirt and  walked out to the porch. I sat down on the rocking chair and played some lonesome blues on my harp. I’d been playing since the seventh grade when dad gave me a chromatic harmonica for Christmas  but mostly I liked playing my Hohner Blues Harps. Pretty soon my feet started to freeze so I went in and sat by the wood stove, which the people inside had been stoking to warm the frigid house.

The front door opened and I heard Todd talking about how cold it was outside and how many different types of birds they had seen. He really was quite a nice guy. We’d met him at a freeway entrance and had invited him to join our threesome as we hitched our way up Highway 1. All four of us had got a ride with these fine people in a VW bus, and then they’d invited us to spend the night in their coastal cabin. Despite the fact that he had just fucked my girlfriend, I couldn’t deny he was a mellow dude.

I was still sitting hung over in the kitchen warming my feet when Teijsha walked in. I could tell she and Todd had been doing some heavy talking ’cause her eyes were all red. I hadn’t even looked at her since the night before when she and Todd had sat on the couch together and started getting it on. As I would come to realize later, free love has it’s down side. There are no ties or commitments , and everyone is free to do whatever they want.

I chose my first words carefully.

“I hope he takes good care of you.”

I guess those were the wrong words because she broke down crying as she ran into my arms.

“Mark, I love you so much, God I love you!”

Well, that really blew me over ‘cause she had just spent the night with Todd, and in the short time I’d known her she didn’t usually just ball anybody.

“I still love you too, Teijsha.”

She was holding on pretty tight to me and it felt damn nice. But I didn’t really know what was happening so I put my arm around her, like when your grandmother is hugging you and you’re just kinda’ hanging on until it’s over. She sobbed for a little while, holding on fiercely and rubbing my back.

“Do you love him?”

“No, but I think I’ll be very happy with him. But that doesn’t change the way I feel about you. I’m so fucking confused!”

She cried some more then and I was getting to feel a little more sure of myself. I tightened my arms, and she responded by lifting her head up off my shoulder. She looked into my eyes with her beautiful tear streaked face, like she used to do when she wanted me to kiss her. At that moment, kissing her was the last thing on my mind and I turned my face away to look out at the fog shrouded coastline.

“Don’t lose me,” I said.

“Oh Mark, I won’t, you’ll see me again.”

“I hope so. God Teijsha, I love you so much.”

Then we both cried for a little bit and I started fidgeting, worrying about Todd walking in on us. Then she did something that really blew my head wide open. Teijsha had a way of talking to me that made me feel tremendous rushes of emotion toward her. It was when I had my arms around her and she would squeeze her hands up between our bodies. She would play with the buttons on my shirt as she talked to me, looking at the buttons she was pushing around and glancing up at me every once in a while. She smiled up at me from behind her long lashes. Every time she did this to me my insides melted and I felt I could love her forever.

Well she started doing that again only she was crying at the same time, stopping to sniffle between each word.

“Do…sniff…I…sniff…do I…sniff… have your address Mark?”

“No, I’ll write it down for you.”

“Mark, if I came up to Olympia in a couple days, would you take me back?”

“Oh, for sure Teijsha, for sure!”

“Well, maybe one day I’ll come walking up to your parents house and surprise you.”

I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down my parents address, where I planned to be for about two weeks during the holidays. I gave her the paper, then found Myron and told him I wanted to split right away. I wanted to hitch to Olympia without spending another night on the road.

Myron was a really mellow dude. He and I and Teijsha had been slowly hitching up the coast between LA and Eureka for a week and a half. Highway 1 was a great place to hitch because there were lots of fellow hippies driving and hitching the road, with frequent places to sleep on the beach. He was headed for Portland eventually. But he knew I couldn’t handle the Todd and Teijsha scene, so he was ready to split immediately.

I went inside to get my poncho and found Teijsha sitting alone in the pantry, weeping. “Did you want to be alone?” I asked. She nodded her head.

I finished packing my pack, an old canvas relic from World War Two. I said goodbye to the beautiful couple who had invited us all to crash at their seaside cabin.

I went back to the pantry, not knowing what to expect. There was my lovely red haired Teijsha. She was curled up in the corner, looking very alone and far away. Her beautiful body was covered in baggy clothes, but her huge eyes stared brightly at me. There was a depth to those eyes that stays with me still to this day.

“Goodbye…” I murmured.

