Tag: Seattle

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In Memory of Gail Larrick

The red in the rocks to the north of where we stood bled like rusty paint into the juniper-piñon green. To the south and west, the chalky white buttes and ridges jutted and alternately reminded me of the ends of white spuds and crumbling teeth from a shark’s jaw fossil.

The streets in the little Mormon town looked almost as old as the surrounding rock. Squatting in the middle of large lawns were century-old two-story homes with sleeping-porches and dormer windows in each side of the upper floor. Oak and elm and ash trees shaded the yards with their peeled picket fences and trikes and bikes that littered the mown grass.

Betty and I stood in the street and said her name, as she had asked. “Gail Larrick. Gail Larrick.” We filmed it on a cell phone and sent her a video. She e-mailed back that we were standing close to where her home had been in Teasdale, Utah. Many years before she had lived in the village. She loved it in Teasdale. That was obvious from what she said about the red rock country and how she knew all about the Henry Mountains and Hanksville and Caineville and Goblin Valley and Capitol Reef and Escalante and Torrey and the Fremont River and the bomb…yes that bomb…and government poison gas tests that eliminated bands of sheep; and Delta, Utah, and Dugway, Utah, and many more places in that glorious combination of mountain and desert and red rock and salt flat and snowy peak and rolling hills we call Utah.

But she knew a lot about a lot of places in this special country and I suppose we could travel all over these United States and speak her name, Gail Larrick, and these places would know her in some form that non-spiritual folks like me would not understand. Some communication occurring between the rock and tree of a particular place and the spirit of a seeker like Gail. Palouse Falls, Ulm Pishkun Buffalo Jump, Pine Ridge, Tubac, Aravaipa Canyon, La Luz Canyon, Pawnee Grasslands, and the list could journey on, a litany of all the places that she communed with and that in some way communed back. The conversations private, in a language that only Gail understood.

Sometimes that voice came through to me in her writing, because that’s how I first knew her. She took my internet writing classes, first in poetry, then in lyric essay, those short little sticks of dynamite that ignite the space behind the eyes of those who choose to read them.

It is there I learned about her passion for red rock of Utah, and the gangly arms of Saguaro cacti, the crash of waves on the Mendocino Coast, her connection with the ceremonies of Native Americans. Her passion for photography. Her writing communed with me.

Through her writing I knew her as one who lived alone, but she did not fear that; she had chosen to live so, and I would fear that loneliness to no end, but she didn’t. She embraced her loneliness and made it her friend. And so she wrote.
Not to say she did not have family and a large circle of close friends, because I think she did although I was not well acquainted with that part of her world.

Once Betty and I went from Boise to Sonoma County where I taught a class with my friend Guy Biederman. Gail signed up. I would finally meet her in person.

At the time, Gail had been sending me intricately-described short pieces about her travels and her life, both past and present; things about her dad and mom, her former life in Seattle and San Francisco, her time in Arizona, and most gloriously, her pieces about—yes I will say this—about her glorious southern Utah. Not my Utah, or your Utah, but Gail Larrick’s Utah and her encounters with the buffalo in the Henrys and the Mormon women of Teasdale and the sweeping glide of the monster red-rock cliffs of the southern part of that state, her trips to Escalante and beyond.

When she wrote these pieces, there was a hint of the mystical in her words, in her imagery that made me wonder how I would feel about her. And when I met her, I was surprised. She was frank and straightforward, her mystical belonging only to her.

After that, we planned to write books together. Which we did not do. And I am sad about that, that she is now gone and I cannot share that experience with her. I suppose I am selfish in this regard; there was much I stood to gain from working with and being around Gail Larrick.

But one thing I know, I will be speaking her name in French Glen and Sonora and Lee’s Ferry and places between and beyond because I will know she has been there and in her spiritual world, may be there still, to hear me speak her name.

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On Man, Nature and Beauty

The weekend before last, Betty and I ate a sumptuous Sunday supper with our daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Baruch Ellsworth, at The Corson Building in the Georgetown area of Seattle, Washington. After dining we headed back north to our lodging and noticed Mount Rainier, whose bottom was obscured by clouds that made the mountain look like it was suspended in a pink space, the pink coming from the setting sun illuminating the snow covered sides. The majesty of the instant reminded me of all those moments when nature sneaks up and surprises us with the magic of an unforeseen display.

Driving north we looked to the west and the peaks of the Olympic Peninsula jutted up like busted-off teeth, the recent snow only slightly more radiant than the mountain range’s rocky parts, all of it defined by the splayed light of the dying sun. A rose tint cast on the western sides of glassy skyscrapers. The thin clouds overhead captured their own pink tints, so that the night hung with a pregnant beauty created by a mix of season, sunset, snow, rock, and the steel and glass of tall buildings.

Since returning to our home in Boise, the mental image of all those pinks captured in both natural and manmade surfaces has set me to thinking on the nature of beauty in landscape.

I am a creature of the American West, having lived in desert, city, coastal and mountain environs, and have learned to appreciate what the land has to offer. Coastal rips of white and blue waves engulfing craggy rocks populated by black cormorants; fierce-toothed dust storms looming over spiny Sonoran desert mountain ranges; Rocky Mountain meadows and creek banks pocked with purples and reds and yellows of lupine and Indian paintbrush and cinquefoil; acres of high-basin barbwire and sagebrush dusted with an early morning snow; the lacy fingers of ice on the edge of a winter river. And not just nature, but also sunlight jigging in the windows of tall buildings, or the reflection of the spring-green hills in the glass of skyscrapers, the exquisite arc of a bridge over a foamy river…mixtures of man and nature’s creations that generate moments compelling one to mumble, “Aha.”

I suppose that those human/natural creations can be either serendipitous moments of sun and glass and cloud, or something envisioned by an architect or urban planner designing a building, a park, a bridge. Either way, there seems to be beauty in the meeting of land and man.

Granted, sometimes the meeting doesn’t result in something particularly grand, but in something heinous and ugly. I often recall moments of driving down boulevards of towns in the American West when the view of mountains, meadow or canyons has been blocked by cheap buildings, too many catty billboards, street lights, telephone lines, street signs all jumbled, with no thought given to how they may meet the human eye.

When we decide, as humans, to do it ugly, we do it well. Yet it’s not so simple as saying man only creates—through his bad behavior, his greed, his lack of foresight—things that are monstrosities to the eye and our sense of aesthetics. That would be too easy. Sometimes, I think, through his most catastrophic acts, man, in conjunction with nature, does create beauty.

Before I continue, don’t get me wrong, because I despise warfare on the most elemental levels. But as I sat trapped in the Siege of Khe Sanh, 1968, one of the things that rattled me the most was the stark and searing beauty created by war.
Bombarded trees shattered, their stripped limbs backlit by the early morning sun, or caught in stark white-barked contrast to the bomb and artillery shell-hole-pocked red mud landscape and the long spine of rugged jungle-tiered mountains in the distance. Those same tree limbs observed in juxtaposition to the hulls of blasted coffee-plantation houses, the roofs bashed in, the walls half gone, their surviving bricks delicately fingered out into the space left behind when incoming artillery killed all the life inside. Or the jumble of sea bags and ammo boxes with their weird geometrical scatter against the dull green of a shredded Marine Corps tent and the red dirt of the surrounding terrain. The abstract expression existing in the jumble of spent artillery casings and scraps of torn jungle dungarees, a collage it seemed; and a Guernica-like Picasso-esque helmet without a head, a boot close by, no foot inside. Beauty…our horrible beauty.