Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • An artist you’ll want to meet

    An artist you’ll want to meet

    It’s whimsy, OK? But it’s more than that.

    We stumbled on Stan Peterson’s work by accident, when a road trip we planned didn’t pan out and we needed a new destination.

    So. We’re lying on a blanket under a shady tree in Spokane’s Riverfront Park (wonderful, surprising, must-be-visited). We’re bummed because we can’t proceed to Canada (a passport left-behind issue). And because we dig on the stoics, and the stoics advise going with the flow rather than getting all het up, we revise our plans as we listen to the Spokane River tumble over waterfalls nearby.

    Inevitably, we wind up the next day 300 miles away at the Maryhill Museum on the Washington side of the Columbia River, not far from Goldendale. If you don’t know the Maryhill, I both feel sad for your not-knowing and envy you the upcoming pleasure of discovery. Walking into the Maryhill for the first time is like reading a new and about-to-be beloved book. You’ll read it many times, but that first time is magical.

    And that’s where we found Portland artist Stan Peterson tinkering with his show titled Horse Play. We came upon the wood carvings with their muted color washings in the best possible way. You come around a corner and you see the horses in the little boat and you immediately think of singer Lyle Lovett’s If I Had a Boat song, with the delightful line: “Kiss my ass, I bought a boat and I’m going out to sea.” It’s amazing how often that is the correct response to life.

    Peterson’s carvings are whimsical, but muscled. The work feels certain of itself, completed. And it’s grounded in place: horses, river barges, pelicans, sturgeons, bluebirds. I fell in love right away. And then I checked his website and now, well, I’m a new fan.

    It’s instructive to meet the actual artist, and I’m glad we did. But I only remember one thing he said. Despite being a lifelong artist whose work sells in galleries, the Maryhill show is his first at an actual museum. He was excited as he said this — eyes bright, big smile. Like a kid at play.

    You can meet him, too. Peterson is giving a walk-through chat at 3 p.m. on Saturday Aug. 29. The museum cafe will be open and serving fresh salmon. (RSVP at the museum website). Since this is the closing walk-through it’ll be the last chance to see his work at the Maryhill.

    I might have to go back.

  • Treasured teacher and mentor

    Dancing with Dael! What a joy.

    Nia dance instructor Dael Parsons gave me a gift, a method of being more fully myself. Her strategy — simply noticing what was happening with her students, then gently guiding — was what I needed.

    I walked into her dance class almost seven years ago. Newly retired, I had become the boss of all my hours. The first thing I wanted from retirement was a regular dance practice. I’d drifted into a few Nia classes with other instructors over the years. I felt it was special, different from other workouts, but I didn’t know why.

    I do now. Dael showed me the way. Nia, which I’ve written about many times, is about movement for joy, for pleasure, for health. It uses choreography and music, but Nia doesn’t care if you never quite master the steps. Nia wants you to be present for your whole self — brain, body, soul. It helped me get out of my brain, which is where a writer thinks the important stuff resides. This writer, anyway. For me the body was the thing carrying around the brain. A conveyance system. Because of Nia, I saw how silly that was.

    I came to dance with a private loathing of my body because of its failure to meet social norms. I couldn’t look at myself in the dance studio mirror. Dael’s way of teaching helped me past that. Seven years later, I have a dance practice I adore with sister dancers I’m delighted to see. I look at myself with joy, whether I’m half a step behind the beat or forgetting what’s coming next in the day’s routine, or simply leaping around in the space, despite the choreography, because my inner 12-year-old wants to.

    Dael created the psychological space within the studio and offered the deep wisdom of her own extensive experience, not just with dance but with anatomy, with the skeletal and muscular structures that we manage when we move to music.

    I started retirement with the bedrock need for a healthy body practice. Dael showed me the way.

    Why am I speaking in the past tense about this phenomenal teacher? Now she’s retiring. I get to dance with her three more times before she puts her shoes back on (in Nia we dance barefoot). I’m looking forward to each one of them.

    The Eugene area is blessed with other fine Nia instructors. I’ve danced with several and will continue dancing with them.

    But Dael will always be the embodiment of Nia practice, a north star I’ll never lose.

  • The Blue Mountains: wider than I knew

    The Blue Mountains: wider than I knew

    Courtesy of Miller and Roadside Geology of Oregon

    Two-laners all the way. They make the best kind of road trip, and I am building my preference list one journey at a time. My current favorite, the daylong run from Eugene to Baker City. You motor up through the Willamette National Forest, skirting the shimmering McKenzie River and over the spine of the Cascades down into congested yet adorable Sisters. Yes it is a tourist town. But the restaurants are fine. The ice cream parlor has been there forever and the city park is cool on hot days. After Sisters, you roll eastward across the high country through handsome ponderosa pine forests then jump into the Ochoco Mountains, where lodgepole and quaking aspen rise around you. John Day. If I stopped to talk about John Day, I’d have to get back in the car and go there. It’s its own deep-dive destination. But continue on to Prairie City, and give a shout southward to the Strawberry Mountains, then cross at last into the Blue Mountains.

    One day’s drive, three mountain ranges. Or so I thought. But when I went looking — via maps, via Google — for the boundaries of the Blues, I was in for a lesson. The Blues go on and on, encompassing many other ranges. The stunning white-peaked Wallowas? The Greenhorns? The Elkhorns? The Maurys? All part of the Blues. And yes, even the Ochocos.

    Geologists know this kind of thing. And now, thanks to geologist Marli Miller’s fine essay on the Blues for the Oregon Encyclopedia, I do too. Her article included the above map, taken from the book Roadside Geology of Oregon that Miller also wrote. The extent of the range is impressive — 15,000 square miles. That’s bigger than the state of Maryland. Or Massachusetts. Or Hawaii.

    Why are these other named ranges all nested within the vast Blue Mountains? Short answer? Well, there is no short answer. First, the mountains share the same bedrock and were uplifted together a honking long time ago. From afar, the forested mountains have a blue look to them and were referred to as the Blue Mountains by early trappers and immigrants. Eventually mapmakers began naming particular mountains and ranges for human purposes like mining, timber and other land-ownership stuff. Then the ecologists came along and recognized that these mountains all sit in the rain shadow of the Cascades and have similar climate and critters. So. One name to rule them all.

    Now, you could do interstates all the way to Baker City — Interstate 5, then Interstate 84, basically divided multi-lane freeways. But I love the state two-laners: 126 to 26 to 7 and there you are. Baker City, a place with a hell of a past: range wars, gold mining, Oregon Trail wagon-wheel ruts still visible in the hardpan. And a fabulous view of the Elkhorn version of the Blues.

    To get there, you’ve gone through fine small towns like Prineville and Mitchell and Austin. (You could hit Sumpter if you wanted a close-up look at how a gold dredge can mar a landscape, and also a walkthrough of the old gold dredge itself if you’ve a mind to gawk at antique feats of engineering.)

    It’s all the Blues — big and wide and Oregon. They invite you in, the people in the small towns make you welcome and the landscape says “Come back soon. You missed a few spots.”

    Top photo by Susan Palmer