What is it about humans and dogs….our loppy, messy, 4-pawed, big hearted evolutionary companions, that is a recipe for joy? I reckon Sailor, a boy with a seafarer’s heart (albeit with his head out the window of a Japanese auto), navigating by nose, calibrating lunar distance, knows some things about the North American west.
He sets me daydreaming about the shared landscape across California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon….a kind of visual vocabulary of smells: the chaparral plants, the Jeffrey pine, mule fat and laurel sumac, crushed grapes and California everlasting. The juniper berries and sagebrush, mesquite bosques, roasting poblanos and creosote after rain, groves of quaking aspen and sulfur springs, campfires and evergreen humus, the crisp crystals of freshly fallen snow…. North and east, south and west….up, down, and around again, like a stone spinner, tumbled smooth, taking us all the way, right down into the bedrock of our own interior wilderness.

We love you Sailor. - Sarah Brunnier