A Walk With James Hubbell: On a Path to Seeing Things Differently
By Peter Jensen, Ilan-Lael Board Member
New to San Diego 45 years ago, I was writing about interesting houses for a local magazine. In the first months after my arrival, I kept hearing the same thing: “Have you been out to Jim Hubbell’s place? You must go! You just must!”
“Out” meant the tree-bearded hills spread around Volcan Mountain in Julian and Santa Ysabel. Yearning for a day in the country and intrigued by a man and his house who had such a wide and fine reputation, I called him and asked if I could pay a visit, tour his property, and talk about his creative process.
“What makes an artist?” he asked. “Here it is. The whole world is full of wonder, do you see? This tree on fire. Or mashed potatoes. Or shooting stars.”
The day I drove up was unseasonably cold and going gray with a possibility of rain. I grabbed an old sweater made of Irish wool and threw it into the back of the car. The sweater’s cable-knit strands shone with natural lanolin. You can go out in the rain in this sweater and not feel water creeping next to your skin for an hour or more. Even then, you don’t get cold. You can pretend you are wild and free of most weather inhibitions.
I found him at a slant-top drawing board in his small one-room cluttered studio. Cloud-filtered light, colored by dozens of stained-glass samples hung in an east-facing window, spread across mounds of books, watercolors, drawings, and plans. He was listening to a tape of Patsy Cline favorites while bending over a pencil drawing of a stone monument not unlike the Anasazi ruins in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. His hand, when he shook mine, was flat and hard as the blade of a shovel. I could see immediately that the same hand was as capable of creating details as fine as needlepoint in a pen-and-ink drawing or troweling tons of concrete.
The faint smell of wood smoke was in the air, and it seemed strangely out of season. No fire burned in his wood stove. He mentioned that he had been noticing the same smell for days and assumed that a neighbor might be burning a brush pile.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said, suddenly, like an arch druid who goes into the forest every day.
It was soon clear he was happy to walk in silence. His conversation was with the oaks. Mine wasn’t, yet as we strode through the crab-shell leaves beneath a dense stand of oaks. Attuned more to city life, talking was my best way to communicate.
We stepped through three strands of barbed wire and I fell silent. His dog Honey rambled ahead of us, disappearing into every thicket. No trail led off into the distance. This was wandering, not hiking with a purpose.
Passing through a hidden valley, we soon began to climb toward a distant ridge. Handkerchiefs of mist and smoke descended to greet us, and there it was: the answer to all the smoke. Surrounded by its fallen branches, a lone, sentinel oak stump about ten feet tall was being hollowed out by an active fire. We stepped closer, drawn to the warmth, but also a flickering of great beauty. Yet I felt a strong sense of grief over the loss of another forest Methuselah.
“No,” he whispered, for Jim spoke mostly in whispers, “this isn’t a death. See the eye of the burl? Its heart is still on fire. This may have been done by lightning, or my neighbor clearing his land, but the tree has decided to give us a gift one last time.”
“Why are we so busy cleaning up and throwing things away?” he continued. “Even nature does it. But an artist, on the other hand, spends his or her life making—and usually keeping—everything.”
In classic Hubbell fashion, he turned my sense of loss into the joy of seeing something new. Not just a tree. A tree with a living heart of flame. A tree with two paths leading to it: one of joy, the other loss. Jim could see only the joy, and he looked like he was 10 years old again with the discovery.
“What makes an artist?” he asked. “Here it is. The whole world is full of wonder, do you see? This tree on fire. Or mashed potatoes. Or shooting stars.”
When I returned to the city and my house made of sticks and gypsum, my sweater smelled of smoke. I hung it outdoors. Later that evening I also stayed outside late into a clear night, swinging in my hammock, watching for shooting stars. Or even mashed potatoes.
When the path is joyful, who knows what you’ll find?