tranquille creek gorge
June 3, 2015
ANCIENT FLOWS OF LAVA have left our regional landscape (Kamloops, B. C.) with dramatic canyons, a single lane dirt road skirting the edges.
MY PAINTING FRIEND MAX drove me through this arid landscape, only 10 minutes outside a city of nearly 100,000. Every so often she’d tell me of cars which had not been successful at executing a snowy, icy, tricky piece of road only to careen down the sides. At one place, the car was still there, making me both dizzy and almost nauseous, leaning over to see its rusting bulk caught between broken pines and rock.
‘MY GOD, WHERE WERE THEY HEADED?’ I’d asked. ‘Home, of course’, Max pointed ahead. And there was a small grouping of houses not far from the road, some fencing in horses or livestock–one had alpacas–and looking semi-deserted, though that was far from the case. Dogs barked at Max’s pickup as we threaded through and headed into yet more wilderness. ‘They take this road to Kamloops and back?’ — it seemed to my chicken, urban-minded guardedness a scary place to build one’s home. ‘Only for shopping, or a night on the town’, Max said. ‘Which is why someone sometimes doesn’t make it home–especially in the Winter.’
love it.
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I’m going to google where this place is. I want to go there.
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thank you Rebecca, because I wasn’t sure if that aspect was a success!
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‘hairy ride’ hahahaha–I’ll tell Max….thank you Cynthia (again)
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the textural feel of this strikes me as anything but “tranquille”….which feeling is borne out by your hairy ride on the single lane road….hauntingly good…
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You’ve got some really great textures in this one – especially the cliff face. Super.
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