She shook her head slightly, but said nothing, just looked away.

I walked up to Todd, who was sitting in the nicest chair, with his arms folded tightly, staring out the window at the foggy ocean.

“Take good care of my friend,” I told him. He seemed quite taken aback at that and hesitated briefly before warmly grabbing my extended hand.

“I’m really sorry man,” he said.

“That’s alright, I did it to the dude she was living with down in Venice Beach two weeks ago. That the way it goes,” I said.

“That’s the way the ball bounces,” I heard Myron mumble quietly behind me.

“That’s really beautiful man,” Todd said. “Take care of yourself, you are a beautiful person.”

“So long,” I said.

So Myron, me and my harmonica started truckin’ off up the road to the freeway entrance. I turned around once and saw Teijsha looking out the pantry window. It was still partially covered in morning frost, but I could see her tear stained face watching us walk out of her life. I got out my harp and played the Beatles song “Let it be”. We got a ride in a red Volkwagen with a couple cool ladies, away from Teijsha, and one hell of a lot of me.

~~

The back story

I’d met her two weeks before. I had hitched South for a while to escape my wet November tipi. I’d built the tipi after dropping out of high school. I’d cut down the trees, bought a roll of canvas, sewed the seams, everything. I based it on a book called: “The Indian Tipi”. I had put it up on a commune West of Olympia. But the tipi got damp and uncomfortable as the rains came in, so I would head south to warmer weather.  I had no where to go, no one to meet, no money in my pocket. I’d fetched up at the Ventura Pier, sitting by the side of the road. I’d given up on getting a ride and was in a mellow mood, watching the world go by.

I got out my trusty harmonica and started playing the blues, sitting on my old canvas rucksack. I saw a VW bug slowing down next to me. I stood up and there was a beautiful red haired girl inside the car, all by herself.

As hitchhikers, we were totally dependent on the people who gave us rides. Very few of us had any money, I might have had five dollars. The people who picked us up gave us shelter, food, everything. We had to basically let the honesty in our souls shine through while standing on the side of the road. They had to be able to look at us and know in an instant, while traveling at freeway speeds, that we were good people.

In some respects, getting rides was an art form. Even back then, single women would generally not pick up guys. Yet there was lovely Teijsha, looking at me through her open passenger side car window, the VW burbling quietly at the curb, waiting to hear my spiel.  For hitchhikers, especially guys, this was the gold standard.

“Hi, I’m Teijsha, where are you headed, looks like you need a ride?”

“Far out, yeah, I’d love a ride! I’m not headed anywhere in particular, just hoping for a change of scenery and maybe some food?”

I smiled warmly into the  little car at the amazing woman. She looked boldly right back at me, clearly liking what she saw. She was about my age (17), and was wearing very short cut off tattered blue jeans. Her legs were long and slim and she was curved in all the right places. The view into her low cut tank top as she leaned over and rolled down the passenger window was taking my breath away. She was stacked like a brick shit house…to use a common term of the times.  To say it was lust at first sight would be an understatement.

“Sure, I have some food at the house, it’s not far away. You wanna come with me? We can get high.”

I threw my pack in the back and she drove me to her place where she had some food. Then we sat on the couch smoking reefer while staring deeply into each others eyes. There was something going on and I really wanted to see where it led. She told me we needed to wait for her boyfriend to get home from work.

He was a chill dude, I’ll call him Ben. He accepted me warily. Clearly this was not the first time she had brought home lost puppies.

After a couple beers and more reefer, we decided to all go to a drive-in movie. I hid in the back seat under a blanket to avoid paying.  When we got our parking spot, we leaned the front seats down and all three of us crowded into the back seat where there was more room. When I look back on those strange times from the perspective of age, I can only shake my head at what happened in the back of that car. Both Ben and I started making out with Teijsha. I was making out with her on my side, and Ben was doing the same on his side. Her attention was divided and eventually Ben threw up his hands and left.

After a couple days of that Ben was getting increasingly unhappy. Teijsha and I decided to hitchhike up to my tipi in Olympia where we could start fresh. I wondered how she would make money to help support us. While I had a part time job waiting for me in a print shop, I knew she had no real skills, and my money wouldn’t support two of us.

“Teijsha, how will you make money up in Olympia?”

“Um, I can sell smack? I was a user for a while, and I still have a lot of contacts.”

“Shit, I don’t want you turning all my friends into heroin addicts!”

