The Battle of Coon Creek Historical Marker, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50

The Battle of Coon Creek Historical Marker, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on five shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames
6 x 48 7/8 x 1 3/4 inches

The historical marker for The Battle of Coon Creek is located two miles east of Kinsley, Kansas, on U.S. Highway 50. Although the sign failed to position the conflict, I am fairly certain that it didn’t happen right by the highway. The Arkansas River crossing comes up before that of Coon Creek, on the way in to town. It may have made more sense, to place the historical marker somewhere along the creek. Although where it is might be closer to the actual site, it’s not that easy to envision the battle terrain, surrounded by mounds of prairie covered sand dunes. I liked the historical maker; it was a designated place to pull over. That fondness extends to any set of trashcans cans, with or without the presence of picnic tables. The opportunity to stop and inhale a spot along the highway is a significant part of traveling. Without it, a journey can be reduced to mileage, a meaningless quest for destiny, where time steals from the spectacle of oncoming horizons.  

 

The battle involving U.S. troops and Plains Indians occurred in 1848. I’ve decided to skip most of the posted information. In two trips across Kansas, separated by a year and a half, a new sign replaced the old with a different history. That discrepancy could be due to what to cover in the limited space of couple of paragraphs. However, what each sign had in common was the description of an Indian woman clothed in silver ornaments and a scarlet dress, supervising the removal of the wounded while riding around on horseback. Based on the difference between signs, a motorist restricted to seeing just one of them, would come away with a less complicated view of the solidity of history, written about events grounded in the shifting sands of Kansas.

 

The intriguing thing about photographing a site is that I usually know how much to include. However, once a scene is moved to my computer, I no longer recall exactly what I saw, until the information is laid out for painting. When I saw the pencil rendering extend across the panels, I was delighted and surprised by the latitude of the tree’s shadow. Although I keenly remember seeing the shadow, I was unaware of how much it would influence the mood of the painting.

 

Painting a designated place to pull over is not a new arena for me. I’m smitten by any landscaping that leans into the immediacy of scenery. I find such a site a difficult invitation to skip. Although my father was not in my thoughts when I stopped to look around, when the painting begin to materialize, something about the broad shadow and the vista beyond, reminded me of traveling with him. I’ve consumed a lot of time wondering why that should be. Traversing the plains of Kansas was not an experience I had with my dad. Everything about life included something to do with mountains. When you’re raised in Utah and Nevada, there is no place to go, where you can outpace the face of geology. Anywhere out on the highway, slumbering mountains arise all the way to the coast of California. The only thing that this painting shares with the memories of traveling with my dad is the presence of a trashcan. It’s hard to believe that such a minor detail could be so meaningful. But as he drove, he seemed to fill ordinary mileage in with a sense of adventure. The highway wasn’t just about getting to an astonishing site, it also included a veneration for all the places in between.

 

I never uncovered a specific reason why this painting reminded me of traveling with my father. Perhaps, it just comes down to where I happen to be. He has been dead ten years now, and so it may be easier to fully appreciate the vision his living gave to me. With his dedication to the highway, it is not surprising that I grew to love the swell of every oncoming horizon. The clout of topography can be measured by the fact that it precedes the parameters of meaning. It is there. It is out there. And as such a place, narrative has no sway within the realm of surroundings. That’s the thing I admire about landscape painting. It is an open ended enterprise, mysterious enough to be the original Rothko. Because earth and sky defy description, painting never reveals anything about me, leaving the terrain vacant for anyone wishing to engage in a narrative free mystery.

 

US Highway 50 and the Great Basin: A Young Boy Discovers a Lonely Highway, (Second Installment of a Highway Journey)

This is a continuation of the previous post that touched on the discovery of a mysterious highway when I was 10.  Although what I saw may have been affected by weather, it was the strange geology of the place that captured my imagination. The endless succession of mountains and valleys was nothing but hypnotic.  



A dry lake along US Highway 50. Since I left the details unidentified in the writing, I did the same thing here.

