Slammin' on the Brakes

 Slammin' on the Brakes

  (Sunday May 16)

A day away from the rock. People unfamiliar with So Cal think of this place as always being sunny and warm. Mostly they're right, but they do not know about our Sisters of Spring, May Gray, and June Gloom. Most locals dislike the sullen twins. The two of them move in just when it's about to be summer, and they hang around until sometime early in July. They're my babes, my sweethearts, my pin-up girls, and they are gentle on my dour disposition. This is my favorite time of the year.

These Spring days stretch out long under a soft cool blanket of cloud. Pewter mornings become late silver afternoons with little perceptible difference in temperature or light. It's neither warm, nor cold. Nothing casts a shadow, and everything seems quiet. Somehow you feel like you should speak in an indoor voice.

Here in the quiet of the back yard, I am aware only of the part of the earth called California rolling slowly into summer. I can feel the cool, and hear the birds, and smell the orange blossoms. The dragon fruit is flowering, and the San Pedro is getting ready to throw out almost two dozen torches. The lophophora, replanted two weeks ago, are greening up. One has produced a pup, and two are going to flower. The Bridgesii show no signs of flowering yet. Cactus take their time. 

 

I shut out the world, and the madness here, or I try to, anyway. But the quiet itself is a deathly reminder. My house is less than a block away from the elementary school. As long as I've lived here, a feature of the back yard, just like the birds, and the weather, has been the periodic school bells, and the shouts and screams of kids on the playground. I was night janitor at that school for almost ten years. I retired in '17.

The school is open again. But the playground is silent. Most of the faculty I knew is gone. There are fewer teachers, fewer kids. No "Activities". Teachers, staff, and kids are masked up all the time, and the hallways are marked up with tape X's so that no child may be within touching distance of another. It's a goddamn horror movie come to life. But so it is everywhere. 

I could hear a drizzling rain outside the widow this morning. There wasn't enough rain to matter,  but it wasn't cycling weather, either. I haven't been getting much exercise lately, so I decided to just go walk. I took the alleyway between the elementary school and nursery. The nursery parking lot backs up against the school grounds right where the kids eat lunch. You can see the old upper campus, and the tree-lined grass area  where the kids meet for outdoor assemblies. I remember, fifteen years ago standing in this same spot. The burn was dead. I couldn't force myself to get back to the stone. I thought about maybe just going back to work. Get a part time gig. I could think of worse things than pushing broom at a little campus like this one...

Then came a most excellent adventure in the cardiac ward. Our phony ass insurance paid nothing. Luckily, the doctor and the hospital settled for what I had in my savings account. Alive but broke. Not the worst of fates by a long shot, but getting a job was no longer an idle consideration. As it turned out, I ended up as the night man right here at this same school.

I worked hard here. It was good. Now I'm back outside on this cold windy afternoon. Lots of memory. I thought of Littlecat, and the heartbreak washed over me again. Three years, and I'm still sad over that tiny beast. And now everything's just...

So I burned a bowl, and just walked on. There was no escaping it. Hardly anyone was on the streets, yet more than half of the people I saw were slouching along alone in those filthy masks. God, I hate the sight. I went down by the railroad tracks, and burned another couple of bowls...

Anyway. It was a productive week. Here's how the the rock rolled:

(Mon. May 10)

 Saturday the eighth of May was The So Cal RatRod Ride, founded in March of 2012, by my wife and me. The monthly gathering is in its tenth year, and the club we founded has become family. The day was cool and clear. Cruising the the Huntington Beach bike path with the gang was a good break from the solitude, and brain wrestling in the back yard.

Getting into a carving like this is a lot like taking a trip. It starts with planning things out in your head. You make a rough outline: see these cities, visit these national parks, leave time for an unexpected side trip, or two. But it often happens that synchronicity will step right into the middle of all your plans, and change the trip into something completely unexpected.

That's how I got into stone work in the first place. It started back in the summer of 1990. I was teaching school then, and I had summers off. I was sitting in the dining room of my old apartment one August afternoon, drinking beers with my buddy Jeff. I drank a boatload of beers that summer.

Both Jeff and I had owned motorcycles back in the early seventies. We were drinking Millers, and bullshitting about bikes, and I suddenly said, "Hey, let's go up to Rosemead, and look at Harleys."

So we drove up to the Harley shop in Rosemead, and looked at bikes. I quit drinking on my 38th birthday later that month. Took delivery on a brand new 1991 FXSTS Springer Softail later on in September. June of '91 I  packed my stuff on the rear fender, Easy Rider style, and headed out Interstate 40, Eastbound.

I made it to Virginia Beach, VA a few weeks later. I started the return trip with a sojourn through the back roads of West Virginia. 

