By the Sea — Green River Pottery

Twilight was falling as they came up to the Ocean Temple, for the autumn was far advanced. They stood on one of the little chambers facing the bay – it smelled of wood, like the bathing cabins at the Kur, and its walls were scribbled over with mottoes, initials, hearts and rhymes. They stood and looked out over the dripping slope across the narrow, stony strip of beach, out to the turbid, restless sea.

- T.M.

Summer has passed me by. The Santa Fe studio stayed busy of course, each of the seven days, and out at my home studio I have fired my kiln three times, once each for June, July, and August. I've taught summer classes, had summer guests, gone on hikes & been caught in a summer cloudburst, gotten sunburned once or twice, been on a summer trip to Montana. Still — I had this thought, that summer has passed me by, as I was out on a run with my neighbor this morning. We trotted along a county road, swirls of drying sand from the last storm, and I glanced up at a little field thick with weeds. These have been growing all season, encouraged by all the rain we had, gaining ground and crowding out the tumbleweeds, gaining height, so that now, as September arrives, they are eye-level and dense and starting to flower. Yellow. The last brilliant yellow of the growing season, before the October aspen leaves. I have done little! And the time has flown. As we ran along I felt that resigned sadness of the last summer wildflowers.

My neighbor was talking about a hunting trip he once took in Kansas, and how flat it was there. I really love the mountains! he said. I am really drawn to the, I don't know, the mystery of them. The peaks, and the steep...you know.

view from Fairy Lake trail in Bridger Range, MT

Yes, I said, we sometimes speak in half-sentences as we run along, the ambition of the mountains, right? The challenge, and whatever. Adventure.

Right. I bought a new pair of shoes for fall trail running in the mountains, he said. The La Sportiva Buchido Two's?

Cool. A little silence passed. I don't know, I said. Mountains – sure – I got up in the mountains once or twice this summer. What’ve I been doing? Just working I guess, but not even making anything. Just keeping the studio going. After another silence I said If I could go somewhere right at the moment I don't know about mountains! I'd go to the sea, right? I would just sit on the beach.

The August kiln firing had just cooled down & been hastily unloaded, none of the work really looked at yet, or sorted & photographed, studied for how to do the next firing better. That would be today. I'll spend the second-to-last pre-Labor-Day Sunday at this task. The kiln fires for about twenty-four hours and I check on it frequently as it ramps up, every hour or two at least. In winter, the 2am wakeup to check the kiln involves pulling on a couple layers and a hat, then crunching over snow & ice out to read the pyrometer & look at the gas pressure. Summers, the midnight walk under the stars is a shirtless stroll, the air outside finally cooler than inside, I take my time & listen to the night. Last week, checking the kiln at 3am, I saw Orion, a winter constellation & another hunter, rising for a stolen hour before the sun.

It's good to get new gear! I said to my neighbor as we ran along. You'll be glad to have a pair of new Sportivas for the fall. These glasses? These are awesome, I said, pulling them off my sweaty face for a second. I bought them in Bozeman when I was up there. I did get up on one mountain up there in the Bridgers, plus they've got a cool lake there right in town, with sand spread all over one part of the shore, Bozeman Beach people call it. I went swimming there like three times! Awesome to have some new shades for that. I love polaroids.

Just before heading out on today's run my last summer visitor left, speeding back to the airport in a rental car. The house is quiet, and in the afternoon I'll set the photo background back up in place of the spare bed & begin sorting & studying. That quote at the top of this blog is from one of my favorite books, a very autumnal read, all about decline. In the chapter that passage is from the main character, old now, past page five hundred, is recommended by his doctor to take time off & rest. How about a trip to the sea? The summer season has passed and unfortunately he goes anyway, leading to some of the saddest passages in the book. The beach is rainy and deserted. He sits by the water and says to his son:

I have learned to love the sea more and more. Once, I think, I cared more for the mountains — because they lay farther off. Now I do not long for them. They would only frighten and abash me. They are too capricious, too manifold, too anomalous. What sort of people prefer the monotony of the sea? Those, I think, who have looked so long and deeply into the complexities of the spirit, that they ask of outward things merely that they should possess one quality above all: simplicity.

Back from a run I head to the studio, sweat evaporated in the still-hot end of August, the long afternoon beginning. I’ll probably search for Speachless, a Bruce Cockburn album I often listen to this time of year. There are certain records I play at certain times — I’m oriented in the year sometimes more by what I’m listening to than by the actual calendar date. If I reach for Blood Money, that Tom Waits album, probably the zenith of midsummer heat has arrived. Tatiana Nikolaevna playing preludes & fugues — probably the holidays have just ended & January is here. The clear, vibrating, distilled, sound of the acoustic guitar — as the sky turns a bluer empty blue & the air clarifies — probably this is what I hear in Speachless as the nights cool & the days shorten. I put finished glazed pots on boards & take them in for photography.

Today as the summer sun sets, exactly one minute sooner than last night, at 7:40, probably I will wrap up photographing & step outside to see the stars appear in the moonless sky. It was a good firing, I’ll conclude — if you just get even one good piece from a firing, as the saying goes, it was a good firing.

If I get enough good pots from the next kilns in September & October I'll have work for a fall show. Maybe October 14 - 15. This vase, above, would be one to include. Hastily thrown during a class, I can tell because it's indented near the base by my hands squeezing the still-wet form to pick it up off the bat — I would only do that in a class. Judith Duff's white shino glaze is thick on the outside of the form, rutted like a midsummer county road, and that's wood ash, melting at the shoulder & dripping down into glass.

Great waves, the beleaguered main character says in that favorite book of mine as he sits sadly by the sea, how they come on and break, come on and break, one after another endlessly, idly, empty and vast! And yet, like all the simple, inevitable things, they soothe, they console, after all.

— Theo Helmstadter
August 28 2022