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Alexander
Cockburn
recollects...
Being
an optimist myself, back in September, I pondered how best to honor the
new millennium, and decided to commission works of art, to be placed on
the steep, wooded hill behind my house. This plan allowed me to
approach Elizabeth Berrian, an artist living in Eureka, Calif., who
makes wire animals. Back in the 1840s, an early settler in the Mattole
Valley, where I live, reported in his journal that from a hilltop he
could espy no less than 30 specimens of Ursus arctos horribilis, aka
Ursus ferox -- grizzlies to you and me -- grubbing about looking for
berries and bugs, or hunkered down on the edge of the Mattole, scooping
up salmon. We still have mountain lions and brown bears, but the
grizzly is long gone, so I commissioned Berrian to weave out of
aluminum stainless wire a 9-foot grizzly, destined to haunt my hill.
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In
the months that followed, Ursus, hanging from a pulley in the barn
where Berrian works, gradually grew in size to his present majestic 9
feet, and on Dec. 30, I drove up to Eureka in my truck to pick him up.
We tied him on his back to the lumber rack, and I headed for home in
the darkness. Halfway up a mountain grade, all power in the '68 Dodge
truck failed. No lights. No power. No emergency brake. Low compression
so the gears wouldn't hold me. Take my foot off the brake pedal, and
either I'd roll back to the right and drop off the edge, or roll back
to the left and drop into a ditch at the base of the cliff. Stay put,
and some homeward-bound logging truck would plow straight through me.
Ursus and I waited for the end. And it wasn't even Y2K yet.
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| The rancher in a mighty 350 Ford
pickup
didn't hit me. He had a chain, and pulled me to a safe spot, handing me
his cell phone The AAA dispatcher 300 miles south in Petaluma patched
me through to Jerry, who runs the local breakdown service at Tipple
Motors in Ferndale. I told him I had a wire grizzly on my rack, and if
necessary, he should pull me 50 miles home to Petrolia, almost a
freebie on my triple-A plus card, one
of the greatest bargains in
America. In the end, Jerry fixed the truck, and Ursus and I puttered
south under the stars. The next day, Jerry called and said he'd had a
call from the AAA office in Petaluma, wanting a photo of "the wild
grizzly" reported by the night dispatcher as having been tied to a
truck up in Humboldt. On New Year's Day, we unveiled Ursus before an
admiring crowd of Petrolians, and now, he's up on my hillside, a
ghostly intimation of the past that we should honor more, while
simultaneously fearing the future less.
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World
Class Wire Sculpture
· Elizabeth Berrien (707) 445-4931 · email wireladye@yahoo.com
Content and images
© Elizabeth Berrien. All rights reserved.
·
Updated Oct 7, 2011
· this page valid HTML 4.01
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