Buckets of Artists 2014

Every year for the past 4 years at Easter time, artists Lia Littlewood and Isaac Russell, event organizers and community activists, oversee an annual art project which involves the whole community of Yuma, Arizona. Throughout the year, they collect used or new 5-gallon buckets from construction companies, pool businesses, paint companies, and big-box home improvement centers. The buckets are cleaned and then in February, anyone who wants to participate can get a bucket from Isaac and Lia. Participants then create an Easter basket using the buckets. The buckets get decorated, sculpted, painted, and transformed into works of art, then dropped off at the Yuma Fine Arts Center on the Friday before Easter Sunday.

Isaac and Lia take these bucket creations in the middle of the night, and ‘hide’ them all around the community – on park benches in parks, doorsteps in front of businesses, sidewalks, bus stops, along the Riverwalk, etc., all around the city. Many Yumans see articles in the local paper, The Yuma Sun, on Facebook, etc. announcing this event, so they go out early Easter Sunday morning, often before daylight, and hunt for one of these artistic treasure buckets. Inside each bucket is a letter to the finder inviting them to bring their bucket to the Kress Ultralounge the following Wednesday evening.

The lucky people who find a bucket come downtown to the reception where they can show off their bucket, meet the artist that created it, get a free dinner, and have a chance to share their general good fortune of having found one. This has become a much-beloved and looked forward to event as the word spreads further every year.

This is the first year I have participated in this project. I will tell you how I decorated my bucket. I got two large, pool chemical buckets from Lia and Isaac in February and brought them home and let them air out in the hot desert wind while I planned how I would decorate mine. One was for a friend. I was planning on making just one this year. Some people decorate more than one.

I will go through the process I used to create my bucket. It’ll give you an idea of what kinds of things are involved in turning a plain old plastic bucket into a work of art.

Here is a shot of the buckets when I was ready to coat them with primer to cover the printing from the pool chemical company.

I painted them with two full coats of high-quality latex primer to create a plain white palette to start my decorating. I had decided to re-create a tropical undersea scene. I planned to entitle it “The Octopus’s Garden.” It was going to be a mixed-media art design incorporating painting and found sea objects like dried starfish and miscellaneous sea shells, along with aquarium decorations. I used various kinds of plastic seaweeds and kelp and other undersea plants and sea life from stores that sell stuff for fish aquariums. It was really fun to gather all the things I imagined would look cool on my bucket to create my undersea vision.

Here is the very start on my base under-paintings.

After finishing all the fish and background painting, I painted over the brown sand bottom with wood glue then quickly poured fine aquarium sand all over the wet glue to make a sandy sea bed. Then I began attaching all my decorating details to the scenes using a hot glue gun. This ended up taking several days as I wanted the final design to totally reflect my vision of the Octopus’s Garden.

I kept adding more and more details.

Here is my bucket when it was finished. This is the side with the octopus holding his garden sign.

There were four different sides to my bucket and this was the side that represented my theme. Here is the side opposite the one with the octopus.

When I was done, I put some crumpled up newspaper in the bucket then layered some colored Easter grass on the top to finish it off, and make a ‘nest’ to put the letter to the finder inside on the top.

It was kind of hard for me to know my creation would be left on a park bench somewhere in the middle of the night. I had spent many, many days working on it, not to mention all the time planning and the gathering all the things I needed to complete the under-the-sea scene. Plus, I had The Beatles’ song, The Octopus’s Garden, stuck in my head for weeks! Its a good thing I always liked that song and think it is cute. I was also worried that the person who found my bucket wouldn’t come to the reception and I wouldn’t have the fun of meeting whoever found it.

On the evening of the reception for the finders, I arrived on time to find that the people who found my bucket were already there!! Yeah!! His name was Elijah, and he said he and his girlfriend found it on a park bench in a tiny park called Roxaboxen Park – which is a famous Old Town Yuma park that actually had a popular children’s book written about it. They had gone out looking for buckets about 5 AM Easter Sunday morning when it was still dark and found mine!

