"A beautiful head!" : Portrait bust adventure

Robert Coulson Dean, Portrait Sculpture: “A beautiful head!” (process reflections)

In July of this past year (2012), I was asked by a local pastor to do a portrait sculpture of her husband, Robert Dean.  Great!  Then she told me that she would like the sculpture to be a surprise.  Hmm. That would mean no modeling of Robert from life; no close-up camera shots or video; no catalogue of facial and head measurements with calipers; and no getting to know him, through this process. Yet the finished portrait sculpture would have to pass muster with a woman who had know his face, intimately and attentively, for a couple of decades or more!

So when I happened to see Robert in Kroger’s one day, I found myself “tailing” him: ostensibly  checking over the vegetables, while trying to get a good look at his profile, without being too obvious. A sculptor turned gumshoe. I did at least form an “impression” of Robert: a man moving comfortably through the world, content in himself, and distinterested in much that went on around him.

Just as his wife had told me, Robert had a “beautiful head”—a nicely shaped cranium, clean of hair, with no odd bumps or ridges (unlike my own). In short, a head fittingly suited to his profession: psychiatry. His nose was fine, even small. And he wore glasses. With this information, I roughed out a basic form, and coated it with clay (oil-based plastilina).

Then I learned that Robert would be co-teaching a Sunday School class, beginning in September. Of course I resolved to attend! The subject of the class was to be Karen  Armstrong’s, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, a book which, as she says in her Preface,  addresses “one of the chief tasks of our time,” namely “to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect.” If you are unacquainted with Karen Armstrong, but interested in religion or spirituality, I highly recommend her work, especially The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions. Her work, and this book in particular, have profoundly shaped my own perspective on Christianity I add, with gratitude, that I was first introduced to her work several years ago, in another Sunday School class at this same church.

About twenty persons attended the class, for which the tables and chairs had been arranged in a square, so that all of us were able to face each other. It was a nice arrangement, and excellent conversations ensued.  Robert and his co-teacher took turns, week to week, in leading the class. Usually, we would divide into small groups, discuss elements in the “assigned” reading for that week, and then reassemble near the end of the hour, for summary conversation, and closing remarks by the teacher.  Robert proved to be, as I had expected, an excellent teacher: articulate, discerning, and confident in his ability to guide discussion. (His co-teacher was also excellent.)

What I especially marveled at, in watching Robert, was the range of his expressions: a pursing of the lips, and a knitting of the brows, sometimes together, and sometimes separately. Sometimes one brow rose, while the other fell; then he would smile, briefly but broadly. Some of these facial movements seemed involuntary, yet they also seemed to be the quicksilver evidence of the passage of thoughts through his mind.  I could not retain a memory of the details of his expressions for long, I found, so I would bicycle straight home after the Sunday School class and go right into my studio and work on the clay model.

Sometime in late September, when I was getting to the point where I felt like I was “just pushing clay around,” in the words of the California sculptor Richard MacDonald, I got together with Robert’s wife and went through some family photo albums, and took pictures of a few photos of Robert, and tacked print copies of these photos to a bulletin board propped near the clay model in my studio. The pictures covered a span of time of at least twenty years, from when he was a young father, with a fringe of dark hair above his ears, to pictures of him with a hat on when his daughter was perhaps in college.  Pictures can be tricky to work from: a profile will give one “look,” and another picture, face-forward, can present a remarkably different look. A lot has to do with differences of light and shadow, from one picture-taking circumstance, to another. Which picture to believe?

A successful portrait bust is more than an anatomical rendering, of course; it’s meant to be a psychological rendering as well.  What lay “behind” Robert’s facial expressions? What, within his mind, was rising to the surface and exhibiting hints of itself in these expressions? I could see, or felt that I saw, a certain meditative expression in his face, as he listened to discussion and then prepared the studied articulation of his response, and then, when speaking, stare into a “middle space,” as if visualizing his words, before finally surveying his circle of listeners, and concluding with a humorous remark, his mouth flashing into a smile, and his eyes searching his audience for their reaction.

