My building skills are pretty rusty at the moment, and I need something to inspire and motivate me. A chance conversation with a friend led me to this:
Hands bloodied and soaked from the waist down, Rudyard Kipling was happy. Not just happy, “utterly, supremely, and consummately happy,” the famed author wrote, lying on the bank of the Clackamas River next to the first salmon he’d ever caught.
Today, historians and fishermen say it was actually steelhead Kipling and his two companions nabbed that day in June 1889, but it’s a minor discrepancy in an otherwise fondly written account of the trip that has resonated with anglers and local residents for more than a century.
On Saturday, Kipling’s famously happy day on the Clackamas River near Carver will be commemorated when the Oregon Geographic Names Board is set to officially name a landmark boulder near where he fished “Kipling Rock.”
Let’s see: Oregon, steelhead, Carver… there’s a project in there somewhere.
I think my rusty but adequate building skills are up to the task to making a rock. And some water. And maybe some feesh, and a feeshpole. It would look nice on either my bit of land in Steelhead St Helens on the river side, or on Dhughan’s bit where he’s got parkland on the lake by a running stream. I could add an information signboard with links to the scholarly stuff my friend pointed out to me, and maybe create a readable book with the Oregon chapters of Kipling’s travelogue (his work is out of copyright). The time period is right, there’s historical photos galore, and it fits with another project I’ve had in mind for my little bit of Steelhead.
Now maybe I’ll finally figure out how to make a blobby sort of rock thing in Blender, and texture it. Seems simple enough…
UPDATE: November 19
Having some success with Blender at last, and just now ran across the official Oregon Geographical Naming Board meeting page with more information about Kipling Rock (and a much larger version of the color photo). It appears that this project can go forward over the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanks to Ms. Debra Wynn’s research and perseverance, a literary landmark exists in a small but pretty place in Oregon, and I hope to create a similar landmark in virtual form in Second Life.
Wish me luck, I’m off to crash the server!
In the meantime, there’s a pretty amusing and interesting biographical sketch here.
