Beneath the patio parasol, in the rising warmth of the sunny Saturday morning, I read
terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea
as told in 47 boxes.The shimmering leaves in the trees whisper to me below the soft drone of a distant lawn mower. I am transported from the blue-black waters of the Mediterranean to one perfect summer of green grass.
The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust… It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.
Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
Yet the stories remain. They endure so long as we read them, remembrances carried by the warm summer breeze.
The second Saturday of my summer break sustained cooler weather which attracted me back to Osage Hills State Park for a long walk. I turned in at the bike trails area, surprised to see ribbons and signs for “Tour de Dirt” but no vehicles. Evidently some sort of biking event had occurred or was forthcoming, but was not yet in full swing.
Tour de Dirt Bikers (click image for slideshow)
I set off down the red loop and a snake, which had been sunning itself in the creek, darted away as I approached. I found that the event organizers had put up tape to direct bikers around the red loop. Recent rains had left a few tiny pools on the creek beds I needed to ford and I passed the large conglomeration I call Turtle Rock. Higher up the hill the creek bed had more pools.
Suddenly several mountain bikers looped past me. I’d see far more bikers on this day in the park than ever before, each of them unfailingly polite in letting me know they were coming and thanking me for clearing out of their way. It turns out the actual racing portion of Tour de Dirt would be the next day, Sunday, so I suppose they were familiarizing themselves with the course.
New Sign
The few flowers I saw were mostly wild petunias. I reached the Osage Trail and decided to head south a ways towards Camp McClintock, wondering if the park boundary was still unmarked. A few hundred feet from the trail intersection I spied a new sign demarcating the boundary and forbidding any but Boy Scouts from proceeding. I like the Scout slogan of Do a good turn daily, but I’m certainly no Boy Scout. So I dutifully turned around and returned to the red loop, discovering that the race organizers had installed a new ramp on the most treacherous portion of the trail.
Not surprisingly there were more pools near The Grotto, although the falls were not running. The trail led onward and I found that the race course diverted to follow part of the blue loop. I trekked onward to the creek and crossed the prairie, noting that the “social trail” shortcut to the tower trail was part of the racecourse. It was beginning to dawn on me that several of the odd trails I’ve noted at the park, sometimes providing shortcuts and other times paralleling the hiking trails, are all part of a mountain bike racecourse used for this event. Just when you think you know everything about a park’s trail system, you learn something new.
I walked to the park office area and bought a Coke by the restroom, then followed the trails to the picnic area which was filled with vehicles of the mountain bikers. I paused to swing for a bit in the unoccupied playground and then walked by the pool, which was helping cool off some of the more portly park guests. I walked down to the Sand Creek waterfalls, where an odd splash caught my eye. My waterproof boots allowed me to walk out into the stream to find the rocks responsible for it. The rope swing over Sand Creek awaited users.
Learning to Row
I walked over to the cliffs, finding people jumping off from there for the first time in my many visits. Mountain bikers are risk takers, after all. I left them alone and walked up and over the hill to Lookout Lake, where a family was struggling with the oars in one boat while behind them Three Men in a Boat fared little better. I tried not to laugh out loud at their struggles, glad to see one fellow give up on rowing and opt to fish.
I wrapped up my walk, having hiked 7.8 miles in about four hours. By the time I was finished, it had warmed up considerably and I was more than ready to head home and shower off the layers of sunscreen, insect repellent, and sweat which I’d built up.
In late April I first visited the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. But that was a hiking trip and I stayed outside, walking the 4.5 miles of trails on the grounds, saving the art treasures of the interior for a later visit. June began with a rainy day, perfect for touring the art museum in which a Wal-Mart heiress has invested $317 million.
Once again I had to park in the outer lot and take the pleasant winding Orchard Trail to the entrance. Most of the wildflowers had lost their blooms by now, but there were still some splashes of color. I passed Roxy Paine’s Yield and took the elevator down to the courtyard and entered the museum. I checked in at a booth and paid $10 for the temporary exhibit, “The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision”. I could not take photographs in it, but am delighted to report that they had Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, a series of paintings I have admired since I first saw a slide of them in my undergraduate art history class at the University of Oklahoma. It was great to see them both in person and displayed properly; I hadn’t realized that the central The Consummation of Empire painting was slightly larger than the others to either side.
I liked several of the paintings in the galleries, which are laid out chronologically, but most of my attention was drawn to the striking sculptures anchoring each area.