He wore glasses—I worked the clay model with them on, then off.  His wife, musing a bit, said finally, “well, I think you’d better put them back on. I’ve always known him with glasses.” Taking a cue from the work of Charlotte NC sculptor Chaz Fagan, I merely “suggested” the glasses’ frames: side bows, nose pads, frame arcs above the eyes, and corresponding depression arcs in his cheeks.

At last, I was satisfied, and so was Robert’s wife. From there, it was molding, a casting in hydrostone, and again in hydrocal, and then a color finish of layered acrylics; a custom walnut base provided by Trev Smith of Happy Hollow Woods;  and name plaque from New River Engraving. Christmas Eve—finito! Visible to me in the finished work were the marks of every stage in the process, as important in their way as my sculptor’s signature on the back.

The portrait sculpture of Robert Coulson Dean was presented on Christmas Day, in the presence of his wife, and children. His wife emailed me later with this report: “Robert  was quite taken aback by the sculpture, which he feels very much captures essential  things about himself. He was by turns embarrassed and amazed that we had done this. He is a very unassuming person, and thinks of busts as being made only for the prominent, but of course he is also deeply flattered. So thank you many times over.”

President Barack Obama, Chi-Meister

Life Cast

The “casting from life” that almost killed Thomas Jefferson

In doing research for my bronze portrait sculpture of Thomas Jefferson as he might have appeared in 1819, at age 76, I naturally searched for contemporary portrait paintings or sculptures depicting him during this period of his life. I ran across references to a life casting by John H.I. Browere, done in 1825, when Jefferson was 82, and was therefore eager to find photographs of this casting. Eventually, I did, in a book from the New York State Historical Society, where the portrait sculpture made from this life casting is permanently housed. Brief text accompanying the photograph described the casting process itself as a painful one for Jefferson: Browere had to break off the hardened life cast from Jefferson’s face with mallet and chisel!

I had no idea, however, just how painful, until I read the vivid account of the process in Alan Pell Crawford’s excellent book Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. Browere, having oiled Jefferson’s face, applied his “plastier,” or grout, in layers. About an hour later, the sculptor tried to remove the hardened grout, “without discomfort” to Jefferson.

But the grout was stuck to Jefferson’s face and would not come off.  “Evidently,” according to Crawford, “ Browere miscalculated, for when the hour had elapsed, the grout was harder and drier than anticipated. He had also failed to put enough oil in the concoction ‘to prevent its adherence to the skin,’ Virginia [Randolph, Jefferson’s granddaughter] said, and as a result, removing the plaster proved so ‘excessively painful’ and so slow that ‘we expected Grand-papa to faint from exhaustion.’

“To remove the plaster, Browere produced a mallet and chisel, and began ‘to break it into pieces and cut off a piece at a time,’ Jefferson told [James] Madison. ‘Those thumps of the mallet would have been sensible almost to a loggerhead.’ Horrified by the spectacle, the family fled the room, leaving only the artist, his subject, and Burwell [Colbert] the butler.

“Increasingly frustrated, Browere hammered away with increasing force and frequency until Jefferson was exhausted, ‘and there became real danger,’ he said ‘that the ears would separate from the head sooner than from the plaister.’ By now, ‘patient [though] he always is in suffering,’ Virginia said, Jefferson could be heard sobbing.

“He was also gasping for breath. Because of some defect in the arrangements made to permit the subject to breathe, Randall wrote, Jefferson ‘came near suffocation.’ Eager to attract the preoccupied artist’s attention but unable to speak, Jefferson grabbed the chair on which his hand rested, lifted it as high as he could, and slammed it to the floor. The surprised sculptor’s work-in-progress also fell with a clatter, and Burwell ‘sprang furiously forward,’ catching his master as he collapsed.

“Hearing the commotion, the family rushed back into the room to find Jefferson in the arms of Burwell, ‘the fierce glare of [whose] African eye boded danger.’ Permitted to ‘pick up his fragments of plaster and carry them off,’ Browere remained at Monticello as his long-suffering subject’s guest for at least that night, if not more.” (pages 214-215)

If it had been me in that room, and not Browere, with the aging Jefferson propped in a chair with pillows, I would have applied petroleum jelly to Jefferson’s face, and I don’t think there would have been “a lick of trouble,”  getting the plaster off. The oil which Browere applied probably just soaked into Jefferson’s skin, accelerated by the warming temperature of the drying grout. Actually, I would never have had the temerity to ask Thomas Jefferson, especially in his frail condition, to submit to a life casting. I would have sat knee-to-knee with him, touching his face lightly now and then to take a caliper measurement, and modeled him from life, in clay, talking with him as I worked. Imagine that!

