Windstorm or no windstorm, Vop and I still had to take care of business. As independent guides, we each made the rounds to the various resorts to arrange guiding hours. A single excursion like that could give us bookings until the end of the summer, but the sooner we did it the better. The problem was it meant leaving “Stan the Steamer,” as we had taken to calling Vop’s rescue (he seemed to want to keep his namesake’s jersey), alone for the day. We were both concerned about leaving him unsupervised, but Vop hit on a very elegant solution. He remembered that Stan had been very excited when he saw the boxes of oil pastels that I kept in the spare room. Stan had pointed and even spoke—or at least, mumbled in his own language—a rare occurrence: “... farger, farger, det fanns sa manga farger...”
I got the pastels and some paper out and settled him into the spare room. By the time Vop and I left, he was happily making marks on the paper. We promised each other to get the visiting done as quickly as we could. It was similar to leaving a young child at home. We didn’t trust leaving Stan alone to his own devices.
Of course, hurrying was easier said than done. Just showing up, booking in a few dates, then leaving would have been considered bad manners. There was all that catching up to do. Each stop was more of the same. Births, deaths, marriages, and trips to exotic places—many things can happen over the course of a winter.
Vop and I arrived back at the same time, but it was getting late in the day. We were both hungry and a little afraid of what we might find inside the house. However, as it turned out, we had nothing to worry about. We found Stan still in the spare room. He had run out of the paper I had given him and had started in on covering a stack of old newspapers.
The spare room was adjacent to the woodshed, which housed some of the firewood and kindling, as well as news-papers used to start up the wood stove. There was now news-paper all over the room, each sheet carefully coloured in. Stan had blocked out the text in one colour, pictures in another, and he had worked his way through the whole pile. He had then turned to the firewood and had traced the grain of the wood using different colours to accentuate the changing shapes. Even the kindling had been treated in the same fashion. The level of detail and workmanship was incredible to see.
The storm eventually backed off and the plane finally arrived. By that time, what with all the food and warmth and engagement on his task, Stan was quite docile. We loaded him on the float plane with no trouble at all.
A few days later, I found Vop standing in front of the woodstove, holding one of the hand-coloured pieces of firewood. He was turning it over and looking at the way the grain had been outlined and traced in different colours.
He finally looked up and said to me, “So, Dave, you’re an artist. Do you think it’s okay to burn this stuff, or is it, you know, like art now?”