Proserpine
Proserpine
Thankfully the rather awful early portraits of the American Colonial period, with their flat amateurish style lacking proper shading and perspective, were accompanied by the gorgeous sculpture Proserpine by Hiram Powers from around 1840. The somber expression of the goddess of flowers, combined with her quite sexy topless emergence from framing acanthus leaves, is alluring. This was the second of five versions of the goddess Powers produced. The first had her emerging from an elaborate basket of spring flowers and later versions had simple beading. Over the years Hiram sculpted almost 200 versions of Proserpine.
The next section of the first gallery had another wonderful sculpture of the human form, The Choosing of the Arrow by Henry Kirke Brown, from 1849. The musculature of the athletic youth is beautifully portrayed as he bends his arm to retrieve another arrow from his quiver. The handling of the figure echoes ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, but Brown travelled to Mackinac Island in Michigan to observe the Ottawa and Chippewa tribes and his observations led him to include the topknot. He was commissioned by the American Art Union, a New York art lottery organization, to produce twenty casts of this work. Subscribers to the organization had a chance to win gorgeous works such as this.
Free
Free
A later gallery had another striking sculpture, this time a basswood carving from 1876, by Emma Marie Cadwalader-Guild, entitled Free. It depicts a African American slave, now freed, but still feeling the pressure of his bondage as he leans against a tree stump. The carving, her first modeled from life, was perhaps used to help her create a bronze statuette she exhibited in Paris, London, and Munich.
There were some fun paintings by James Henry Beard, including It Is Very Queer, Isn’t It? from 1885, depicting a chimpanzee holding a copy of Darwin’s Descent of Man and ruminating with a chimp skull and human skull nearby.
The Bubble
The Bubble
Harriet Whitney Frishmuth liked to capture motion in her sculptures, so The Bubble bronze from 1928 has a dancer, modeled on Yugoslavian ballet dancer Desha Delteil, manipulating one in her gyrations. I like how the curators illumined the white glass sphere, making it as much of the focus of the piece as the dancer.
Lest you think I ignored all of the paintings, I did take a shot of The Lantern Bearers by Maxfield Parrish in 1908. Those lanterns really seem to glow when you are there standing in front of the work, which he created for Collier’s magazine by using bright layers of oil color separated by varnish, applied alternately over a base rendering. The museum acquired it for $4.3 million.
Also fun was the Walking to Borås wood sculpture by Jim Dine, catching Pinocchio in midstride. In the final gallery I was struck by the photorealistic Untitled (After Sam) by Rudolf Stingel in 2006. It is a self-portrait based on a photograph by Sam Samore, showing Stingel in a melancholy state. The photographic appearance of the face and pillow fabric were startling and impressive, requiring that I get very close to the canvas to be able to see it was painted.
A reading area between two galleries had a courtyard window featuring Big Red Lens by Frederick Eversley, a large cast polyester lens he fashioned in 1985. I wish the curators had placed an outdoor sculpture in the courtyard, as that would have been far more interesting to look at through the lens than a set of doors.
One of the more disturbing works in the museum was Rêve (Dream) by Alfonso A. Ossorio. My eye was drawn to the long hairs on the punctured and bound male torso, making me think alternately of snakes, vines, and flames. That part was pinging my gaydar, and Ossorio must have had a feverish dream, what with the unsettling imagery and color scheme.
Crystal Bridges Architecture
I liked the architecturally imposing museum restaurant, a near-twin of the other bridge room but open-air instead of being filled by two large gallery rooms. However, the restaurant entrance featured Claes Oldenburg’s Alphabet/Good Humor sculpture, looking like a giant ice cream bar composed of alphabet pasta, which was not particularly appetizing.
Bentonville
A few blocks away from the museum was the downtown square, home to Sam Walton’s original five-and-dime store which began the Wal-Mart story. I’d visited there with my friend Jeff Silver decades ago and on this day found the square blocked off for ArtsFest, a gathering of booths, food vendors, and musical entertainment. Despite the drizzle it was fun to walk the tiny festival and see one of John Sewell’s erotic carved female torsos, with strategically placed knots, alongside his humorous walking vessel. The Confederacy is represented by a large statue of 2nd Lt. James H. Berry in the center of the square. I ate a funnel cake and then headed home, having enjoyed my rainy day in May…okay, June.
