Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Rawhide & Prickly Pear Memories

January 8, 2013

   Yesterday I went home for lunch and whipped out a little "Prickly Pear" study:



I'm quite intrigued by prickly pear cactus and their spiny, seemingly willy-nilly growth. Meanwhile, I was looking through an old True West magazine and saw a great photo of Rawhide, Nevada in the late forties. Inspired this daily whipout which I executed this morning before coming into work:



This Is Where I Came In



That is what this makes me think of, the fact that when I was really getting into Western history as a kid in Kingman this is how all the old mining towns looked: White Hills, Chloride, Stockton Hill, Cerbat, Gold Road, Oatman, Signal to name but a few in Mohave County. Virtually all of them tied to minig and the ever present A-frame mining hoist on a distant hill.



Finished "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac this morning. I loved this book so much I came into work and immediately ordered "On The Road: The Scroll Version" which has all the sex and the real names. Much of the novel takes place in Denver in the late 1940s and while the Beat Generation is drinking and howling, Kerouac drops in this dead on description:



"Outside the saloon old former prospectors sat dreaming over their canes under the locking old clock. This fury had been known by them in greater days."

—Jack Kerouac



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