In any event, Browere managed to produce, from the broken pieces of plaster, a casting of Jefferson’s face, which he used to create a rather grim-faced portrait bust in a “classical” style, complete with toga-like cloth folded over Jefferson’s thin chest. What was most disconcerting for me, however, was my sense that Browere’s portrait, though “cast from life,” and surely, therefore, an accurate and unmistakeable rendering of “the man himself,” didn’t look like the Jefferson I would recognize. I feared that if I were to use Browere’s portrait as the basis for my own portrait of Jefferson, I might end up with a cluster of viewers whispering to each other, “who’s that?” Or worse: “that doesn’t look anything like Thomas Jefferson!” Of course, an prominent nameplate, in bold-face type, could dispel such comments, but that would hardly be much satisfaction to me. Naturally, I wanted to achieve a “speaking likeness,” not some puzzling visage requiring an identification tag!

I had similar reservations about using Thomas Sully’s 1821 oil portrait (when Jefferson was 78), and even Gilbert Stuart’s 1805 oil portrait (when Jefferson was 62), though this latter portrait was used as the basis of the Jefferson image on the two-dollar bill (as though this could be much help).

In fact, I had begun modeling a portrait of Jefferson on the basis of these two paintings. But one afternoon, as the portrait was beginning to take shape, I stepped back to evaluate my progress, and was indeed struck with the discomfiting realization that absent a name, I don’t think I know who this guy is!

It was at that point that I fully realized my dilemma: I was attempting a portrait of Thomas Jefferson which was both historically accurate, and immediately recognizable. I felt that my mistake was in beginning with historical accuracy, in starting with Jefferson as he may really have appeared, when he was “an old man,” a “senior citizen.” But we don’t know him as an old man! In our “national memory,” Thomas Jefferson is, and will forever be, above all else, the youthful, idealistic, and splendidly handsome author of the Declaration of Independence. If you don’t believe me, search his name in Google Images.

I understood that I must begin not from the actual Jefferson of factual history, registered in contemporary likenesses, but from the iconic images of a mythic Jefferson enshrined in the American Mind. What iconic images? Take a look at Jefferson’s profile on his nickel. That’s the Jefferson we know, daily passing his image through our millions of fingers, like a talisman. Think of Mount Rushmore, our holy shrine of Great Presidents, Jefferson’s chiseled visage, hundreds of feet high, with its far-seeing gaze looking grandly out across a continent. This.

Fortunately, myth can have its basis in fact. I felt certain that the iconic Thomas Jefferson image which is stamped on our nickels, cast in our bronzes, and chiseled out of a sacred Native American mountain, was derived in part, at least from the 1789 marble portrait sculpture by Jean Antoine Houdon.

We know this portrait of Thomas Jefferson—or rather the derivations from it--though we probably don’t know Houdon.  He was an eighteenth century French sculptor famous in his own day for his marble portrait busts of “nobility,” including King XVI and the Emperor Napoleon. (There were many other very accomplished portraitists at this time, too.) When I first began doing portrait sculptures, I studied, at length, excellent photographs of his portraits busts, in an oversized book borrowed from the Virginia Tech Art & Architecture Library. I marveled at Houdon’s technique, the vitality and life-life effects he was able to achieve. The eyes of his marble portrait busts appeared so astonishingly real that I was almost persuaded that he must have inserted glass eyes. I decided from my study that sculpture for Houdon was all about light and shadow, rather than about mass and volume. It was therefore a huge pleasure for me, several years later, to visit the National Portrait Gallery, and view a special exhibit of Houdon’s great works, and come face-to-face with his “speaking likenesses.”