“Don’t worry, I will only sell to users, it’s easy to tell who’s using. I won’t mess with your friends.” I was dubious at this statement, but I trusted her, and more than that, I really wanted her to come home with me.

Her boyfriend Ben didn’t take it well. Teijsha had insisted he was just her roommate, but I could tell he loved her. He didn’t get violent, just got quiet and sad. He told her he loved her and would always have  a place for her if she decided to come back.

Teijsha and I hitched north up the coast, a couple of vagabond hippies with no money, no plans, just flowing along in the river of life.  The rides were usually easy to get, especially when you had a girlfriend as beautiful as Teijsha. With her movie star looks, everyone wanted to be near her. She bubbled with excitement and passion for living.

And then we met Todd, and, as my parents had done with me, I gave her her freedom. It broke my heart to do it, but I felt it was the right thing to do.

Walkabout

Hitching was a very reliable method of transportation back then. I had become so good at it that I could beat the Greyhound between Olympia and San Francisco. There were  thousands of hippies traveling around the country then (early seventies). All the freeway entrances had lines of hippies with their thumbs out. Anytime I felt the need to escape my life, I would load up my pack, grab a guitar,some harmonicas and walk  to the downtown  freeway entrance. A car would usually pull over within an hour. I had the dress and look down to a science. Fellow hippies could look at me and know in an instant that I was fellow traveler, and more than that, they knew I would be cool.

They would pick me up, make room for my pack and we’d share a joint and whatever else they had including food. I’d also get rides from “straight” people. Often they were business professionals in nice suits and ties. They were curious about why I was on the road. All they expected in return was entertaining conversation…maybe a song on my harmonica, and occasionally help with the driving. I hitchhiked the entire west coast, parts of Canada, and all the way to Colorado and back. All my high school friends were in college by then, but I felt the need to stay on “Walk-a-bout”. All I was sure of was that I just wanted to be free and not think about the future.

My parents (strict Presbyterians) were not happy about my choices, but dad was a very wise man. He knew my mind was set. I think he also had faith in my intelligence, and knew I would come around eventually. So they let me have my freedom. Their offers of free college tuition had no attraction for me.

People who I could relate to were all heavily involved in stopping the Vietnam war. We wanted to change the world, get in closer touch with nature. It was all a bunch of foolish pipe dreams with no real basis in reality, yet they made perfect sense in my confused 17 year old mind.  Around my high school, and to my peers, I was a hero. I had dropped out of the corrupt American dream and was living the real dream, the life of freedom. I had a part time job printing at the Sherwood Press…whenever I was in town…and the tipi. Life was full of marching in the streets, standing vigils at the State Capital, and volunteering at the Olympia Food Coop, which still runs to this day (2017).

It took me three years to come to my senses. I sort of “hit bottom” and didn’t like what I saw. Through it all I always had a part time job in printing with my old friend Jocelyn. She didn’t mind that I liked to hitchhike around the country. She also acted as a lifeline between me and my dad. My dad and I were estranged for a while. But Jocelyn sang in the choir with dad and would pass on messages to me since I had no phone in the tipi. She had a fleet of young people who helped her at the print shop. They were all high school friends of mine like Ted, Margot and Byron Youtz, Marc Young and even Devi Unsoeld and her brothers.

Once I realized I needed to get serious about life, Jocelyn suggested I attend a trade school for printing. I was already running her shop. I didn’t do billing, but I could handle all the day to day interactions with customers, and print the usual run of jobs from wedding announcements to her bread and butter work: funeral announcements. There was a vocational trade school half an hour up the freeway in Tacoma.

I walked into the college that fall and asked if they had openings. The teacher, her name was Connie, seemed sad that they were full. I told her a little about my history. Suddenly she asked me if I was a high school drop out. When I admitted that I was, her face brightened. She said they had one opening left but they were holding it for a dropout. It came with a full scholarship but only if I agreed to attend extra classes to finish high school while I studied printing.

In looking back over my life, it’s clear to see that was a pivotal day. I was a natural printer. All the classes were easy. I could run the letterpresses better than the instructors. I was so good with the machinery that the pressroom instructor (Lamar) tasked me with rebuilding one of the Multilith 1250’s.

A year later I was weeks from graduation and I got a job  at J. L. Darling. Another year after that I took a hiking scrambling class and met Sue.