Blog
July 14th, 2014
Saturday was a scorcher—I wouldn’t normally pick a day with the temperature in the mid-nineties to hang out in a concrete jungle, but it was a special occasion.
You see, it’s a rare treat to get to have a tasty meal and a good conversation with a roomful of talented illustrators.
Photo by Sophie Dufresne—thanks, Sophie!
We all got together in downtown Portland with the lovely Lilla Rogers to talk shop, ask advice and compare notes. I think all of us came away with our heads full of ideas and our hearts full of confidence. (Not bad for a lunch date, I’d say.)
After that, though, I had a lot to think about, and 95 degrees wasn’t doing my brain any favors. So I bolted for the coast—where it was 30 degrees cooler and a thousand times more peaceful than the city. So I soaked in the sun and stared out to sea, while my ideas took shape.
July 13th, 2011
My next stop on the trip was one I would have made anyway, just for the sheer natural beauty. But what really happened is that I let my inner movie geek take over. Film buffs: recognize that location?
Ah, Cannon Beach. Home of the iconic Haystack Rock and filming location for The Goonies and a whole host of other movies. I would have loved to stay longer, but the only thing likely to roll in that morning wasn’t a pirate ship—
—it was another storm.
I finally managed to tear my eyes from the ominous horizon—less gaping, more fleeing!—but as I turned to walk back to the car, I happened to glance northward:
The moment was more like an instant; there was just enough time to let the shutter fly before the light disappeared.
As the first sheet of rain reached me, I jumped in the car and got the heck out of there.
At last I was finally back on my mental map, with just a sliver of Oregon remaining. Within minutes I was perched at the summit of my favorite place to watch the clouds, where the weather is always changing: Astoria.
Here, I set about finishing what I started the last time I was in town. Without a detailed map or internet access to tell me where to go, all I could do was wander around. But that’s the best way to explore a place like Astoria—and I found what I was searching for anyway.
Look familiar?
Or how about this place? (Hint: “It’s not a tumor!”)
Even if I hadn’t been location scouting, I had my hands full with a beautiful panorama around every corner. I just love the view of the bridge from here.
But staring into the mouth of the mighty Columbia, just as the rain turned into a heavy snow squall, reminded me that home was still many miles away—and that I was hoping to get there before dark.
There was just enough time for one final rainbow,
and then I embarked on the last lonely stretch of empty road.
As I pulled over for my last glimpse of the Pacific, I realized that I’d come almost exactly 1000 miles along the coast. Even with six days spent on the road, those miles flashed by entirely too quickly. But then I remembered that I still had the southern half of Highway One left to explore—and the promise of a whole lot of meandering, some day, to get there.
Sounds like a plan.
July 7th, 2011
My lucky good weather held out until I hit the Oregon border. And then the storm hit.
It poured. I mean, absolutely cats and dogs.
Once in awhile it let up enough to let a hint of sunshine through,
but then the shower curtains would roll back in a moment later.
Sometimes the weather made me laugh out loud. Whenever I’d step out of the car to snap a photo, I’d be buffeted by gale-force winds, and then an invisible person would throw a gallon-sized bucket of icy water right in my face. (Didn’t need coffee to stay awake that day…)
And somehow, it seemed like the quintessential Oregon to me. I think for my maiden voyage up the coast, a monsoon was the appropriate setting; it’s hard to imagine the place in the sun.
And at the end of the day, I could watch the storm rage and crash from the cozy comfort of a beachfront room. Then I sipped a mug of hot tea, and just listened to the roar of the waves.
June 30th, 2011
Eureka!
(Sorry. I just felt a great need to say that. Ahem.)
I stopped in Eureka, CA for a cuppa after my sojourn in the nearby redwoods, and was charmed in a heartbeat. Thanks to its obvious proximity to timber, Eureka is chock-a-block with fancy Victorian and Art Deco architecture. And by stumbling upon a book in a shop downtown that day, I discovered it’s not the only town on the Redwood coast that can make that claim. Since one of them was only a few miles back the way I’d come, I turned right around and headed back up the valley to Ferndale.
Nicknamed the “Cream City,” Ferndale had its heyday in the 1880s, when the area’s prosperous dairy farms provided much of the wealth that built the town. These affluent farmers built ornate and sumptuous homes there—which the locals called “Butterfat Palaces.”
Right away I could see why—when I got to stay in one.
The next morning, after an early breakfast, I took a stroll around town.
As seemed to be a running theme for my trip, I had the place to myself. The only sounds I heard were mourning doves and lowing cattle—and the early morning glow bathed the buildings in sunlight.
Ferndale is a tiny town; if you add up all its historic buildings you might get three or four city blocks. But the place is worth its weight in butter when it comes to the details.
I mean, come on! Just look at that pink door! (I want a pink door on my house!)
It’s the details that actually played a large part in saving the place from destruction and “urban renewal.” After a series of devastating floods in the mid-20th century, the buildings on main street were slated for demolition. That is, until a local resident bought up every threatened building, then painted them in outrageous Victorian colors—essentially creating the tourist draw the place enjoys today.
