#playasummerlake

mid-September, 2018

Playa on Summer Lake is an art and science residency program, a 15 minute drive from Paisley. This past Saturday, Valerie and a healthy contingent of Paisley residents visited an open house they sponsor monthly. One of the artists/scientists is working toward a PhD in ecology, and she had a map on the wall of her studio of the ecoregions of the USA:

Paisley and Lake County are in the #80 region. I looked it up. Paisley is in 80e, to be very specific (I doctored the map to show Paisley in red, see?):

Says Wikipedia about 80e:

High Desert Wetlands (80e)

The nearly level High Desert Wetlands ecoregion consists of high desert lakes and surrounding wetlands that provide critical habitat for nesting and migratory birds and associated upland birds and mammals. Elevation varies from 4,000 to 5,200 feet (1,219 to 1,646 m). The fine-textured soils are poorly drained, and basins collect water seasonally. Although water levels fluctuate from year to year, lakes and wetlands in this region hold water more consistently than on the coarser, better drained soils of the Pluvial Lake Basins. Sedges, rushes, black greasewood, tufted hairgrass, mat muhly, meadow barley, creeping wildrye, and Nevada bluegrass occur in wetter areas. Drier areas support basin big sagebrush, Wyoming big sagebrush, silver sagebrush, bluebunch wheatgrass, basin wildrye, Idaho fescue, Thurber's needlegrass, and cheatgrass. The region covers 1,651 square miles (4,276 km2) in Oregon, including the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and land surrounding Malheur Lake, Paulina Marsh, Summer Lake, Lake Abert, and the Warner Lakes.

 Who knew that there was such a thing as a Desert Wetland.

The young scientist took us on a walk out onto the playa, the lake bed, which is dry and cracked now in the first days of Autumn.

I believe this rock is a bird outhouse. As the child’s book says, Everybody poops.

It was a strange light that illumined my fellow walkers. An overcast day in DC means a chance of rain, but does not mean that at all on the playa. See how odd we all look? Without landscape, or context. Otherworldly.

But right next to this desolation, there is green grass, and hills, and Winter Rim, so named because white man explorer Fremont trudged along it during winter, and gasped at the lake he saw on the edge of it, so beautiful and inviting that he called it Summer Lake. Back in the Pleistocene epoch, he’d have seen a vast deep lake, healthy and full of life. As we have it now, Summer Lake evaporates to just a wee bit of water that is a couple feet deep and miles wide. Close to shore there is cracked mud like this, with alkali dust a-blowing on the edge.

 There is plenty of life along the edge of Summer Lake. This is what free range and grass fed looks like.

You can see the alkali dust kicking up in the background from the edge of the lake.

I’d never walked on the lakebed before Saturday, and I didn’t have the proper shoes. But I was elated to walk along the patterned mud and see the world from that perspective. I was expecting more of a beach feeling, with sand, as the grass gave way, since my only reference point is the beach of the Atlantic, or the Chesapeake Bay. But this crusty dryness, and breezy, dusty air, is new.

We all turned around and walked back onto the Playa land, which is watered to an emerald lawn, and has a fresh water pond, human made I think, so lovely.  I look forward to walking closer to the Summer Lake water and Spring is apparently the best time.

I googled and looked up images from artists at playa and found art installations like this one:

Here’s another one, in the dry lakebed.

Check out the giant horseshoe crab on Rebecca Welti’s blog:

There are also art installations in the water that must happen in wet Spring, to wit:

 Here’s a picture by an artist in residence of Playa in winter:

On this particular Saturday’s open house, we guests and artists walk back from the playa lake bed and meander over to the main building, which is very beautiful. We munch on pita chips and hummus, tortilla chips and salsa, and down big glasses of water. Then we got to listen to poetry. The tallest guy in the picture on the playa is the poet. I should have written down what he said, at least a few phrases: he wrote observations of this place, and that is poetry indeed.

Next up was some strange sonification of natural phenomena woven together by a musician. As I listened to the 9-minute recording, I thought of Harley motorcycles, the ocean waves, and some sort of underwater booming. She explained after it was over that we were hearing sounds from Jupiter (brought to us by NASA), whales, a cat’s purr and lots of other vibrations-made-audible. It was not a relaxing listen: Toni said rightly I think that someone with war-related PTSD would be a nervous wreck following such a concert. That would be her husband, a Vietnam Vet.

A lovely young woman named Julia Connor played on her violin, a variety of fiddle tunes, one of them from Scotland, a place where a wee bit of my DNA comes from (see, middle name, MacFarlane.) I loved what she played, all of it. And then her husband, also a Playa resident, joined her on the grand piano and rich full sounds came from the two of them. What a treat for the ears. She is going to release her first solo album and I’ll try to remember to look for it.

Time to go.  

One of the deep gifts of living in Lake County is going to Playa events. These artist and scientists stretch my mind with ideas that would never occur to me without their example. These folks come from all over the US, but most come from within the Pacific Northwest or California. Even so, most are not familiar with this kind of landscape. And I think it’s safe to say that the work they do while here is refreshingly grounded in a sense of place.

I would like to be a part of this residency at some point, and I will apply eventually. I’d do a combination of extreme knitting/crochet, and working with wood as a sculptor and mobile-maker. I want to make things that hang and move in the breeze, and make gentle wooden or chiming noises. I would happily schlep my stuff, yarn, sticks, and the half-wheel from an irrigation system that Valerie rescued and I want to yarn bomb:

(Common Use photography)

I’ll keep you all posted.

 Back in early August, we went to the lawn of Playa to hear a young man play a grand piano. Hunter Noack drags that thing all over rural Oregon and plays for free at places like Alvord Desert and Fort Rock, the crater of a volcano. That one Friday night, the smoke cleared and we feasted on music, with poetry readings between the pieces.  I will leave you with a video of one of his shows, and the playing of a piece by John Cage called In The Landscape.  The setting is Fort Rock, Lake County.  Enjoy.