Late afternoon found me cruising very slowly through a small town called Elkins. I passed the entrance to Davis and Elkins University. A couple blocks later I passed a small motel, and The Voice  spoke loud in my head, "Stay here." It was so distinct it startled me. It almost seemed audible, when it spoke again, "JUST STAY HERE!"

A gap appeared in traffic; I made a U-turn, and got the last room they had at the motel. I had stumbled into town for the first day of Bluegrass week at the Augusta Heritage Arts festival at Davis and Elkins college. That night I walked up to the college, and heard live Bluegrass for the first time. I made Elkins a stop on my travels in '92, and did so again, in 1993. I didn't plan it this way, but in '93 I happened into town on a Sunday afternoon, just in time for registration day for Irish week. I thought, "What the hell, see if there's an opening for something that isn't song and dance." There was a stone carving class, but it was full. I was disappointed; it sounded like fun, but Oh, well... 

I was on my way out the door, when the clerk I had spoken with came running up to me. There was a cancellation. Was I still interested in Stone Carving?

I stayed the week, and had a blast. Most fun I ever had.

But back to the present.

I've been having the devil's own time trying to incorporate the snout on the narrow end of the stone into the figure that I'm shaping.  

This is a really fine piece of stone. But there is stuff that works well in this material, and stuff that doesn't. One problem with a translucent stone is that surface details do not show up well, because the stone doesn't cast a shadow on itself. Fine lines just disappear. I need broad open planes to catch and hold the light. The lower half of the form has been shaping up like a ponderous  blob. I can't incorporate that wonderfully contorted "nose" into the form without it looking like an appendage. I wanted  two figures locked together to form that ellipse in the center, but doing it means passing one through the other, and then leaving room in the middle for the central figure to pass through both. (Don't worry if this doesn't make anything like sense. I'm way down the rabbit hole of my own imagination, here.)

I've been wrestling with this for days, now. It's like trying to divide one prime by another, and make it come out even. It's becoming a Gordian knot. But this is what having the burn is like. Wrestling. Stressing. Waking up in the middle of the night thinking on it. Allowing a the tail end of a chunk of rock to occupy center stage in my imagination. Believing, without question, that this is serious. Important.

Time to slam on the brakes, and put the tools up. I had planned on just relaxing Sunday, but right after breakfast I was looking at the stone...

(Go do something else...)

But wait, do I really need this here? What if I...

And that damnable snout...

So I spent all day Sunday, all day Monday, and all day Tuesday re-thinking the plan, drawing new lines on the rock, until:

 *eureka*

So here is the old plan. 

And the nose on the bottom left?

The nose goes. The snout is out. The tail is a fail. Just like the Gordian knot, this thing is getting cut.

And the revised version:

Uh, it doesn't look like much...

Just wait. 

(Thursday, 5/13) 

It has been one month since I started this project. The stone started out at 115 pounds. After cutting the base, the project weight was 97 pounds. It weighed in at 80 pounds even at the end of today's session. This was a lot of hard work. Notice the arc drawn on the left side of the stone, and the cut lines along the upper left. Everything to the left of the arc gets removed. I made a series of cuts along the entire arc, and broke the excess off in chunks. This is a simple operation, but stone is absolutely unforgiving. Small errors can have huge consequences. 

Imagine a disc laid out like a clock face. The minute hand traces a circle with a ten inch diameter. The hour hand traces a circle with an eight inch diameter. You want to shave down that ten inch diameter disc to eight inches. It will take all day trying to file down the edge. So you make cuts along the radii at one o'clock, two o'clock, and so on. Then you can just cut the wedges out, and you're there at the eight inch diameter circle. All well and good, unless one of the cuts strays a hair inside that eight inch diameter line. Once that happens, the eight inch circle is impossible, and the whole plan must change to accommodate a smaller disc. So it was along the whole arc on the left edge.

One cut went almost a quarter inch too deep. Luckily, it was still outside the line, but not by much. I was sweating whether I'd have to re-shape the whole arc  to accommodate a couple of stray bites with a hacksaw.

With this arc established I began shaping in the back end of the figure.

The form that dwells in my head is perfect. All the curves flow together. It's all symmetry, harmony, and elegance.

But the stone is irregular. It leans to one side. There are concave planes where I want convex. It's got dimples, wide spots, narrow spots. These are not negotiable. The stone won't grow to fit the image in my head, so I have to make the image in my head fit inside the stone. 

I was doing the "sit & stare" part after excavating all that material Thursday afternoon, when a tiny bit of wisdom went up like a skyrocket: "If you try to make it perfect you'll ruin it. It doesn't need to be perfect; it needs to be right."

(Saturday, May 15)

Lots of work, and lots of progress. I busted my butt this week, and I need to take a break. So here's where a week's worth of of work got us:

I was going to take the bike out, or go walking, but...

I worked instead.

So here's where we are on the stone. Challenges ahead:

JWM