Cabin Journal

Living Dangerously

I’ve been reading Paul Theroux’s book on traveling through Africa, Dark Star Safari. He’s not happy unless he’s in an uncomfortable situation: on a bus where the road is more like a track through sand, the truck is likely to break down any minute, and the area is known for marauding bands of militias who prey on people whose bus has broken down.

Myself, I’ve never been the kind of person who likes to willingly put herself in danger, and yet when I heard there would be 90-mph winds at my cabin, I didn’t hesitate to throw my computer and bag in the car and drive up there, with the wind pushing my car sideways on icy roads where blown snow had created drifts, obscuring where the road ended and the forest began.

I wanted to experience the strong winds, while hoping they didn’t bring the ponderosas down on the cabin. It’s like seeing nature when it’s stretched to its limits. 

At the cabin, all the trees were swaying, dancing to the rhythm of the wind, and I wished them well, fervently hoped they could hang on. Each pine tree is an instrument for the wind, which sets up a symphony through hundreds of trees, producing whooshes and roars that reach crescendos before the next lull.  

Inside, the cabin creaked and swayed, with gusts coming through the chimney, the old Coleman propane heater, and every crack in the house. I held my breath as I heard and felt the wind try to prop the roof off and kept my fingers crossed that the roofer knew what he was doing three years ago when he put on a metal roof.

Sitting at the table, I watched the wind drive the snow, creating small whirlpools of white dust all around the yard and on the hillside across the valley, where the white flakes spool across the line of dark pines. It felt like being under siege, like being attacked by a marauding army that comes at you from every direction: above and below, through the trees and under the house.

 Even the lulls between gusts were unsettling, waiting for the next one to hit. It blew all day and night, and when I woke up the next morning it was still blowing. Where does all this energy come from? What propels it? Doesn’t it ever get tired?

When I went out for my walk, I had to steady myself on the icy patches, as the winds tried to pull my legs out from under me. Mount Meeker and the surrounding peaks were hidden in the churning clouds of snow, although on the lower hills, the wind whipped up an occasional churning tornado of snow. When I walked back the wind had already erased my footprints.

As for birds, it’s the ravens that love the winds, as if they were a cushioned superhighway, a way to stay in the air forever without moving. Somehow the birds know how to ride the winds without being slammed to the ground, are able to keep their bodies in place so all they have to do is rest on the wind currents, hold steady, while the wind pulls at their feathers. I envy them this ability, wish I could float so serenely on the steady stream of gusts.

 

A Beautiful Blizzard

All winter long I’d been hoping to be at the cabin when it snowed; several times I arrived after a big snowstorm, with the sun out and the snow sparkling under a big blue sky. Last week, finally, I got to be in the middle of a good snowstorm.

When I arrived Tuesday, it was a warm day, with temperatures close to 50. But Wednesday morning, the temperatures started dropping, so at 10 a.m., it was only 16 degrees. The snow started falling lightly, but by the time I went out for a walk, around 10:30, it was coming down hard, and the roads had more snow than I anticipated, as if the plow driver had gotten stuck on the main roads and our minor dirt roads were a secondary consideration.

In the middle of a blizzard, everything becomes more difficult. Even wearing a heavy parka, I was cold, and my fingers started hurting after only 10 minutes or so. When I tried to take a picture of the swirling snow, my lens cap fell onto the road, and I had to scrounge around in the white flakes to find it. A bit farther up the road my camera batteries died, necessitating taking off my gloves to put in new batteries.

When I had looked forward to this snowstorm, I hadn’t thought about the cold, how the wind finds any crack in your clothing, leaving a gift of cold flakes on your neck or wrist. Or that cold hands are painful. I kept going up the road through the thick forest where the cabins were more hidden than usual. Even in the woods, the whipping snow was almost disorienting, as if the familiar cabins were distorted, so I couldn’t be sure of my bearings. The world had become blurred, so only the foreground stood out, like the red mailbox (above), a fixed bright object in a swirling world.

 More than usual, I felt exposed to the raw elements; no one else was out, not even a car humming down the road. At times like this, you think how easily you could disappear—a slip in the snow and how fast the snow would cover and obliterate you. There’s almost a cold fury at work here, one that you have to respect and be in awe of.

It seemed that in every direction I turned the wind was blasting me, spitting snow down my coat and into my ears—sometimes from the east and at other times from the northwest. Except for the magpie (brave or foolhardy?), I saw no animals. Everything and everyone else had taken cover under this winter onslaught, waiting for the snow to stop, the sun to reappear, and the world to settle back into something recognizable.

