Capt. B's Earthship Log

June 19, 13026 Colorado Times Recorder

Jul 02, 2026

THREE EXCEPTIONAL WOMEN

by Art Goodtimes

KATRINA BLAIR ... If you lived in Durango, you knew Katrina. Her family was prominent. Her dad a geomorphologist at the Fort. He founded the Mountain Studies Institute originally to be a Silverton-based repository for all the extant scientific papers about the San Juan Mountains. As a county commissioner, I joined an early board. Her dad and I and Katrina loved Dolores LaChapelle. Helped scatter her ashes into the waterfalls of South Fork Mineral Creek ...

But Katrina was a miracle woman herself. Starting Turtle Lake Refuge. Building a community of earth stewards. Turning a pesticide company parking lot into a model orchard and garden. Running a weekly wild food restaurant. Making a whole line of herbal weed delights for local organic groceries and farmers markets. Writing cookbooks and compendiums on edible invasives and native treasures she gathered in the wild. For the past 15 years every August trekking from Durango to Telluride, six nights, usually alone, often with only oil and spices in her pack, eating and collecting wild foods (including mushrooms) and hosting fabulous Wild Food Dinners at the Telluride Mushroom Festival ...

But those are just what she did. What she accomplished in this world. Who she was was far more amazing. Rita Marsh said she “lived with an incredible lightness of being.” Rayna Grant called her “Spirit sister of the wild realms. Whisperer to plants and fungi.” Mycologist Tradd Cotter said she was “such an incredible soul sister to us all and an icon of the festival.” Kaki Hunter called her “a blessed human filled with light that radiated through those iridescent beaming blue eyes.” Turtle Lake’s Libby Kirpatrick spoke of her “generous fluorescent magnetism” and said for her Katrina was “host to the jet stream portal of how to live a simple beautiful life beneath a cliff in turtle valley where the stars touch my soul...”

Katrina

A little wild girl in love with

the zing & sparkle of

every bitty thing

Especially what we call

weeds

funga & flowering bouquets

who never lost

the girl nor the wild

the bigger she got

so big

she fills the whole voluptuous

garden beds of my heart

YOUR VERDICT ... I’ve been friends with Jacqueline St. Joan since our late mutual friend Paul Klite, gypsy fiddler at the Telluride Mushroom Festival, dragged us around the Denver jazz scene one balmy night. Actually, even before that. We met at a poetry reading where she said I was “a poetry explosion ... flying apart.” Which I took as a great compliment. And we’ve shared poetry ever since, performing together recently at Denver’s West Side Books & Curios in Highlands ...

But she is more than a poet. Her first book, My Sisters Made of Light (2010), was an American Association of University Women book-of-the-month selection and raised $25,000 for building a shelter in Punjab, Pakistan for abused women with children. Her second The Shawl of Midnight (2022) was a sequel, both published by Golden Antelope Press. And her short stories and non-fiction have appeared widely ...

Like her namesake, she’s passionate about causes. And in Jackie’s case, specifically about human rights. So, it’s only a little surprising that this lawyer’s career morphed into a municipal judgeship in the Mile High metropolis. But not without bumps in the road, especially for a convention-breaking feminist activist. Check out her website: www.jacquelinestjoan.com ...

Her new memoir, subtitled A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss, picks us up for an on-the-road trip back aboard a DC childhood bus with a union musician father, whose backbeats instilled the wordplay in her bones, and a Catholic FBI typist mother, whose corn-pone treble inspired her pen. And then a powerful legal system spin along Colfax Ave. This isn’t a feel-good story. Nor an urban dystopia piece. St. Joan, as one reviewer wrote, “was a controversial Denver judge during the turbulent ‘80s”. And the book takes an honest look at the bench behind both open and closed doors. And even deeper into her personal closet. Good times and bad times. Public and private ...

Only don’t expect a dry paper sack loaded with of unwrapped litigation stories. This book is juicy. We learn about personal and professional traumas that slammed doors in her face. And how -- in naming herself and writing her own story with “no man to get her through this very smoky night” -- she banged her gavel on the polished wood and pronounced judgment: “like amnesiacs / in a ward on fire, we must / find words / or burn” ...

And as if that wasn’t enough. She ends the tale with her dazzling Memoir Poems, like this one:

Restraining Order

I am watching the freckles

on the back of my fingers

multiply and divide like

lovers under the lens. The

speaker at my podium

says: He’s my pimp. Tore

a branch from a tree. Beat

me. The branch broke

I am lifting the law books

down, a browning obsolete

boulder older than I am,

the weight of a witness

of losses. The letters of the

law chew on my fingernails,

and now she is saying:

Choked me ... can’t

remember the rest.

I am skin closed in

this chair in this black cloth

swallowing more water these days

staying tempered, staying cool,

a surgeon dusting her hands

for powder burns, and suddenly

I look at her, wide-eyed, broken:

He shouted he’d kill me. I don’t know if he will

I am blotting the battered bench

with a clawed Kleenex, aligning my

pencils just so. She says justice. She says

justice. She says: He dragged me by my hair.

My head broke the mirror.

Do you need to see the pictures?

FAV FOOD OF THE MONTH ... This bag of Ranier Organics sweet cherries I’m munching at the computer from Selah, Washington, that I bought at Wild Gals Market in Naturita today – down the San Miguel Watershed from Wrights Mesa where I live.

TALKING GOURD ... Our little Western Slope poetry sangha lost another amazing fairy child goddess with our cello poet gypsy Kyra Kopestonsky’s recent passing. Here’s the poem our Bard of the San Juans, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wrote in her honor:

It Sounds So Improbable

She faced, for an hour, a mountain lion.

She made noise. She spoke to it.

Eventually she sang to it.

Today, I return to the place where

my friend learned that just because

something can kill you doesn’t mean it will.

Eventually, the cancer did take her.

It’s true. But first she lived with it.

For years. First she played cello,

belly danced, snuggled with cats

and climbed with goats. First she sat

with me on the couch and giggled

and snuggled and read. First she knit

me a deep red shawl because I’m afraid of red.

First we sat by the river and made daisy chains

for each other’s long dark hair.

It sounds so improbable, but she met

the great cat and the cancer and her life

and her friends in the same great way—

with gentleness. She carried

a big stick not to swing but to pull

through the brush to make music.

She was a listener, a walker, a maker,

a lover of life. It sounds so improbable,

but she valued kindness above all else.

In the end, the mountain lion, after letting

my friend know full well she’d been seen,

it folded its ears and walked away.

In the end, the cancer traveled to her bones.

In the end, my friend will be known

for her gentleness, for how the tenderest touch,

the smallest note of love, the one most honest word

is the best way to make the whole world lean in.