Here are some photos from the happy reunion and reception!

Above is the Carpy Harpy with the young couple who found my bucket.

I will definitely participate in this event again next year. It was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever done. I am already thinking up ideas for what I might like to create for next year.

Below are some of the other buckets that came back to the reception with their new owners. It will give you a good overview of all the different ways people decorated their buckets. Some people furnished their own bucket of a particular size or shape for what they had in mind. With this event, anything goes, which makes for some very creative buckets.

One lady made a model of a Recreational Vehicle out of her bucket with real little furniture inside, a working lighting system that ran on batteries, and little people inside. It was incredible! It won Best in Show as voted on by all the people in attendance. Her name is Dana “Gibby” Gibson and she is an artist who lives in an RV park here in Yuma every winter.

Isn’t this clever?

Here are some more buckets with their finders and their artists. It shows how creatively different the artists were this year.

Here is our very own Isaac Russell with his Bucket of Money creation. He used old wooden wire spools for the gears.

The bucket above is actually a working kaleidoscope. If you held it up to a light source and turned it around and around, the center part was a multi-colored delight!

If you happen to be in the Yuma, Arizona area next Easter, go out around the town very early Easter morning and maybe you will find a fun surprise. Many thanks to Isaac and Lia for starting and continuing this fun event in the community. Maybe you could start something like it in your own city or town? What a gift that would be for your fellow citizens! If you’d like more information about the Buckets of Artists event, let me know and I can put you in touch with Isaac and Lia.

Next year…….

Backpacking Isle Royale National Park

This is a true story about a backpacking trip I took with my 16-year-old son, Daniel, back in 1995 to Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park. This was a memorable journey made by a middle-age mother and her teenage son, both out to prove a few things to themselves, and each other.

A love and reverence for the wilderness is something our family had always shared. We used to car-camp for many years all across the country. This was to be our first back-packing trip. We chose Isle Royale as the place we would try out this new experience with all our new back-packing gear. Dan’s older brother, Chris, and his wife, Toi, had made the same trip the year before and loved it. They enthusiastically volunteered to go on a return trip with us this time. One of their friends from Thailand, Sunthorn, wanted to come along, as well. He was a delightful addition to our group.

Dan and I spent the winter before our planned trip reading everything we could about Isle Royale and all the gear we would need for the back-packing. We accumulated gear over several months. Internal frame backpacks, lightweight sleeping bags, a backpacking tent, cooking equipment, water filters, sturdy hiking boots, and lots of other miscellaneous necessities swelled our budget to the bursting point.

Here’s Dan ready to go. He even has a fishing pole with him.

Since Isle Royale is out in Lake Superior and accessible only by ferry or seaplane, we needed to consult the ferry schedules and we chose to schedule the Isle Royale Queen which departed from Copper Harbor, Michigan. We decided not to go by seaplane.

We studied a topographical map of Isle Royale and all its possible trails but we never fully appreciated the magnitude of the elevation changes on those trails – the Daisy Farm Trail and the Island Mine Trail. They looked deceptively level on the flat plane of our kitchen table.

July finally arrived! We were packed and ready to go. We each had 40 pounds in our backpacks – perilously close to a third of our body weight! We had been warned by experienced backpackers that we should have no more 20-25% maximum of our weight. With my inexperience and Dan’s teenage hubris, we set out on our adventure anyway.

The night before we left, we had a fabulous Thai feast with several of Chris and Toi’s Thai friends. It would be the last home-cooked meal we’d have until we got back.

And what an adventure we had! We boarded the ferry at Copper Harbor feeling on top of the world with excitement.

The trip across to Isle Royale is about 5 hours. We had a couple decks of cards with us and amused ourselves by all playing a rousing game of Zion Check. One hiker commented to us when he saw our cards that “You guys must be really strong backpackers since you’re carrying unnecessary weight with those cards.” We decided he was teasing us. Some hard-core back-packers are known to cut the handles off of their toothbrushes to reduce weight. It didn’t take us long to understand this, once we started walking to our first night’s camp.

