I’m doing some proofing today, away from my regular set up. I wanted to see how the rv and lettering were going on the Explore print, so I just proofed the bottom half or so. It’s a tall skinny print, and I haven’t gotten to the top part yet. There will also be a color block behind it, but my lining-things-up-and-keeping-them-straight stuff (“registration” is the technical printmaking term) is all back in Memphis, so I may just wait on that part till I get home. This one is also quite tall, 24”, so the press would be helpful as well.

I did try a double layer for this second print, much smaller, so it felt less hard to manage, but the make-shift set up I tried moved on me. You can see that the one on the left especially moved as I printed. It gave me some helpful information anyway, but I may wait till home to do much more work on this one. I’m trying to decide if I need two blocks for the two blues (and you can see that if I do, they need to be curved a bit at the join), or if one block rolled carefully will be just as easy. I want the round light to be larger in the final version, but it’s always easy to take more away, and you can’t put it back, so I started conservatively. It’s the dock light across the lake from me at my first camping stop in Missouri. It’s nice to take your muse on the road once in a while and get some new views. The RV print is our campsite in Idaho a few days later.

It's been a tough week with various large griefs around here and among people I care about. I've been carving on my new block, the 18x24" one, while watching some escapist BBC mysteries, but it's big enough to be going very slowly, so there's nothing really to share yet. I'm grateful for that meditative work, and I'm grateful for sketching, where I can turn bits of daily life into color and pattern and be-here-nowness. I'm also grateful that this was the week when strawberry rhubarb pie showed up at the local grocery. Rhubarb doesn't grow in Memphis, and that's a treat I really look forward to coming out here. It hasn't been available, and then yesterday it was. Baked goods, stones with strong life lines, walks in great beauty, and tea have all been balms this week. So there they are for my journal this weekend. 

I had a lovely day going from Montana to Idaho. I had less mileage to go than any other day, so I decided to take a lovely looking two lane highway that followed the Clark Fork river a good way. It took a lot longer, and I was tired when I got there, but it was a truly lovely day. I sketched once along the way (top left, next to Mr. Darcy), and here are a couple of photos as well. 

I spent a wonderful night at Long Branch State Park in Missouri on my way out west, and I have two, maybe three, prints dancing in my head from that one evening sitting on a tiny private beach with a Great Blue Heron for company. This is the smaller of the two that I’ve started. Brown ink is the only ink I have out here, so it’s what I’m using to proof, but this won’t be the final color. I just wanted to see how the carving is going before doing any more. I sat and watched this one single light out across the water, and it reminded me of Gatsby watching the light from Daisy’s dock. I’m not sure if I’ll try for green or just leave it white, but I’ve got a little way to go before making that decision.

I slowed down on the sketching as the week went on. Our next stop was Keyhole State Park in Wyoming. There was a nice looking trail running a long way around a deep blue lake, though our campsite was off a smaller bay. It had lovely red rock on the far side and geese the next morning at sunrise, but it was super hot when we got there. I turned the air conditioning on in Alice for the first and only time on the trip, and Mr. Darcy and I put the bed down and took a nap. Then I did the sketch above looking out toward the water from our spot. On a cooler day it would be a neat park to explore further, and we did enjoy a short walk the next morning with a lovely breeze. It had cooled off enough to sleep with the windows open, which is nice because the A/C is pretty loud. Here are a couple of photos from the morning.

The next day we got to Lewis and Clark Caverns state park in Montana. The landscape reminded me of the reddish hills and scruffy bushes in Turkey near Bergama where I got to stay and paint a decade ago. Very few trees, and an open campground with just circles of rvs, but some really nice trails. Again it was hottest, but we had a nice short hike after we got in. It’s another park that would be good to explore further in slightly cooler weather. I had thought I might need a full day off driving one of these two days, but each morning I woke up ready to go again, so I pushed on. I found that an average of 450 miles was very doable. I mostly got in about 3pm, and I’d have time for a bit of a walk, a little sketching, and a lie down if I needed one. I was going to bed early with the light failing instead of using lights in the camper, and then waking up early and enjoying the beauty of the morning and breakfast and tea before taking off again. I could easily have spent long and lingered on this trip, but Mr. Darcy was ok with the camper but still not that relaxed, and I was looking forward to seeing Jude for the first time since early January, so we just kept moving. I’ll definitely do some state park visits to just settle and paint when I’m not trying to make it solo across the country though.

My second night’s stop was at Lake Vermillion State Park just over the border into South Dakota. I had been excited about being able to sit right on a lake, and the view was pretty, but the riprap kept you from getting actually to the water, which was a disappointment for Mr. Darcy. Much like life, the less exciting photo in the Missouri state park actually turned out to be a more magical place, though I enjoyed this one too.

I ended up naming my camper Alice. There were all kinds of epic journeys to draw from. I always loved the Odyssey growing up. But I realized that I don’t want that kind of male-centric, testosterone-laden template for my own journeys. So I named her after Alice Steinbach, whose book Without Reservations was the middle aged version of Eat, Pray, Love ten full years before Liz wrote her book. Alice showed the way to step out into the world following your own curiosity, relying on yourself, enjoying your own company, but also making space for new friends along the way. It’s as a happy journey instead of a tortured. One, and one where she reclaimed her sense of self after subsuming it for years as a wife/mother/employee. That kind of gentle and intelligent journey is whaat I prefer to use as my model. Her wisdom was a huge influence on me as I stepped out of an overbearing relationship that spanned my 20’s and figured out who I was again. And I like having a female name without a lot of flourish or pretension. It suits the adventures I hope to have in this camper.

The biting flies drove us in earlier than I’d left the water the night before, but the sunset was glorious. And we had a lovely walk the next morning along the lake with a beautiful breeze before taking off. I also passed a milestone as an rv owner and managed to dump the sewage on my own without help (though I’d gotten a little early advice from a friend).