The Lonley Potter Has a Visitor and Finds Inspiration

 I hope that none of my readers have been under the apprehension that the goal of the lonely potter is to produce pottery for the market place. If so, please put this concept aside and learn to accept, as I have, that the lonely potter will never produce marketable quantities of  work that he deems good enough to sell. The point of this pottery journey is...the journey.

While he does seem to enjoy the completion of an interesting piece, the only times I have seen obvious signs of pleasure during this journey have been when the lonely potter was teaching or demonstrating different facets of his craft to an appreciative audience.  So it was with great pleasure that I returned from a week in Alberta with, not one, but two fans of the lonely potter's work. In fact, on a previous visit, John had learned how to throw a pot on the wheel and had produced two recognizable pots. As soon as the lonely potter heard that John would be stopping by again, he began preparing for a day of raku, so John's pots could be fired one day and ready to travel the next. Nancy, who arrived with John, has been a willing recipient of the lonely potters' product in the past, and he was counting on her to take a few more away on this visit. To top all this, the lonely potter had been saving a ten year old bottle of  Tokaj wine to share with someone who might appreciate it. So, a day of raku and wine was planned.

In preparation for the visit, the lonely potter had done another experimental sawdust firing, using newly discovered techniques involving copper wire and moss soaked in salt.  The results, of course, were dismissed as not what he wanted. If, however, one did not know what he wanted, I think they are very interesting, so, here they are:

I had made the trip to Alberta and back with John and Nancy. We had had very good luck avoiding traffic accidents, tornadoes and flash floods, but it became clear that we were not going to dodge the smoke from the forest fires raging through the interior of B.C. . We watched the smoke getting darker and closer as we came closer to our destination. We watched big airplanes and small helicopters flying into the smoke, and wondered how close the fires were to the lonely potter. 

Close enough, it turns out, that the air was more smoke than  air and the sky had an eerie orange glow, while the sun was a light orange dot in the sky.  Combined with 30+ temperatures, and vegetation either crispy or wilting, John and Nancy were having flashbacks to their trip to Australia during bush fire season. The good thing was that the smoke from the pottery firing would be totally obscured by the smoke in the air already, so we were unlikely to be bothered by neighbors worried about what we were burning.

It was a good day, despite the smoke, although a few hours after Nancy had washed, vacuumed and polished Susanna's car, it was sprinkled with ash...

After a day in the smoke, showers and baths were enjoyed by all. Then a good meal and a good night's sleep.