Meditations #4

Image credit: copyright Christopher Reiger, 2012

Platte Clove Residency: Some Remove

Plattekill Falls; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
On the first afternoon of my residency at Platte Clove, after settling into the cabin and familiarizing myself with local trail maps, I decided to explore a short path that begins a few steps from the cabin's porch and winds its way down one of the valley's uppermost gorges to Plattekill Falls. It was a lovely reintroduction to the Catskills. Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the mixed forest's overstory, unevenly illuminating a floor decorated with eastern hemlock cones. Hidden from view in the canopy above, red-eyed vireos ceaselessly repeated their lilting questions.

At the trail's end, I discovered four local twenty-somethings swimming in the waterfall's plunge pool. As they frolicked nearby, I searched for timber rattlesnakes among broken slabs of bluestone that littered the south-facing slope of the ravine. Although I turned up no snakes, I rousted a number of American toads, a species so common in the eastern United States that I long took them for granted. Absence, as the adage has it, makes the heart grow fonder; because American toads are not found out west, I was especially glad to see them.

Eastern hemlock cones; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
By the time I returned to the trailhead, dusk was fast approaching. An Eastern phoebe chipped at me from its perch on a low-hanging branch. Light in color and smallish, I guessed the bird was a female. As she pumped her tail and flitted from branch to fence post and back, I offered my best chip replies to her persistent calls and snapped a few photographs.

Half-an-hour later, while I was sitting near a cabin window reading J.A. Baker's The Peregrine in the day's last light, I heard faint scratching sounds and peeping from the cabin's second floor. Expecting to discover mice, I ascended the steep stairs but, before my eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the second floor interior, my attention was arrested by a whirring blur outside the screen of a low-slung window on the cabin's north wall. The bird must have seen me moving within, for it disappeared as quickly as it had materialized. The urgent cries of its young, however, which began when it approached the cabin, continued for some seconds after it had gone.

When the young birds quieted, I carefully lay down on the floor and inched closer to the screen, so that my face was a few feet away. I waited, though not for long, and the adult bird returned, a high-strung throb of wings. It hovered for a beat, then darted up and under the cabin's eave to join its imploring chicks. In the instant it afforded me, I recognized it as the Eastern phoebe I'd photographed, and it occurred to me that her earlier chipping was likely an attempt to draw my attention away from the nest's location.

Eastern Phoebe nest at Platte Clove cabin; Platte Clove
Nature Preserve; Catskills; NY; July 2012
I lay on the cabin floor for some time, watching the phoebe parent come and go, each visit feeding her voracious chicks an insect she caught on the wing. While I wasn't able to observe her hunting from my vantage point, I imagined it well enough. I've long been an admirer of phoebes' predatory prowess. They're members of the large tyrant flycatcher family, Tyrannidae, a group famous for "hawking" or "sallying," hunting behavior whereby the bird springs off its perch, grabs an insect in mid-air, and returns to its original position. I thought of a passage I'd read, not twenty minutes before, in The Peregrine.

"I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. [...] All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalize his song, and forget the killing that sustains it."

Baker, like all natural historians, amateur and professional alike, recognized that death is the way of life. As my father is fond of saying, "every day something dies so that I can continue to live." This is universally true, even for the most dedicated and conscientious Buddhist. To believe otherwise is to be either ignorant or willfully naive. But, vitally, the death of a moth, worm, or man is not the end of the line but instead a point along the way. It is the end of that individual creature, of course, but the energy cached in the discrete body is paid forward, as it were, passed on to the greater whole.

Longtime readers of my essays might recall that my preferred term for this pay-it-forward process is reconstitution, the biological version of the afterlife. As I wrote several years ago,

"Most people find contemplation of the body's posthumous decomposition uncomfortable. But the knowledge that my corporeal substance will rot and, in doing so, release energy for use by the rest of things is deeply satisfying. Poet Galway Kinnell describes reconstitution in his poem 'The Quick and the Dead' as 'the crawling of new life out of the old, which is what we have for eternity on earth.' [Beyond] the biological, death remains a mystery. I can not, one way or the other, speak to supernatural transference, though I feel that metaphysical notions of self or soul preservation are misguided. The 'me,' I think, will rot with my body, but the flow keeps on keeping on, until the end of time."**

Kinnell's poem describes reconstitution beautifully and succinctly, but it was author and essayist Edward Hoagland who wrote the passage that provided me with my principal symbol for reconstitution, the phoebe. In On Nature, Hoagland muses,

"In my stint in the army, working at the hospital morgue, I'd noticed how commonly the dead had managed at the last moment a benign or temperate sort of smile. This circularity is neither alarming nor incongruous, but rather seems to make things whole and complete. In the summer, dancing butterflies of pretty colors will congregate where I've gone outside to piss in the grass. The glint of tiger yellow or cobalt blue in their beautiful wings may be enhanced by the minerals that they so crave and that my body has declared surplus. And if a nesting phoebe soon grabs one, she is going to profit also -- which is a foretaste of the myriad uses that more extensive portions of me will be put to eventually."

