No Paint Thinner Required
Finding Art along the Path to Ultralight Minimalism
Funny that it would happen along Parker Creek downstream from Parker Lake below Parker Peak. Three inspirational Parkers. Though there have been many talented artists in the Parker family, befittingly, there were only three with me in spirit that day.
Grandma Parker for one. Give her a bucolic scene sitting next to a babbling brook, nestled amongst the granite boulders in the woods, or even just sitting in her own backyard staring out across the ridge, she seemed content to work for hours peacefully capturing the beauty around her with watercolors or graphite.
My mom, another Parker, has been a fabulous and prolific fiber artist most of her life. Whether it be knitting, crocheting, weaving, embroidering, and most other things having to do with designing and fabricating wonderfully complex, stringy and fluffy creations, she’s never been short on projects. She’s kept herself well stocked with stashes of fuzzy inventory everywhere.
And my Parker son is an artist. As a kid, he loved to draw, create extraordinary Lego builds of his own making, and venture into the deep recesses of his imagination to battle an untold number of mystical creatures. Now as an adult, he’s been rediscovering many of his natural abilities as a fine arts major, and has been steeping some deep latent talent in photography, painting, drawing, and the like. We’re so excited to see where it will all lead him.
Thoughts about trying my own hand at the arts as an adult had never quite fully germinated. Those seeds were still sitting in well sealed envelopes tucked away in the dusty back corners of my head for future use in my “old age.”
Having spent a decent part of my engineering career drawing up wangdoodles, figibotts, and other proflanged tribicule crastinations, drawing was only something that I was paid to do, and was always frustratingly guided by the many structured and methodical rules, laws, and criteria that govern stiff and careful scientific work and provide prescribed time-tested guardrails that steer engineering projects towards planned successes that are on budget, on time, problem-free, and lead to long useful and peaceful lives that allow the design engineers to quietly fade into the background soon after seeing through buttery smooth, hiccup-free startup routines. Room for creativity was narrow and confined, often considered too tumultuous for clients and engineers that liked to stem off headaches with tried-and-true solutions.
As an adult, I’d hoped that after spending decades in what I often perceived as “career confinement,” that someday my more creative side could fully reemerge and break through the hard crusty layers that had formed from years of suppression in what was often a stifling and stuffy technical career in the maths and sciences. I was looking forward to getting old! Creative arts, you see, were one of my first loves. My most cherished times as a child and a pre-teen were when I was immersed in something super imaginative, creative, and artistic. Retirement would provide me the much needed time and space to let this side of me make a reappearance.
As fate would have it, almost two years ago when I was driving down the east side of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range to kick off retirement with a multi-week ultralight camping tour of the western states, I queued up one of my favorite diversions, the Zero to Travel Podcast. The host, Jason Moore, asked his guest, Kari Gale, to describe her experience hiking the Camino de Santiago, a famous pilgrimage route that I’d had my sights set on. She was also going to share about her time living in a tiny house as an extreme minimalist. Sounding all too enticing, I hit play.
As with the best things in life, the biggest highlights of the show were completely unexpected.
Kari was in the midst of describing that she’d hiked the Camino with her sister completely offline, without cell phones or any other kind of connection to the internet, when she revealed one of the best wrinkles in her story.
Having longer legs than her sister, Kari was often far ahead. At the end of the day, she’d park herself on a street corner at their destination to intercept her sister before she’d have a chance to wander off into the sunset in a sun-baked haze of confusion. It was at one of these first stops, early in their trip, that Kari whimsically picked up a pencil and started doodling to occupy the long wait. She’d never drawn before but it wasn’t long before she fell in love.
Over the course of her journey, Kari found immense satisfaction in drawing everything around her, from beautiful sights along the way to everyday mundane objects like a cracked wineglass that sat before her one afternoon. Raptured by the podcast, I found myself recalling, remembering, and seeking a world that I’d left behind a long time ago. Those little seeds sitting on that dusty shelf in the back recesses of my noggin were starting to stir.
Kari then peppered in another detail that was all too compelling and has since left a lasting mark.
