Animals 2

When you walk around the streets and sidewalks of Salida, you begin to notice animals. Not just the deer in the park or birds on a wire, but small sculptures tucked away on porches and backyards. Or larger ones seeming to be fenced in.







Now this may be influenced by the town's commercial artists who hold forth in galleries. These shops exhibit a range of animal expressions from the iconic to the downright weird. All capture some sense of movement or wildness combined with playfulness.







What I find unique, though, is the way folks...well those at least in the downtown cluster of bungalows...express humor and spontaneity through these renditions of our fellow creatures.











Not that our friends on the wire take notice...but then they perhaps have interpretations of us hidden away in their nests.

Location:Salida

Boston Museum of Fine Art

Some of the warm rooms of the new wing for Art of the Americas embrace and usher the visitor into a 19th century display of art as it was, at that time, displayed. The rooms provide an early example of multitasking...after all, with so much to see, how does one see just one thing at a time?





On the above wall, it took a while to discover the central painting was by Bierstadt's Storm in the Mountains...which could be a riff on the Rocky Mountain landscapes he captured on canvas so well. But how to focus? You have to take your time.

And if you take your time you can discover all kinds of puns and juxtapositions in placement. For example, I was examining a wall of paintings while noting the sculpture in the room and then realized the contemporary scene was being captured in a frame directly opposite. Two visitors to the museum viewing the same sculpture from a somewhat different angle.





But, then, that is one of the qualities of art, the ability to surprise. On my way to the museum, I passed by the monumental open space that frames the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Public space...one of the great gifts that an institution or a city can give to the people...an openness that lifts the spirit after a time in the dark canyons made by streets and skyscrapers.




A poster noted an exhibit of sculptures placed around the portal of the church...I made a trek to see what was being shown...checking the various sites, finding nothing too striking. And, then, I happened to look up (am not sure what made me do so) and there on the bare limbs of the trees were
huge boulders.








The idea of boulders in trees was so unexpected....after laughing and examining the trees with a broad smile on my face, I searched for a "title" for this work, finally finding a small plaque which described the work as having "handmade boulders." Quite huge. Quite realistic. Such fun!

Nice to find artists (and curators) who can make us laugh.

Location:Boston

Grand Opening Woods Distillery, Salida, Colorado

Salida is a foodie, locavore town...eat and drink local. I went to buy some eggs at Ploughboy (they only accept cash, check or IOUs) and was informed that the eggs, previously from Center in the next valley over, were now produced In Town at a neighboring backyard just a few blocks over.


but the big news in town has been the opening of a local distillery...not to be confused with the local breweries, such as Elevation, located just over the line in neighboring Poncha Springs. Woods opened on March 2 to a throng of well wishers.























It was a family affair, parents with children, folks from the retired community, ski patrolers, business people, musicians, artists, snowboard riders, writers, and probably a few drunks from all or any of these categories.

So a new sign on 2nd Street...a new place to drop in besides the Dawn Cafe,





...a new label to show off in your liquor closet...





The gin, by the way, is excellent...using juniper berries from the mountains to the west of town....cheers!!!

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Location:Salida

A day or two

-OK so what makes sense sitting in a hot bath thinking over the last couple of days. Well, skiing with friends and family....




Getting up early, while the groomers were still doing their grooming, and it looked like the sun would stay out over Monarch. The sense of the day opening with potential for deep powder in the trees.

But it is not simply being alone in the snow.




It is being with the snow, the inches that have fallen during the day, the woods, the sense of being in nature, as mammals, as a particular species that has learned to use tools to deal with climate, with weather, maybe even with climate change. It has changed before, but of course more slowly.

And yet ways of dealing with those elements...the warm waters that come from the earth inspected ways...through fractures in the crust of the earth, that Ted seems to sense, the center point of stillness...at Joyful Journey Hot Springs...after a day in the snow.





Of course even there we find instructions about how mammals should be behaving.


So we experience the "natural" to bring us in contact with whom we are...all in a few days. And then, as opposed to the outside, the wild, the uncontained, but then we cluster together in caves, in primitive dwellings, and then in what we call homes...


Playing games, being hyggelig...as they say in norsk, being cozy, warm, close....an ideal actually sought by all kinds of mammals. Even us people.

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Location:Salida, Co

Mountains

When miners, farmers, railroad workers came into these mountains, after crossing the great plains, they did not look kindly on these snow-covered peaks.  Mountains represented obstacles, cold, unpredictable danger.  The "purple mountains majesty" was largely a creation of English romanticism...a shift in aesthetic sensibility in the late 18th and 19th centuries...these "wild places" became part of an upper-class and, then, middle-class value system.  

"Over the course of the 18th century (whilst on the Grand Tour), 'the English' detoured specifically to visit the glaciers (whilst on their way to Italy) and spoke in hused tones of the towering cataracts and vast unpeopled reaches of the mountains." from the art in history blog.

But then there is the other side, the art of looking from the inside out.  Sawatch to the west, Mosquito Range to the east, Sangre de Cristo to the south, Las Garitas to the southwest.  and we...just sunk down in the Dry Union formation.  Makes you realize how una directional we can be. 

But for me a lot has to do with exploration.  On Wednesday, I went looking for a trail off the road to Monarch Pass.  Kept checking the map, going back and forth, and finally I realized it had to be at the same location as a Dept of Transportation (DOT) facility.   So I figured out where to park, set off on a trail, which ran into another trail and, then, just by accident, I saw out of  my left eye a sign...:"235"...the trail I was looking for...a few days before...maybe a week before...a skier had come down the trail...otherwise the trail had not been visited for some time. 

Thinking the trail was a steep climb of .5 mile (800 meters), I set off on snow shoes security linked to my high hiking boots.  Kept on going on and on.  And on.  And very steep, and then getting steeper...until I saw the banks of snow that form along a ridge line and I realized we'd come to the lake...rather we'd come 200 meters above the surface of the lake. 

The trail is just somewhat shy of 1.8 miles (120 meters)...plowing through the powder on the way down...so much fun.  

But for me it is about exploring...oh...I could get all the way to Cottonwood Pass if I leave early in the morning and pack some energy bars.  Or...just where does this lead...and "that's why the east side of the valley is so different.  It was not glaciated which wears the small stuff done and gone and only leaves the hardest of surfaces.  

So there is that process of "going into the mountains"...leaving the flat lands behind (if there ever were just flat lands this side of Russia)...and exploring the contours of Nature of the contours of one's own mind.

Signs

Signs communicate with us...in different ways.  They present themselves in unexpected and expected ways.  Riding my bike around Salida this afternoon, I found the range of signage intent to be quite astonishing.

Some signs "advertise" a product or products...a brand...a way of life...all in one image.  Some are creative and some are "just the facts, ma'm, just the facts." 

Some provide direction...or attempt to...to negotiate the chaos that otherwise would envelop our smalls towns and byways.  Helpful signs...here is the path to, if not righteousness, at least to civil participation in common use resources, such as stores, roads, parking.     

 

Other signs identify significant public institutions or resources....

and sometimes signs serve a more subtle role...to announce changes in social mores or to plead for inclusion of diversity.  .

Sometimes they invite us to take a break...

  
Which, if you've spent too much time today already on the  web, might be something you should do.  Cheers.