Repainting Mineral King, Day Two

This is what greeted me at 8:30 a.m. on Day Two of repainting the Mineral King mural in Exeter.

The truck’s cab is at Mosquito Lakes; the bed is at Mineral Lakes. That’s one big truck.

See the little green car in the background? This truck could eat my car for breakfast. 

I stood on this stool to reach the upper trees. It was a little dicey, but I was very very careful. A woman driving a Tulare County Dial-A-Ride van came through and admonished me kindly, “Don’t get hurt!” I thought about it later – she drives all over the county giving rides to strangers and yet is concerned for my safety?

Larry came by and said, “I knew you would move up in the world”. I told him that it was a normal thing for people to get high when they are faced with difficult situations.

It is so very hot on this wall – continual and relentless heat and sunshine. Good thing it isn’t really hot out yet, because in the high 60s it feels like 100 degrees standing there. Each time I stepped back, I thought something like, “Holy cow, I have seriously underbid this job; what was I thinking? Was I thinking at all? How am I going to do this??”

During one of these sessions, I leaned against my other mural’s cold, cold wall and thought about things. Then I decided the closer slopes needed to be recoated with something less blue. I also decided to use a large brush and just slam a base coat of green on the forested area to be detailed later.

Alrighty, then. Now we’re getting somewhere.

At the end of Day Two (no, I am not going to use the tired cliche here), this is what we have. Perhaps on Day Three I will beep beep back up the truck and then stand on the ground to finish detailing that hill in the foreground.

I forgot how very noisy it is in a city. My mural seems to be located at Delivery Central – Challenge Butter, Farmer Bros. Coffee, some ice machine company, uniform delivery, Pepsi delivery – diesel engines all. Then there is the amplified telephone ring from the fire station, the noon whistle which almost knocks me off my ladder, and people’s conversations in the nearby parking lot. (Does everyone still overuse the word “like”? – sounds that way to me, just painting and eavesdropping and wondering. . .)