The tire swing hung from a cottonwood that leaned out over the hill, and if you pumped it high enough and let the arc carry you past the trunk and out over the drop with 500 gallon fuel tanks below, you were suddenly fifteen feet above the ground without having climbed anything. The hill fell away beneath you. For a second, maybe two, you were flying. I was maybe seven years old, and I remember thinking that this is what freedom feels like, that this is what the world is supposed to feel like, and not yet understanding that I was being shaped by something I would spend the rest of my life trying to get back to.
The place was fourteen acres on the Dismal River in the Nebraska Sandhills, a thin triangle of land, part of thousands of acres of a Sandhills ranch. The base at the water's edge and the tip climbing south to a small hill where the unused cistern sat. My grandfather built the sod house with his own hands and whatever help showed up. My grandmother rendered lard, made soap from wood ash lye, canned and fermented and baked in a wood-fired oven, and lined a root cellar cut into the hillside with jar after jar of food for the winter.
Wild chokecherries, sand cherries, buffalo berries, black currants, raspberries, plums were made into jams, jellies, chutneys, pies, frizzy cool drinks and fruit rollups. A hand-dug well on the south side of the drive that produced over sixty gallons a minute, cold and clear, the moss and duckweed doing the work of a filter. Deer, antelope, coyotes, great blue herons, beavers, muskrats, and the barred owl that kept his station in the tree right beside the cellar and could be seen through the kitchen window whenever someone pumped water, his call a consistent reminder that we lived with the other creatures.
One of the best things AI is good for is trying to replicate a memory. While this is close if I wanted something to paint from I would keep trying. AI used was Midjourney and Paintify.
My grandparents didn't own any of it. They were stewards on a large ranching operation, workers who had tried homesteading years earlier and lost everything when their hogs died of cholera and they didn’t prove up on the claim. But they made that fourteen acres into something so complete and so alive that as a kid it never once occurred to me that it wasn't theirs. Or, put another way, it was theirs in every way that matters.
I have been watching Taylor Sheridan's new series The Madison, which is exactly the kind of thing that reaches into your chest and rearranges furniture. Sheridan is a complicated figure, the son of a Fort Worth cardiologist who chose the cowboy life rather than being born into it, the guy who has somehow built a creative empire out of stories about people who feel the land belongs to them and are watching it slowly being taken away. A very specific kind of person feels that in the gut, and I am apparently that person.
Watching it, I kept coming back to something I have been trying to name for years. There is a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that translates loosely as a homesickness for a home you may never have had, or can't return to. It isn't grief exactly, because grief has a clear object. It's more like a frequency your nervous system recognizes as right, a tuning you were set to once and haven't quite matched since. That is what fourteen acres on the Dismal River did to me. I didn't know it while it was happening. I was swimming in the river and making mud pies and flying on a tire swing and eating my grandmother's biscuits without any awareness that I was being permanently calibrated.
Grandma's root cellar replicated with Midjourney and Paintify. Missing the lye soap which she kept away from the kids.
I have tried to buy that land since I was a kid. The answer was always no, because in the country, ranchers don't sell or divide land. When I got out of the military I found out the fourteen acres had been separated from the ranch and had come up for auction in the nineties. A state hydrologist bought it. He still owns it, no interest in selling. So that particular door is closed. But the wanting is not.
I have a mantra I say to myself sometimes, usually when the schedule gets heavy or the year feels like it's moving too fast. “Don't die without a dock”. It's shorthand for something larger, a small homestead piece on the water, a river or a lake, somewhere to grow food and keep chickens and sit with the people I love without the interference of screens and schedules and all the ambient noise of modern life. Somewhere to teach my grandkids the things my grandparents taught me without knowing they were teaching me anything.
I am aware that this desire lives in some tension with the gratitude I also genuinely feel. We have a great life. Good friends, a house, work that I love, more than most people on earth have. I know that. The guilt of wanting more than what is already a generous share is real, and I live with it honestly. But I've come to think that the wanting itself is not ingratitude. Dreams and desires are also gifts of the Creator, and they point at something. Mine point at the Sandhills, at cold clear water, at a root cellar full of jars, at the sound of a barred owl through a kitchen window.
The Sandhills depiction from Midjourney is pretty good. Grandpas hand dug well had a smaller tank and the well spigot flowed continuously, overflow went in a stream down to the river.
Here is what I've been discovering lately, slowly and with some surprise: the land-longing and the creative longing are the same longing wearing different clothes. The reason I paint, the reason I print, the reason I mess with silk dyes and encaustic and resin and any other material I can get my hands on, is the same reason I have been trying to buy fourteen acres on the Dismal River my whole adult life. Both are reaching for something real and slow and made by hand. Both are resistance to a world that wants everything fast, digital, and disposable. Both are a way of saying, with my body and my time, that some things are worth the difficulty.
My grandfather built a sod house. He dug a well by hand. He collected fallen oak and burned it and used the ash to make lye and turned the lye into soap. He carved wooden flutes and whistles for us kids from cattail, willow and elderberry. He was not an artist in any formal sense, but every single thing I just described is a handmade act of creation, a decision to make something rather than purchase something, to be present to the materials and the time the work required. I came from that. I didn't know it for years, but the tendrils go all the way back, and I am only now beginning to trace them.
A fairly faithful attempt from AI to replicate one of Grandpas flute. He typically did not put any finish on his as they were intended to be temporal and not a long term piece.
The moon used to rise just outside the back door of that sod house, huge and yellow-orange, seemingly taking up the entire sky, and I would watch it lift over the small knoll while the cicadas and frogs and the occasional owl built the only symphony that has ever fully satisfied me. I don't have those nights anymore. I am working toward them. In the meantime, the studio is where I go to feel something close to that quality of presence, that sense of being inside a thing rather than watching it from a distance.
The dock can wait a little longer. The making can't.
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio
AI's version of the barn owl that lived out side the kitchen window
Patterns in the Hallway