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By Franky Cruz, AIRIE Fellow Photograph by Monica Mcgivern /Franky Cruz Concrete houses made of paper and robotic soldiers at war against their enemies of heat and humidity surround me as they keep the indoors cozy. I sit somewhere in Mayami on a tiny patch of grass between cuboids made to shelter humans from the winged biomechanical vampiric beings with a kamikaze blood focus on the vessels. I recall experiences with pen and paper writing as I imagine my instrument a crow feather black ink quill. On this dapple of nature I remember what it was like when this was more a tropical hardwood forest with giant oaks painted with bromeliads all around. The elevation is ten to eleven feet above sea level. When this place was more like that place. The silver cord that connects my experience with that of our natural environment has been braided and thickened, helix layer by helix layer, by my time spent in that thirty-day summer atelier at the River of Grass. I arrive too early at the darkest blue o’clock. At about five thirty in the a.m., Eager to drop into whatever bed like structure existed in my emerald nest. The Laboratory keys where not on the table. With woodpecker wrists I wake up April. While the darkest hue of April becomes the lightest blue of May above my head, I take an early morning barefoot hike on the neighborhood trail. Contact. The same trail that while riding on the found in the room where machines wash rags, a two wheeled rusted chain travel machine labeled “Artist in residence,”I met a what I thought was a giant white rabbit that revealed itself A very light almond feathered tufted nocturnal bird of Prey. A secretive owl that covered with one wing its talons to hide its bounty, leaving on the ground only viscous, magenta flavored, fiery red entrails attached to two white-feathered legs of some kind of white heron under the tree where the owl locked its gaze toward me. Eyes meet eyes I say my goodbyes. Its time to un-tetris my objects, to make objects, out of the fossil fueled four wheeled gypsy caravan and into the laboratory atelier. Eyes settle into darkness, a forty 8-hour sleep is in order. Eyes wide open and mind; frequency sponges like limestone of the aquifer as I treat experience like the water that flows thru and shapes it. I accept fire as an important element in this river's existence and let it fuel me. I install by hanging my canoe like a hammock between two slash pines to paint fire on it, it becomes a phoenix as Bob Marley sings into the pine island neighborhood... “Eh, we got some thing they could never take away, We got some thing they could never take away and its the fire (fire) and it's the fire (fire)”. On a sunrise bicycle ride as the everglades stretches and yawns the surround sounds of the hawk and the pig frog song assisted by a duet between the crickets and the small bird orchestra. A yellow painted turtle little legged itself into a pond as a male carpenter bee whizzes past my face declaring that I am in its territory. Cardinal couples replace tollbooths on the hopper highway. Cannibal Lubbers feed on the road killed bodies of their brethren. Blood-sucking insects become muses and are declared the real kings and queens of the badlands. I paint portraits of Tabanidae adversaries. Crows are too smart to care. A red shoulder hawk dives onto its prey gripping it with its ratchet like talons in front of me while at the laboratory. I watch the bird of pray fly backwards onto the near by radio antennae. Inside the lab I play on paper with natural pigments that act like rivers flowing into an estuary.
