Anhowe

Davenports and kettle drums
And swallowtail coats —
Tablecloths and patent-leather shoes.

— TW

Fridays are like Mondays for me, since they end the two-day window when I work at home, in my own studio, although this time of year, snow melting and the rivers up, I might actually be kayaking. Instead of working. There's always that balance — you need time, lots of it, in the studio, and you need inspiration sometimes too. Recreation before creation, maybe.

My neck was sunburned & my arms sore from a day paddling, and now my Monday had arrived & I was back in the gallery on Lena Street, it was nine-thirty in the morning, I was writing emails and answering the phone. The kilnload of student work still too hot to peek into, the Squarespace app open on my laptop so I could update the website, the new sign I'm supposed to get printed sitting on a thumb drive on the desk.

I'd been emailing with someone — this happens surprisingly often — whose partner was a potter once, and had a studio at home, would you like a few bags of clay, she has retired now? I guessed that by ‘now’ he probably meant thirty years ago, the bags are dusty if not damp & moldy, their labels fading. Do you know what clay they are? I asked. I think they're all earthenware.

How about Friday at eleven? He said that would be fine, and once we had a plan, he emailed his address along with carefully-written pre-Google-maps instructions. Just follow West Alameda all the way out...

...I knew it, West Alameda. I could just about picture the place, probably a hand-built studio in the windswept open around La Cienega, probably a box of Studio Potter Magazines gathering dust, 1969 – 1983. That would be great actually, I would certainly take those if offered. I sighed and flipped my laptop shut. Why do I always agree to this? I am too busy to drive all the way out West Alameda and I don't need more bags of earthenware clay. I called, once on the road, to say I was running late, and a very old person picked up after a few rings on a landline. Her voice was guarded – probably they get a million robocalls. Actually though with the new bypass around Santa Fe (built about 20 years ago) I ended up being on time, finding their old mailbox out on the dirt road, easing my truck down a dirt track, an old low adobe house nestled in the sweeping landscape and that must be the studio, there. I parked next to an old Subaru whose hood was propped open with a little piece of two-by-four – that's for the mice, I knew from my own days of country living. You want to keep them out of the engine, and if the hood is up even just a bit, they don’t like it.

There's actually a few other things too, the potter said, and we walked uphill toward a juniper tree, they dotted the landscape of course, you could see ten miles of juniper trees from here, they grow only a few inches a year, so this one we're standing next to now, five feet tall, might be fifty years old. It might be three hundred and fifty, or seven hundred years old even. Would you like this wheel?

I winced. The potter's wheel before us had been hand-made from a sheet of plywood and several two-by-fours, then carefully painted with urethane, back in 1970 probably, the flywheel a plywood sandwich of red bricks, bolted together, still clenching its heavy load. Hmm, I said. Does it still work?

Oh yes. I think so. I could hear in her voice how good it would be for me to say yes, to take the old wheel away. She and her husband were doing some spring cleaning – she was finally ready to let the old pottery things go.

Okay, I said. You know when I was in seventh grade we had a wheel just like this in the artroom. Just like this!

Oh, said the potter. Yes this one used to be on Cerro Gordo. There was a potter there back in...the early Seventies?

Really?

Yes. She was from California. She built this.

Ah. And then you ended up with it? I gave the wheel a nudge with my toe and the whole thing creaked though the wheelhead didn’t turn. I could use the bat pins, I thought to myself. I could use the carriage bolts, if I took the time to take the whole thing apart. There was a jumble of other old wood things up by the juniper. We chatted. She told me how she got started doing clay, and, this almost always happens, we found where we had overlapped, or almost overlapped. That studio that used to be opposite where the old Zia Diner used to be? I used to work there she said. Oh! I worked there for a little while too, I said. When I first got to town. I was kind of apprenticing? I kept the gallery open on Saturdays for them.

We walked back downhill and I met her husband, lean, steady, gentle, under a wide hat. I shook his hand. This is a really nice place you have, I said, looking at the low walls, the replastered adobe coming off again in places.

