I happened upon a Dérive today, sort of by accident. I'm glad I realized in time what was happening.

The beginnings were planned: yesterday I set out from my home in Western Massachusetts, intending to visit a particular art museum in Utica on the way to spend the evening with friends in Rochester. But my last few errands before leaving ended up taking most of my morning, so there was no stop in Utica for me as I rushed to Rochester to see my friends and meet their adorable new daughter. We talked until late at night, and slept late (for me) too.

At noon, I got on the road to finish my drive to Ohio. I'm going home for the wedding of one of my cousins. I had another side trip planned for today, but I thought I might ditch that too. Then an adventurous spirit got the better of me: so what if I wasn't at the farm in time for dinner tonight? I had made no promises. So I hauled out my directions to the Charles E. Burchfield Nature & Art Center in West Seneca, and hit the road.

A little background information: Charles Burchfield was an American watercolorist who grew up in the small town in Ohio where a lot of my relatives live, and he grew up drawing the woods in the area, the factories and houses on his way home from work (at a plant my grandfather would work at a few decades later, one street over from the house my grandfather would buy a few more decades later, in the same neighborhood where my mom's younger siblings would spend their teenage years). By the time he moved up to the Buffalo area he was in a realism phase, but the earlier works are fantastical, weird, and sometimes even eerie. He painted houses as if they have personality. He painted the heat of summer. He painted the cold of winter. It's AWESOME. The Nature & Art Center is on a patch of land that his house looked out over, and it has been made into a park.

The Nature & Art Center is on a wide avenue in the Gardenville part of West Seneca:


I got excited as soon as I saw the seal at the bottom of the sign: it's how CEB usually signed his works.

The area around the main building is surrounded by sculpture:



And also some very nice landscaping:


There was even a sculptural picnic shelter:



The park has a fair number of placards with information about the artist, some of them more helpful than others (since the Burchfield-Penney is actually completely closed for renovation right now, and believe me I checked):

But I think it was once I walked past this sign and heard the creek that I thought, "Holy crap, this is a Dérive!" and got very excited.



It turned out that the creek is wide and flat, basically a trough cut in the shale by the action of water (and I have to wonder if there was some glacier action going on too):


The water was shallow and warm, but refreshing. Upstream, people were wading and even floating a little in the deeper spots.




Duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh
Duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh
Bat Boxes!




The burls at the base of this tree were the sorts of natural fractal patterns that Burchfield loved to paint, and would have featured in one of his early spring works:



Totally creepy if you look close:



See?






















I don't get the chance to just go and wander around in the woods. Dérives are better with company, who wants to come with me the next time I go on a wild art chase?



Then it got even better: from the gazebo in the middle of the park,



You can see the windows of Burchfield's home (not open to the public), and how they look down on this land, and look across this creek. (Except you can't really make out the creek because it's running behind this group of trees. That wall in the background is the retaining wall below the street in front of the old Burchfield home.



This called for further wading in the creek, while chatting with some locals. A little boy came up and looked at me and whispered in his grandfather's ear while I was talking to grandpa, causing the grandfather to say: "Yes, she _is_ wearing a Red Sox t-shirt. Er, we're Yankees fans." "Yes, I am, and I was there last Saturday to watch your team beat the pants off us at Fenway." There ensued a conversation about visiting historic parks while you still can (only 2 more months of baseball at the current Yankee Stadium left!) and I discovered once again that among serious sports rivals there is a marvelous bond. But i didn't get any pictures of this part, because I thought they'd find it creepy to be photographed by a random tourist. So I just photographed myself wading some more.



And then a walk back on scratchy gravel,



By some bush I cannot identify but of which I had to take a photo,



Through the playground,



And back to so-called normal, civilized society.

Usually my breaks from driving involve coffee, rest stop bathrooms, and if I'm lucky, free wi-fi. But WADING? Best travel break ever. I was ready to get back on the road. (I-90 says hello, by the way.)


I have stopped at a Panera in Erie, PA because I couldn't wait to record this task, but now I really want to get home to mom and my brother and start thinking about tasks I can do at the farm. So I guess my Dérive is over, and it's back to the world of scheduled activities and timepoints. Also, I'm nearly out of laptop battery and I'm tired of road food. Adios!