Ancient Places (21 page)

Early on, Wehr’s collecting bug extended to agates and unusual shells, which he connected to the kind of timeless beauty he always felt in the presence of fine art. “When I was young,” he wrote later, “I had no inkling that in time I’d become a paleontologist. But
everywhere I went I came upon traces of ancient life.”

A pair of accomplished musical scores Wehr wrote in high school helped him gain entry to the University of Washington in 1947. Within two years he had won a fellowship for his original compositions. When one of his professors took a brief vacation, Wes—slight of frame, blue-eyed, full of enthusiasm, and not yet twenty years old—found himself teaching piano composition to Mark Tobey, by then pushing sixty and well established as a world art star. The two became lifelong friends, and Tobey introduced Wehr to Seattle’s bohemian art scene. Tobey kept a piano wherever he lived, and always played his newest creations for Wehr; both men also shared an interest in natural artifacts and occasionally toured the mineral collections at the Burke Museum together.

Mark Tobey cultivated associates on a high level, and Wehr was never shy about tagging along. “Wes had this
weird sense for famous people,” one of his colleagues recalled. “I don’t know why.” Wehr developed a habit of scribbling down snippets of conversations with his eminent friends, and eventually used them as the raw material for a pair of memoirs.

When poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Seattle to teach writing classes, Wes sat in on her sessions and began another extended friendship. Around 1960, at a time when he was struggling with his musical career, he took up painting, creating tiny
impressionistic landscapes with wax crayons.
“I tried to paint landscapes that were like the mysterious vistas I saw in polished petrified wood from the Ginkgo Petrified Forest near Vantage, in eastern Washington,” he explained. “Or like the ‘landscapes’ in polished thunder egg agates from the Oregon desert.” Wehr carried his small works around in a battered briefcase and would whip them out to show friends in coffee shops around town. Elizabeth Bishop was charmed, and for Wehr’s first exhibit in the mid-1960s, she contributed a gallery note praising the painter’s
“chilling sensation of time and space.” In private, the poet made a point of telling Wes he needed to widen his scope of experience. Around the same time, Mark Tobey, who at first had also encouraged Wes’s painting, offered a critique that Wehr recorded in one of his notebooks: “Your landscapes have a nice poetic quality. But I can’t always tell how strong your artistic will is.… Maybe you need to go do something else for a while—maybe some rockhounding.
Or go to the Oregon coast and collect some more agates.… That interest of yours in agates and fossils is going to save your neck in the long run, I predict!”

Wehr hardly needed encouragement along those lines. As a lark, he and a companion fired off a package to Hermann Hesse that contained profuse appreciation for his books, some petrified wood from eastern Washington, and a polished agate nodule from the Oregon desert: “This stone was called a ‘thunder egg’ by the early Indians,” they explained to Hesse. The great author replied with a small book of reproductions of his own watercolor landscapes.

Wes also used ancient stones to build a relationship with the philosopher
Susanne Langer, who in the 1940s and ’50s produced rigorous but popular books focused on theories of art and seeing. Langer provided a wellspring not only of analytical thought but
also of clear observation that could bridge artistic and intellectual boundaries. Wehr loved the fact that she always carried her cello with her wherever she traveled but still knew how to make a picnic for the field; when he visited Langer in New York State, they would comb famous trilobite sites for curios to take home. Like Tobey, Langer was almost four decades older than Wehr, and she wielded considerable influence on his mind.

“It’s nearly impossible for me to figure out now just when and how I began to evolve toward becoming a paleobotanist,” he wrote later.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Wehr continued to ride into the wild with artist friends to explore the essence of things. Often their destination was the dry side of the Cascades, where they could search Crab Creek for petrified wood or climb talus slopes in Moses Coulee to peer into rock shelters. “In the desert
at night,” Wehr ruminated, “looking at the basalt cliffs and the full moon above them, I began to visualize what the landscape had once been. Those nights in the desert became meditations on how all things change: the landscape, human relationships, and the values that dominate one’s life from season to season.”