But I digress. Having decided that my starting point for a portrait of Thomas Jefferson would need to be the young Jefferson of the American Mind, rather than the old Jefferson of historical reality, I stopped sculpting the clay model which I had already begun, based upon the Gilbert and Sully oil portraits, when Jefferson was 61 and 78, respectively. I began again, this time working from a reproduction of the Houdon bust which I had purchased at Monticello. Satisfied that I now had a Jefferson we would recognize, I turned to a police text, Forensic Art and Illustration, by Karen Taylor, and gave Mr. Jefferson the evidence of his years: jowls, wrinkles, headache lines in his forehead, a sunkenness in his cheeks--all the painfully earned marks of growing physical, financial, and familial troubles. For while 1819 was the year his beloved University of Virginia was formally chartered, it was also the year of a shocking event: Jefferson’s grandson, Jeff Randolph was stabbed in a fight, and nearly died from the wound; worse, the assailant was Charles Bankhead, the husband of Jeff Randolph’s sister, Ann. These troubles, and more, are recounted in vivid and intimate detail, in Twilight at Monticello.

One more thing: Houdon, like Browere, would make a lifemask, as well as compiling extensive tables of measurements, in preparation for a portrait. So, also like Browere, he visited Jefferson at Monticello, sat him down, and covered his face with plaster. But there’s no record of him having to use mallet and chisel to get it off!

Lost

 

On the morning of January 23^rd, overwhelmed by a complex brew of feelings and desperate, on an uncommonly warm and sunny day,  to escape from laboring in the studio on projects which had “stalled,” I got in my car and drove up to Mountain Lake for a hike.

            Though warm in Blacksburg, it was chilly on this mountain top. In a “normal” winter, there would have been snow on the ground. The resort was closed for the season. Nobody was around. I hiked without stopping straight up to the magnificent overlook behind the picturesque stone hotel, pausing long enough to see the New River, far down in the valley, snaking its way past bright cliffs. I hadn’t dressed for the wind though, so I kept going, down along the ledge rocks, through a copse of small trees, to the wide corridor of tall grasses under the powerline towers. Turning onto a gravel service road which led back into the woods, I soon came to a rustic stone bench, nicely made, and turned onto the 1.9 mile Bear Cliffs Trail.

I walked quickly, noting the new trail blazes—bright yellow patches on tree trunks, spaced every 25 yards or so. About halfway to the cliffs, I stopped to take pictures, of mossy outcrops and bent trees, brown leaves gleaming on the ground. A few minutes later, stair-stepping up and over a pile of slab rocks, moss and lichen covered, I lost the trail. I “scouted,”  then backed down the way I had come. I saw a trail leading left, skirting the rocks. I followed this—a faint track—stopping every few feet and turning around, to be sure I would recognize my way back. I found a trail blaze—whitish, this time, an old one. Walking forward, and turning back every few steps, I came suddenly upon a deep, rocky crevice, with a screen of trees on the opposite side, and beyond, another vista. I bent over, looking down into the crevice. There were strewn boulders at the bottom, and cave-like hollows: a good place for bears. Had I arrived already at Bear Cliffs?  This was to be the climax of the hike, where I would explore, take pictures, exhilarate in the view, and in my own sense of adventure.  But these expectations were overridden now by anxiety. I lingered only briefly, and turned back, disappointed, but uneasy.

         Through the trees I saw the familiar pile of slab rocks, to my left. Good!  But when I arrived at the spot where I comfortably expected to turn right, and find the trail home, I could not discern my way. I took a few steps, this way, and that. Suddenly, I’d lost my bearings. I could see no trail; and then trails seemed to lead off everywhere. Bright light—like being in an over-exposed photograph, wind, small, twisted trees all around, silence. I thought: this is what it’s like to be lost. This is the state of mind people fall into. I imagined myself wandering, exhausted, at nightfall, shivering in the cold. I visualized the character in Jack London’s, To Build a Fire, clumping wildly through the woods on frozen feet.

           I struggled to maintain my composure—my god, imagine the embarrassment of calling 911, I thought, and having to be ‘rescued’! I walked slowly, searching for trail sign: flattened leaves, scuffed rocks. Then, yes! A marker I recognized. I turned around, and saw it plainly, a signboard hanging crookedly on a tree, to the right of the slab rocks: Bear Cliffs, in yellow letters, with an arrow. I had been lost. I had gotten off the trail. I turned toward home. As I came down the Bear Cliffs Connector Trail toward the lake, and my car, I thought of John Muir, with his little knapsack, tramping exuberantly, alone, for weeks at a time, through the vast Yosemite wilderness. What a great spirit he was!

