A Rookie Mistake
Reposted from my May 2023 newsletter, edited for this platform.
I am not in Alaska right now. I am in Montana at the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities in Centennial Valley, a very remote valley located in the southwestern corner of the state, as the first an Artist-in-Residence for the 2023 season!
Breathtaking. Isolating. Inspirational. Daunting. Over-stimulating. Lonely. Soul-moving. Just a few words to describe how it feels to be here.
Also in this valley is the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, a bonus for someone deeply interested in birds. Yep, me.
As art residencies go, the idea is to have space and time to work uninterrupted, which is a coveted gift. With that in mind, my newsletter this month is unedited and brief, but I haven't forgotten about you.
Have you ever made a rookie mistake well into your career? A time when you just didn't think something through all the way? Something so basic?
As you can see in this month's journal page, I did.
How could this happen, you might wonder? On arrival, someone cautioned me to watch out for the "ankle-breaking" gopher holes. I thanked this person and took his advice, as I've broken one ankle already in the not-so-distant past. Not fun.
Soon I started seeing plumpish rodents all over the place. They reminded me of Prairie Dogs but I knew they weren't; tails were too long and they sounded different. I also discovered the many openings to their underground world.
I assumed these were the gophers and their dens. Naturally, they became the first subject of my affection and attention.
Oh gosh, they are so entertaining to watch! Running back and forth with mouths full of dead grasses, stuffing it into their dens, calling to each other, chasing each other. They were watching me, too, as I worked in and around the studio and cabin I occupy.
In my practice, research is always part of completing a journal page, as a way to extend the learning that comes with nature observation. Assuming these were gophers, I went ahead and wrote this in my journal
That was the mistake.
Later I set about researching gophers and very quickly figured out that my day-long entertainment critters were not gophers at all, but Wyoming Ground Squirrels
A very basic rule was overlooked in this case. No harm done, really, it's just something I should have known not to do and I completely flaked on it.
You know what they say about "assume"...
This time it's only on me. ;
As you might know, I love to include a watercolor sketch of the environment that I am sketching in. Here's a look at the valley, looking towards the Gravelly Range.
The Centennial Mountains are behind me, my cabin and studio space sit at the base of a slope on this side.
The day I created this little sketch, smoke from wildfires in Canada filled the valley. Two days later, the rains came and cleared it all out. Colors and edges changed. Shapes took form that were not present before.
A jaw-dropping moment to see the valley in its complete beauty for the first time.
There's a really incredible and inspirational story about how the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center became what it is, born out of a passion for conservation and built out of a ghost town – a little stopover place called Lakeview that existed back in the day when people were carted by stagecoach to the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park – thanks to the philanthropic vision by two families of what this place could be once again: the Tafts and the Nicholsons. Take a look here.