Curious about the formal geology that lay beneath these landscapes, he
began to correspond with George Beck, a geology professor at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. Beck had begun exploring significant Miocene fossil sites in the Columbia Basin in 1925, and as a classical violinist, he also displayed the kind of artist’s sensibility that appealed to Wehr. In 1934, Beck published the first major paper about a petrified forest exposed above the Columbia River crossing at Vantage. Over the next several years, he played a key role in establishing Gingko Petrified Forest State Park, which interpreted this fifteen-million-year-old environment for the general public. Wehr counted Beck as an important mentor and joined him for digs at Ginkgo and various other Miocene sites in Yakima Canyon.

Wehr also continued his artistic pursuits, experimenting with melted crayons to produce effects that could be compared to the way hot magma metamorphoses geologic strata. He made friends with Seattle artist Joseph Goldberg, who was advancing his own encaustic techniques. They were both interested in beautiful stones and together made several visits to eastern Washington and Oregon—not digging for fossils, but stopping at rock shops in search of high-grade agates and thunder eggs. The pair would line up all the moss agates in whatever new store they came across, then study the green-chrome or rusty-iron filigree traced across milky quartz fields and judge which one was aesthetically best. It was clear to Goldberg that
Wehr had a very pure eye for both art and agates, and that he was a hell of
a painter. He was disappointed when Wes began spending less time melting crayons and more time swinging a rock hammer.

Wehr himself did not see such a clear distinction between art and science. His correspondence with professional paleobotanists carried the same fervor that he applied to his artistic friends, and his sharp eye for detail served him well in his outdoor avocation. In 1976, the Burke Museum named Wes an affiliate curator of paleobotany. The post came without a salary, but it did provide Wehr with a small office space and gained him access to the Burke’s extensive collections and network of researchers.

Several of those
associates recognized the quality of Wehr’s work and always seemed to come up with funds for proposed field trips. His journey to the Okanogan Highland town of Republic with Kirk Johnson was only one of many that bore fruit.

In 1985, Wes Wehr dropped by Spokane’s Cheney Cowles Museum to pitch an exhibit on the work of Helmi Juvonen, one of his many west-side artist friends. The response was favorable, and Wehr accepted an offer of modest funds for travel and loan arrangements. After Helmi passed away, Wehr pressed on with the project, procuring all the items for the exhibit. At the opening he gave a talk to patrons, and after the exhibit closed he arranged permanent donations of several of the artist’s pieces to the museum.

Although Mark Tobey, the acknowledged flag bearer of the Northwest School of art, had died in Switzerland a decade previously,
Wehr told the museum’s curator that over the years he had presented Tobey with numerous rocks, fossils, and crystals that had influenced the master’s art. Even now, he suggested, he had access to enough Tobey material to mount a second exhibit.
In 1988, Wes arranged for loans of several of Tobey’s minerals and personal effects archived at the Burke Museum, then called on several private collectors to supply a variety of original graphic art for the exhibit. He juxtaposed these framed pieces with the Burke artifacts, set in clear vitrine boxes, in order to highlight their impact on Tobey’s thinking. The artifacts included many of Wehr’s personal favorites, from fine jasper and obsidian to fossil ocean shells to one butter-smooth fragment of a Chinese walnut tree that during the Miocene had flourished in Yakima Canyon.

A fossilized water fern, genus
Azolla,
hailed from Republic in the Okanogan Highlands.
Azolla
’s leafy stems were etched black on a buff-colored mudstone slab that dated back to the Eocene, fifty million years before the show, and somehow seemed to capture the best of Tobey’s intentions. For much of the artist’s career, Tobey would insist that his wildly abstract art dealt with the real world, reflecting his attempt to balance science and spirituality according to his understanding of the Baha’i faith. The comparisons in the exhibit allowed one local reviewer to take the artist’s point to heart.
“After viewing the patterns and designs in Tobey’s collection of rocks and fossils,” she wrote, “I can see what he means.”