I probably could have stared at egg-and-dart cornices all day, but then I turned a corner, and stopped dead in my tracks.
But before I go on, I have to provide a little back story.
The Tailor and I have a tradition of putting together a jigsaw puzzle on New Year’s Day (riveting pastime, I know, but we love it)—we’re always raiding thrift stores in search of the next puzzle. This year’s was an image of an ornate victorian house, in some town I’d never heard of.
Well, when I turned that corner, I was absolutely gobsmacked to discover it was the jigsaw puzzle house!
I knew I couldn’t possibly be mistaken—after all, when you reconstruct a building from 1000 pieces of cardboard, you start to memorize the details.
So I plonked myself down on the curb, and started jotting down some of those details in my sketchbook. After all—why settle for a jigsaw puzzle when I had the real thing before me?
June 24th, 2011
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The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk,
and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining
to win the sky.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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I’ve had four months now to mull over the experience of driving through a redwood forest in the early morning, in complete solitude and silence. And even now, there really are no words to describe it.
Thankfully, though, a redwood forest by its very nature makes it easy to ignore such things. Because my brain certainly wasn’t going to get a handle on what my eyes were seeing—nor was my camera.
And neither, it turns out, was my paintbrush. I needed a sketchbook that was six inches wide by about twenty feet tall.
And then I realized that I needed a sense of scale, a point of reference. Enter the only other car I saw that morning, and my wide-angle lens.
Eh. That’s still not it.
The only thing to do is to go there in person, crane your neck, and gaze upward in wonder.
June 19th, 2011
Even though my trip south originally brought me across the Bay, it seemed like San Francisco was the logical starting point for my long trek home along the coast.
So after a quick sketch (while humming that Journey song that popped into my head for the umpteenth time), I crossed the bridge and headed north.
It wasn’t long before I’d left civilization almost completely behind. My chosen route was the (in)famous Highway One, which winds a precarious path along the shore, with breathtaking views and treacherous challenges at every hairpin turn. In other words, it was perfect in nearly every way. Despite the environmental guilt of it all, I confess that I love driving—and hugging the curves of 300 miles of switchbacks in a stick-shift Subaru? Pure, unadulterated bliss. And while I missed the company of the Tailor, or any of my other traditional travel buddies, it was nice to be able to stop and take a picture every thirty seconds, without the risk of annoying anyone!
I knew that by traveling the Coast Highway on a weekday in February, I’d have the place pretty much to myself. But I was completely unprepared for the solitude that awaited me at my first stop along the way: Point Reyes National Seashore.
Point Reyes is a long, jagged cape with an equally long history. Sir Francis Drake reportedly landed there in 1579, and people have inhabited it, farmed it, settled it, and even wrecked their ships upon it for many, many generations. Since the 1850s much of the land has been parceled out into dairy farms, which are still in operation today, thanks to the protection of the National Park Service.
What first struck me about the place is the near total absence of trees. The place reminded me more of the Scottish highlands than anything I’d seen in California—and in fact, one of the few small towns located on the peninsula is called Inverness.
And I’m sure that at the height of summer, the place is crawling with tourists—but that day I was completely alone. For miles and miles and miles, it was just me and the cows.
I hadn’t intended to travel the whole length of the cape; I wasn’t on a fixed timetable or anything, but by that point it was already late morning. But I saw a sign indicating a lighthouse ahead, so I kept going. There was no mile count on the sign, and I didn’t bother to fish out the map. It couldn’t be far, right? Well, the road wound on and on and on, with no sign of a lighthouse, and no indication of where this would end. But then, a full twenty miles on, the track came to an abrupt end. I got out of the car, faced back north, and nearly had to pick my jaw up off the ground.
The lighthouse was just a short hike from there:
I could see why people were forever dashing their boats upon the rocks.
And that wasn’t the only thing I could see. I was staring into the bright teal surf when something surfaced and caught my eye:
A gray whale! It’s funny—I’ve lived on one coast or another for over eleven years of my life, and I’d never seen a whale in person before. If that wasn’t worth the forty-mile detour, I don’t know what is.
After the whale-watching and a 2-minute watercolor, I made the long trek back to the highway.
The remaining stretch of Highway One was almost equally deserted. It made the miles melt away quickly, and gave me the feeling that I had the whole Pacific to myself.
Before long, the rolling hills and eucalyptus trees tapered off,
and the landscape gave way to cypress stands and evergreen forests.
The road ended just as the day did. As the sun went down the path turned eastward, away from the shore, and plunged into the thick darkness of coastal forest. By the time I pulled into a hotel for the night, it was pitch black, and Highway One had been replaced by the other Pacific Highway: US 101. I was in completely unfamiliar territory, and would be until I came all the way north to Astoria several days later, but despite the darkness and lack of bearings, I knew what lay ahead. And I was almost too excited to sleep, because I knew that in the morning, the sun would reveal exactly where I was: in the heart of redwood country.
