Green River Pottery

Detail: Lidded Jar with Yellow Glaze (local clay)
June 2010

The Sleeping Beauty Wave
photo by Atom Crawford

Vase with Green Glaze
14"

This Month at Green River Pottery: June 2010

 

Sleeping Beauty

 

I try not to check my email during the day. It’s a distraction—an addiction, really. I try to stay off—but then I always end up telling myself “okay, just this one time, it’ll only take a second...” Drying my clay-covered hands, I move furtively to the computer. Naturally it takes more than a second—I find something pressing, some message that demands to be read, considered, and twenty minutes go by. But it’s more than time I loose: it’s concentration. Working well in the studio depends on a certain kind of focus that I have spend years developing. There’s a kind of protective bubble inside of which I can be productive, watching my hands as they feel the clay and respond to its changing form, its motion. It’s the clay, always, that sets things going and keeps me on track. My attention has to stay on that. But when I sneak away to check email, I’m telling the clay to wait. I’m breaking the bubble.

There are a few months of the year—April, May, June—when it’s particularly hard to stay off my email. There’s a particular web site I can’t help visiting, too: USGS Real-Time Water Data for 08276500 Rio Grande Near Taos, NM. The river usually starts to rise in April, peaks in May or June, then begins to drop off. Right now, as I write (I just checked) it’s flowing at about twelve hundred cubic feet per second, down from twenty two hundred, where it peaked a few weeks back. Opening my email, I scan the new messages for ones that read like this: RC after work today? Tesuque mkt 5:00pm.

Yesterday I found one of these. I’m in I typed in response, then hit Reply All. At 4:45 I covered everything with plastic and hastily tossed my kayak in the back of my truck. By 5:30 I was squeezed into a Subaru with four boats strapped on top, eating a hard-boiled egg, taking a couple of Pecan Sandies when the package came around, the music loud, the smell of wet neoprene filling the crowded car.

We launched around 6:00 and had a few blissful hours playing in the waves. By dusk we’d been surfing the so-called ‘Sleeping Beauty’ wave for an hour. Tired out, waterlogged, it was nearly time to quit. But twelve hundred cubic feet per second is a pretty good level for Sleeping Beauty. Constricted by a jumble of boulders that washed into the river from a side stream many years ago, the main channel of the Rio Grande squeezes itself together and bunches up into a smooth, huge, plume of green water. When it drops six or eight feet down a ledge, an excellent wave is formed. Wide and smooth and deep, its curve is graceful, backing up to near vertical, bursting into a pile of white foam that sits there gleefully, perpetually, as the current surges through the stationary shape. A river wave is the opposite of an ocean’s—in the latter, the wave speeds toward the shore while the water stays put, more or less; in a river, of course, the shape of the wave stays put while the water surges through. Just like clay centered on the wheel—the form is motionless, and the material that creates it whizzes past.

You lean back slightly, raise a knee so the current catches one edge of your boat, pry the paddle blade in on the opposite side, twist your body till you’re facing into that smooth green trough with the white foam breaking above. Instantly you feel the river take you and whisk you out onto the wave. You’re surfing. You’re one with the river, pure motion and pure stillness—time itself. One of life’s great feelings. You lean, pry the paddle blade, carve back and forth, feeling the speed of the water surging below the hull of your boat. Sometimes you catch an edge and find yourself suddenly thrown from the wave and tossed in a heap to the bottom of the river. Even that starts to feel fun after a while, as you learn to reach the paddle, snap your hips, roll the boat back upright again and catch your breath. You get back into the eddy and paddle back up for another ride.

“I’m gonna go one more, and then I’m done,” I said to George as the last light faded from the sky. He nodded. “Me too,” he said. Everyone else was already loading their boats back onto the car. “One more good one, though,” I added. George laughed.

But the next surf was so good that I eagerly paddled back up, unwilling to quit. A mistake, and I knew it. Sure enough, as George eased his boat to the shore and climbed out, I caught more than an edge out on the wave—the whole front of my boat buried itself, and the next thing I knew I was spinning end over end, tumbling, a face full of foam. I snapped my roll just at the wrong moment and flopped back upside down. Holding my breath in the cold dark, swirling away downstream, trying to get in position for a second roll, I realized just how tired I was. I should have quit while I was ahead.

But that’s always hard to do. In the studio, too, I often go too far, ignoring the signal that it’s time to stop. I pull up the side of a big bowl one last time and it collapses; I make one last round of teapots, repeating a design that was successful in the past, and the resulting forms are uninspired, repetitive, creatively exhausted. It’s good to make pieces that sell, but trying to repeat pieces that sold in the past never works. I consider it a real warning when I unload the kiln and find work that is good but without beauty, technically proficient but inanimate. Pots that are asleep!

And, it’s always a wake-up call to miss my roll. My usual response, when this happens, is to make time to head back to the river by myself—foregoing my usual companions, I drive up there alone, find some safe eddy, and re-work the technique again and again until my confidence returns. Something about snapping the roll when no one is watching, and when it doesn’t even really matter if it works or not—that always does the trick. I loosen back up, rediscover how the roll actually happens, and gain a new understanding.

Today I took a look at those recent teapots—they were really bugging me—and realized I could do the same thing. I turned off my computer. I turned off the radio. I returned to the wheel with a fresh lump of clay. “I’m gonna make a teapot just…as an experiment,” I thought. “Just one more. Something cool though—something I might want to use—nobody else has to like it.” Invariably, telling myself this is how I re-animate my designs, how I re-gain inspiration. A good pot has to have that feeling of freshness, newness, of having just woken up—each pot has to be a rediscovery, on some level.

Working slowly, I squeezed a little water on the clay. I watched my hands begin to work. I felt that stillness, as the spinning lump found its center. I was back on the wave.

back to top