When the show closed, Wehr funneled several permanent donations of works by Tobey and associated Northwest School artists to the museum’s nascent collection. A couple of them had been created by Wehr himself, whose own position in the Seattle art scene was based on his small land- and seascapes. As a second signature style, Wehr later executed black spidery figures that reminded some people of dendrites, those branching mineral stains that seep to life inside layers of stone.
In keeping with Wehr’s preferred scale, these creatures were the size of postcards.

In 1991, the Spokane museum premiered another exhibit titled
Environmental Solitude,
which jointly displayed works by Wes Wehr and encaustic master Joseph Goldberg. At the opening, a reporter described Wehr as dressed like an academic; shy to the point of stammering yet eager to talk about both art and paleobotany; standing alone in a corner but cajoling anyone who entered his orbit to inscribe their contact information into his well-worn address book—Wes always said he’d like to stay in touch. In the interview, Wehr played down his artwork to focus on a fossil project he was involved in three hours north of Spokane. Ancient leaf imprints there had attracted the attention of an eminent British paleobotanist, who, by chance, was on hand to attend the exhibit premier.
“The interesting thing for me tonight is that my life is divided between paleontology and painting, and that’s a very good life,” Wehr said. “Have a painting showing, take off tomorrow on a field trip …”

Even as Wehr was participating in exhibits at the Spokane museum during the 1980s and ’90s, he was running back and forth between a host of isolated fossil sites—always on the move, always with a mission, always displaying an almost desperate need to show off pretty objects and to connect people with each other. The curator grew accustomed to receiving postcards announcing that Wes would arrive the next day on the bus from Republic. On these occasions, he never forgot to bring her a small fossil as a gift. She filed away dozens of his terse postcards and tiny stone imprints, but whenever she asked Wehr exactly what he was digging, he would answer curtly: “We found some
stuff,” or “It was very hot out there,” or “I’m completely worn out.” And that was about it.

“He never really told me much of what was going on up there,” the curator recalled. “It was like a different world.”

All of Wes Wehr’s paleontological cohorts acknowledge that his artful eye helped him clearly visualize the tightly compressed and often baffling figures etched into fossil-bearing stones. He had a way of recognizing significant lines, of reconstructing smashed features in his mind. As his interest in the discipline grew, he took the time to learn about analogous living flowers, developing his basic intuitive sense of what looked artistically interesting into an understanding of what, in the botanical scheme of things, might be significant.

During the 1980s Wehr showed some fossil conifer material to a professor at the University of Montana, and the two started working together, most specifically in Yakima Canyon. One of the slabs Wes passed along contained an undescribed extinct species of fossil fern, and
his Montana cohort named it
Osmunda wehrii.
For the first time, Wes had his own name entered in the precisely ordered address book of life on earth.

Meanwhile, Wehr and a growing band of professional collectors continued to turn up new Eocene fossils at various locations around Republic. Along with a wide range of community members and a visionary city administrator, they decided they needed to share this bounty with the world, just as George Beck had with the Gingko forest. Their plan called for both a museum and a public digging site on Boot Hill that would be available simultaneously for serious scientific research, public education, and amateur enthusiasts.

As the concept took shape, Wes continued to crack fossil slabs at a furious rate. He also, for the first time, began to transform his copious notes into popular articles. One of his earliest publications laid out the promise of fossil plants at Republic and other Okanogan Highland sites. Wehr described how the middle Eocene epoch in these highlands had seen the rapid appearance and diversification of several significant groups of flowering plants, including roses, maples, saxifrages, heaths, and soapberries. “Today, 48–49 million years later,” he wrote,
“is a time for the similarly rapid appearance and diversification of many theories about their origins, botanical affinities, and geographical distributions.”