It became clear pretty early on that we had WAY TOO MUCH STUFF! We started off OK and we took some great photos of each other looking like this was no big deal.

Here’s Dan starting off. All smiling confidence.

Here I am, looking like my pack isn’t even heavy. Hah!

It turned out that we got off of the ferry from the mainland about noon and we needed to make it 7 miles to our first night’s camp at Daisy Farm. This didn’t sound so bad. However, it was up and down and winding all along the shore of the lake and it took forever. There is no place to camp in between and we had a reserved space so we HAD to make it before dark. We stopped part way at a place called Three Mile which was about 1/2 way to Daisy Farm. We ate lunch there.

After lunch, we continued on. We stopped a ways further along and redistributed some of the weight in our backpacks to our more hardy and forgiving companions. Here is a photo of Toi after she volunteered to help us carry some of our stuff.

How humiliating! Toi weighed 105 pounds and now she was carrying about 70 pounds of gear for the last 3 miles of the trek to camp. She never once complained nor made us feel like the wimps we were. It became clear to me that we were going to have to alter our route to the west end of the island which was 35 miles away, up and down mountains, at a pace of about 10 miles per day. Dan and I were in no shape to accomplish that.

We put up a Herculean struggle and made it the last couple miles to our rustic shelter at Daisy Farm.

We threw all our gear inside and then headed off to the water’s edge to get our water supply refilled. We had to filter all of our drinking water as all of it had to come out of the lakes, streams, and ponds. We knew about this in advance and came prepared.

Here is a close-up of one of our water filters. We each had one.

Here is a shot of us cooking on our picnic table in front of our shelter.

Note that my incredible daughter-in-law, Toi, doesn’t look like she just carried 70 pounds of stuff for the last 3 miles.

The food we ate was mostly those freeze-dried packets of backpacking food that you buy in places like REI and other adventure stores. They have delicious-sounding names and the pictures of the food on the front of the packages looks wonderful. However, they vary greatly in palatability by brand and personal preference. Sunthorn, from Thailand, subsisted on Ramen noodles almost the entire time. He supplemented the noodles with fish he caught out of small lakes and ponds on the island, and he and Toi both picked wild plants that they knew were edible. Toi taught me how to stir-fry up a delicious batch of baby fiddlehead ferns. What an incredible woman! The packages of back-packing meals didn’t weigh much individually, but since Dan and I were carrying enough of them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 8 days for the 2 of us, it really added up.

Here are a few notes Dan made after that first arduous day’s hike. At least he had not lost his sense of humor.

So, at Daisy Farm, we said good-bye to Chris, Toi and Sunthorn, as they headed off to hike the rest of the way to Washington Harbor at the extreme west end of Isle Royale. Dan and I made arrangements with the camp ranger to have the ferry stop and pick us up the next day on its way to Washington Harbor. There was no cell phone service on the island 20 years ago and the only communication was by radio at one of the sparse ranger stations at each end of the island and at Daisy Farm. We planned to go on ahead by boat and do our hiking around the west end of the island for the next 4 days while we waited for those guys to hike across the island and catch up with us.

Here’s Dan in front of the ferry waiting to load our stuff on board for the trip to Windigo at Washington Harbor.

We realized much to our consternation that the only way to get on this ferry at its unscheduled stop at Daisy Farm, was to heave your gear and packs up to someone already on the boat, then grab on and climb up that rope and buoy you see hanging off the side of the boat, and heave yourself over the side. The small boat dock at Daisy Farm wasn’t designed to load and unload passengers off of the ferry. When I look at that now – 20 years later (and older) I really am amazed I was able to do it. But I guess the thought of the alternative – hiking the 7 miles back the way we came – made that athletic fete feel more imperative.

Here is the map of the west end of Isle Royale where we waited for the rest of our group to catch up to us.

