Ruins

The thriving Harrington-Beall Greenhouse Company filled this wide plot of land on Vashon Island from 1889 to 1989. When the company left, it left the greenhouses to be consumed by blackberry brambles and ivy vines. Slender trees have grown up through and shattered the glass ceilings. Pieces of broken panes crack and fracture beneath our feet as we move from one overgrown room to the next. A thin, gray deciduous tree has been crimped abnormally in it's growth between the building's frame. In this bright, but cool October air the tree has begun to drop leaves onto the crumbling brick, the moss, shattered bits of glass and blackberry vines below.

For weeks I have been looking at photographs of Angkor Wat and other jungled monuments in South East Asia so the abandoned-to-nature sense of this place feels somehow sacred, as does the significance of these voracious and gardener-feared vines laying claim to the formerlly hermetic environment of the greenhouse. They stretch like this for acres. There are some places where the structure of the place is almost utterly obscured. It feels like walking outdoors until we encounter a short brick wall and ceiling frames.

In Greece, the ruins I visited were clearly delineated and elucidated by interpretive signs. Even when little more than a corner stone remained, a plaque would declare the calculated dimensions and appearance of the building that would have occupied the space, calling on our imagination to fill in the details and to picture where Socrates stood to deliver his teachings. My patience for the exercise wore thin.

Here at the Harrington-Beall Greenhouses, one could argue, there is less history, less cultural value. But here, like at the fenced lot kitty-corner to Town Hall where an apartment building was demolished and the jagged foundation was left exposed or at the empty apartment building where the last resident set fire to his world and to the building that sits now ruined and vacant, I am left to imagine my own stories about the pieces that remain. I am not asked to try to picture monuments. Instead, every small item I spot provokes curiosity about the ordinary lives. The banality of these places posses some profound mystery. The singed wall of the dead man's apartment. The dangling fragments of glass, still clinging to the greenhouse framework, which has been muscled by wrist-thick brambles.

The dangling plates of glass suddenly conjure disconcerting images of a guillotine. I crouch in protective shelter of a remaining door frame and watch sunlight drop through the building's skeleton. I like the silence, the ruin of the place. I turn and trace my way back, relishing the crunching sound of my tred over the fallen glass panes like breaking the shell of the first frost on bare soil.

What in Sam Hill. . .

It is a wealthy man's privilege to be visionary, even if the vision be eccentric or unmanageable. Sam Hill imagined an agricultural and artistic mecca out above the stunningly picturesque Columbia River. Though his vision never exactly succeed, it is him we can thank for the scenic highway through the Columbia River Gorge. And it was to his home, now the Maryhill Museum of Art, that we set out toward one warm day in September.

The museum is perched on the hillside overlooking the river, twenty-five miles east of the Dalles. Hill began construction on the mansion in 1914 on a portion of his 5,000 acre land along the river. The harsh and remote location got the better of his dreams and when he stopped construction on the house in 1917, it might have continued to sit unfinished and empty except for the encouragement of friend and modern dancer Loie Fuller, who convinced Hill to convert the mansion into a museum. This same museum, dedicated in 1926 by Queen Marie of Romania, did not open to the public until 1937, six years after Hill's death. The place now sports beautiful shady grounds, studded by sculptures and strolled by peacocks, a large collection of Rodin pieces, some beautifully intricate chess sets as well as a small gallery devoted to Louie Fuller, a larger one to Queen Marie of Romania and one dedicated to an overview of the Native People's of North America.

A more exceptional indicator of Hill's eccentricities is the Stonehenge memorial he dedicated in 1918, which is considered the nation's first WWI memorial. Erected on a landscape nearly opposite that of it's Scottish model, this Stonehenge rises from the Eastern Washington grassland and looks down to the river.

We wandered around the concrete pillars, snapping pictures along with the other tourists who had pulled into the dusty parking lot beside us. Just downhill and slightly west of the henge we spotted Sam Hill's tomb; a pale block we mistook for an electrical box. I was struck by how unusually modest this grave marker was compared to the concrete mansions, monuments and motorways he had constructed in his life. Looking south from Stonehenge where the river cuts through the rocky gold landscape it seems strange that Hill considered this arid land ripe for an agricultural utopia. His faith in human ingenuity and perseverance to transform nature pressed him to continue his projects. In the end, though, they can only speak to the ability man has to leave an indelible mark on a land.

plenty

I have returned several times to West Seattle's Camp Long since I learned of it's existence at the Mandy Greer- Zoe Scofield show a month previous. (see Water Calling, pt. 1 from July 2009). I have come here to pick blackberries for a pie, to walk the network of trails and to attend another performance.

The Eleventh Annual Arts in Nature Festival was a two day event at Camp Long, hosted by the Nature Consortium and featuring live music, dance, installations and hands-on activities. There was a broad variety of events, from Marimba ensembles to modern dance troupes, aerial acrobatics, Brazilian Jazz and everything in between.

