Gallery Night weekend has successfully come and gone.  The largest pastel I've ever done, "Broken Sky Over Blue Mountain" found a new home. So I'm now happily interviewing landscapes for my next mega-painting. But for me, the highlight of that weekend was spending a few precious days with my little sis, Kathy Nammour.


Kathy Cook Nammour with her furry niece and feathered nephew  2007

The grownup version of my baby sister now resides in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. During our Midland years, however,she spent every childhood summer at Camp Mitre Peak. (Back then, my idea of immersing myself in the Great Outdoors involved sunning around the pool, bicycling around the Tall City with girlfriends, or on really adventurous days, driving golf carts into water traps at the ol' country club.) Kat, who has traveled and lived all over the world, vows Far West Texas remains one of the places most dear to her heart. So it's ironic that I'm the one who now traipses around rocky mountainscapes with an easel on my back, that I'm the one who calls Big Bend Country "home". So it was special to finally share this place we love in common, a land she knew as a child and that I only truly learned as an adult.

In Alpine, we spent the requisite time shopping (we are, first and foremost, female). Jim graciously wined and dined us. We drank a lot of coffee, marveled that once again, we'd unwittingly had our hair cut alike.

And one morning, we spent hiking around Mitre Peak, revisiting Kathy's former haunts.


MITRE PEAK SKY         9" x 12" pastel  by Lindy Cook Severns  c 2006      private collection

In Big Bend country, you don't trespass. It isn't polite and it isn't prudent. Folks who live thirty miles from nowhere take responsibility for their own safety and they (we) don't like surprise visits from strangers. Also, in cattle country, fences and gates have a purpose. You never know what's going on on the other side. We always ask permission or don't tread private property. (I haven't actually heard about any recent shootings, but way out West, you never know. Last year's bodies might all be buried.) Anyway, my law-abiding husband felt reassured when Kathy knocked on the caretaker's door, introduced herself, then asked if she could show me around. Jim was facing his second hip surgery (he had it the Monday after Thanksgiving and is already doing half a mile a day on a cane) so he couldn't accompany us. The loyal dog stayed in the truck with him.

The parrot, a dedicated hiker, set out with Kathy and me.
Past rock landmarks like Frankenstein and the monkey's head. (I apparently have less imagination than generations of young scouts.) Past a roadrunner staking out a bush. Across oak leaves so thick, a rattler hidden beneath that leafy carpet wouldn't have felt us walking on him, or so I told myself.

Kat pointed out the mess hall, cabins she once occupied, the place she killed her first rattlesnake, the place one camper's foolish mother had teased one of the resident serpents until it had struck her. (Kathy knew of only two bite incidents in all those years. Both involved childish parents playing with snakes.) The infirmary. The pool. I'd been to Mitre several times, either to leave my sister or to pick her up, but this time, the place looked different. This was my VIP tour, and with a poignancy so strong it stung, I suddenly imagined my sister there, summer after summer, first as a camper, later, a counselor. Mitre Peak had been her special world. The sister I know so well had experienced things those Mitre summers that I can never share. I felt jealousy for Ginger and Lisa, her childhood scouting friends who called each other by silly nicknames that have stuck into middle age; I wished I had been there to hike the ten miles into Alpine with them.  I realized I've seldom walked in my sister's footprints. Arrogantly, we presume to know the worlds of those we are closest to, when the terrain that shaped them is, by definition, beyond our knowing.

As I mused on the different paths our lives have taken and marveled at the scenery, Kathy led me up a boulder path between oaks and madrone. We hadn't planned to hike so far. I wore ballet flats, Kathy, street shoes. As we scrambled over an especially treacherous rock, Kat observed that she used to be much taller and the rocks, less steep. We laughed, discussed turning back, continued on.
"This is a baby hike," she confided. "Where we'd take the campers their first year." Abruptly, we came to a narrow cleft in towering rock. "Daphie's Cave," she announced smugly. She explained the story: A young ranch girl (Daphie, I presume) would retreat to this cave to draw, to write, to dream. Later, hundreds of tender scouts explored her secret world in turn. And now, my sister was sharing it with me, a baby to that hidden place.

Charged with the enthusiasm that comes with discovery, we continued upward, around more boulders, happily planting our scuffed street slippers through a squeeze of rock that separates the not-skinny-but-thin-enough from the unthin while praying we wouldn't get stuck.
"Do you hear it?" she whispered.
I did. Water. Tricking, gurgling, running water teasing through the arid mountains. I smiled.
She said, "This is the first pool." She might have been opening a safety deposit box and pointing to a string of nine diamonds. The parrot cooed. We lingered, took pictures. Enjoyed. Shared the moment in that place where my sister had skinny-dipped on hot August afternoons past.



Going back down, the boulders weren't as steep.

Whenever our parrot does something surprising, I'm humbled, reminded that the world of humans isn't the only amazing world out there. There is much in nature we cannot know, muchless understand. Likewise, hiking Camp Mitre Peak with my little sis, I felt humility. Kathrine D'Cook Nammour is her own person; a part, but only a part of her is the known world I call "sister'. We are who we are, and no one, not even those closest to us can presume to know all our caves and pools. That's why it's such a treasure when someone we already love shares the route to one of theirs with us.

I don't know if a scene from that morning will ever become a painting or not. But I fit through that rock squeeze; like countless Brownies, I've seen Daphie's cave; I know how to find the first pool in my sister's soul.

As for me skinny-dipping? I refer you back to the passage about trespassing in Big Bend country. It isn't from lack of will that I shall refrain.