One of the prettiest walks in the Tulsa metro area is Redbud Valley, an oasis along Bird Creek northeast of Tulsa, just east across the Rogers county line. Its surroundings are much more functional than scenic: to the south is the Lafarge Cement Plant and an industrial area, to the east is Waste Management’s Quarry Landfill, to the north is the quarry for Greenhill Materials, and a few miles to the east is the Port of Catoosa. Redbud Valley is a legacy of Dr. Harriett Barclay, a botanist at the University of Tulsa who valued the many flora abounding on this plot of land with a travertine spring issuing from a high bluff of Oologah limestone. She spearheaded an effort, assisted by the Nature Conservancy, the now-defunct Tulsa Tribune, and University of Tulsa, to preserve this land, which is now part of the City of Tulsa’s Oxley Nature Center.
The trails were built by Boy Scouts and students at the University of Tulsa. My friend Carrie Fleharty first showed them to me several years ago and I’ve been back a number of times, including some visits with photos in October 2009 and January 2011. Fellow science teacher Betty Henderson and I decided to walk the trails on a warm day in late May, celebrating the first week of our summer break and compensating for a float trip with friends which was cancelled by an uncertain forecast.
The only trail segment we did not cover between the two of us was the Woodland Fork, which is a shortcut bypassing the prairie. It is always a pleasure to visit this oasis nestled in the northeast corner of the metropolis Tulsey Town has become.
Each month in 2012 I’m selecting a song, new to me, to highlight as my Song of the Month. In reviewing my downloads, I found that I added a whopping 328 songs to my collection in May because when the Google Play service was launched, they offered a bunch of free tunes. I’ve only listened to a fraction of them, but the standout was a song I’ve owned for years. So how can it qualify as new to me? Because in all the years I’ve owned and listened to the song, I never worked out all of the lyrics to assign their meaning…until now.
n 2001 Train was catapulted from cult band to stardom by the anthemic sounds of Drops of Jupiter, which won the Grammy for Best Rock Song. I liked the song, but only caught some of the verses. My general impression, which is not at all the songwriter’s meaning, was of a down-to-earth boyfriend talking to a pretentious girlfriend returning from a long journey to exotic locations. The other day a friend and I were on a road trip, working our way through my new Google Play hoard. A live version of Drops of Jupiter came up and she remarked that she liked the song even though she had never paid much attention to the lyrics, because it had a such a great chorus. I grinned, because that was precisely how I had dealt with the song as well.
The next day that prompted me to download the lyrics from my favorite service and listen. Wait a minute…this no longer read like a boyfriend talking to a girlfriend, at least not a live one. It was something else. It turns out Pat Monahan wrote the song in response to a dream about his mother after she died from cigarette smoking. He thought, “What if no ever really leaves? What if you’re just kind of here, but different? The idea was…she’s here, back in the atmosphere.” I love what he said in an interview:
It was an obvious connection between me and my mother, because Drops of Jupiter was as much about me being on a voyage, trying to find out who I am too, through all of this. The best thing we can do by loss of love is find ourselves through it.
Well said, well written, well composed, and well sung, sir.
Now that she’s back in the atmosphere
With drops of Jupiter in her hair, hey, hey
She acts like summer and walks like rain
Reminds me that there’s time to change, hey, hey
Since the return from her stay on the moon
She listens like spring and she talks like June, hey, hey
Hey, hey
Tell me did you sail across the sun
Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated
Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star
One without a permanent scar
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there
Now that she’s back from that soul vacation
Tracing her way through the constellation, hey, hey
She checks out Mozart while she does tae-bo
Reminds me that there’s room to grow, hey, hey
Now that she’s back in the atmosphere
I’m afraid that she might think of me as plain ol’ Jane
Told a story about a man who is too afraid to fly so he never did land
Tell me did the wind sweep you off your feet
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
And head back to the Milky Way
And tell me, did Venus blow your mind
Was it everything you wanted to find
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there
Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken
Your best friend always sticking up for you even when I know you’re wrong
Can you imagine no first dance, freeze dried romance five-hour phone conversation
The best soy latte that you ever had . . . and me
Tell me did the wind sweep you off your feet
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
And head back toward the Milky Way
Tell me did you sail across the sun
Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated
Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star
One without a permanent scar
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself
Nah nah nah…
And did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
Nah nah nah…
And did you fall from a shooting star
Fall from a shooting star
Nah nah nah…
And now you’re only looking for yourself out there
June 9, 2012
Meador Manor 