There may be a need to explain the voice of the piece being written.  There could be a thought that says this does not sound like a ten year old.  Although, I intend to write what comes to mind of the drive I experienced, the way I encounter things remains the same.  When I was two, I stepped outside a drugstore and felt the weight of neon sputtering light into cast iron darkness.  Of course, language was limited then.  At the age of six, seven, or eight, I wondered whether I was a physical presence, or just an idea with the impression that it had a reality.   My mind isn’t anything but average.  It just happens to cling to things like the sights and sounds of a playground.  It is not sharp enough to find banality loitering around a parking lot.  All it sees is the light that illuminates crumbling pavement.  Story telling can be tricky, and although I intend to give it to you straight, all truth winds up being fiction.  I will try to work from a place of honest deception.  When a narrator is needed, I will rely on a travel guide.

 

Getting back to the sand dunes, the range to the south is closer than it was, there is another beyond that, and it stretches out for as far as the eye can see.  A single butte in silhouette, rides the horizon.  From any position, the valley is like a sea with this island sailing away in hues of blue and gray.  Here a shift in blue has everything to do with how far away you are from your destination.  I have never thought about this that way before, but blue is separation.  In a strange way, if the separation is severe enough, earth and sky merge into a swell of uncertainty.  As a phrase, “the cutting edge” is an odd way to describe the pursuit of the unknown.  An edge is a boundary, and boundaries define.  It might be better to portray a lot of what goes on as “cutting corners.”  My way of thinking about the edge, may be unfair.  The phrase probably refers to the extension of something beyond where it was before, like from city to suburbs, but right now, I am in a place where art cannot not compete.  It never has.  It never will.  We are not dealing with empty walls that could use the break that paintings often provide.  Our vaulted ceiling is sky.  The butte seems to move as we roll along.  A river is crossed, a town creeps up on a slowing car, and one highway turns into another simply by taking a right at the stop sign.  Now, that didn’t take long.  Skim through a few pages, and the highway arrives.  This is it.  This is our point of entry.  In the presence of a ten year old, there is no distinction between highways.  All I know is that this is supposed to be the scenic way home, and as far as I can tell, it is.  As far as I am concerned, the highway has no number.  It is my favorite though, and I can feel it.

 

The fields around town display gray combinations of sandy soil and plants compressed by the bitter weight of winter.  Windbreaks give way to sage.  The mileage markers are lean and the desert is spare.  Stunted brush grows close to the ground in clumps no larger than clenched fists.  The land is mean.  The desolate environment endorses a trickle down reality.  Annual stockpiles of rain, sleet, frost and snow may measure less than 4 inches.  Mountains to the west capture the promise of rain by taxing the clouds rolling over their summits.  The earth grows prosperous.  If the right’s enterprise creates wealth for the nation as a whole, they should have chosen a better image to prove their point.  Nature does not produce abundance on scant rainfall.  Conditions like these generate desert.  Try a little trickle down economic philosophy on your garden and see what comes up.  Who in their right mind, would want to be trickled on anyway?

 

A dry lake shimmers.  Blue mountains break the shoreline.  Surrounded by hills and mountains, it reminds me of the Bonneville Salt Flats.  In fact, I wonder if it is connected.  I look to see if I can tell.  I can ask dad.  He will know.  I don’t.  I ride in silence.  It is interesting to see bleached mud flats.  The lakebed is substantial.  The sky is overcast.  There is nothing ominous about the weather overhead.  Gray can be kind to shades of green.  However, there is none along the highway that now looks down into an empty lake.  I begin to wonder how much longer the desert will last.  Even I tire of the subtleties that subterfuge separation.  Simple sentences can stun, but I seem to be shying away from them.  I should stop the shameful game I am playing, but so sleepy now, shall my mind succumb to something as severe as reason?  Should I save this sad search for satisfaction found in the sound of the letter S as the highway steels away from the lake, or shall I leave it lying on the shallows of shoreline silence?  Now that sentence is hard to surpassed, at least by someone like me.  I have been out here too long and I am tired of trying.  Is this pure nonsense?   I mean, can it be clean?   Or, do unraveling thoughts prevail?

