Thoughts on Dan Robinson - Part 3

My time in Washington was three days. The second day was spent driving all over the watery northwest corner of the state with Dan as my tour guide, taking in the scenery and looking for big old trees. We headed north out of Bremerton on WA 3, then veered west on WA 104 past Squamish Harbor and the town of Shine, eventually hooking up with WA 101, the Olympic Highway, which ran alongside first Discovery Bay and then Sequim Bay, then further past Port Angeles and the Elwah Indian Reservation. Suddenly strange sentinels with multiple heads were eyeing us from the side of the road. These were wonderfully rendered contemporary totem poles, the perfect symbol for this overcast landscape of rolling hills and big water, out in front of the reservation resort and casino. I did not care that they were there to lure in passing tourists; the totem poles were an evocative reminder of the way this place once was. I have seen totem poles only in museums before, when they are old and weathered and the colors are faded. Seeing them new and fresh and colorful was a momentary shock of insight on the way we conceive of the past.

From the reservation we traveled on to the Salt Creek Recreation Area, snug along the shore of the Strait of Juan De Fuca, a big, long body of water separating the United States from Vancouver Island in Canada. We parked and got out of the truck, spending some time out in the chill and wind-driven rain, under the leaden sky, getting soaked while walking a beach all strewn with massive old trunks of driftwood dead trees. These giants were scattered here and there like matchsticks, the moving of them child’s play to the powerful currents of the strait. We gazed out across the cold, gray-green choppy water and saw a few rock islands jutting up in the mist, looking like they drifted over from China. There was a sense of timelessness on this beach. The day was raw, though, and the wind and rain lashed us until we returned to the refuge of Dan's truck.  From there we drip-dried as we drove south into the Olympic National Park, two-lane touring on thickly forested roads, all closed in by a short-distance panorama of lush, wet, dark evergreen foliage. We finally broke out into dramatic open space as we skirted along the edge of Lake Crescent, before eventually finding our way back to the Olympic Highway and slowly back to home. We spent all day touring, hour after hour talking ideas, telling lies and swapping stories. The road trip gave me a little taste of the Pacific Northwest, a hauntingly beautiful place, but I found the entirety of the day's experience deeply agreeable. It gave me a little more insight into who Dan is and how he got that way.

The next day the conversation continued at Elandan, where I walked all through the garden once more, this time with Dan at my side. Yesterday we had been looking at the source material, the inspiration, the great old growth giants in the forest, and today we were looking at the bonsai that were shaped by the experience of that natural example, shaped by a person as familiar with that natural example as he is with the feel of his own skin. Dan was pointing it out to me, all that experience and all that information, as we went from specimen to specimen. He was talking about where the trees came from, the wild forbidding places where they were collected or how long since he started them from seed. And he was talking about why this dead branch was still on the tree, and how the implausible looking carving on that trunk was not implausible at all, and all about the primacy of deadwood, and the importance of a focal point, and why he wants to have parts of the tree growing downward or sideways or back toward the middle, and why he has no use for a triangular shaped crown on any of his trees, or why he would not use a concave cutter or make a finish cut with a saw. And certain words kept coming back around in his conversation, bobbing up like ducks in an arcade shooting gallery, words like accretion and hydraulics and gnarly, and deadwood and ancient and gnarly, and cataclysmic and regeneration and gnarly. Gnarly, gnarly, gnarly! He likes his trees to be gnarly — gnarly branches, gnarly trunks, gnarly deadwood, gnarly surface roots. Gnarly for Dan equates with great age, with decline but also with the ongoing struggle to live, and this is what he looks for in nature, examples of this dying but surviving look. This is also what attracts him to any given subject he might work with as a bonsai. He likes best to collect wild trees from nature, trees growing in tough places where they suffer but survive and get old without getting big, trees that have gnarly old trunks. "Show me a great trunk!" he proclaims, the excitement from just thinking of such a thing animating him and spurring him on. If he can start with a great old gnarly trunk he can build the gnarly rest of it and make it all gnarly harmonious, make it fantastic and yet still plausible. To walk with Dan through his collection, through his garden, and listen to him expound on all his experiences, thoughts, ideas and opinions, is better than any workshop you might take. And to hear him go on about all this tree stuff and the life stuff that it represents, you cannot help but be impressed by his energy, his fervor, his belief that everything he is telling you is true and important. And the amazing thing is you know he has said all this stuff, every bit of it, a thousand times before, and each time he has repeated it he has done so with every bit as much energy and conviction. And when you look at him going on this way you begin to think that in the world of bonsai Dan is someone far out of the ordinary, a larger than life type of figure, half human and half legend, like Davy Crockett or Casey Jones. He is a John James Audubon for the ancient trees, doing three-dimensional painting with a die grinder. With his long white hair and sun burnished old skin he can look like a Native American, a sagamore whose eyes have squinted at ten thousand sunsets. When he is up on his soapbox railing against all that is rigid, repressed and ridiculous with the way so many people do bonsai, he can take on the bearing of a tent revival preacher, and when he is telling you his idea for how to do bonsai better he can become a most charismatic carny barker, a salesman who has complete faith in his product because he uses it himself. He is all these things wrapped up in one colorful package. Dan Robinson is bonsai royalty — he is the King of Gnarly.

I did my program for the Puget Sound group on the night of my last day in Washington. Although the time touring around and looking at old trees and the time spent studying Dan's bonsai and the extensive running conversation with Dan was a trip in itself, I was all the time conscious of the program I was there to deliver. I was looking forward to it. I always look forward to doing a program, but this was the first time I was to deliver one on the West Coast, and the audience was comprised almost entirely of people who had never seen me before. It is energizing to have a new audience with which to engage, all innocent and unsuspecting. I did an illustrated lecture titled "Naturalism and American Bonsai." This program has been in development for several years now, and has been presented in a variety of places in different, evolving iterations. During the three days I had been listening to Dan I was all the while mentally comparing his take on bonsai to mine, noting the similarities and even more so the differences. I think this was good in terms of furthering my thought process regarding both naturalism and American bonsai, crystallizing some ideas and stimulating a few insights. I felt in good form doing the presentation that night. People came up afterward and had complimentary things to say, but you can never be one-hundred percent certain how well you have communicated with an audience when you present a program. It is a pleasant feeling to have people respond favorably, but you cannot know for certain if what they are responding to is actually what you intended by what you said. You can never know for sure whom, if anyone, you truly reached. This thought sometimes discourages me, although ultimately I have come to decide it does not matter so much. You cannot control it. You have an idea and you think it has some merit so you put it out there and maybe someone responds, or maybe they do not. Maybe they have no idea what you are talking about. But it is the act of putting it out there that matters, participating in the free flowing stream of ideas that gooses humankind slowly ever forward. Fourteen years ago I wandered into Elandan Gardens and met Dan Robinson, and he put forth a lot of ideas, some through his words and some through his work, and I really did not know what to make of it all. I would not have said at the time that his ideas reached me, but looking back now I have to think they did. At least some of them did. Maybe some of the ideas I shared that night in Seattle will have a similar reverberation in the minds of others, but as I said before, you can never know for sure.