Painting Daze

Fran and Syd take time out of the field to paint the office.

It’s a strange sensation, switching from field to office and back again. For days the only walls I experience are bits of nylon held together by p-cord and decorated in desert dirt. I become accustomed to the vibrancy of Sonoran colors; dark oranges, gritty browns, and soft greens that fade to gray within the city limits. But to be successful in the field we have to sometimes be in the office, talking on phones, typing on computers, and surrounded by walls that are much more permanent. These are walls that are 6 inches thick and stretch from floor to ceiling; a structure I did not build and can not touch. My eyes wander and sometimes I catch the excitement of a smudge of dirt left over from where a crew leader leaned against my wall during last week’s debrief. I stare at the smudge and wonder what great, wide open spaces they are currently experiencing. As I stare the memory of a conversation comes back to me.

“I’m going to paint my walls green,” Jean said in passing, “Well, it’s more of a teal. I already have the paint. You should paint yours too.”

A seed was planted, and a project was born, and SCC does their projects well. Within weeks colors began splashing up onto the walls of SCC Sonoran Desert. Purple came first, like the lavender just before the sun gives way to the first stars. It is the purple you find at the bottom of sunsets, and is what I am looking at right now, as my fingers take their journey across the keyboard. Next came Jean’s green. It is a muted green somewhere between the shade of a naked Staghorn Cholla and a young Jojoba bush.

For a few days we were satisfied with the gentle splash of color, but then the cravings for more began. We acquired a five gallon bucket of brown. The shade has inspired comparisons to many things, but none of them are quite true. To me it is the color of the rare bits of soil that have the courage to run around after a gentle winter storm. The brown stretches around us as we travel from office to office collecting comments and delivering details wrapped in the latest quips.

After all of this color we had only one wall left in our master plan to bring color to our office. Debates raged. “Make it blue! Make it Pink!” Our wall blushed shades of test paint beneath the scrutiny of the office staff until finally a decision had to be reached. Orange. Orange, like safety vest is orange? No. Orange, like a pumpkin is orange? Not quite. Orange like a flaming sunset turns orange? More gentle. Orange like this? Orange like THAT? No and no. It is just orange. It is its own, unique color. It is the color of our wall, at SCC.