In late 2010, I created a small artwork entitled, "the black phoebe (reconstitution)." (The black phoebe is the Eastern phoebe's western cousin.) Shortly after my move from New York City to San Francisco during the summer of 2010, I delighted in watching a black phoebe hawking on the surf-sculpted rocks of a Pacific beach. As I did so, I thought about another, less dramatic variety of reconstitution, the adaptation and reinvention that follows a significant life transition, be it a new job or a cross-country move. The mixed-media artwork inspired by that black phoebe is a simple celebration of reconstitution, but it was also a way of attaching myself to western fauna, a way of locating myself in my new habitat.

It's curious that it often requires some remove to understand one's own inspiration. I don't think I fully appreciated what impelled the creation of "the black phoebe (reconstitution)" until, on the cool wood of the Platte Clove cabin's second story, I watched and listened to the Eastern phoebe feed her young.

Christopher Reiger
"the black phoebe (reconstitution)"
2010
Pen and sumi ink, gouache, watercolor, marker, and thread on cut Arches paper
14 x 15 1/4 inches
** I'd amend my earlier observation; I now view "the flow" that "keeps on keeping on" as congruous with both philosophical materialism and conceptions of the numinous (in the sense that Rudolf Otto popularized).

Image credits: all photos, Christopher Reiger, 2012; artwork, Christopher Reiger, 2010

Platte Clove Residency: Report

Platte Clove cabin; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
It was much too short a stay, but my residency at the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development's Platte Clove cabin was otherwise terrific. In the coming weeks, I'll post photographs and a number of short essays about my time there. Some of the experiences I'll share with readers provided quality grist for the art mill, and I expect to begin work on new pictures soon.

As a side note, I'm grateful for the generosity of Jeremiah Teipen and Eun Young Choi, artist friends of mine who graciously lent me their car for the drive from New York City to Platte Clove (and back), and for the thoughtfulness of Katie Palm, CCCD Education Director, who went above and beyond in her role as the coordinator of the residency program. Thank you!

View from Sherman's Point; Devil's Path Trail;
Catskills; NY; July 2012
Image credits: all photos, Christopher Reiger, 2012

Platte Clove Residency: Prologue

Platte Clove residency cabin, Catskills Mountains
Early this coming Wednesday morning, I'll land at New York City's JFK airport, borrow a car from friends, and drive north to an attractive cabin located in Platte Clove, a valley at the eastern edge of the Catskill Mountains that was etched by glacial meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age. Each summer, the mountain side cabin is home to a revolving door of visual artists, writers, composers, and ecologists selected by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development's Platte Clove Residency team. I'm honored to be one of the Platte Clove 2012 Artists-In-Residence.

From the residency's press materials:

"[The Platte Clove residency is] a retreat for artists, working in a variety of disciplines, located in the living landscape where American art began. Situated at the Catskill Center’s Platte Clove Nature Preserve, artists will reside in a rustic cabin in the middle of 208 wild, pristine acres full of hiking trails, multi-tiered waterfalls, and old growth forests."

If, when viewing the region's topography from above (think Google Maps), you imagine the Catskill Escarpment, the rugged northeastern range of the Catskill Mountains, to be a flexed arm, the Platte Clove cabin is located in the crook of the elbow. Though little known by name, the escarpment (and the elbow "crook," in particular) is one of the most celebrated landscapes of the United States. Made famous in the mid-19th century by Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School painters, Platte and Kaaterskill Cloves were, for a time, celebrated hotel destinations for New York City aristocrats; today, they're most popular with hikers.

Since I'll be hitting the trails, I expect to cross paths with quite a few fellow outdoorsy types, but I also hope to see abundant bird life, white-tailed deer, and maybe even a black bear. Being a herp enthusiast, I'd also love to encounter a timber rattlesnake. The only area residents I hope to avoid are deer ticks. The recipient of countless tick bites over the years, I've already been infected with Lyme Disease once (it was easily knocked out by a course of antibiotics), but I'd prefer not to deal with it again.


Thomas Cole
"A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning"
1844
Oil on canvas
36 x 54 inches
During my four days in the Catskills, I'll shoot photographs, hike, read, create some painting/drawing studies, and keep a journal. The journal component of the project will detail my daily activity and species encounters, but will also include musings on the intersection of conservation and art. During my earlier residencies at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, in Nebraska City, Nebraska, and Florida's Everglades National Park, I was able to provide HH readers with regular updates. (You can read the KHNC posts here; Everglades posts here.) The Platte Clove cabin lacks an Internet connection, however, so I don't expect to post anything until after my return to San Francisco. (The cabin also lacks running water, so, after several long days on the trails, I expect to be a little ripe, rolling back into the Big Apple looking and smelling like Grizzly Adams.)

More to follow.

Image credit: Platte Cove cabin photo ripped from CatskillSearch.com

Denise Bibro "Summer Show"

Christopher Reiger
"Cost Benefit Analysis"
2008
Pen and sumi ink, gouache, watercolor and marker on Arches paper
12 x 12 inches
Several of my 2008 and 2009 works are included in Denise Bibro Fine Art's "Summer Show," a group exhibition featuring paintings, mixed media works, photographs, and sculptures by 12 artists.

"Summer Show" runs from July 10-August 25, 2012. More information can be found here.