June 14th, 2011
My usually insatiable wanderlust has been at an absolute fever pitch lately—and a pretty intense recent case of studio burnout has only increased the feeling. So in order to recharge the old battery a bit, and maybe stir up some brand new inspiration, I’m closing up shop and hitting the road. The Tailor and I are embarking on an epic five-week cross-country adventure, starting tomorrow morning. Along the way, if all goes according to plan, we’ll visit eighteen states and six Canadian provinces—and probably a host of art supply and camera stores along the way, to keep me stocked with sketchbooks and memory cards.
We’ll be back in the third week of July, which will give Jessica and me just enough time to design and print a new Dead Feminist broadside, and then hop a plane with the stack of prints. Jessica and I will be among the presenters at the first annual Ladies of Letterpress Conference in Asheville, North Carolina. If you happen to be local (and since a curiously huge percentage of our customers and followers live in NC, you might be!), swing on by and say hello! The conference will be held on August 5-7—as far as we know, we’ll be up to bat on the first evening.
So as you can see, I’m going to have some blogging to do in the near future. Which reminds me that I never had the chance to report back about my last road trip, down the Pacific Coast. Either time flies, or I’m spinning too many plates. Since I won’t be set up to live-blog from the road this summer, I’ve queued up a series of posts about the Pacific Coast Highway to run while I’m away. It’s almost like being in two places at once!
So anyway, you take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and we’ll meet up again, at the other end.
February 17th, 2011
After thirteen days and 2,382 miles on the road, I’m finally home in the real world again. And that’s exactly how it feels—like I’ve been in a land of make-believe for the past two weeks. A place of impossible landscapes and endless shorelines and absolutely no connection to things like phones and computers and deadlines and to-do lists.
Now that I’ve washed back ashore, however, there are photos to edit and sketches to scan before I can tell you about it. In the meantime, Jessica and I have a schedule to keep: as advertised, our next Dead Feminist broadside is back from Codex and ready to share. Look for it here and in the shop tomorrow.
See you then!
February 11th, 2011
Going A.W.O.L. from the studio can be a very good thing—especially when this is the destination.
I’m here to spend some time with these folks,
for the sake of this.
But the “work” part of my trip is done now, so I spent today up here.
And tomorrow I’m leaving for home, but I’ll be taking the long road, by way of this.
The goal is to take as much time as possible for things like these,
and for moments like this.
I promise to share when I get home and have access to a computer again. See you on the other end of the trail.
May 30th, 2010
The Tailor and I had some errands to run in Portland yesterday, and since the the rain that has been pounding us for two weeks was finally starting to give way to sun, we decided to take the long way home, along the winding coastal road.
We stopped for clam chowder in Astoria, Oregon—a historic hill town (and one of the oldest settlements in the Pacific Northwest) perched above the mouth of the Columbia River. Beautiful views and Victorian houses aside, the really fun thing to do in Astoria is to look for the locations used in films like Short Circuit, Kindergarten Cop (it’s not a too-muh!), and The Goonies.
We meandered through a few neighborhood streets and an antique shop on the main drag, but as we had several hours to drive yet, and since the sun was setting in earnest by the time we finished dinner, there wasn’t time to play movie tourist. But as we walked back to the car, we saw a theatre marquee announcing that next weekend, Astoria would have a celebration honoring the 25th anniversary of The Goonies!
After a few depressing moments where we realized how old that made us feel, and that we had uncancellable plans for next weekend (though if you want Corey Feldman’s autograph, you might want to check it out), the Tailor started getting excited.
Him: I want to watch The Goonies when we get home!
Me: We don’t have The Goonies.
Him: We’ll swing by Stadium Video!
Me: I seriously doubt they’ll still be open.
Him: What if we bought a copy on the way home? There’s got to be a Target or something between here and Tacoma.
Me: Didn’t we decide to take the back road so we’d miss all that? There’s nothing for a hundred miles!
Him: Well, yeah. C’mon, everything is closing here. Where can we go to find DVDs for sale?
Me: Hmm, if we can get to Olympia by 10:00, we might find a store that’s still open.
Well, as expected, the drive was beautiful but desolate. When we finally reached the outer suburban ring of West Olympia, it was 10:30, but since we had arrived in the land of chain stores, it was worth a try. Despite the guilt over our sudden willingness to hand our money over to corporations, we tried three big-box stores that start with a “B,” two of which that, like everything else at that hour, were shut tight. Since we still had that last shred of hippie conviction that prevented us from trying to find a Walmart, we gave up and headed for home.
But then, just before we reached the highway again, I spotted (through my doubloon, of course) a Blockbuster Video on the left, with a neon “Open” sign in the window. I had just enough time to roll my eyes and slam on the turn signal before some instinct took over and steered the car into the parking lot. It took some digging, but buried in a corner was a miraculous, unassuming copy of The Goonies.
Needless to say, we stayed up way too late last night. Goonies never say die!
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