July 2013

For those of you with a Romantic Complaint like me ruins seem often more felicitous than construction. The falling down as graceful an arc as the rising up. The emptying as filling as a Big Gulp.

I have long been the lover of abandoned places. Growing up in a small house and a large family, escapes to vacant lots, shattered woodlots along the factories and polluted rivers near my home and even the feral beauty of weeds within the chain link confines of the freeway seemed more mine than anywhere else. I saw beauty in defeat, in the disposition of human ideals, where nature could creep in with grass-snake-ease and invisibility. Is there a course of therapy for this sort of thinking; a syndrome to be cured?

Or is the therapy the visiting of these places?

I am not talking about the Acropolis or Chichen-itza  when I say ruins. These places have been polished by dollars, or pesos, or euros, as the case may be, to touristic specifications. I am not talking about the monumental. Simply the abandoned. The old iron mines I botanized in on the Island of Elba, the old farmhouse whose roof had collapsed under the weight of moss on the Kitsap Peninsula where I looked for ‘relics’ with my friend Gavin.

And now closer to home the Tall Chief Golf Course. I decided to not back fill my visits there with a “brief history”. Though visiting abandoned sites can often be about what is no longer there. What is missing, or lost. I prefer to see what is there.

Yesterday I walked down at 6am. The valley was so quiet at that time of day I wondered why I never walked that early before.  When I left the road for the colonnaded confines of the golf course I could hear two great blue herons brawling with pterodactyl-like croaking. Both wanting the froggy pickings of the small pond there I imagine. Swallows whistled overhead, high-pitched screams though to them some morning song. They harmonized with the sharp whistles of western wood peewee.

I waded in the dew soaked grass like Wordsworth on a pilgrimage. But this was no Tintern Abbey.  The smooth fairways were now tousled waves of bent grass in bloom. The walls were Lombardy poplar colonnades, not a stone in sight, and though some struggled with age and decay a great portion were still vibrantly alive, nestled in the moist morning air, the not-quite-fog we call the marine layer. Though I knew it would burn off, and the expansive blue skies we’re enjoying in spades this summer would be back, it had a calming effect, like fall does when it moves into the valley slowly, gently. An unctuous blessing.

No future plans for the golf course make it even more desolate and at one’s disposal. When what-could-become and what–is-becoming mix. I would love to be reductive, to talk about saving nature from development or imagining a magnificent garden estate rising from these ruins. But that was not my goal. I just loved the silence. Though I did eye a few of the dead poplars along the road and thought about our chain saw. Each winter a storm invariably topples one of them right onto the power lines and we are plunged into darkness, sometimes for days.  I love the candlelight one has to burrow into to read. I don’t like the sound of our neighbors generator, nor ours when we realize this  may go on for a while and the freezer is dripping on the floor.

I chided myself for seeking out such a maudlin place on a summer’s morn. After all there are daisies in bloom, tomatoes ripening and boisterous ducks at home as the season continues to crescendo. This walk was not necessarily a meditation, nor as Wordsworth would have it a search for inspiration. I wasn’t sure why I came. Curiosity, I guess. Then a clutch of fledgling summer tanagers swooped by my head as if I were just another stump in their bug-hunting day. And the pop-pop-pop of a not so healthy engine went down the road and the barely incanted spell was broke. My stomach growled: Breakfast.

I picked a daisy from our garden when I got home and put it in a bottle on the kitchen counter. And began to chop potatoes.

A few weeks ago I went to an estate sale, more as a suburban archaeologist than a shopper (I’m running out of space). It really ended up being more like a trip to a museum than an archeological dig. The estate sale hosts flounced around in “outfits” with nametags and set up the merchandise like they were Chelsea gallerists. I poo-poo-ed their staging, done more to validate the outrageous prices than to give the objects their due.

At the entrance to the house were 2 tables, roughly nailed together boards painted white 50 years ago or so and sufficiently weathered to warrant tossing in the fireplace (except for the lead paint). They were labeled “Shabby Chic Tables” and priced at $250- each!! The true horror was that there was a “SOLD” sign on both of them and the sale had only been open a few hours.

They were the sort of furniture I would have picked out of a junk pile on the side of the road 30 years ago and set up in my collage studio where I celebrated the begrudgingly slow passing of time. It was really a rather revolutionary gesture to be a garbage picker in the Reagan Years. It was a defiant act against the ever-insistent American machine called: NEWness. Though the aesthetic always had a maudlin undertow, the action of collecting what was discarded was an embrasure of decay and the ultimate and timely death of all things and ideals. Heady, I know.

Then the term “shabby chic” was coined for such toss-a-ways. Did Martha Stewart have anything to do with it? I am not going to go into a history of recent Good Housekeeping decorating trends. I remember the sadistic articles though, recommending beating furniture with chains or leaving it out in the elements: everything your mother told you not to do with the furniture. Since that time every barn from Sedro-Wooley, Washington to New Lebanon , New York was plundered and purged of their history for the seekers…Of what? The past? A careful-careless sort of look?

I still really enjoy the beauty of aged and distressed objects and furniture. Rusty gears and weathered woods. Lichen covered trees and a mossy brick path. I feel comfortable with aging and the aged. Think good sharp cheddar.

But what about plastics?

I found these chairs on the side of the road nestling up to a rain sodden sofa from Ikea. And a corrugated cardboard sign with the liberating word “FREE” on it. Not much is free anymore. And I’m still a garbage picker when the picking are good. When I got them home Michael wrinkled his nose in silent disapproval. “ Not exactly shabby-chic, are they?” I acknowledged.

Or are they?

I’m not really sure what natural processes are at work on these very unnatural plastic chairs, a few, maybe 10 years old. Yet as I approached them with my camera they had the look of a lichen covered marble  headstone in a Victorian cemetery. Somehow this aging makes them seem more comfortable than the slippery new whiter-than-white plastic chairs we have. I think if I hold on to them long enough someone might even be able to get a few hundred dollars out of them at the estate sale after my death.