 

Appreciating Smaller, Gentler Landscapes

When I first came to Colorado, I was drawn to the high peaks and tundra, which seemed otherworldly to me, something wild and remote, untrammeled by humans. Any place else seemed boring. In those early years, I once hiked on a lower elevation trail, the Sandbeach Lake Trail in Wild Basin, and went only went a few miles before I decided it wasn’t nearly wild or interesting enough and turned around. But a few weeks ago I decided to give this trail another chance, this time with snowshoes, because it’s not far from my cabin and would be a quick and easy place to go.

In the intervening 30 years, apparently, I’ve lost some of my impatience for instant gratification, learned to appreciate other sides to nature—like the tall, majestic ponderosas on this trail, which not only shoot straight to the sky but are spread all over the ground, toppled by the high winds that hit this ridge from the west. (Last year, a hiker was killed on this trail by a falling tree, a reminder to be alert.) And while the trail doesn’t go above treeline, it does provide glorious views of the valley below, with the North St. Vrain running through willow bushes, as well as the hillside across the valley and the cirque of mountains to the west.

As I’ve gotten older, and perhaps under the influence of owning a cabin surrounded by aspens and ponderosas, and on the edge of an open meadow filled with grasses and flowers (in the summer), I’ve come to appreciate smaller and gentler landscapes.

One of my favorite walks in Meeker Park, especially in summer and fall, is along Tahosa Creek (top photo, taken last fall). There, different elements form a perfect small landscape: the creek rippling under the shade of the aspens, embroidered all around by tall green grasses (above photo, taken last summer), and backed by the hardness of the granite ridge on the other side. For a full sensual experience, throw in the soft yielding light, the quicksilver movement of the creek and aspen leaves, plus the sounds of the water running and the wind through the aspen leaves. In such a rich landscape, I want to sit quietly by the creek and not move again. There’s a sense of being protected here deep in the woods among the boulders and aspens, a different feeling than being on the tundra, exposed to the winds and sky.

I generally don’t like bushwhacking through the forest; it’s much easier to follow a trail, where the woods have been cleared. But I’ve found that following the creek puts me in a close, intimate contact with the woods, as I brush against trees, clamber over rocks, grab onto the trunk of a tree to steady myself on a rock. 

Last summer, I found a valley that I didn’t know existed, down the road from my cabin and up another road. In the valley bottom was the most perfect of small landscapes: an oval pond that reflected Mount Meeker, surrounded by aspens on one side and grasses on the other, while beyond the pond, the valley opened to Mount Meeker in the distance.

I still love the high mountains, still find it uplifting to stare at the broad, empty flanks of Mount Meeker and know that the mountain exists outside of the world of most human endeavors. But, increasingly, I’m happy to be looking up at it rather than climbing the mountain; I don’t have to be on top to enjoy the view.

My Neighborhood Walk

Although I have my usual walking route around Meeker Park, every week I see something different or in a way I’ve never seen it before. Last month, the sun was hitting the ridge on the west side of the valley, a rocky ridge where a few trees had taken hold among the rocks, silhouetted against the blank face of Mount Meeker (below). It was a view I had never noticed before, but I had arrived at just the day and time when the light was hitting the ridge. Another five minutes later or earlier, a different day, where the sun had moved just slightly, and I wouldn’t have noticed that view. But every day the light changes, and the landscape moves subtly from one season to the next. Or my mood is different, primed to see some things but not other things, ready to notice the clouds but not the cabins or the sky but not the ground.

Or one day a bird appears that I’ve never seen before. It’s colorful, with orange on its chest, like a robin, but smaller and speckled with striped wings. It’s practically right at my feet, on the ground pecking at something and doesn’t seem inclined to fly away when I try to take its picture. When I look it up in my bird guide, I discover it’s a rosy finch (in its winter plumage, bottom), which are somewhat common here. So why have I never noticed it before?

My weekly walk takes me from the valley bottom—with open fields, the creek, and  willow bushes—to up on the hillside, among the ponderosas and aspens, so I see the world from two directions and attitudes: that small, insignificant feeling you get looking up at the something larger—in this case, the mountains—and the opposite feeling of surveying your kingdom: the valley with the small ranch and cabins scattered along the edges, above the marshy areas where the willows grow and aspens form a border between the road and fields (top).

