The face in the bark

What can I say. I saw this pristine quaking aspen tree trunk over on Park Avenue one day. Did a double take and took this picture of the "cubist" drawing. Note the rakish eyebrow over one of the lady's eyes.

Up in the high country in the Coconino, unmarked trunks are rare. Most of the aspens are covered with a particular kind of graffiti, carved in the past by Basque shepherds. In checking out the subject with The Google, I discovered, among other things, that the U of Nevada/Reno has, can you believe, a Basque Studies Center. One of its newsletters stated that tree carvings represent roughly a one-hundred period in the story of Basque immigration to the American West, from the last decades of the nineteenth century until the 1970s. The Basque sheepherders inscribed thousands of messages on aspens in ten states from California to Montana. (I suspect the reason that Nevada would have the Basque Center is that on many of its isolated mountain ranges, aspen comprise the climax forest, unlike most western ranges where conifers take over from the aspen.) According to another reference, the aspens in New Mexico and Colorado were carved primarily by Hispanic sheepherders. There is something about the smooth white bark that just invites sign making! Oh, yes. The academics have a name for all this: arborglyphs.

Water Hauling: Local readers in particular should find a new post at FreshWaterFootprint of interest. The subject: areas in Yavapai County where residents must haul water -- and why. Probably a subject most of us don't know much about. Another link: the Daily Yonder, the blog about rural America, looks at where the prosperous rural counties are located.

Even at the Doctor's...

...there's still something to photograph. First the quick report -- the reason I've had to cozy up to the O2 machine almost continually the past couple of weeks is that I seem to have a touch of pneumonia. So I'm on a short course of antibiotics. We'll see how it goes. However, I was able to take advantage of the visit to photograph a few of the water colors painted by the doctor's mother.

What I like about this lady's work is how she evokes a rural western past that has long since disappeared. My grandparents were a part of that world -- yet even they were gradually separating themselves from it. Town mice, not country mice (even though my California grandfather still kept a cow.) My mother and father were of the generation that made the break with the rural past complete.

Not many would put a milkweed pod front and center of a landscape!

A more recent addition to the waiting room walls is this series of old tractors. None, I note, with caterpillar treads, like my Phoenix grandfather drove along the side of Baseline road so that he wouldn't hurt the blacktop.

And, finally, an old auto, abandoned along with a way of life. Reminds me of reading William Least Heat Moon.