Dry Canyon Form

Last fall I began reading some of Jack Kerouac's books and turned into quite the beatnick wanna be. I started with Dharma Bums which became my new favorite book(and still is). The book has two awesome places where his characters are hiking the Matterhorn in California, and a distant fire watch cabin in Washington. Those places are now on my list of things to do, as for now I have just stuck to my local canyons and tried to write in those places. I have also done my best to be more like John Muir and leave the trail behind venture to places where trails seem lame and seek talus and boulder hopping routes. As I was boulder hopping in Smithfield Dry canyon I sat and read some of Kerouacs Haikus and other poetry and began my own compilation of poems. It took awhile to get going, I am usually a visual artist but have wanted to branch out and began writing. So I sat and looked at the many crags and stone structures that plastered the canyon walls and realized none of the other canyons had theses types of forms, and then I began to write...

geodesic slabs, slant

perfect formation steep sheets

junipers abound

swiftly setting sun

one lone cliff tree, sillohuete

inspiration flows!

After writing these poems I began sketching, and things flowed. It was just an awesome place to be at that moment. I wasn't atop the Matterhorn skipping down boulder fields like Kerouac's character Japhy. But it didn't matter I had found a spot close by that takes me farther than Dry Canyon, maybe farther than Kerouac's Desolation Mountain. The Naomi Wilderness is now a place for me to be a Dharma Bum, a place that I find whatever it is I am looking for at the time. We all need a Naomi place, a Dharma place.

I did much deliberating on what I should name my blog. I knew there would be refrence to sasquatches, or bigfoot, possibly a yeti. I knew it would allude to the fact that I am a mountain bum and that wilderness was a place of solitude, solace, a place I call home. However I didn't know how to term it, then as I was reading "Walking" by Henry David Thoreau I was inspired, yes inspired. In the first few pages of the book he gives a description of what sauntering means. Usually sauntering is connected to maybe someone who might not be all there(which I have been guilty of at times) or someone who might be considered lazy(yet again, guilty). Thoreau's view and defintion suites me better... and will be used as a motive in the future when the other said defintions are hurled in my direction. Sauntering as stated by Thoreau, " is beautifuly derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy land, till the children exlcaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they preten, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret to successful sauntering. For every walk is a sort of crusad, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land form the hands of the Infidels." Sop this is what I about to go out walking and come back with meaning, to come back full with stories, poems, revelations, and bigger calve muscles. The blogs posted here will usually be reports of my saunterings, things i have gained in the woods.