The Endeavour Tour

Yosemite: that rich part of our natural landscape that has hosted humanity for thousands of years. The Ahwahneechee lived there, the Europeans arrived in the 1800s, railroads showed up in 1907, 89% of the region is designated as wilderness area, 20% of California's total plant species can be found within its boundaries, and it was the first park identified by the US government for preservation and protection.

And yet, when I tell anyone that I'm planning on spending the weekend camping there, the first thing that anyone brings up is the hantavirus. I am happy to report that, so far, I have survived my time there.

Which (hanta, aside), it turns out, is still a little surprising. I mean, with a renewed commitment to unembarrassed, wild "yesses," of course you agree to go camping for the weekend in the Yosemite region. It is not until after I've agreed, however, and I'm buying quick-dry trousers at REI for the first time that it occurs to me that I haven't been overnight (no-car) camping since I was about 16. This could lead to some embarrassing vulnerabilities, I realize and uncomfortable admissions about my own capabilities. I am only marginally comforted when I remind myself that this excursion is only for two days. I cannot fully humiliate myself in that time, I hope.

Sometimes there is unexpected value, however, in distance from experience, I think. There is a rare pleasure that attends remembering something that you haven't done in a long while and are pleased to discover that you can do: fitting a large backpack to sit at your hips, scrambling up a long, rock-riddled white tumble of hillside (the carrion of former glaciers), tying your hair back in your mother's old pink-flowered scarf hoping that you don't twist an ankle in your inappropriate sneakers. About thirty steps in, I was wheezing, cursing my former smoking habit and wondering how to confess that I'm not going to make it when I realized I needed to loosen the strap across my chest…  My fully expanded lungs, it turned out, were more than equal to powering their way over the rust red-clinking-talus trails. No hyperventilating necessary. It is funny how simple the solution is sometimes.

It is often this way. With a great deal of doubt and a review of past failures, I say "yes" to something that I am unsure of. This silent deliberation, followed by a resolute step forward. These choices have led to heartbreak and embarrassment and new cities and great loves. Few things worth their salt are earned at the value of "maybe."

And this is also how I come to learn things. It seems that I can only love a city after I have left it. I would like to currently ignore the maladjusted psychology implied by this observation in favor of telling you that Seattle is a city worthy of being appropriately grieved. I have only been in California two months (two flattering late summer, early autumn months, to be sure), but returning to Seattle for just one weekend – as much as it is an affirmation of my new life begun 1,000 miles south – is a sweet symphony of sensory experiences that I love: the smell of falafel on University Ave at lunch time on a weekday in the fall, the spongy and spindly couches at Seattle’s Best Karaoke, the warm bag of fresh fried donuts from the Pike’s Place market tumbling about the grainy bottom of the cinammon sugared paper bag, the jets of red layer-cake sky at sunset as I drive north to see my friend’s new house. I remind myself I’ve left, because by leaving I have affirmed how much a part of me all of these things have become. I think, in this blog I have implied that we are the (mostly invisible) things that we carry with us (the language, the friendship, the rare artifact), but it turns out we are also the things that we leave behind. But that is part of the risk of saying “yes,” I suppose, as well.

When one of the guys at work comes into my office on Friday morning and says "you want to go see the space shuttle?" - even if you have no context for what he is talking about, you say "yes" before you're even out of the seat.

Which is how I ended up at the Eastshore State Park in Berkeley on a bright September morning last week. The park extends for miles along the East Bay shoreline and the north end is a small cluster of hilltops where Saturday morning parents can take their children to fly kites. There are unexpected and spectacular views that take in the San Francisco Bay to the west and the hills of Berkeley and beyond to the east. This Friday morning, there were clusters of fleece vests and sunglassed people who had all turned their gaze to the Southeast where a small, steadily-moving smudge was coming towards us through the haze. We might have looked like cult followers awaiting the return of the mother ship and in spite of the distance that we were from the Endeavor shuttle being toured through the air, the atmosphere was that of awed expectation.

The Endeavor shuttle has clocked more than 122 hours in orbital flight, hosted 25 missions in a ten-year career and is now returning to a terrestrial home after a celestial existence. And, apparently, it's now being tugged through the skies of west coast cities to celebrate its retirement. We can come out onto our hilltops and city vistas and wave. Here it was on its farewell tour, just 1,500 feet above us, barely discernible, but everyone on that hilltop was dopey-grinned and shielding their eyes against the morning sun in what appeared deceptively like a salute.

