Drinking Water

The other place I get drinking water is from wet weather springs, ground water hitting a layer of sandstone and punching out in a stream. I excavate a ledge, where I can place a gallon jug, and direct the water with various pieces of plastic, little diversion devices I fabricate on the spot. I let the spring run for a couple of minutes, to clean itself out; generally I roll a smoke and sit on a near-by stump. I can usually harvest a gallon of sweet water in less than five minutes. The drinking water I buy, for forty cents a gallon, is nowhere near as good, but more dependable, who wants to sit on a hillside and watch the birds for five minutes? 300 seconds, counting down. It's good to be home. D drove me out, I'll hitch a ride in with B on Tuesday. After the big push, this week, I needed some time alone, some quiet time, some writing time. Incredibly productive time yesterday with D, we solved problems and hung some difficult pieces. Decided (after our four o'clock limit for doing math or handling art) that we could hang one last wall, and my math completely failed me. The end of the day I tend to over-think and thereby fuck up. I can crunch the numbers fine if I don't think about it too much; and the converting (endlessly) fractions into inches, but by the end of a long hard day none of it makes any sense. I ran the numbers three times for the final wall and every time they came out different. D laughed, ran the numbers, and he was wrong too. We check the numbers by sliding the pieces along the floor, underneath where they'll hang, the empirical conformation, confirmation (I make a note to look at those words this week-end). We finally arrive at a set that looks fine, that we both know is slightly incorrect, and hang the wall anyway. Let the eye be the judge. Still, 13 pages of math for this show, I use a legal-pad and don't use the lines; there were a lot of small arrows and circled numbers, it's arcane. We spent several hours taking apart an expensive piece, framed, under glass, matted, that had slipped on its hinges. We have to take the whole thing apart, re-hinge it, re-frame it, and the frame needs some work; neatly solved by D with a couple of screw-eyes and a run of braided wire. Distribute the load, that's the key. The hinges are Japanese rice-paper tape, archival of course, that we activate with what we always call archival spit. Hike in with a heavy pack, cooking school tomorrow, and there's no way I could count on the student bringing the correct ingredients, so I brought in what we needed. My first Sherpa load this year. I just take smaller steps and walk more slowly, there's an algorithm for any given situation. Even if I didn't stop to get a gallon of water, I might have meant to, could have, might have. I love the informed.