Biography: Part 1

INAUGURAL SHOE

THE RUNNER

THE FIDDLER (lifesize)

In 1972, six months after graduating from High School at the age of eighteen I hopped into a 68 V.W. van with my boyfriend and moved to San Diego. After painting every interior wall of the rented house with the faces of rock stars and saints we were politely asked to leave and from there went briefly to Colorado where my boyfriend and I got a job painting the interior of apartments the conventional way.

After a few months in the Rockies we decided to take a road trip and packed up our dog and turtle and headed to the Mt. Shasta area of Northern California. We landed a job in a town called Dairyville, on a farm. Our job was to live in the old farmhouse and everyday pack up the horse-mules, Kit and Daisy May and spend long afternoons surveying the land and making sure the farm was safe. This was an ideal job for me; everyday I spent hours sketching the mules and my boyfriend and writing poetry. The only tragedy of this job was the death of my turtle to sunstroke. He died peacefully in the tall prairie grass. We remodeled the old farmhouse with our hands, building sky ports from old car windshields we found in junkyards, and furniture from excavated river wood. We opened our home to writers and artist passing through. We experimented with L.S.D. and organic hallucinogenic mushrooms (we were very health conscious).

Because I had left my parents house so abruptly (they had wanted me to stay at home and attend a near by University.) I never really told them what I was doing or where I was so until the age of twenty-two they were always sending some family member after me to try and bring me back to them. When we got word that they knew where I was, we packed up; it was time to leave Dairyville. So off we went, had a flat tire, an angel of a man, (he was truly a wingless angel) helped us get our van back up and running. He had the blue eyes of an ocean; you could see miles through the aqua transparency. We were sitting in the back seat of his car looking at him speaking to us through the rear mirror, he said if we needed money we should think about picking cherries in Stockton. We did need money, but the best part of this to me was the idea of living with the trees and the migrant workers. I was raised by a civil minded liberal Mother who use to take us to Caesar Chavez rallies when we were growing up. I marched for the rights of immigrants the first time when I was six years old. When I was in Junior High School my older brother and sister and I were at the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was assasinated, we were standing three feet from the podium when he was shot. My Father was out of town and my Mother could not attend so she had sent us to represent our family. I had always wanted to sketch the ‘everyman’ and especially the migrant workers I remembered from the Caesar Chavez rallies. There was something about their faces as though they wore the earth and their smiles were etched from the ivory of bone, their laughter drunk and full with the ripeness of an everlasting harvest. So my boyfriend Carl and I said yes. The angel drew us a map, we jumped in our traveling home and off to Stockton we went. We picked cherries in California, Montana and then Washington, all the time sitting by campfire at night with our newfound families. We all traveled the same route ending up in many of the same orchards, so you would see the same families week after week. I would sketch their faces by firelight, and then give them their portrait. They would always stare at the paper, laugh out loud when they saw their faces looking back at them, then they would get very serious and thank me, it was a humbling experience. When we got to Washington we picked cherries, then because we loved the lushness of this beautiful wild and pristine state, stayed on and picked pears, then it was fall and with fall came the apple harvest.

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