3. Road trips

Robert Curtis on road with family, 

c. 1919

Colorado road

Alison at the "Monte Carlo", c. 2008

Novack, miner, Ballarat, CA c. 2008

By 1951 or so the war scarcity had eased and on Sundays my Grandfather Robert would do the site inspections on public buildings his Architecture firm had designed all over San Diego County.  We rode along for the drive and I eagerly helped with the inspections by collecting loose nails, etc.  After we would eat at some distant restaurant, I preferred the ones on the harbor with views of the water and boats.  I went with my Grandfather to an art show at the Library Annex Building at Wall and Girard Street in La Jolla and saw the marvellous plein air works by Alfred Mitchell and began to develop a landscape aesthetic to go along with the architectural exposure, road trips and fabulous meals.  We also spent much leisure time in Balboa Park with a collection of more than a thousand tree species planted for the 1935 Exposition.  As a young teenager I won the annual Park and Recreation sailing race on Mission Bay.  I think this was a pivotal point as I suddenly learned there were no limits.  I began board surfing also much by luck as a family friends son sold me my first surfboard, at a time when there were perhaps only a hundred or so in San Diego County and I solidified a lifelong interest in the water as an active water man.

“If we are to understand consciousness- the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us- we need to turn our back on the orthodox assumption that consciousness is something’ll that happens inside us, like digestion.  It is now clear, as it has not been before, that consciousness, like a work of improvisational music, is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation in and access to a world we know around us.  We are in the world and of it.  We are home sweet home.”  (Noe, Out of Our Heads)