We built it ourselves, he said.

Really?

Yes, we made the bricks right here. With dirt from back up on the hill, he said, pointing back toward the old juniper, which was probably wondering what happened to its retired potter's wheel after all these decades, now that I'd moved it into the back of my truck. No kidding, I said. That sounds like a lot of work.

It was a lot of work! My nephews came out from Vermont to help. In nineteen seventy-four.

You made the bricks right here? That's awesome. Was that an old adobe frame back there up by the wheel? I thought that's what that looked like.

The husband's face brightened in the shade under his hat. Yes! An old four-holer.

That must have taken all summer, making those bricks, I said, and turned back to the potter. She lead me into her former studio, now thick with dust, a space relinquished to the mice many years before. They — the signs of them — were everywhere. The bags of clay sat on the dirt floor, dusty & dropping-covered. They were all different, they couldn't all be earthenware clay. Hmm, I said. Do you know what's actually in these bags? She wasn't sure. Anhowe Ceramics Supply, the label said in puffy round Seventies letters. 3825 Commercial Street in Albuquerque. I've never heard of this place, I said.

No, I think they've been out of business for a long time.

Nowhere on the bags were the contents described – instead there were product numbers. This one says TC, I said. Here’s BL5. Any idea what any of these are? Eight fifty-pound bags. This one looks like thirty-mesh grog — useful. I held my breath as I lifted it and began carrying it to the truck. The husband had a handcart, and was eager to help, I'd load a bag and he'd tow it along the garden path to the truck, and then I'd hoist it up. We did a few laps this way, and stopped to rest once, looking again across the juniper-dotted land. In the foreground though were some big machines, a backhoe, a bucket loader, you could hear them beep as they backed up, and they made clouds of dust wafting in our direction. We're going to have new neighbors soon, the husband said grimly.

Yes, I said after a pause. Doesn't look like they're building their house by hand though.

Scattered among the steadfast xeriscaped plants, unaffected by years in the sun, were some of the potter's works. A celadon vase, an oatmeal matte platter form, cracked across the middle. I recognize some of these glazes, I said. She's a really great potter, said the husband, also steadfast. Right, I said, wanting to look more closely but not wanting to pry. The piece I really wanted to kneel down & see more closely was a slab-built vase form, kind of Greco-Roman-looking and just two-dimensional – the form had a little flange at the base to make it stand up, which it was still doing. This made me think of course of Betty Woodman, who would have been cranking out her impressive & influential work back in those days, wall-mounted slab-built forms a little like this, though I said nothing. There was something delicate about this situation, the husband with the handcart, the potter taking a last look around an abandoned studio and a little deference, a little restraint, on my part, was in order. This'll be me someday, I was thinking, someday my son will be googling pottery studios in Santa Fe and some young kid, just in his fifties, will drive out in a pickup to load my leftovers, the bags of feldspar that once were critical to getting through my two-day window and now are long forgotten. I wouldn't want anybody sizing up the scattered pots around my studio I guess, either. Not everyone's work can get noticed, not everyone stays working through to the end, not every pot lovingly made in a home studio that's been lovingly built gets very far, and these pots never made it more than thirty feet from their kiln. Their time has passed.

Clay along Rt 84 in Abiquiu. Join the studio for a geo-ceramic field trip July 6, lead by 2 geologists

Working with clay is so much about time, and the desire to step out of time, to do something your own way, to arrange the materials of the earth, just a tiny bit, in a way that works for you. Bravely you begin and then you suddenly realize, as a decade passes, just how much time it takes, and how much more you'll need, and finally time catches up with you and you're old, and your studio is old, and another twenty years have gone by. It's like clay is a lens that instead of bending rays of light bends time itself, concentrating it, on a good day, down to a single burning moment. On other days though, the lens never quite focuses. I drove off, my clothes billowing dust as I rolled the window down & gained speed, back on pavement, a couple minutes on the new bypass & I’ll be back at the gallery, and back to work.