I know Anastasia and Aaron because Anastasia is one half of “The Musical Mountaineers.
I’d reached out to the Musical Mountaineers to do a tinyboatsession. For the location, it turned out that Anastasia and Aaron lived in the perfect spot to collaborate a song in a tiny boat and a song on a mountain. It’s a tiny lake in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains that is an hour away and feels like million miles from everything. After we wrapped up the initial Musical Mountaineers/ Tinyboatsession, Anastasia told me she and her husband play music and perhaps sometime later we would shoot another tinyboatsession with them. She also mentioned some unbelievable sightings of some other forest-dwelling musicians that the two of them saw on their hikes every once in a while and showed me some footage they had collected and called “The Make Believables.”
Several months later, I came up and did another tinyboatsession with them on their beautiful lake. Afterward, I got to know Anastasia and Aaron better. Aaron used to work on boats and now builds trains—by build train, I mean he’s the guy that literally organizes what and how each car goes together in a giant railyard! Anastasia used to work in the Forest Service and then law enforcement for the railroad. They met through trains, married and later she changed careers and now runs Kula cloth, which is an antimicrobial pee wipe folks can use over and over in lieu of using lots of toilet paper out in the woods. Besides that, she does poetry, dancing, and hikes up to mountains to play songs and goodness knows what else! -Jordan & Clarabelle