I arrived in Washington with my regulators, torches, grinders...and my kayak. I actually thought kayaking was the reason I was moving to this part of the world. For 3 years prior I had been leading women's kayaking trips on the Sea of Cortez in Baja for a small company called Paddling South. In hindsight, I think kayaking was just the vehicle to get me here.
I knew a woman on Bainbridge Island...we had kayaked in the Queen Charlotte Islands a year or two before. I ended up living in her sauna in the backyard for the next 8 months. It was exactly 5 foot 6 inches x 5 foot 6 inches. That also happened to be my exact length.
Bainbridge Arts and Crafts was the first gallery to represent me. I began making some blue herons out of steel. They were life size and had a bluish finish that was applied with heat. While my steel work supported me over the next 10 years, it was the herons that were my mainstay. To this day I would bet that there are over 50 pair of these herons on Bainbridge Island alone. A picture of my herons even made it into a book put out by Sunset called LOW MAINTENANCE GARDENING.
And then some other birds began to show up.
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