 

sky shatters

over a dry lakebed

 it could have been

a thunder clap command

conducted by a bolt of lightening

  the laceration,

the blast

military flight

divides sky

asunder

                                                                               

In an effort to skirt a mountain, the highway climbs a fan only to fall away.  A valley is waiting just over the rise.  Below, the scenery has shifted.  Openness closes down into a narrow basin.  The facing ridge is a row of rough and tumbling outcrops that disfigure falling shadows.  This spectacle takes place out in the open and in the light of day.  Who knows what goes down when the sun slips behind the horizon.  Actually, the temperature does, and night can be brutal.  If the temperature was 90 degrees during the day, you may be facing a low of 45 under a canopy of stars.  I hope you planned for this and not some soft yielding Texas evening filled with the sound of cicadas.  Summer is a season that climbs into the sky each morning.  Autumn rules the night.  I’ve even seen ice hiding in a garden hose strung out across the lawn in July.  Rise and shine to the bite of a frosty morning.  The thrill of a new day is chilling, and in the arid atmosphere, steam quickly withers away.  A freeze can take place at anytime of the year, and it is rare for it not to cool off when darkness settles in.  This is not Las Vegas, and contrary to common perception, the state is not excessively hot.  Even though Utah snows are more abundant, they melt away more quickly when summer arrives.

US Highway 50, Utah, Nevada and the Border Inn

Border Inn Motel, Slots, Café
oil on canvas
16 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches

This painting can be seen at William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

The Border Inn lies on the Utah-Nevada between Delta and Ely, Nevada. It is a welcomed sight for those not noticing the sign that read NEXT SERVICES 83 MILES back in Hinckley, Utah. That is a long haul without any habitation. The course of the highway and the signs that remind you to watch for deer, cattle and falling rock lie in brush and stubble. Because of the beautiful nature of desolation, bullet holed trashcan pullovers pass by in silence.

If the border tied into traffic from Salt Lake City, it would be like Wendover and Mesquite crawling with Mormons on gentile retreats for the weekend. The alpine peaks of Great Basin National Park are not much of a draw. Before the park, nobody knew what was there. As it is, most of the time, you can have much of the park to yourself.

On many Nevada highway borders, there are places like the inn proudly displaying gambling signs. This is too small for anything more than a few slot machines. Still it is small town Nevada away from the industrialized gambling of Reno and Las Vegas. The West survives in these towns along the highway due to isolating wind, heat, cold and snow. Because of the lack of water, farming was never really an option. When the ore played out, many towns vanished in the sage. Part of what kept these hanging on was vacant highway. You’ll probably have to stop at two or three of these for a hamburger and gasoline. Nevada takes openness for granted. NEXT SERVICES 83 MIILES was a courtesy of Utah. Nevada goes on the assumption that you are not going to gamble on the accuracy of a fuel gauge as you leave Ely for Eureka or Lages Station.

Handmade booklet for painting
4 9/16 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches

The Loneliest Road in America: US Highway 50, Nevada and the Great Basin; Peavine Peak, a Painting from an Exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas

The next several posts come an exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas that I did in 2010.  The paintings where a survey of U.S Highway 50 crossing Nevada.  The following is written information from the invitation and the handmade book that went with the painting of Peavine Peak.

 

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada
oil on canvas
16 1/16 x 36 1/8 inches
2008

The Loneliest Road in America

 

Although it may not be America’s loneliest road, a portion of US Highway 50 has that designation for a reason.  On its way from Maryland to California, it crosses Nevada, the driest state in the union.

 

For personal reasons, I extend the theme to include some of Utah.  As a child, I traveled back and forth between parents on this highway.  The 500-mile drive from Fillmore, Utah to Reno, Nevada was devoid of farming for 410 miles.  The rivers that rise on either side of the Great Basin never find their way to the sea and wind up wasting away in large evaporation ponds like the Great Salt Lake.

 

The region informs the way I think about light, and although I was not aware of it, the long vistas taught me to see instability.  It is a feature of any horizon and key to a sense of depth in painting.  It is nice to return to mending miles of silence strung along by power lines and waves of sage known as The Loneliest Road in America.

 

 

 

Peavine Peak
oil on canvas
5 7/8 x 17 1/2 inches
2009

 

Peavine Peak

 

As remote as it looks, Reno is on the other side of the mountain.  This in fact, is not far from Horizon Hills, a subdivision just down the hillside.  We lived on Pawnee Court, a dead end street, in a maze of streets claiming tribal ancestry.  In a way, that may have been fitting.  The development looked like a reservation.  The houses had an air of being manufactured and the lots were mostly barren.

  

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture.  As neighborhoods go, this was nicer than most.  However, architecture in the state, if there is any, looks haphazard.  If you want more than gaming and houses of prostitution, stick with the sage.  Wind-rustling brush shapes the face of the horizon, and from our place, it was either high or low.

