Man of the Mountain

Man of the Mountain. That's no title! But there's something of it in the way I'm standing--and I can see that it's on that same Songs & Places finale night in the Spring of 2012. Fiesta / Vecherinka / Hoedown. (See Song Night post.) Must be fairly early, because there's still some light coming in the window, through those full-height Wurster shutter doors. Yellow rose on the table, concertina. Incandescent spots, and a few of the extra moveable-panels for the students' work. The walls around the room would have been covered with drawings and paintings, but we've pushed the big central tables aside to accommodate chairs for guests--these events tended to be popular--sometimes students would remind me they'd attended one several semesters before. I always liked that continuity, of course--but the paths and byways were a mystery to me--especially since these Visual Studies classes were so far outside the Wurster mainstream. Which in many ways was their purpose. An autonomous world, like one of those small Mediterranean countries with obscure royal families and fine beaches--a place you'd go in August for a month's holiday, anticipating that special things might happen--ones you never quite got at home...

And yet they were serious, too, in their own way--that goes without saying--for I really did want the kids to be familiar with these strands of tradition that we'd inherited through the songs. Even if half the time they were very personal, made-up even... Everyone of course singing in their own way...
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The founding experience, for me--and I think it explains the island analogy above--was Catalina. We'd go there for a week each summer, first time with my grandmother in maybe 1954. The big steamer, heading out of San Pedro at dawn, across the outer harbor and through the breakwater, and then into the first of those rolling Channel Island ground swells. Which told us we were on the open sea...!


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