I heard there was gold out there in the West. Gold and lots of it. The Eastern winds whispered in my ear, 'Go West young man!' West where the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings. I heard the cops have wooden legs, the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs. So I said to the East, you've treated me well and perhaps I'll be back some day but for now, I'm headin' for a land that's far away beside the crystal fountains. Six months? Has it really been six months since I wandered West. Well, I haven't found gold, and the hens lay their eggs raw. But despite those mild disappointments, Portland has been good to me: I think I'm going to stay.

In the beginning, there were maps. They were special maps cut so deliberately into color-coordinated, highway-bound precincts. The maps were intended to cover my topographical chaboo/sculpture. Undulating grassy knolls springing forth from gridded city streets, I thought, would be nice. What a mess. Papier mache is, by its very nature, a mess, but this was a mess of supreme dimensions. Mappy, mulchy, modgepodgy mess. Where are the roads, the rivers, the railroad tracks? Lost in the pasty pith. Rip it apart. Rip and wreck: they say destruction is a form of creation. Glistening wet with purity, a devine rebirth. Now, shining white bright like some grotesque and distorted Modernist Monument, we can wonder if it is still a topography. Sure. Why not. Could be a mountain, couldn't it? A snow covered mountain. A post-blizzard, mid-winter, mountain man's wet dream. Place your coffee upon the barren flats and think of ski season in the alps.