 

By suppertime, the wind was roaring and tin canned processions of tumbleweeds and milk cartons assaulted backyard gardens.  Although there were dogs in the neighborhood, there was no need for them. The wind had a canine sense of design.  Had there been any trees, thrashing branches would have whipped leaves into the sound of many waters.  No one had air conditioning, and the afternoon heat was chased away through open windows that later closed to keep out the night.  Then, in the chill of morning light, the wind was silent.

 

 



Handmade book for Peavine Peak
4 1/4 x 3 x 3/8 inches

 

U.S. Highway 50 at Robinson Summit: The Loneliest Road in America Climbs another Summit on a Path across Nevada

A Bend in US Highway 50 at Robinson Summit,
White Pine County, Nevada (The Loneliest Road in America)
oil on canvas
20 3/16 x 32 1/8 inches framed

A few years ago, I made some paintings based on a stretch of U.S Highway 50 known as the Loneliest Road in America.  This section crosses Nevada.  Although that designation and the making of Great Basin National Park have increased traffic, the road is still a highway of desert isolation.  Two summers ago, my brother’s family and I tried to camp at the national park.  All the sites were full.  We ended up spending the night below Sacramento Pass at a Bureau of Land Management camp.  After twilight, travel completely stopped.  Crickets occupied the night.  A starlit sky defined pinion, a thicket so deep detail had the absence of black water.  I was stunned.  The highway was a part of my childhood.  I thought I knew the lonely nature of the place.  But even at the height of the tourist season, night was completely still.  For each painting I made a small book.  The following comes from one of those written descriptions.

Summits sometimes fail to provide sweeping vistas.  While a highway may make the grade, and cross the divide, spectacular views may be winding miles away.  After climbing the embankment, it was obvious that there was no panoramic blue to examine.  However, it did give me an interesting view of the highway.

When I was young, I was so taken by mountain peaks, that I missed the matted fabric of forest floors.  Never rambunctious, I had little or no interest in sports.  However, if a mountain was around, I wanted to climb it.  I had an obsession to see as far as I could see.

I remember hiking in the foothills above Salt Lake City with a friend when I was eleven in the snow.  His feet grew cold; he stayed below, while I scrambled to the top.  I loved perspective’s swoop and dive into tiny woven streets reflecting sunlight below towering mountains.  Basking in the curvature of exhilaration, I thought my friend was a wimp.  I loved high places, but it was never for an adrenaline rush or exercise.  I had a passion for seeing seas of topography.

In many respects, that made me blind.  I was only interested in the spectacular, and it was years before I learned how to see.  I remember a trip back to Ontario where my family comes from, and being bored with states like Iowa.  No mountains towered over corn fields, and I disliked the whiteness of skies and the deep stinking heat of humidity.  I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could stand a land of fields and trees where puffy little clouds floated around in atmospheric anemia.

When I moved to Texas, I was always searching for higher horizons, and eventually began to see beauty in the turned up fields of the countryside.  Weekends found me on roads to places like Meridian and Clifton.  I never knew where I was going, but enjoyed driving.  However, because I always had to return, I was undeniably tired.  Going anywhere required miles of driving; exhilaration turned into weariness and defeat.  I began staying closer to home and looked for adventure in the city.  In a sense, this was not new; as a child, I could see topography in any empty field.  My thoughts turned to the content of walks.  I began to see the vagaries of life in heat crushing concrete.  Even weeds defined the high and mighty sky.  Being in step with the pedestrian really set me free.

Handmade book placed on the back of the painting
4 9/16 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches

William Vaughn Howard and a New Framework for Painting

William Vaughn Howard
Title Unknown
acrylic, pastel and graphite
3 5/8 x 22 1/2 inches

The painting above was given to me by my painting professor William Vaughn Howard.  I studied with him as an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno in the early 80’s.  He spent the summers in Greece on the Island of Paros; I bet that is where this was painted.  Although small, it has the structure I want to discuss.   

Detail of the left end

In 1986 I flew back to Reno from Dallas to see what turned out to be Bill’s last show.  What I saw was a group of paintings, the likes of which I had never seen before.  As I recall, 18 inches of verticality rolled out across the walls for another 12 feet.  The 1 to 8 ratio was hard to fathom.  The minor extremity of a 1 to 2 ratio troubled me.  I never knew how to handle the extra space.  The structures were shifting peripheries.  The sweeps eliminated the ability to focus on any particular part of a painting.  Moving through shifting views seemed to be the point of the exercise.  Eyesight could not help but move and vision became a kind of travel.  The absence of a focal point was not a loss.  Instead of leaving, I found myself wanting to resume the sweep of freedom that had carried me away.

