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Going to CCS was the best investment I could make as a student -- the more I put into it, the more I got out of it. I found CCS ideally suited for a motivated student. I really appreciated the incredible support I received from the faculty. I'd waited 12 years before going to university. I'd taken off with my surfboard when I was 17 for France and ended up hitchhiking around the world. That led to living in Yucatan and documenting the contemporary Maya. I was learning a lot, however I began to appreciate how much I was a product of my own culture. Sitting in a jungle camp, I could learn Maya names for the flora and fauna, I could document their lives, I could do a lot of things, however I couldn't bring up Le Corbusier in a conversation. When I came back to the States I was selected as artist-in-residence for the state of Washington, which involved teaching K-12 and working on a lot of projects. When the districts decided every project I suggested was a great idea, I became dubious. I wanted to find out whether or not I could still think clearly and I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to go to a university. There were a lot of people who thought they were helping by trying to dissuade me saying I'd find it difficult being older (I was 32). And I'd also started working summers as a mule skinner and wrangler to support my Maya project. However it turned out to be a perfect mix. I could average over 30 units a quarter at CCS completely immersing myself in school, and then after two quarters, I would head off to work a season in the Sierra Nevada with 60 head of horses and mules who didn't argue about semantics or claim to be merely assuming the role of devil's advocate whenever they wanted to argue. After the first snows and the end of the season, we'd bring the stock down, turn them out for the winter, and I'd be ready again for CCS. CCS was a perfect venue for learning, for exploring what you don't know and finding someone to teach you, for making mistakes and being able to learn from them, for taking walking biology, for kissing a horse on the nose and not having someone think you were strange, where a guest lecturers would open new worlds for me. It was a place where you could get feedback for your work, where there was a lively intelligent community that supported experimentation, where you could print all night in the lithography/etching studio and a Dick Lovell, who was teaching the class, would bring a twelve pack and help pull prints until dawn. I learned good work habits. I still pull all-nighters, I'm still working on my Maya project (the first installment - The Modern Maya (Univ. Of New Mexico Press) was published in 1991), I'm now a contributing editor with National Geographic Traveler so I still get to travel, now with my wife. I'm happily married to a CCS graduate, Mary Heebner. We collaborate on a lot of projects so that life and art meld into one. We still attend lectures at the college, and I still like to kiss a horse on the nose.
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