The shuttle was piggy-backing this journey on the back of a NASA jumbo jet that made a serene loop North and then back South and at one point passed over the Golden Gate Bridge on a rare barely fogged morning. This white-tailed slow-moving object seeming to float in the sky between the two distant red bridge peaks made us all turn to watch its progress. Nobody gasped or awwwed for the moment, but that was the feeling all the same as the shuttle departed and headed south.

NASA’s shuttle fleet is being retired, marking the end of an era of pioneering space exploration.

The soundless jet retreated over the sun-burnt hills and cloud-streaked sky, and I heard someone say “there is no replacement for the Endeavour” and this information struck me as a sweet-sad hymn. It’s not the end of our age of space insight, of course. We are, after all, roving the surface of Mars, visiting space stations, slowly putting our toes into this unknown pool – all lit by a moon that we were on forty years ago. But it was nice to stand on that hill with strangers, listen to the wind on water from the Bay, sip my morning coffee, and see the legends that we have made retreat in other untraveled directions.

Now and Future Elegies

A dear friend of mine died yesterday. Suddenly. Still very young. An incredibly gifted artist whose patience, reverence and diligence on the canvas were only exceeded by those qualities in himself as a person.

For one of the first times on this trip, I find myself homesick. I want to see Seattle. I want to pause at its intersections, look up at the criss-crossed electric bus wires tangling with the traffic lights, I want to walk down alleys that open onto views of the mountains, I want to be wrapped up against the rain in some inappropriate wool jacket and pause in front of a spread of graffiti that I’ve never noticed before while I wait for a bus, hear the shush of the passing cars peeling through the puddles.

Christopher Martin Hoff. Sono, oil on linen.

But, in truth, I think if I were in Seattle, I would still feel homesick. Seattle is a city authored by Christopher in his paintings and I think I would be looking for him. Every single day (rain or shine, really), he could be found carting his easel along avenues in the unreasonably up-and-down hilly city. He had the ability as an urban landscape painter to make naked its transience, its sadness, or its beauty. And he almost always worked on location on paintings both large and small, leaving behind a not-large-enough, but still sweeping collection of work painted with kindness and insight. It was this insight, this awe at the often-overlooked that turned him, for me, from an acquaintance into a date. It is also something that I wrote about quite recently (in January) for no other reason than that I was thinking about Christopher. Here is an excerpt about the night that we first met:

It takes a certain kind of man to approach two women in a bar and the sad fact is that most of the time, he isn’t the kind of man that I’d want in my general vicinity, let alone as a partner. And yet that’s how many of us spend our nights out as single women, vigilantly waiting for a man to approach us or then finding our way out of conversations with those that had the gumption but not our interest. It’s a rare thing to find yourself at ease with a stranger in a bar, but it happens.

On the tail end of the week, after going to a lecture at the Frye Art Museum on Capitol Hill in Seattle – an area that I usually avoid for its lack of parking and cooler-than-thou, ball-squishingly-tight-pants-wearing hipster crowd – a girlfriend and I decided to discuss the topics brought up throughout the Frye’s presentation at a nearby bar. We weren’t out to meet people, we weren’t even planning on being out at all. I was wearing the dress I’d worn to the office that day, we were both shrugged into bulky winter wear and the only quality in bar selection that was relevant to us was proximity.

So we departed the museum along with a stream of other artists headed out to their own bars to discuss the evening and fell in step behind a retreating, thin-shouldered man ahead of us. And although we have a tendency to be a bit loud and obnoxious after sitting still for a long while, my friend and I, the man in front only turned around once to glance with a smile of amusement at our boisterous Anchorman-quoting as we headed to the Hideout.

Christopher Martin Hoff. Ahab, oil on linen, 28" x 36"

The Hideout is dimly lit and covered in art – large framed paintings or small portraits, a slate of rotating photographers host their work there from time to time. There’s an old chandelier and a range of plushy little booths where two girls can settle in for a private conversation.

