Lost and found

We lost another book. This happens. The project intent to create work that is instant ephemera is tested when a sketch book is actually lost.

For the period of time when it eludes us, it becomes more solid, its value escalates. The flavor of its pages ripen into an unquenched thirst. I imagine its pages more luminous, the longer it is gone the more it falls into myth.
In the remembrance of something no longer available, you can not test the idea of it. You don't have that reality check of the object to bring what is imagined lost back to what is in reality, the thing itself.
When I found my first 3" shark tooth, it seemed huge. I had been collecting for a while and had some decent 2" and a lot of 1" teeth, many smaller ones with a great variety of design.. but the big teeth seemed to exist only in shops, where they could be bought, but then they would lack the journey of discovery and collecting in the field that is part of what makes the finding so much more than an object.

The afternoon was sunny, a fall day, when the light is long and warm. I had walked quite a long way when I felt the wind change. the clouds seem to come from nowhere, it was time to head back. Climbing over cliff sediment, I made my way through tangles trees that had toppled over the cliffs above. They lay across the small path of sand at the waters edge,their leaves in the bay and their roots still clinging to the yellow clay from the top of the cliff. Yellow ochre against the steel gray methane smelling sediments rising straight up at the waters edge. Covered with fine iron rust carried from above, the cliffs are a thing of great beauty and light, shimmering with water and the fading afternoon light.
I scrambled over the clay sediment, the tide was incoming and the sloping surface was now slippery. I was soaking wet and it had begun to rain. I was on my hands and knees trying to cross this area below the cliff.
It had been a great day, but the weather changes quickly on the bay and the water was getting light and starting to jump with the change in the wind direction. A storm was coming.
I was a little nervous, the water was very warm but the wind was very cold. I decided to stay n the warm water as long as possible. 45 minutes. It takes 45 minutes for hypothermia to set it. I was about two hours from the beach house. My imagination was about to take me off to a place of death tangled in roots eaten by crabs, when I felt this slice across the palm of my hand. Damn, I thought, some nasty shell. When I saw the cut, I knew it was not a shell. I felt back to the spot where I felt the sting of salt, and there was this edge, emerging from the hard black clay, it took me a few minutes to dig it out using a turtle bone, but there it was. A pristine tooth. I looked at it in the fading light, it seemed smaller now that it was in my hand. I put it deep into my pocket. As I worked my way up the beach, the rain was harder the rising tide had covered the beach and I had to slog my way home. The excitement of finding the tooth had filled me with a kind of warmth. I walked faster, surer and occasionally felt down into my pocket to make sure the tooth was still there. It felt large again in my pocket. I slipped, I feel, I felt for it again, still there.
When I reached the beach house the kids barely noticed. They were eating pizza and playing a board game with their dad. I showed the boys the tooth, they loved it, it seemed huge they wanted to hold it. In their small hands, the tooth seemed larger still. When their dad saw it, he said, what's the big deal. It seemed to shrink as his lack of interest in the tooth began to sharpen into focusing on a criticism of my having spent so much time collecting and only finding one. I put the tooth in my pocket where it hid from all this valuing and measuring. I wrapped it in a paper towel and put it in a white porcelain box shaped like a walnut. And there it stayed for fifteen years.
I recently opened the box. Over the years more objects had accumulated. Things that go into the curiosity cabinet. I had a lot of distance from the finding these things, but alone, going through them now, they still have the pull of objects that become more solid when you lose them or when they are desired by someone.

These objects stand up in their right space and can be checked from time to time. The distortion of desire or loss still hovers. I can have a panic until I find the ax head or spear point, but as long as the object is available, it is a measure against the imagined lure of the unattainable, the lack or the obsessive fear of loss.

The good news is that I cleaned two rooms trying to find the lost sketchbook, and though I did not find the book, Jessica did. She had also cleaned. I asked her if the sketchbook was as special as we remembered when we thought it was lost? She said no, and giggled a bit. The joke was understood. And it was just the one page that we both had become attached to that we really missed. And there, it actually is a really nice passage.