THE ROAD TO BEAVER PARK

An artist recounts a yearlong sabbatical spent exploring the outdoors in this memoir.

In the summer of 1976, Kirk and her husband, Don, took their two children out of school, rented their house, packed a trailer and camper truck, and set off for the American West. “Our odyssey will not be governed by clocks or calendars,” the author writes of their first few days away from the normal pressures of life, “just seasons and cycles.” While Don saw the trip as a chance to continue his graduate work in biology, Kirk viewed it as an opportunity to paint and sketch en plein-air. Throughout the California coast and the Great Basin of Nevada, the author began to refine her technique by re-creating the grandeur of national parks. She includes her sketches to show how she slowly became aware of the same essential elements at each new location: mass, light, and space. As the family made its way across Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, Kirk continued to progress in surprising ways, both artistically and personally. With each natural wonder, the family members drew closer to one another and to a spiritual revelation. “I performed no rituals, chanted no chants, did no deeds to attract the attention of a deity. Even so, the connection happened,” the author writes after seeing part of the Milky Way. Unlike a traditional memoir, much of the family’s life, both before and after the sabbatical, is left unaddressed in these pages. While Kirk cleverly includes her husband’s and her daughter Amy’s perspectives with snippets from their journals, their lives remain at a distance despite the intimacy of their writings. But as a transcendental reflection on nature and artistic expression, Kirk’s prose offers some truly wonderful passages. It is hard not to rejoice with her as she marvels at the Rocky Mountains, begging to be painted: “The sky, the sky!” she exclaims. “What blue is that?”

A meditation on artistic technique and how nature connects people with the divine.