Along the way, I have my favorite spots, my totems to reconnect with, but also I’m curious about how the landscape has changed since I last saw it. Is the creek frozen yet? Or, in spring, are the aspens starting to leaf out?  How does Mount Meeker look with the new coat of snow? In April, I’ll look to see if the pasqueflowers that grow on the hill next to the road are starting to bloom, or if the mountain bluebirds have arrived in the field next to the ranch. If the two horses are out, I’ll pause to see if they notice me, sticking their heads up from the pasture.

There’s something to be said for knowing and loving one place well, for seeing it in every season, every mood, every change of weather. Because I know Meeker Park so well and because I love it so much, every change seems momentous.

The Solitude of Winter

In the cabin next to mine once lived a World War II veteran named Bill Waite, who came here suffering from war injuries and prepared to die. And yet, in his small cabin (below), less than 400 square feet with no insulation, he lived for another 40 years.

When I first bought my cabin, I wondered how he survived the winters here, not physically but emotionally. Although a few of my neighbors live here all year round, back in the 1950s and ‘60s it was less common, so Bill would have had few human companions in winter, no one to chat with about the weather or the coyotes he heard howling at night.  

For a long time, I wondered what he did all day. From people’s descriptions of him, I don’t get the sense that he was a reader; he may have had a radio to listen to, and that may have kept him company. He could have relieved his boredom by driving into Estes Park, only 12 miles away, and probably did that at least once a week to get supplies. And there’s always work to be done: chopping wood, keeping the fire going, maybe hunting, making meals, hauling in water.

But it was mostly a solitary existence in winter. And it’s only now, in my third winter at the cabin, that I’m starting to get a glimpse of what it would be like to be here all winter every day, rather than my two-day forays from my Boulder home, where I can be endlessly entertained by email, my cats, lunches with friends, or news from NPR.

On my winter walks at the cabin, I rarely see anyone out, so there’s a sense of solitude but also of spaciousness, as if I could walk or wander anywhere or let my thoughts go in any direction. But more than that, everything slows down, so things I wouldn’t ordinarily notice in a more urban and chaotic setting become apparent. Subtle things, like the pattern of the wind-whipped snow, the murmurings of the chickadees coming from above me in the aspen trees, the muffled sound of the creek under ice and snow. And always, the sound of the wind rushing through the trees.

Gradually, life slows down so I’m hardly aware of being separate from anything around me; it’s as if my heartbeat matches the rhythm of life around me: the streaming clouds, the horses that look up from eating, the flock of crows flying overhead in the blue sky. The slow, subtle undercurrent of life pulls me along so I don’t need to do anything but let myself flow with it. It feels like a state of altered consciousness.

I don’t know what injuries, physical or otherwise, that Bill Waite sustained in the war, but his attitude toward life must have changed after he moved to this cabin. All the horrors of war must have been gradually supplanted by seeing the snow blow across the face of Mount Meeker, seeing the sun set on the Twin Sisters Peaks, hearing the wind fill the branches of the ponderosas.  As he gradually absorbed the rhythms of life in this high mountain valley, something must have switched in his consciousness, so that he didn’t want to die but wanted to keep feeling this: the silence and sense of openness that fills your heart.

When Fences Make Poor Neighbors

 

Fences make good neighbors, poet Robert Frost once famously wrote. Maybe humans need demarcations of their property so as to keep order and prevent the world from running amuck, but animals don’t find them friendly.  Once, sitting in my cabin, I saw a bear get caught in my neighbor’s barbed wire fence. It managed to extricate itself, but I wondered how many times animals hurt themselves when trying to get free of a fence.

Last week, I was driving south of Buena Vista in south-central Colorado and saw a herd of pronghorn in a field surrounded by a wire fence. Pronghorn can’t leap over fences like deer; their legs are too fragile and could break. While the older ones had figured out how to get under or through the fence, the younger ones were frantically running back and forth outside the fence, and another  younger one was on the other side of the road, trapped behind another fence. When I got out of my car, with some crazy idea that I would try to help them, some of the younger ones desperately threw themselves through an opening in the fence, while others continued to pace back and forth. I left, hoping they would eventually figure it out.

The Arkansas River Valley is full of ranches, and the fences keep in the cattle as well as separate one ranch from another. In Meeker Park, if there were cattle ranches at one time, there are none now, yet there are wire fences everywhere. A lot of the fences go straight up the hill among pines trees and over boulders, places where cattle are not likely to frequent. So I have to think these fences were installed merely to declare that this is where my property ends and yours begins. I guess it’s important to maintain our separateness, to establish what is ours and what you can’t have, lest you try to take what is mine.