I had been tipped off to the Museum of Sound cabins and headed directly to them. Each of the eight cabins was an open stage for the artist who took up residence there for the weekend. The installations they created in theses spaces ranged from elaborately reconstructed visual and auditory interiors, replete with audience-participation activities to the virtually unaltered interior spaces with only the barest presentation of the artist's statement. I preferred the style of the former.

In Kristin Tollefson's "Land of Plenty," installed in Cabin 9, I discovered a trove of treasures, a nook that Annie Dillard would delight in. I certainly did. Her exhibit, Tollefson says was inspired by "becom[ing] acutely aware of the things I chose to keep or collect and my motivations for doing so. . ." The small cabin was filled with collected things: whole egg shells, beads, buttons, feathers, burls, seeds and leaves all amassed in multi-sized Mason jars and adorned with light or nests of paper and gauzy cloth. It was a bit like a laboratory, like a forgotten tool shed at an old farm or a bit like the nestled corner in a dream where your feelings are manifest in small, perfect objects. I studied the contents of each of her jars over and over.

I, too, recently became aware of the precious things I chose to collect while I was boxing up the few belongings I would keep in storage and disposing of the rest. During a night of packing, I sat and stared at a small jar I had over the years filled with found things--a dried cricket, a cat's jaw bone, feathers, seeds, a wishbone, bits of sea-softened glass and smoothed stones. These small things speak almost as clearly of my past as do the photo albums and boxes of letters I was sorting and storing in cardboard boxes.

I stared into Tollefson's dream-lit jars at these valuable, simple things and wondered about her history with them and the stories she could tell about each one. In her program blurb she writes about how she is drawn to simplifying her existence, "but utility, sentimentality, beauty and guilt associated with what I have saved get in the way." I had shared this conflict until recently. Simplicity is less of an option for me now, but I am learning to turn circumstances into opportunity. It was comforting to live vicariously through Tollefson's sentimental objects, nestled as they were in jars lined up on the rough wooden shelves and floorboards of the small Camp Long cabin.

Water Calling pt. 2

Where Mandy Greer and Zoe Scofield's piece at Camp Long was evocative and impressionistic, the "Waterlines" presentation at Volunteer Park was directly focused on educating audiences. Stokley Towles is a storyteller and his story is sewers and pipes and reservoirs and bottles. The story is really about water; drinking it, cleaning it, cleaning in it and conserving it.

Tracing the history of water use, he includes a glimpse at our transition from water fear (based on the polluted condition in eighteenth century urban centers) to our "conquest of nature" and production of therapeutic bottled water. He lines up rows of bottled water and read their elaborate selling points: Doctor recommended, intelligence boosting and purifying. A small bottle from Japan that touts itself as containing extra Hydrogen is displayed with a locally produced bottle that advertises extra Oxygen. Towles suggests the two waters be melded to make water with extra. . .water! Displaying a bottle of Dasani water he explains that Coca-Cola produces this water at local bottling plants. The water begins in the city pipes--the same water in our tap at home--Coca-Cola filters and purifies the water, adds minerals, slaps a label on it and sells it with elaborate health qualities. He drops two pennies into a jar. The amount of city water purchased with two pennies instead purchased in these bottles would equal how much? He pours a pitcher of pennies into a jar equal the size of the one with the two pennies and it fills right to the top.

Towles is heavy on exuberant demonstration and reminds me of the mad-scientist educational television shows my younger brother loved to watch. The trailer unit where we are seated is full of charts, maps and photos that outline Seattle's water cycle, use and quality. One map shows the location of rat-in-the-toilet complaint calls around the city. One map shows where the drinking water of each region in the city originates. One bulletin board is for visitor's water stories. One map shows the seasonal taste and quality differences recorded by Seattle utilities employees.

I have only one question, why are we inside a trailer at Volunteer Park? Why does this presentation need to be in a park; this particular park, or in a park at all. I know the group of installations, performances and presentations is a joint Parks Service-Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs project and thus necessarily located in one of Seattle's Parks. But, while Mandy Greer's performance felt integrally linked to the location, Stokley Towles' performance feels connected more to the concept and able to be located anywhere since it did not feel like a very site-centered site-specific performance. I longed for some reference to why we were located here specifically. Maybe I was only disappointed that the show was not outdoors and the weather was so beautiful that day.

Water Calling pt. 1

This summer, Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs has focused on water with a series of site-specific installations and performance pieces at three city park locations. At each site, local artists have responded to water cycle, use and conservation.

Camp Long is one of the city parks I didn't know existed. Like many of my fellow Seattleites, I have my favorite parks, many of which are in my own neighborhood. Frequenting the same spots as I do, I neglect to get acquainted with new parks. Thus, Mandy Greer's performance, "Mater Matrix Mother and Medium" was a chance to not only view a creative installation and a performance, but to explore new spots in the city.

Camp Long was built in 1937 at a WPA project and sported a lodge, cabins, picnic areas and Schurman Rock, the first man-made climbing rock in the nation. The lodge, cabins and group picnic and campfire sites are still rentable and might, on quiet West Seattle evenings, provide some illusion of having escaped the city.