Detail of the middle

Although fascinated by the arcs, I couldn’t understand how they came to be.  A rectangle encourages rectangular thinking especially when working abstractly.  When there are no observable curves that you are trying to fit within a space, the action of brushstrokes and splatters happens with an awareness of the outside edge of the stretcher.  It is hard to work a space that is not a conventional rectangle.  When the picture plane is extended, it is visually difficult to stay away from the middle.  This is not a matter of mathematics, but rather one of perception.  Almost any division seems to dangerously align with the middling core of the middle.  The wider the span, the more significant the middle becomes.  Within elongated space, the practicality of a two thirds rule applied to the horizon is exceedingly useless.  How do you compose in any meaningful way covering all that space without becoming lost?

Detail of the right end

When I visited Bill’s studio, he showed me photographs taken in panoramic fashion.  The photographs represented continuous views of coastline running into sea.  I failed to see the significance.  I wondered why align so many photographs together.  I found it a bit confusing.   He died not long after I was back in Dallas.  Within a few months of that visit, I was photographing in the same manner.  Nothing had ever been so exciting.  My neighborhood came alive.  And as I overlapped photographs on the apartment floor, I began to understand the origins of those wonderful waves and how they signaled a need for extremely long paintings.  The arcs are natural to panoramas.  They are the photographic records of a camera turning to embrace the surroundings.  Although, Bill is no longer here to confirm the nature of his compositional structures, it seems plausible that he saw a continuum in photographic prints that were then abstracted onto expansive canvases.

The new views quickly expanded the latitude and capacity of my dioramas.  Once the lay of the land extends beyond the parameters of a single snapshot, landmarks are no longer limited to highway milestones, but include the faded veneers of mom and pop shops along pock ravaged access roads.  There is a realization that composition is comprised of two or more frames of the view finder.  Or put another way, there is no composition to find because the composed is all around.  Point the camera here, there, or anywhere and the added space embraces continuum.  The confines of a standard viewfinder is alien to the everyday navigation of moving around.  Composition is about placement.  Although often thought of as the arrangement of outside objects, there is no need to define or compose when information positions you within your surroundings.  I quickly found this to be true.  When I composed prominent sites, frequently people didn’t know where they were because traditional compositions sever everyday relationships.  When I started painting the insignificant bits of habitation, I wound up painting locations that people instinctively knew much to their surprise.

I believe those last paintings tackled a new kind of vision.  Although the terrain of landscape had been a staple of abstraction, it never contained the breadth of time seen along a highway.  The new was housed within traditional strictures.  Canvasses had the proportions of portrait painting.  Ratios appropriate for the interior life of habitation may not be fitting for the great outdoors.  There was no vista, or distance sprawling out in sunshine, a gleaming rise of stubble gray, pasture, baled developments replacing hay, the magnetic skip of high tensioned power lines, the blue cast slant of earthen furrows, the widespread lisp of horizon outside Deming, New Mexico, the spotted dots of juniper and mesquite tabled between lowly mesas, tin, a windmill that no longer spins, freight on rails, churning smoke, and the elm sheltered trash that marks significant bits of history along an open highway.  The makings of a time horizon that I’ve grown to know as place came into play with the paintings of William Vaughn Howard. 

Information for the images below

City of Richardson from Central Expressway and

Spring Valley Rd. on the Morning of July 4th, 1987

mixed media diorama

8 3/8 x 124 x 3 7/8 inches

 

Drawing US Highway 50 Historical Site Hazen, Nevada: A Southern Pacific Railroad House, Lynching, Fire, a For Sale Sign, and the Unexpected Chiming in of Dungarees



Far Right Side Detail: Hazen, Nevada; US Highway 50 ( The Loneliest Road in America)

Left Side Detail



Right Side Detail

HAZEN WAS NAMED FOR WILLIAM BABCOCK HAZEN, WHO SERVED UNDER GENERAL SHERMAN IN HIS “MARCH TO THE SEA.” THE TOWN, ESTABLISHED IN 1903 TO HOUSE LABORERS WORKING ON THE NEWLANDS IRRIGATION PROJECT SOUTH OF HERE, INCLUDED HOTELS, SALOONS, BROTHELS, CHURCHES, AND SCHOOLS.

