Early Morning at Moon Lake

My practice when painting on the road is to set out my wet paintings to dry while I’m working. That was the case here, when I got up early to paint the sunrise. The forest was still. I could hear the susurration of wings as the occasional bird flew overhead.

The first night that we spent sleeping in a lay-by, I was unnerved by the silence. I quickly learned to love it; it appeals to my need to be alone without any signs of human interaction. If I were younger, I could easily have been a backwoods prospector. The first thing that would have gone, however, would be the socially mandated feminine foundation. A muddy bra is a terrible thing. So is a muddy nightgown, and by this point in the trip I had both.

I was startled by a ruckus directly behind me. A woodpecker was testing the surfaces of my drying paintings. He was as rattled as me by the encounter, and flew into a nearby spruce to complain.

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In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In between, we visited every province but PEI (been there, done that), and Yukon Territory. In retrospect, it might have made more sense