The Rain, by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

West Kansas, as you can see, is wheat country. Black gold hides under the surface, and the land is dotted with oil wells. It’s a barren, rough landscape. Strangely romantic.

This road leads to Bunker Hill, population 100.

While hunting, we came across a flock of turkeys. Unfortunately, wild turkey was not on the Thanksgiving dinner menu that day–they were on someone else’s wheat field.

Pheasant hunting is truly a sporting event. You tromp through dense thickets to scare up the birds (we call the thickets “boo patches”). When a bird emerges, you distinguish whether it’s a rooster or a hen. If it’s a rooster, you hike up your gun and take aim–as it’s flying away from you. If you are lucky, some of the bird shot hits it and you release the dogs, who will fetch the bird. Mostly though, it’s a lot of trudging through fields.

If you have enough people, you can encircle a field and close in on the birds.

Here’s Grandpa and Stealth, his lab, who’s an incredible retriever.

I made Grandpa stop the truck anytime I saw a photo opp.

Along the way, we stopped to check wells and do some grunt work. (Not me, of course.)

And took a pit stop at Stan and Penny’s farm, some of our cousins. Gramp and Stan talked guns in his shop.

And I photographed cows. They didn’t like it very much.

Then we loaded up for one last round of hunting.

And as we closed out the last day of hunting, Evan got himself a bird!

It’s in our freezer waiting to be cooked into a pheasant pot pie.

We had Thanksgiving at Grandma Marguerite’s house. The kitchen, inevitably, is where we congregate. This is a pretty typical scene.

And at the end of the week, we drove back to Lawrence and did city stuff again. You can’t ride a scooter in the country!

All in all, it was a great trip. Thanks for the fun guys!

(And Grandpa, I’ll send you pictures on a CD sometime this week.)

The desert. All the reds, browns, and unexpected greens. The way the setting sun lights up the ancient, craggy rocks and paints them in purple. Evan took this photo when he was backpacking with our friend Alex last winter in the Superstitions. It was the week after Christmas, and we had escaped a bitter Northwest snowstorm by the skin of our teeth, driving through the Oregon passes at 4 a.m. so we could bypass a blizzard that would ground planes and leave people without power for days on end. Spending the worst part of each winter somewhere nice and sunny is a habit we’d like to work into in the next couple years… take the camera and set off on some great adventure.

This year, we’re planning to hunker down out here. Stay warm with lots of blankets, our wood stove, and a space heater. By the end of the week, there’s supposed to be snow on our mountain, which is really only a foothill, but a big one, and to have snow on it means winter has arrived, in all her glory. Hopefully we will have time to take some great photos of snow on firs and such. Lord knows we haven’t found time to do anything lately besides work, but cabin fever does set in eventually and forces us to get out. At least every once in a while.

Honestly, I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for 2 1/2 years now, and not once have I been across the mountains. (We live in a bit of a bubble over here.) So it was high time that we take a trip–and we need another one. I had jury duty the next day, so we could only go over for the afternoon.

Land is cheap out there, skies are big, and vistas are huge. It’s a place that lends itself to exploring. And it feels like the old West–cowboys on hillsides would not be out of place. Roaming cattle, log cabins, ranches… someday I will run a working farm out there, fingers crossed.

This is the view on the drive through the mountains:

And another:

Evan took this one. Mushrooms had taken over the forest–they were everywhere!

He took this one too. I love the colors & the perspective w/the fence in the foreground.

An awful picture to take because of the sun, but I had to get one of the road and the spires.

We ate dinner in Twisp, a turn-of-the-century mining-turned-tourist town. I love all the old fonts on the signs.

We just launched our newest site, Ars Grafik. It’s a marketplace of primarily free web and graphic design elements–all the great things that designers need in their toolbox, like free WordPress themes, PSD brushes, vector images, PSD and AI patterns, fonts, stock photography, textures, and more! We’ll be adding content like crazy now that it’s up.

This has been a continual process of reevaluating our place in the online world, and we’re really excited to get Ars Grafik off the ground. So pass it along to any creative types you know or drop us a good word on your blog. It’s MUCH appreciated!

I haven’t forgotten about posting pics from eastern Washington. More to come soon!