We spent 8 days on Isle Royale covering about 30 miles. We learned a lot about the island with its gorgeous scenery and magnificent wildlife. While camping and hiking around the west end of the island we had moose wandering around right outside our shelter – close enough to reach out and touch some times.

We also had a beautiful fox nosing around our camp area.

We hiked all around using our shelter as a base camp. There was actually a small ranger station nearby which had what we considered luxury facilities.

A shower –

Running water that we didn’t have to filter ourselves –

And a laundry room!

We had fun watching the wildlife, fishing, hiking, and just generally having some great times together exploring this beautiful place. We learned a lot about ourselves and each other. Most fifty-year-old moms might not consider carrying a 40-pound backpack for miles and miles, sleeping in the woods, filtering their water, eating reconstituted dried food every meal, a vacation. But it was all worth it hearing Dan whisper in the night in our shelter at Washington Creek Campground, “Hey, Mom. Are you awake? Did you hear those wolves howling? Isn’t that awesome?”

Sharing that adventure was mortar in the bonds that connect us. This experience challenged us to dig deeply for strength to make it to the next camp. It was a rewarding, self-image building education. Toward the end of one particularly rugged day, Dan saw me struggling and shifted several pounds of my pack weight to his own, in spite of being exhausted himself. Later, after we took a break, I took the weight back from him and we continued on to our camp.

Dan learned firsthand how difficulties could be overcome by sharing the burden. We were all a team and we survived by altering our pre-planned route as we went along to adapt to our strengths as well as our weaknesses. We both came away with renewed respect and appreciation for each other.

Chris, Toi, and Sunthorn caught up with us a day sooner than we expected. They were backpacking gods, traversing rugged trails for 35 plus miles in only 3 days. We all had a great lunch on the dock while we waited for our ferry, the Voyager III, to take us around the north side of the island back to Rock Harbor where we started out a week before.

It was a 6 hour trip by boat back, and when we got there, we had to wait until the next morning to catch our ferry back to the mainland. We explored around Rock Harbor, visited the museum, ate a burger and fries in the little cafeteria, and rented canoes for several hours to paddle around Tobin Harbor. Dan and I even got to watch some baby foxes playing around their den along the shoreline.

Our Isle Royale wilderness trek provided a perfect setting for teaching and learning intangible values and lessons that apply to many areas of life. Its hard to imagine how the moose, eagles, and foxes we encountered and the wolves we heard howling in the night would have made it to maturity without the nurturing and teaching they received for the adults they depended on. Its the same with our own young.

Plan an adventure with your own kids. Invite them to help make some of the decisions in planning your trip. You’ll be amazed what you will discover along the way. The adventure Dan and I shared back in 1995 was priceless. We fished in Washington Creek, heard loon’s haunting calls across pristine lakes, and watched majestic bald eagles soar lazily through the crystal skies over Beaver Island at Windigo. Listening to those wolves howling at the moon in the still of the night was close to a religious experience.

Dan and I both came away from this trip with a renewed commitment to promoting and preserving wild places. Its important to have places where adventures can still happen. In 1995, Dan had a new drivers permit and he drove all the way from our home in East Lansing, Michigan to Copper Harbor and back where he packed 40 pounds over many miles. He came away a much better driver, he stood a lot taller and straighter, and his self-confidence was ever stronger. He knew a lot more about himself than when we started, and so did I.

Here are some of Dan’s day-by-day notes he wrote – mostly food reviews of our backpacking food for future reference. It has been such fun finding these notes in with the photos of the trip. I’m so glad I kept them all these years.

After we got back to Chris and Toi’s house in Houghton, Michigan, we had another big Thai feast with their friends celebrating our return and our successful adventure. This was much appreciated after spending 8 days eating backpacking food!

The opportunities to do stuff like this with your kids passes by so quickly. These are adventures that they will never forget.

Here is a final parting shot of the inside of our Shelter #13, with a moose cow right outside the front door.

Too much fun!

This story is one in the series of the Carpy Harpy’s “speaking from experience” look-back.