         That night, my wife Ann, sensitive to my moods, as always, asked me what was wrong. I struggled to describe my feelings, and the reasons for my feelings. “I don’t know,” I said, over and over, between long pauses. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”  She waited for more. But I couldn’t seem to articulate anything more. Me! Who was so comfortable teaching American Literature, and leading discussions on novels, and analyzing the complex motivations of characters—and yet who at this moment, when it really counted, could produce no understanding of my own motivations!

        Finally, I described, haltingly, the hike, and getting lost—or at least, the feeling of being lost, which, though total, might actually have only lasted for a minute or two. At once, Ann climbed out of bed, saying, “I have a poem for you.” She returned a few minutes later with a scrap of paper in her hand, and read aloud the following poem, by David Wagoner (from Collected Poems 1956-1976):

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are  not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where  you are. You must let it find you.

Exit David

     Though the figure of David is small, I had expended a large amount of time on him—more than on Goliath, who was two or three times bigger. Why are Big Bad Guys more interesting than Small Good Persons?

     Size was a factor, for sure: at 14” or so, and with his heavily-muscled body, exaggerated posture, and extreme facial expression, Goliath was better suited to my fingers and tools, and simpler to characterize. David, on the other hand, being a mere 6” or so, and of slender build and serene expression, and built around such small armature wire, was a real challenge. I changed his position again and again; I improved, or tried to improve, the accuracy of his anatomy & musculature;  I browsed through Google Images and You Tube, for help depicting the “proper” techniques for sling throwing (discovering, of course, a world of sling throwing methods—Apache, Comanche, Greek, etc); I worked to give better definition to his facial expression, on a head hardly bigger than a peach pit.

     Finally, I felt satisfied: Ah! Now I have him! Then I stepped back, revolve the whole sculpture, evaluating David from every angle, and became dissatisfied all over again: I’d worked him over too much! He’d gotten older—no doubt because I’d been modeling from myself, in a mirror—and he looked vaguely like Clark Kent, mild-mannered and indisputably Western European. Hardly a shepherd boy from Biblical times. Michelango wasn’t troubled by the lack of historical veracity, in carving out his magnificent, Grecian David--GQ in marble; nor was Donatello, whose David is lightly poised, with girlish beauty, over the head of Goliath. But I was bothered.

     Finally, the Radical Edit, one of my favorite strategies, and voila! Exit David. Leaving Goliath to claim the field, in his agony of collapse.

    

     Brilliant! Hmm. Maybe. No, just unfinished. But now what?

David & Goliath

In early 2011, I saw on the front cover of the Christian Science Monitor magazine, a photograph of a group of Taliban fighters: a few men in turbans and sandals, holding an assortment of weapons, and with ammo pouches like small purses slung over the shoulders of their long turbans. The photograph begged the question: how was it possible that such men could effectively combat, for ten years, the United States of America, the greatest military power in the history of the world?

During the same period I had studied this picture of Taliban fighters, I was, along with millions of other Americans, hearing and reading a lot about the “Arab Spring” protest movements in Egypt, and the eventual overthrow of Hosni Mubarek, the strong-featured dictator who had been in power for decades. Who could have imagined that young people with cellphones and Facebook connections could have toppled such a autocrat, with his secret police, vast wealth, obsequious and corrupt political system?

Under the influence of such images and news reports, I began a sculpture based upon the Biblical story of David and Goliath: Goliath, the nuclear bomb of his age, from whom whole armies fled in panic; and David, a shepherd boy with a throwing sling and the power of God in his arm, who walked out calmly upon the field of battle, in sight of thousands of his trembling countrymen—and felled the giant with a stone to the head.

In my first version of this mythic encounter, I presented the two combatants just as David is launching his killing stone: Goliath stands like a monolith, arrayed in all his battle gear. David, slender and lightly muscled, clad in a simple, one-piece tunic, has just released the stone, with a pitcher’s accuracy. There is a moment, or so I imagined, just before the stone strikes, when giant and boy make eye-contact, and recognize their kinship: Goliath had once been such a shepherd boy; and David will become a king, capable in his own right of cruelty and abuse of power.