We came upon an expansive audience sitting on mismatched blankets, grouped around the polliwog pond behind the lodge. Joining the others, we sat facing the collage crocheted "fibre river" that wound through the tree trunks and limbs. The 200 foot long crochet river that wound through a portion of the park from the polliwog pond, through branches, around bushes and encompassing thick tree trunks was made in part during a series of 30 community crochet sessions held all over Seattle. The effect is fascinating, with webs and vines and knots in every shade of blue yarn, wending through the trees. When she began to move I realized that the clump of yarn by the base of the tree closest to the pond was not a tangle in the river but the dancer Zoe Scofield who emerged costumed in a portion of the fibre river, which kept her tethered to the tree. She moved in meditative staccato, touched the water and the tree and rolled herself across the soil and pulled anchor rocks from the pond, all accompanied by a cleverly scored partly live, partly projected soundtrack performed by Morgan Henderson.

When Scofield curled back against the tree where she had begun, we all moved in to inspect the installation, tracing it up the tree trunks and down to the mossy rocks in the water until we thought we had reached the end of the thread. I don't know what I learned about water except the visceral role of its presence in a performance and the satisfaction of tracing a fabricated river over water and tree limbs in a park on a warm sunny afternoon.

Covet not the trees of the field

I was raised on a collection of Biblical rules, some of which made too much sense (don't kill) and weren't discussed in much depth . Other rules seemed unnecessary and almost impossible to enforce (don't wear cotton/polyester blends) and so were dropped. Then there were the rules that cropped up in the grey areas. Don't lie, one of the most excessively reinforced rules, seemed to be overlooked when my parents took me to the fair and called me two years younger than I was so that I could skip the admission fee. These white lies were different than bearing false witness, which, I was told, was the real problem. Don't lie in court or to your dad when he demands "who left the hose running and flooded the planter?" The other stuff is harmless.

Don't covet in another tricky rule to enforce in our contemporary society. Maybe the general dissatisfaction that keeps us tuned to advertising and distressed at our own financial and/or social condition in the world is what the white lie is to perjury. Is it only the direct envy of a friend's good fortune, new house or great job that we are to concern ourselves with. Where then does the longing for place fit in?

When I come here to California to visit family I am faced with a combination of nostalgia and envy. When I visit in the winter it is the weather I am jealous of. In the spring, or early summer it is the landscape I long for. It took moving away from them for me to appreciate the fleshy, golden hills, spotted with dark broccoli crown Valley Oaks.

My covetousness of this landscape has so much to do with the Oak trees. The writhing shapes and scaled bark are so far removed from the uniformly rigid Douglas Fir groves ubiquitous to my home in the Northwest. These Oaks are always dancing. The Blue Oaks that filled the ravines around the home where I grew up were the heartiest things, able to cope with California's frequent and grueling droughts. An old growth Blue Oak may only measure half a meter circumference for its four hundred year life. The iconic Valley Oaks, with the wide, bushy arms, were notorious for dropping limbs. One day a branch with the girth of a Blue Oak trunk might fall in a barley field where the wide lobed leaves would turn unseasonably brown. Despite their sacrificial limbs, these Valley Oaks were superior tree house locations and the most appropriate photo subjects, spread-armed in the open golden fields. I have never spent time framing pines in a camera lens like I still do the Oaks every time I visit. I sit on these hot evenings, watching the sun set behind the rolling golden hills, like sunny thighs and shoulders, coveting the shapes, the warmth, the difference of it all.

monumenting

It is sad that I have become so overwhelmed by the plethora of archaeological sites, fortresses, ruins and points of historic interest. Perhaps it is doubly unfortunate then that I saved Athens for the end of the trip. The Acropolis is astounding in all the ways that one might expect; the size and grandeur of those columns, the age of it and it's lofty view of the entire sprawling, polluted city are all impressive. The place was, again as one would expect, swarmed with visitors snapping thousands of photos in order to capture every angle of those steep marble pillars and platforms. People pass through the sites with their lenses out and pause occasionally to frame a shot and then wait for people to pass so the shot can be captured, un-marred by the presence of other visitors.They wait like this for indefinite periods of time.

I circle the ruins and then find a bench to sit and watch people file past, taking in the sites through their viewfinders. I wander across the hill and down to the Ancient Agora where I walk through the knee-high walls where ancient places once were and where now I find groves of Aleppo Pines and Kermes Oaks. I watch metro trains pass and I study the graffiti across the tracks. At Hadrian's Library I watch three turtles cruise the stone remnants and graze through the green grass that has filled in the floors once tiled with tiled mosaics. And this wall, now the back to these hopping trinket and postcard shops, was once part of the main room of the library, where the forty niches were filled with wooden shelves and cupboards that housed almost 17,000 books. I look up at the open sky and try to imaging these walls, the high ceilings and the rows of book spines. The heat and my swollen feet and ten days of imagining walls where there are no longer walls have taken their toll and I feel a bit defeated by being unable to picture these. But, my mood improves later as I share a meal with four fellow travelers I have met along the way. Two are returning home and two are setting out for the islands. Athens is a place of arrival and departure. Soon, I too will be leaving.