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I don’t know about you, but on this, the National Park Service centennial, this millennial is paging through her big fat stack of stamped pages, proof of a lifetime of national parks love. Apparently I like to cram that ink into every nook and cranny of my passport—but that’s good, because I’m trying to leave room for many more to come. Happy 100th birthday, NPS—here’s to many more!
I just picked up a sheet of the new Shirley Chisholm postage stamps—not just because Shirley is awesome, but also because the color scheme matches our Shirley broadside perfectly! (Great minds think alike?)
Since I posted this drawing and some others this summer, people have been asking me what’s with the stamps in my sketchbook. I guess the short answer is that each one is a little piece of personal tradition.
But you know I don’t really do short answers.
The long one, then.
I grew up in a nomadic family. Between the moves required by Dad’s job in the Air Force and a fierce wanderlust that runs in all the O’Leary veins, we had a lot of reasons to travel. Dad and I, especially, would spend hours poring over our dog-eared Rand McNally road atlas, plotting routes over the back-est of back roads (the squigglier the line on the map, the better) and stops at as many points of interests as we could cram into a journey from A to B.
When I was ten, we made a circuit of our then-home state of Colorado, and devoted our time to exploring every national park and monument we could reach along the loop. At each park’s visitor center, we noticed a rubber stamp and ink pad stationed at the front desk. When we finally asked a ranger what they were for, she handed us a small blue notebook and proceeded to explain about the National Park Service’s Passport program.
A stamp to collect at every NPS property in the country, and a tidy little book to hold them all? I was hooked.
Dad and I found ways to sneak a national monument or two into every road trip and relocation—and even took impromptu vacations just to add a new park to the list. My favorite memory is when I was in high school, and Dad popped his head into my room:
“Have any plans this weekend?”
“Uh, no…”
“Wanna go to Montana?”
So we jumped in the car and drove 600 miles just to flip General Custer the bird at Little Bighorn (I had just read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, so he wasn’t exactly stirring me to patriotism). I mean, if you’re going to do it, you might as well go all out, after all. And we had the stamp to commemorate the moment.
The Passport program also includes collectible paper stamps, which can be purchased from afar (as opposed to the ink cancellations, which are free but can only be obtained in person). I’m pretty lukewarm about these, though; by the time I jumped on the bandwagon they had already phased out the super-cool two-piece design pictured in the lower left corner above, in favor of the cheaper, lower-quality one-piece stamp in the upper right. Since those have been revamped yet again into a pressure-adhesive sticker—and who knows what heinously non-archival chemicals might be in the glue—I’m even less of a completist about them now.
Anyway, I’ve burned through most of the regional sections in my Passport,
and every inch of overflow space.
So I’ve branched out a bit.
What I didn’t know as a kid was that my Passport helped me develop my interest in nearly everything I love most: traveling, design, archiving, printmaking, history, typography, bookmaking, and so on.
At some point along the way, I realized that what I really mattered to me (beyond the travel itself) was the act of adding to an ongoing work—and then looking back to see what I had accomplished. That what I had been doing all along, by compiling this little individual history, is creating some form of artist book. And that my frustrations over an imperfect format were really a desire to create my own.
A page from my daily book—more on that here.
So now all of my sketchbooks are Passports, each custom-tailored—
each infinitely flexible, ready for whatever adventures wait to be documented.
Here it is, nearly twenty years later, and I’m as eager as ever. Moreover, it’s my goal to collect every last cancellation within the entire National Park System before I stamp the big passport book in the sky. I’m about a quarter of the way there.
And I’ll probably have to build a library for all the sketchbooks I’ll fill between now and then.
Since I’ll be a hermit for most of the rest of the year while I finish my Rainier book, I tried to sneak a little stolen summer vacation time into June. If I was going to lock myself indoors during our sunniest season, I wanted as many mountains, oceans, flowers and skies as I could cram into a week first.
For the first few days we had a couple of friends staying with us. Since one of them was visiting from Colorado, and wanted a change from the hot, dusty summer back home, we took a day trip to the Olympic Peninsula for a good dose of lush greenery.
The West Coast highway, U.S. Route 101, ends with a 300-mile, two-lane meandering loop around the Peninsula. It’s the only thoroughfare on the entire Peninsula, and a treacherous road, full of hairpin curves, patches of fog, logging trucks and landslide-prone slopes—but the scenic beauty makes the drive a spectacular adventure.
We took the northernmost leg of the road that day. Just west of Port Angeles it winds through a tunnel of trees as it hugs the shore of Lake Crescent, where we stopped for a picnic lunch beside the impossibly blue water.
We were tempted to spend the whole day at the lake, but a bigger surprise lay down the road: the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the largest of America’s rare temperate rain forests. I’d also bet it’s the most beautiful—if it weren’t a four-hour drive away, I’d go every day.
I had only ever seen the place in a downpour (big surprise—they get up to fourteen feet of rain and over 300 cloudy days a year), but as soon as we arrived that day … the sun came out.
I almost didn’t recognize the place.
The last time I was there, droplets hung from every surface and everything shimmered with a gossamer silver glow.
This time, the glow turned to spun gold and bottle green.
As always, though, every branch was festooned with cat-tail moss, and sword ferns carpeted the forest floor.
And the clover leaves were the biggest I’ve ever seen.
So were the trees.
The best part about our road trip was the fact that it was nearly Midsummer; we still had hours of sunshine left to us. Next on the itinerary: Ruby Beach. It was a short hike down to the water, past Queen Anne’s lace and just-ripening salmonberries, with the roar of the Pacific ringing in our ears.
That bizarre stamp is still the only banana slug I’ve ever seen, alas. The search continues!
I sat down to do a watercolor,
while Ethan moved along the shore to explore the sea stacks,
and Nicole stopped to take in the view.
We made a quick contribution to the collection of obos on a nearby driftwood log, and set off for home.
Yes. Twilight firewood. For setting those vampire books on fire, I think.
On the way back we stopped for a little absurdity. Route 101 passes through Forks, home of a certain infamous vampire series; we couldn’t resist stopping to take photos of the hilarious roadside tie-ins that had popped up since the last time I passed through. I’d never read the books, but when Nicole told me that these vampires only eschew sunlight because it makes them sparkle … well. My morbid curiosity got the better of me, and before I could stop myself, I read the whole blasted page-turning accident scene of a series the following week. Ugh.
And, uh, yeah. They sparkle. And whine and brood and mope. Curiosity satisfied.
I digress. Sorry.
By that point we were starving—but not in the mood for Twi-dogs or whatever punny food might be expected in a place with a name like Forks. So I suggested we hang on a little longer and head to Port Townsend, where I knew of a fantastic seafood restaurant.
An hour later, we had traded Forks for spoons, and were digging into our bowls of the tastiest, freshest, localest carn-starn Manila clam chowder on the West Coast. And changing my definition of road food in the process.
Oh, who am I kidding? You know that whole trip was for the chowder, right?