I liked this first presentation, which was completed in August of 2011. However, over a span of three months or so, my enthusiasm began to wane. I’d stop and look at the sculpture, and see problems: David’s sling, and thin arms, would be hard to mold, and harder to cast. Worse, I felt  the absence of evident and dynamic relationship between giant and boy, as forms. And finally, regrettably, I had to concede that I’d gotten engrossed in Goliath’s “war decorations”: the breastplate and bucklers, straps and spikes; the feather in his wild hair. I love that stuff! But too much detail clutters.

So I went back to work, and over a period of about three months, as you can see from this succession of images, began a process of  extreme deconstruction, and then rebuilding and readjustment, searching for fundamentals. These fundamentals involve both “narrative content,” and “formalistic elements”—the size, placement, and relationship of the physical forms.

I stripped off most of Goliath’s war gear: the huge shield and broadsword, his breastplate and leather strap hung with scalps, the feather in his hair. I replaced these extraneous items with more muscle and massiveness. He’s powerful enough in his physical arrogance alone. I also made him uglier in the face, almost monstrous—difficult to do, when I realized that I had given him strong, handsome features, because in some way he had been charismatic to me!

The really important change with Goliath was to push him backwards, off balance.  I became more conscious of this after talking with Robert Smith, a friend and Tai-Chi instructor, who noted that it just takes a little upward lift to upset the balance of even a large, strong person. So I even lifted one of Goliath’s feet off the ground: a giant, teetering. Also, with his leg up, and arms splayed out, he’s become a “multi-planar” form, rather than, as he was at first, “uni-planar”—a wall—which heightens the sense of precarious moment, and impending disaster.

In thinking of David, I thought of Tiger Woods, with his long, slender form, extended even further by the shank of his golf club, winding up like a corkscrew—and then unwinding, to strike a ball about the size of the stone which David had loaded in his sling. That stone, when it struck Goliath, must have been travelling at least as fast as a baseball: 90 or 100 mph! Goliath, equipped for “conventional warfare,” and mockingly impervious to spears, swords, and clubs, was utterly unprepared for David’s tiny weapon, which, launched from a distance, only needed 2” or so of impact area at the thin skull plate of Goliath’s forehead.

Yet while manipulating clay, tools, and my fingers around David’s figure (about 5” tall) was challenging enough, figuring out how to mold/cast his sling—a mere thread—left me with “no good solutions.” Thinking conceptually and technically of David himself as the essential weapon helped immeasurably.  If he is the real stone and sling, then the stone picked from a creek, and leather strap gripped in his fist are only mechanical devices, and could be dispensed with. Then my wife Ann suggested that I depict David in the instant after he has released the stone, or at the completion of his “follow-through.” This was a great suggestion, allowing me to try to convey that powerful, unwinding release of energy.  And maybe I could also leave out the sling, except as a remnant of strap.

Now, again, rest: set aside David and Goliath. Return later, stroke the chin, and consider . . . .

Wagner Witte3 Gallery

Where Word & Art meet and spark,
An arc across the sky ensues--or so it seems--
Until the cosmos intervenes.
Though 'writ on water' we may be,
What delights are here for thee!

And one of those delights, for me, has been the chance to exhibit a broad selection of my sculptural works in the Wagner Witte3 Gallery, in downtown Easton, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Thanks to gallery co-owners Jen Wagner (an awesome and energetic mosacis artist) and Kathleen Witte (a woman with a quick eye for "what works"), and longtime friends Steve Leocha and Renny Johnson, I have felt warmly welcomed. With Steve's excellent advice and ready assistance in arranging the sculptural works  (and with loan of tables and cloths from Sharon Stockley, a WWG glass & metal artist), I was able to stand back, in the late afternoon of December 15th, 2011 ("last year"--already), and say to myself: "Great!" "Best Ever!"

While in Easton, perhaps as prelude to its annual November "Waterfowlers' Festival," when a huge number of visitors converge on the town for an arts festival which features wildlife-related paintings and sculpture, I had two unusual "bird experiences": I supped on goose which I saw shot from the sky, and I watched a pair of bald eagles wheeling in the wind.