My first Christmas away from home

Innsbruck

watercolour and oil pastel

©2018 Charlene Brown

Until the summer of 1963, I'd never really been anywhere but Alberta except for brief forays into Saskatchewan, BC and the American states of Montana, Idaho and Washington.  So, when I suddenly landed in Europe after working that summer in the Yukon Territory, the first thing I did was hitch-hike through a ridiculous number of countries to make up for lost time.  Then I started looking for a job near Innsbruck, so I would have a place to stay during the 1964 Winter Olympics.  

I got a job washing floors in a Krankenhaus on a mountain-side south of the city. One week after I started I was told that ‘my’ President had been shot. As I hadn’t yet acquired the 50-word German vocabulary one needs to wash floors in Austria, they practically had to act out Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas to get the message across. Even though Kennedy wasn’t my President, like many Canadians I thought he was terrific.  

It was a very lonely time until a joyous Tyrolean Christmas – despite the trauma of being my first Christmas away from home – worked its miracle a few weeks later. 

I used to live here

Wrangell-St. Elias Range from the Alaska Highway

crayon, watercolour and marker

©2025 Charlene Brown

Last week, I painted Pikes Peak near Colorado Springs to illustrate a blog post about a proposed energy transmission experiment, the Sun Train, running from a solar array at Pueblo, Colorado to Denver, about 170 kilometres to the north.  Colorado Springs is between the two.

This connection being rather tenuous, I didn’t include Pikes Peak when I added the Sun Train to a book of blog posts I’m compiling, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene.’

We’ve lived in Colorado Springs for a couple of years (in fact our younger daughter was born there) and the painting gave me an idea for a series of blog posts illustrating places I used to live. 

Full disclosure – I only spent one summer working at a lodge on the Alaska Highway, and our particular stretch of highway was nowhere near as picturesque as the part shown here (which was about 60 miles away).  We were surrounded by muskeg and you couldn’t even see the mountains.  The only accurate part of the painting is the late summer fireweed, with the blooms at the very top of their 8-foot stems and puffy white seed capsules on the withered flowers lower down. That’s what the fireweed lining our stretch of the highway looked like when I left in September heading to Anchorage to fly over the pole to Europe and the next place I was to live (almost as briefly).  I’ll write about that next week.

Experimental solution to electricity transmission problem

 

Pike's Peak and the Garden of the Gods

crayon and watercolour

©2025 Charlene Brown

In an Anthropocene article, Shipping Solar Power at the Speed of a Freight Train, Peter Fairley writes, “By charging up battery cars where renewable energy is cheap and delivering the power to where it’s needed, [a San Francisco start-up called The Sun Train hopes to show] railroads could break the clean energy transmission logjam.” They see freight cars packed with solar batteries transporting electricity obtained at a solar array near Pueblo, Colorado as the perfect way to by-pass the increasingly congested transmission grid in the Denver area.

The concept seems somewhat awkward, but if you consider other advantages like potential capacity increases and decreasing vulnerability of diversified transmission systems, they may have a practical solution.

Anyway, in looking for a way to illustrate this article so I could use it in a blog post, I came up with Pikes Peak, which is situated near Colorado Springs 70 km. north of Pueblo, about one third of the distance to Denver.

A great trip with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Retiro Park, Madrid                       Park Güell by Gaudi, Barcelona                                  Cantabria

Triptych of a trip not taken

watercolour, ink and marker

©2025 Charlene Brown

These are some of the locations I might have painted last September if I’d made it past the Seattle airport (where I fell and broke my arm) on the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria tour: Spain: Icons of Spanish Art - Goya, Velasquez, Picasso, Dali.

The Parque del Buen Retiro (Retreat) is a classic garden with “an Andulusian air” with delights ranging from this Cupid statue in the fountain in the Garden of Roses to the oldest tree in Madrid, a Mexican conifer planted in 1633.  

Park Güell is an enormous garden with stunning and distinct architectural elements designed by the same architect as the famous (not yet finished) Sagrada Familia  ̶  the renowned Antoni Gaudí.

Cantabria is on the northern coast of Spain, slightly off the beaten path from major tourist areas, but with mountains, beaches, stunning views and rich history, it is a “goldmine of authentic Spanish beauty.”  And great food, apparently.