My neighbor has since replaced his barbed wire fence with a wooden fence that is much more attractive and easier for animals to cross without hurting themselves. In fact, the chickarees (gray squirrels), in particular, use the wooden fences (above, photo taken last summer) as highways; it’s easier than having to slog through the snow.  On my walks around Meeker Park, I’m drawn to the wooden fences, which frame the landscape in unexpected ways.

A lot of them are falling down, becoming part of the landscape, perhaps as their reason for existing disappears—fewer horses or cattle to keep penned up—or maybe people found it too difficult to maintain, especially with no reason to keep them up. It would be wonderful if the wire fences similarly disintegrated over time, leaving a landscape with no boundaries—open and friendly to both humans and wildlife. 

Fun With Snow

Another half foot of snow, at least, fell at the cabin last week, enough that I had to shovel out part of the driveway before I could get my car in. On the front deck huge piles of snow had fallen from the roof, while the back deck, which is more protected from winds, had at least a foot of snow. I don’t mind the shoveling; in fact, I’ll take any excuse to be out in the snow.

I love the snow, especially when it’s fresh, before it gets windblown and dirty. When the sun is out, the combination of warmth from the sun mixing with the cold and moisture seeping up from the snow is invigorating. Snowshoeing in Glacier Gorge in Rocky Mountain National Park last week, I never wanted to stop. Coming back down, I got off the path and plowed through the deep snow, feeling like a kid again, breaking through this soft, yielding material that feels like nothing else. It’s like getting permission to have fun. I’ve noticed that when adults suddenly find themselves in snow, they start making snowballs or throw themselves down into the soft stuff to make snow angels.

I like how the snow changes the landscape, exaggerating the shapes underneath it, so they become something else, almost something humorous, like the wooden chair next to the shed (below), which looks a little pregnant with the new snow. The snow enlarges and softens boulders, making the hard outlines of the rock into something totally different—soft with voluptuous curves. It dresses up the pine trees and turns the Bill Waite cabin across from my cabin into a gingerbread house. It softly distorts the straight outlines of the fences (left) and creates white baubles in the aspen trees. On the creek, it etches the open circles of water in blue and white.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the Martin Scorsese movie, Hugo, and I loved the scenes of Paris at night covered in snow. With the 3-D effects, the snow comes drifting out into the audience, and you remember how beautiful falling snow is, how it’s been celebrated in art, in movies, in Christmas cards, in advertisements for Coca-Cola. And then I remember how, almost anytime in Colorado in winter, I can just walk outside and experience it. Aren’t I lucky.

Waiting for the Butterfly

 

At the cabin this week, I had no work to do, so thought I might do some writing, but when I got up there, I had this strong urge to just sit and meditate. I wanted to feel everything around me: the strong winds, the sound of the wind chimes, the sunlight that floods the cabin now, with the sun so low.

I thought about how agendas rule most of my life and what a rare thing it is to just sit and enjoy the day with no thought of what should be done—that endless list we have so we can call ourselves productive human beings and feel we are doing something, anything.

And yet there is a whole universe out there with things to tell us, if only we knew how to listen, were only patient enough.

When I was meditating, a large somber mass of clouds to the east was blocking the sun, with one small, almost ethereal cloud racing across the face of the larger cloud, lit up by the sunlight. Where did it come from? Had I dreamed it, created it from my subconscious?  When I went for my walk, my gaze kept being drawn upward, where clouds of all shapes and sizes were streaming across the sky. These clouds pull me out of my earth-bound world, so I feel myself expanding, able to take my thoughts someplace where they’ve never been before.

At this time of the year, I see almost no one on the back roads. Once in a while I find a pair of footprints in the snow. I feel some kinship with this ghost who likes the same route that I do—down the road to the pond and over the hill through the woods back to the road.

When I had started my walk, I felt disappointed in the landscape: the grasses flattened by the windblown snow and patches of bare ground. The weather is harsher now than just a month ago, with temperatures in the 30s and strong winds. Yet the longer I walked, the winds and cold felt exhilarating, made me feel alive. In the woods, I found some still deep snow that hadn’t yet been frozen or crusted over, so it was soft and yielding, fun to walk through. By the end of my walk, I felt that everything was just as it should be and thus perfect.  

Last week I went to a talk on local butterflies, and one of the speakers spoke about the difficulty of trying to photograph a swallowtail butterfly. He kept chasing it through the bushes, but every time he started to photograph it, the butterfly flitted off. He finally realized he was in the swallowtail’s territory, and he needed to just sit and become part of the landscape. Amazingly, after a few minutes, the butterfly landed on his thumb and obligingly waited to have its photo taken. The world is there, ready for us, if we slow down and wait for it.

