Happy Sunday 🍵☕
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My pastels got stolen in Puerto Rico.
I'd left them on the roof of the car — pad, box, everything — and walked back to the beach because I was tired of carrying it all and just wanted to be somewhere for a minute. When I came back, they were gone. An hour and a half from where I was staying, my GPS wasn’t working, supplies gone, hadn't eaten all day.
Puerto Rico didn't care. It just kept being great.
I stayed until dark anyway. Found a little bar, had a drink, read the room, decided the room was getting a little too interesting for someone who stood out as much as I did, and got back in the car. Stopped at a food truck because I was starving. Pulled up the map on my phone — the GPS could show me the route but couldn't track me, so I had to do it the old fashioned way, check the map, memorize a stretch, drive, check again, adjust — and navigated myself all the way back to Carolina in the dark.
The anxiety was real. So was everything else.
That's the thing about Puerto Rico that I wasn't expecting. I went there to draw. I'd been all over the island by that point: San Juan; Ponce; Cabo Rojo in the southwest where the landscape suddenly shifts from lush green rainforest to dry yellow cliffs like someone switched the channel to California. I'd drawn at the Cabo Rojo lighthouse, hadn't loved what came out, but got a great photo taken of me drawing at the edge of the cliff. I'd stood at a rock formation on the beach where people yell their wishes into a hole above the water, waves crashing below. Puerto Rico has a lot going on.
But losing the pastels forced something. Suddenly I was just a person there. Not an artist on a mission, not chasing light or compositions, just someone in a place, paying attention. And Puerto Rico rewarded that completely.
The last thing I did before leaving was take day trip out to Vieques.
It's a small island off the southeastern side, and it has one of the most bioluminescent bodies of water on Earth. You drive out to the east coast of the country, get on a ferry, drive to the resort area, then at night take a glass-bottom canoe out onto the water — strangers around you, a guide out front, and you paddle into the dark. Every time the oars touch the water, it glows. The water beneath the glass bottom glows constantly. The ripples around your hands glow if you reach in. The whole thing is alive in a way that makes you ask out loud why you've never seen anything like this before, why this isn't talked about more, why the world is somehow still full of things that can stop you completely.
I looked up. Stars, everywhere. Another pitch black sky doing things a sky from home has never done.
I did get one drawing done in Puerto Rico. On the driving day around the country, I spotted a hillside lined with little homes stacked up the slope and pulled over on the side of the highway. Drew it from the car. One piece, no setup, no easel, just the pad on my lap.
You find a way. That's all. You just find a way.
That's what this newsletter is. One place at a time. Where I have been, what I have seen, and what I was personally moved by.
26 States down. 24 to go.
Want more from this trip.. photos, recommendations, stories that didn't make the cut? Just reply and ask. I've got plenty.
Just an Easel and a Dream is Cody's ongoing plein air pastel project: drawing in all 50 states, one landscape at a time.
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Thank You!