views from the valley
outdoors! birds! and a new website!
((tl;dr check out my new website ambiguousobjective.com))
I’m back in Montana’s Centennial Valley, a place I’ve come to love over stretches of summer these last two years, the quick weather and the voices of birds, whose names I learn in fits and starts, forget, remember. I memorize the names of plants and their habits, I attract too many flies. I drove this time with my cat in her carrier in the passenger seat. She sat anxious and panting for the first hour and then, to the rhythm of the road, fell asleep. Now she is exploring the strange corridors of the cabin where we’ll spend the next two months, before we go back to the city, to find someplace new to live.
At the first gas station, where I carried Willow in her cat backpack into the bathroom, aware of breach in etiquette, a grasshopper attached itself with quiet determination to the driver’s side window of my car. I tapped and coaxed but didn’t roll the window down, because I’ve had a grasshopper loose in my car before and it makes me, like them, jumpy, but the tiny passenger would not be dislodged. I was stopping again soon for food and some part of me hoped the grasshopper would hang on the whole way, drove slowly out of the parking lot as though the gradual acclimation to extreme wind would be enough. When I turned onto the highway he got smaller, crouching tight to the glass, and as I reached the speed limit and he still hung on I thought maybe he’d make it. First car past me in the left lane blew him backwards. Before that, though, the lean of his little, mailed body into the onrush of wind was either human or cartoon, the shoulder of some animated knight in a rush towards battle, the strong lines of drawn-in wind, or else my own frantic holding on, the way I’ve felt for weeks, fingers on smooth glass.
The wear and tear of the past weeks shows up as scabbed-over wounds up the length of my legs, places where I’ve picked the skin raw, peeled the scabs off, bled freely. Two instances of heat exhaustion, a deep depressive episode, trip after trip to the storage unit in 104 degree heat, ignoring my body pain to lift furniture and boxes of books, rearrange, reshuffle. The assorted items with which I filled my car are half-mystery, drawn with care but not precision from the stockpile of the storage unit. I am between, utterly, but now that I’m out of the city the betweenness feels easier; I am between in a place like the Wood Between Worlds, between like a breath held underwater, mammalian dive reflex lengthening the seconds the oxygen lasts.
I am back in the Centennial Valley, reading Joanna Walsh on hating green, listening to the very loud mechanics of a hummingbird’s wings. Green is predominant just now, too many shades of it, so while my language-mind says “green” my vision-mind says differently—outside of language the hues are irreducible to a singular term. I am getting used again to bugs, bug bites, little stiff legs and antennae against my skin. To elevation. To something like rest, even while I work, because rest in the synchrony of my spirit with this place, a kinship like deep, clear water. All the water I know is murk and disturbance, holds its mystery. Kelp and scale and sudden wave. Here, too: waters choked with green, greens, growing things. The sky is washed-out and the pale mountains recede into it, hardly there behind green green green.
color of the day: Pantone 14-6237 TCX (Zephyr Green)
bird of the day: Marsh Wren (says Merlin); Red-Naped Sapsucker (says me)
flower of the day: Sticky Geranium
fold of the day: sixteen-panel accordion
hike of the day: O’Dell Creek
song of the day: Omakase by Cassandra Jenkins
So it’s been ages since I wrote to you, and for my absence I apologize; season of thesis and sudden change, season of loss, season of triumph. Thesis defended, Master’s degree granted, first ever solo show opened. 25 collages hanging on the walls of the library feels more concrete than anything has, in a long time.
In Chicago, Maggie and I went to the Art Institute and I stood for a long time in front of Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting of the Radiator Building, one of my favorite paintings, the center of my collage Metropolis 2. Her paintings from ground level, looking towards the moon, are the art I’ve seen that looks the most the way it felt at eighteen, walking a long stretch up Park Avenue after dark, winnowing.
And now, here I am again, trying to measure shades of green, eating three meals a day, climbing the steep stairs of the fire tower to watch Franklin’s Gulls from up close, diving between each other’s black-barred bodies in murmuration, moving towards the lake.
I spent much of the last year writing about this place, printing photos of its many waters, remembering the opening of my days along familiar creases, an unfolding unlike any other chapter. Every time I drive back the trip under my breastbone takes me at least a little by surprise, the resonance of returning. This will be my longest stretch here in the Valley, and already my body feels different, my joints a little looser, the sharp currents of my mood not flattened but smoothed, protruding angles adjusted to slower slopes.
Every morning amid the lowing of cows the Sandhill Cranes sound prehistoric calls, oldest living bird species on the planet, dinosaur gait slow and predatory through foxtail barley, in and out of sight behind the willows. This morning I watched a crowd of female Mountain Bluebirds gather on my roof, listened for but could not spot a Western Tanager, irritated a Red-Naped Sapsucker trying out a wide timber pole supporting the roof of the outdoor stage. This is the place where I started to watch birds, greet them, recognize the one robin that stops each evening with a worm in its mouth at the top of a lichen-covered rock; I am fond too of this boulder, over which I pass my hand in a smooth arc each time I walk nearby, between dinner and my cabin, in quiet hours between tasks. Robins and Wrens are in endless abundance, and Swallows making clouds against blue sky and dust-haze.
What does it mean to go home to a place other than origin? Otherwise my body has always loved ocean, cliff, fog, clamorous waves, clams spitting from beneath the sand. I am loyal too to concrete and steel, urban pockets of golden green. But between these mountains, in a valley still sinking, displaced from Yellowstone’s caldera and drifted away to this place, where there once was a sea but is no longer, here I feel the same alignment as on Maine’s coast or the edge of the East River.
I feel it even on the bad days. I want to cry; I set up my hammock in front of the cabin. A small orange butterfly lands twice on my leg. I look at the verticals: planks up the side of the barn, split in the aspen. And the horizontals: log cabin, long shadows. My skin is a raised recreation of the bites I've sustained and the most constant sound is the subtle orchestral of several flies and one pianissimo mosquito around my ears.
I am beginning an eternal archive not of myself or of this place but of the ephemeral meeting of the two, which seems to exist outside of both, an entity unto itself. I draw and photograph and walk and walk and walk. I collect my sorrows and disruptions as cuttings from plants, and I lay them into order same as joy, as tenderness. Tenderness seems these days mostly to be dreamed, arriving in the place my nightmares usually wait for me, giving me soft hours I am not granted in the day. A way things could be, could have been, are not. My tarot cards confuse and redirect me, I resign myself to waiting.
What the work of this year has opened for me is a way of knowing Madness as neither good nor bad, only as vibrant as the wetlands I am wandering here. Naming myself as Mad means making space for my being as not a problem to be solved but a live and variable being, a way of resting as I am in what I am. More on that next time, but just to say, I sit now like an algae creep across water, like a bird on a wire, I wait it out.
I am following my sightlines, listening to senses other than vision but all the same looking, closely, attentively, extensively, every day. Wait to see each texture, dive a little deeper.
My new website is live! Ehlmathieu.com lives on, but you can find more of my work, including a link to this newsletter and my Patreon, at www.ambiguousobjective.com and @ambiguousobjective on Instagram. Thanks for following along <3
