I did not want to use the usual studio up at Steve’s, the one he kept for me. I did not want to tangle with Steve or the cops. I took an ice cold shower and drove up the mountain past the state park lodge, up away from the creek into the aspen on the backside of Lake Peak and parked at the overlook. I put the straps of the easel over my back and carried the wooden box and a small canvas and a can of turpentine and walked up the old logging road a few hundred yards until the path toward Hobbitville forked off to the southeast. That’s what I called it. They were crude tipi-shaped shelters of dead wood spaced down through the forest like a tribal ruin. They were artfully hidden from the trail. Most were wrecks, skeletons of once proud lodges, but others had been freshly woven with boughs and stuffed with leaves and looked like they might shed water, and they were all haunted with the inaudible vibrations of questionable practice, ceremony and ritual of God knows what. They were creepy.