While her sister could barely remember anything but the broadest brushstrokes of their 500 mile journey across Spain, Kari could remember most waypoints in crystal clear detail. By spending so much time sitting, observing, and drawing it all up, she had transformed the whole experience into something much more memorable. With her drawings, she can now transport herself back to the Camino to viscerally re-immerse herself in the whole gestalt: the people, food, objects, wine, animals, weather, smells, lights, sights, and all the other wonderful things that make up a magnificent time and place. It’s like she’s there again.
Parked on the street corner, it was all too easy for Kari to see the stark contrast. Busily snapping away dozens of pictures on their cell phones all within a matter of a scant few seconds, most pilgrims seemingly had no time to see the sights with their own eyeballs. Snap. Tap. Gone!
Fully immersed in Kari’s story, I was surprised to see that I was nearing the final ascent up to Tuolumne Meadows for a hike in one of my favorite spots. But as I rounded a bend in the highway, I saw an ominous buildup of late afternoon thunderheads upcanyon. Hmmmm….better stick to something down here in the rain shadow instead. “How about hiking to Parker Lake?” I asked myself. “Sounds good,” I replied.
On the hike up to the lake, a few miles in, I caught a glimpse of a small babbling brook off to the right with lots of sunlight glinting off its clear waters. Reflecting nicely in the stiller pools were the green-turning-yellow aspen trees of early fall that bordered its shores.
Such a beautiful spot! Perfect for a quick snack. How about a picture? Snap. Tap. Gone!
Wandering back to the main trail with a mouth still full of trail mix, I stopped dead in my tracks, chewing and all. Stop. Wait. Think. This is just the kind of spot that Kari was talking about. Hold it. There may be an opportunity here. Could I somehow burn this gem of a creekside pitstop into my brain so that I could magically transport myself back to it anytime I wanted to?
Naturally, thanks to my ultralight minimalist creed, I didn’t have any pens, pencils, paint, canvas, or anything else of the sort with me. Stop. Wait. Think.
I didn’t have any art supplies, but I did have my phone. Yes, it was the same phone that took that forgettable picture back there that didn’t really capture it at all. But it was also the same phone that had a pencil looking thing at the bottom of that Notes app that I so often accidentally hit and quickly closed in frustration. Aha!
Could I maybe use that same digital pencil to draw up this scene with any degree of success? Why not give it a shot? I had time. A bed of fallen needles perched on a flat spot between a couple of pine trees overhead looked like a perfect spot to open up my Notes app and give it a test drive.
I’m not going to further expound on all the wonders of that afternoon other than to say that I texted my wife in excitement the moment even the smallest cell signal allowed.
Fast forward to today, I’m so thankful to have had the good fortune of stumbling upon that podcast. I’ve found a lost love. And, thanks to Jason and Kari, I’ve discovered that there’s no better way to capture a moment in time and place. Those first rudimentary pieces of work, with all of their many imperfections and hasty interpretations, immediately transport me back to those precious moments sitting along the banks of Parker Creek and Parker Lake in full spirit, mind and sense: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the prickly pine needles, everything.
And best of all, even with all those scenic Parkers there with me that afternoon looking over my shoulder as I went to work, my only real client that day was myself. Not Parker Creek, not Parker Lake, and not Parker Peak. Not my grandma, mom, or son. This art was for me.
Driving back down the road from the Parker Creek trailhead, I found myself embracing a new wonderful challenge. Just how far could I stretch the simple and free iPhone Notes app over my ultralight minimalist travels so that I’m not needing to carry a bunch of additional gear or buy expensive and complicated apps to further dabble in this newly rediscovered world of art?
I’ll end this by saying that I will forever remember sitting next to that one bend in Parker Creek and crouched on that log under Parker Peak along the shoreline of Parker Lake, with digital pencils and paint brushes in hand, absorbing the full love and energy from the namesake trinity around me together with my late grandma, my mom, and my son who have all so adeptly channeled the artful Parker spirit.
Thank you, Jason Moore, for hosting Kari Gale on your show that day, and a thank you to all six Parkers who showed me the way that afternoon, ominous thunderheads and all.
