A day or two after the yellow trailer moved I was looking out of the repository over a woodpile to the desert when I realized the pile included driftwood gathered from Lake Abert, Oregon, remnants from a trip which, being broke by the end of summer 1977, I’d financed by pre-selling portfolios of photo and silkscreen prints documenting the annual foray in exchange for gas money up front. The gambit worked so well I was able to gather said wood at the source and range anonymously about southeastern Oregon erecting anomalous driftwood sculptures on dry lakes and promontories for some weeks, all subsequently documented and delivered.  Down the years the remaining material became many things; pickup bed liners, home furnishings, now parts of a wall in the Wall Spring studio…

For all that I never dreamed that thirty-eight years later not only would I still have some of the furry salt-bleached stuff but be looking at it from inside a two thousand square foot storage building intended to contain two lifetimes of artworks on the edge of the Smoke Creek Desert…

…let alone that that would be located within a twenty-year old oasis of [mainly] my own making…

So, in brief, bits of oasis, twenty years on, on a few days in June, careening towards the solstice…just add water and wait two decades.  The Lake Abert wood, following that 1977 trip, traveled with me through divorce, chaos, heartbreak, hearts broken, addresses and studios too numerous to enumerate, more chaos…ah well…to end, this chapter anyway, a few hundred miles south of its original source…

M