But the guy in front of us, slim of build and lightly dusted with facial hair also stood in line before us at the bar and turned around with a smile, offering to buy our drinks and join the conversation as he, too, had been to the same lecture at the Frye. With one raised eyebrow and a nod, my friend and I silently conferred with each other, agreeing that we weren’t risking too much by letting this guy in on our evening.

He carried our drinks over to us and sat down deferentially and waited a moment before saying anything, allowing us to drive the conversation if we wanted, but then began by talking about the lecture – how he thought the interaction between the visual arts and writing wasn’t always obvious, but it was still a very rich and interesting relationship and that’s why he had attended. I can't even remember now exactly what the presentation had been about.

He listened to us chat for awhile, smiling politely at our inside jokes and laughing genially, and offered a few shy and thoughtful nuggets about the speaker. It was like being back in graduate school again with a new colleague – all of us glad to be in the company of other people who wanted to discuss ideas of some weight and over the course of the evening it came out that I was a writer and he was a painter. We started talking about art and what he was working on and he tried to describe an alley he was painting at the moment at which point he turned specifically to me, looked me straight in the eye with a bashful timidity and lightly brushed the slope of my shoulder along my sleeve – “there’s this one beautiful garbage bag in a dumpster in the painting I’m working on now that falls exactly the same way your dress does,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

The earnestness of his tone and the lack of derisive snort from my friend made me suddenly aware of how close his elbow was to mine, how bare my legs were under the dress I was wearing and I silently admitted (right then) that at some night in the near future, I would go home with this guy.

That was Christopher, the type of guy that could compare your dress to a garbage bag and make it into a compliment.

Daniel Carrillo. Wet plate collodion portrait of Christopher Martin Hoff. 

Christopher was willing to be misunderstood and to fail. He was one of the only artists I know who was working to make a living entirely off of his art and doing pretty well at it, too. This required some creativity, of course. Breakfast was the same every day: a banana (which he bought by the dozen every Sunday at Safeway). He lived in a reduced-income artists loft (complete with skylight) which would have been lovely except that it was in the heart of Pioneer Square, which (as everyone knows) turns into a den of drugs and high-volume conversations after dusk (I actually had to remove a syringe from the heel of one of my shoes when I arrived at his house one evening – no joke). It meant that WIFI had to be pirated from neighboring businesses and that every item in his closet was regularly put into rotation. When we were dating, he had a vintage white VW bug which was later stolen from him by hooligans out for a joy ride. It was a quirkly little mobile whose internal mechanisms somehow caused my car alarm to go off when he drove down my street. The Bug was held together by nothing more than rubber bands and Christopher’s love of it.

But Christopher didn’t see compromise, he saw possibility. He didn’t see sacrifice, he saw experience. And the result of that attitude is also our only comfort. By investing in himself, by investing in his dream, we are left with an incredible body of work that has been showcased at the Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle.

Isn’t that what we’re all hoping for as artists anyway? A little immortality? A little staying power in an otherwise brutally impermanent world? Yes, I’d wager that’s at work for at least a few of us.

Christopher Martin Hoff. The Chase In His Wake, oil on linen, 30" x 22"

But really, today, I am simply glad that this is true for Christopher – that the relationship I can still have with him is the one that I get to feel while standing in front of one of his paintings, looking at the kind and dexterous strokes guided by hands that were as gentle to touch as they were to the canvas. I am not contemplating some sense of immortal staying power, I’m not worried about the generations to come (although I think he’ll be around for that, yes), I am simply grateful that he took enough time to bet on himself, to doggedly work every day, so that there is something of him for me. Yes, it’s rather a selfish lens, but that doesn't make it any less true and it doesn't make me any less grateful. I am so glad that I have a painting of his in my house; a watercolor of Mount Rainier that he gave to me for my birthday a few years ago, painted on a rare clear day – it’s one of the few prized things that I own.

It makes me want to light the fire under all of the artists that I know – from one continent to another and say: Get to work. Get to work! Get to work! It is possible that we will lose each other one day. Whether we mean to or not. Get to work!

Christopher and I? We were friends. It never worked out romantically, but that didn’t matter. I spent most of my time with him almost four years ago and I’m sure some of the details I know of him are now outdated. But I liked running into him. I liked the short and witty emails that sometimes peopled my inbox from him. I liked seeing his paintings. I liked looking around the city with Christopher’s eyes that could make any city (even Seattle) into something as eternal as Rome.