Being creative like Kate Watters is creative causes me to see one of those fierce short swirls down a desert canyon, the kind of wind that causes sand, willow leaves and bird song to brush against your deepest thoughts. The image occurs to me as I wait in her studio while she finishes a detail at a computer for the Grand Canyon Trust where she is the volunteer program manager.
I savor the mix of postcards, journals, feathers and shafts of grass, pens in the yellow El Pato salsa can, and scissors in the Café Bustelo tin. Colorful cloth spills from a bin labeled “SCRAP NUGGETS.” Images of agaves compete with photos of smiling cowgirls. On a stand a sombrero, a cowboy hat and a bright apron hang together close enough to whisper adventures to each other. A large cloth doll made by her mother peers at a frog kachina with bulging eyes. On a wall a small photo of strong hands making rock steps catches my eye. This rich loam of artist-assembled details feels potent, inviting, inspiring.
“Café Pasqual’s?” I ask her about a calendar.
“The book club I’m in went to Santa Fe to play.”
“Bedrock City?” I nod at a photograph of her leaning out of a blue cement caveman vehicle.
“A photo shoot with Raechel on the way to Serena Supplee’s opening.”
And the strong hands with rocks? The highpoint of her 10 years of working trail crew at the Grand Canyon: shaping the sturdy steps on the Grandview Trail.
She says after decades of living out of government housing and vehicles she feels very lucky now to have a room of her own where art brews all the time. Her art stuff isn’t always in bins somewhere else anymore.
“That’s studio, too,” I say later on a trail on Campbell Mesa where we walk with her dog, Charlie. I nod at the groves of oaks she says she watched through the fall “bearing witness to the end of the season.” I think of one of her essays where a mint green moth alights on her sleeping at Deer Creek. I recall her writing about being on a bus in Mexico, noticing a woman pluck a crumb from the face of a man.
“Yes,” she says, “I’m a documenter. I’m storing stuff away, waiting for the right moment to use it.” Like those scrap nuggets in her studio: bright pieces awaiting the right project.
I ask where that started. She mentions the singing with sisters that came naturally in her childhood home and her mother who still makes original handmade cloth dolls to sell in her gallery. Being in an atmosphere where people trust art is good nutrition. But a turning point for her was studying biology. “When I became a scientist I was looking at plants learning to pay attention and look closely,” she says. “Looking at a patch of ground to assign cover classes to a collection of sedges blows your mind.”
In her 20s, Kate came to Arizona sight unseen with a one-way train ticket from Vermont. She spent six months as a Student Conservation Association ranger at Canyon de Chelly. “It was the double-wide life in Chinle campground with no car,” she says. “Forty dollars a week, eating hot dogs and peanut butter with enough left over to buy bootleg Budweiser and feed the strays.”
What about music, I ask. I know I’ve seen pictures of her in cowboy boots and skirt leaning into a microphone.
“I started playing guitar on trail crew at the Grand Canyon. We’d get off at 3:30, start hitting the whiskey in the labor cabins on the South Rim.” It was a time of cowboy songs and a campfire and stumps to sit on with others who loved music.
“Music is such a universal code for joy,” she says, “with strangers, with anybody. Songs are like conversations. Musicians meet and it’s ‘here’s the song I’m just dying over right now.’ It’s one of my life dreams to be a honky tonk singer playing the Bright Angel bar,” she says, “combing the thrift shops for outfits.”
A restorative breath of bright wind, I think as we finish a loop of walking through the woods on a bright morning. With rocks, cloth, words or watercolors, surveying plants or organizing a crew to put hands on work that needs doing, this Kate Watters is a long good song.
