At The End Of The Yellow Brick Road

When you’re driving along the Mud Bay Road in Haines, Alaska, just before you turn onto the Chilkat State Park Road malarky of potholes and washboard, there is a small property that houses a couple of wizards. You’ll know the place by its sign, Extreme Dreams. Pull in.
Here, in this shop, John and Sharon Svenson sell their work. John is a glass artist and a watercolourist; Sharon makes glass mosaics.
They each have their own studios, in which there are kilns, there are sheets or sticks of glass in shimmering colours, there are cutting tools and sources of flame. There is everywhere evidence of two creative minds, busy making beauty, partly to sell but mostly for the love of creating.
“With a foundation in watercolour, I’ve been utilizing powdered glass and the heat of kilns to fuse multiple layers together, giving painterly effects,” said John. “Still primarily a painter, I had initially drifted to flameworking and fusing as a therapeutic alternative, but once going down that glass path, there is no turning back. My goal in life has been to enjoy what I’m doing and, so far, it has been nothing but fun!”
Sharon’s work has gradually and naturally evolved from woven tapestry to mosaics, she said. “Both involve fragments of colours assembled and arranged to make a picture or pattern. There is endless joy for me in this slow process.”
Sharon was born in Whitehorse and moved to Haines when she was three. After graduating high school in the late 1960s, she got the heck out to San Francisco for a couple of years. In those years she met John, a veteran of the Yosemite climbing scene. Together they moved back to Haines and began building a homestead. Now their place is one of those great, funky Haines collections of main house, outbuildings, gardens, an outhouse, a firepit and a guest sleeping house made entirely of glass. And, of course, the shop.
When you visit the shop, it is usually John who appears. He will walk you through the art, open drawers and bring out treasures. He might even show you how to make a glass bead, all the while telling his stories and soliciting yours.
My husband and I were lucky enough to be John and Sharon’s guest for a supper of deep-fried halibut, the best I’d ever tasted. (John and my husband worked together years ago on a movie shot in the Haines Pass.) We were lucky enough to sleep in the glass guest house the night it rained.
When we left, Sharon pressed delightful gifts into our hands: a bottle of her own highbush cranberry liqueur. Two jars of canned smoked hooligan, the tiny smelt that has fuelled Indigenous peoples up and down the West Coast, for centuries, traded through a network of “grease trails” leading from coast to interior. And, two precious jars of home-canned salmon.
Now, I’m not saying that if you drop into Extreme Dreams, you will leave with canned salmon. But I am saying you’ll find a world that sparkles with colour, just as Dorothy and her companions found in Oz, at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.