A Furious Wind

 

 

The trees around Allenspark and Meeker Park have to be tough, because they routinely face winter windstorms of 40 to 60 mph, with gusts of 80 or higher. They have to survive in a climate with months of dry weather and have to anchor themselves in soil that can be loose rock.

So it must have been an incredible windstorm last week to bring down the large ponderosas, some 100 years old and at least 60 feet high. On my weekly walk, I counted at least 20 to 30 trees that had been blown down, their roots wrenched from the ground, leaving gaping holes in the earth.

One neighbor lost nine trees, and another neighbor has one ponderosa laying in the driveway, just missing the house. Another cabin down the road had two giants lying before its door.

It must have been a wild night, with trees crashing all over the valley, yet my neighbor who lost nine trees said he never heard the crashes. That’s because the wind is so strong, you can’t hear anything else over it, not even the falling of trees. Were there crashes all over the valley? Did the trees fall softly into the earth, into the snow and grasses? Or was it loud? Loud enough for animals to depart before the trees came down?

The felling of these trees could be seen as nature’s way of pruning trees that might have been weakened already by pine beetles, would have been burned by fires before wildfires were suppressed or were growing too close together so their root systems weren’t stable. Or it could be seen as a warning sign from Mother Nature.

The winds, with some gusts clocked at  over 100 mph, also knocked out the power for two days in Allenspark and Meeker Park. An Allenspark resident told me that he hoped he wouldn’t see another storm like that for a decade. But the wisdom about climate change is that our weather will get (and is getting) more extreme, so temperatures will be both hotter and colder, snowstorms will be more destructive, hurricanes and tornadoes more intense, and winds stronger. Will these strong winds become the norm and bring down more ponderosas all winter?

To see these giant ponderosas downed—resting on hillsides, against boulders, among last year’s pine needles—with their root systems ungainly stuck in the air is unnatural, like something you want to avert your eyes from. These seem like acts of violence to me and the result of our carelessness: not caring that we are polluting the earth, pouring carbon emissions into the atmosphere which alter the climate, so it becomes more destructive, creates windstorms stronger than anything we have ever seen.

If a tree falls in the woods, can we hear its message?

Keep Your Hands Off My Yard

 

I got a letter from my insurance company last week, suggesting that I mow the grass at the cabin, and I wondered if they had ever tried to mow rocks. The company had sent someone out last summer to take pictures around the house, ostensibly to look for fire hazards. Their recommendation was to cut the grasses down to 4 inches and clean up the “tree debris.”

At my house in Boulder, I spend a large part of the summer mowing the lawn, trimming the edges, and pulling weeds. The last thing I want to do at the cabin is take care of the yard.

More importantly, the yard is part of nature, part of the landscape which I co-inhabit with chickarees, ground squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, wild turkeys, deer, nuthatches, juncos, Stellar’s jays, crows, and an occasional bear and bobcat.

Cutting down the grasses would create an artificial area—a neat lawn--that would separate me from nature. I might as well put up a sign: “civilized area here,” while outside of that would be the wild, messy area where grass grows as high as it likes, flowers are scattered in unruly patterns, tree branches die and fall to the ground where they rot, and rocks are scattered around the yard.

Of course, I prefer the wild, unruly landscape. I like the tall grasses, how they bend in the wind and how the sunlight gets tangled up in them. I like that things grow where it suits them: just the right amounts of moisture, sunshine, and nutrients in the soil. I’m glad I have nothing to do with those choices that are a result of some serendipity. What is it in humans that makes us want to improve on nature?

I’m aware of the fire danger but if we cut down all the grasses to prevent fires, we’re also destroying the animal habitat. Not only do the rabbits (above) eat the grasses but a lot of the small ground animals use the grasses to hide from predators.

Besides, most of my yard is rocks, filled in with some grasses and wildflowers. It doesn’t lend itself to a lawn mower, and in the process of mowing the grass, I would also be cutting down (in summer) the pasqueflowers, columbine and purple asters that grow among the grasses. Maybe my insurance company would prefer the flowers be in neat borders around the lawns rather than scattered messily throughout the yard. And then there’s the problem of mowing over the mounds of dirt made by the gophers.

As for the fallen tree branches, stuff happens in nature: tree branches fall or are blown down, and sometimes they’ll sit there for years, becoming part of the landscape before I gather them for firewood.

In my neck of the woods, nature rules.