IN 1905 THE FIRST TRAIN CAME THROUGH ON THE NEW ROUTING TO TONOPAH. IN 1906 THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD BUILT A LARGE ROUNDHOUSE HERE AS WELL AS A FINE DEPOT.

IN 1908 HAZEN WAS NEARLY DESTROYED BY FIRE.



AS A TOUGH TOWN, IT HAD NO PEER IN THE STATE. NEVADA’S LAST LYNCHING OCCURRED IN HAZEN WHEN “RED” WOOD WAS TAKEN FROM THE WOODEN JAIL AND HANGED ON FEBRUARY 28, 1905.

I saw no reason to rewrite this statement.  What I know, you just read, and it comes from Historical Marker No. 178 and the Nevada State Park System.  Anything added is from memories of a small town, a railroad crossing, and a journey into darkness.

Hazen was the first town after the interstate.  When we left, the sun was low.  The land flattened out in advancing shadows, a thunderous freight train beside the highway churned past the last bit of daylight.  In the evening mist, every little insect seemed to hit the windshield, sweet smelling alfalfa whistled through open vents and windows.  Cool twilight unfurled a canopy of stars, and although others rode inside the car, darkness was my only companion.

I always like the H for Hazen on Black Butte.  Although the drawing is a depiction of heat, travel from Reno across the state often began late, Friday after work was the first chance to get away.  Hazen on a slight rise divides alkali from alkali.  Nevada is an array of drainage basins that never link up to the ocean.  Rivers like the Carson, Humboldt, Walker and Truckee die in isolation.  By the time trails were blazed for what became current day U.S. Highway 50, The Loneliest Road in America, it was known that none of the rivers of the Great Basin, lead the way to the San Francisco Bay.  Gravity frequently failed to take creeks and streams even as far as the next valley.  The landscape is a place of names dedicated to ancient lakes like Bonneville and Lahontan.  Springtime sometimes tries to fill the remains of vanquished lakes, now an ethereal ice age of sage assaulted by hail and rain, and the rage of thunder and lightening.  Here along much of this paved and rolling highway, the Pony Express made its way to the next station.

It had been years since I worked in charcoal.  Shopping for a sponge to cut up and dip in a new jar of powdered charcoal was fun.  Sitting at a table with familiar materials at hand was bit like slipping into a pair of old dungarees.  Although I never use the word, I thought I heard dungarees in the sound of musical phrasing and jotted it down.  It was like striking a match and I struck many of those while making this drawing, only I don’t know what to do with the words lyrically.  Perhaps the previous sentences should be scrubbed, edited, erased, but I think I will leave them in anyway.  The burnt end of a matchstick leaves a nice trail, a warm residue when pressed to paper.  Drawing can be thought of as a collection of pressure marks.  Defining a trailer house, gravel and weeds as a matter of record is just hand adjustments made with charcoal and an eraser.  Although I love listening to lyrics, I don’t know how to compose words into song.  Charcoal more fluid than paint is well acquainted with the atmospheric light that pigment often denies by relying too heavily on texture, the pasty state of style.  By the way, the charcoal and carbon rich matchstick scratching was enhanced a bit with color from water soluble crayons and a damp brush.

                                   

I stopped and read a sign

About a lynching in 1905

Instead of crying,

People seem to sing

Poor Red Wood,

Imagine the irony

Taller than any tree

Strung up and hung

From the lowly bough

Of a drought ravaged elm.



Standing in the sun,

I imagine dusty men

In old dungarees

Sipping chicken brothel soup

No longer offended

After crashing the wooden jail

Haling a man free

From justice and a judge

To twist in the middle of a crowd,

A lynchpin righteous with delight



I take history in with a smile

And leave with a breeze.

Poor Red Wood

Imagine the irony

Taller than any tree

Strung up and hung

From the lowly bough

Of a drought ravaged elm.









Hazen, Nevada; US Highway 50 (The Loneliest Road in America)
charcoal, burnt matchstick, drawing pencil, water soluble crayon
9 1/4 x 52 1/16 x 1 5/16 inches including integral frame