Cabin Journal

Life Without Animals

 

For the past two weeks, I haven’t seen any rabbits at the cabin. Because I see so few animals in the winter, I miss the rabbits’ presence. In the winter, it’s just the chickarees and rabbits that stick it out, while the ground squirrels and chipmunks hibernate.

The chickarees keep me entertained with their rushing to and fro, while the rabbits have a sweetness and calmness that belie their predicament. I read recently that scientists studying hares in the northern Rockies found the animals live on average one year. Being on the bottom of the food chain makes for a short life. Have all the rabbits here been eaten or starved to death in a winter where the snow has remained on the ground since October?

I miss them; they’ve kept me company all winter long. I know their deaths are part of the natural process, but around the globe animals are disappearing at alarming rates due to less natural forces—loss of habitat and climate change, among other reasons.

What would the world be like if we lost our wild animals?  Strictly speaking, we don’t need wildlife. Most humans, aside from some indigenous people, live in a totally domesticated world that provides all our biological needs: water, food, shelter.

And yet I think we emotionally need wildlife; it takes us out of ourselves and into another world that is different than our own. People are drawn to wild animals. You can see that every autumn, when thousands come to Rocky Mountain National Park to see and hear the elk bugling. Last summer, while hiking in the park, a friend and I discovered a moose standing in a pond right off the trail (top), and within a few minutes a crowd had formed, all of us whispering excitedly to each other, as if something unbelievable had descended from the heavens.

Maybe we’re drawn to things that are wild because we have lost our wildness and want to rekindle that extinguished part of ourselves. Or maybe we’re drawn to wild animals because their lives are so much closer to the edge than ours. For most of us, life is predictable, while most wild animals struggle daily to eat or be eaten. So when we cross paths with an elk or bald eagle or even rabbit, we can vicariously feel the thrill of that other existence (without being eaten).

A couple of weeks ago, I was excited to see a red fox in my backyard in Boulder (above), even though it could have eaten the birds and squirrels that I tempt with bird seed. But it was something from the other side of the fence, from the open space beyond my suburban yard and too tamed life. If we lost the wild animals, it means we lost whatever shreds of wilderness are left. And that would mean that there would be no chance of existence beyond our everyday and increasingly programmed lives.

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 I veteran named Bill Waite who lived in a small cabin (below), less than 400 square feet with no insulation,  for 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. I've been told that he was a reader and that he had a dog. 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 why Bill Waite decided to live here alone.  I heard that one of his neighbors offered him a radio to keep him company, but he said he preferred to listen to the wind in the pine trees.  As he gradually absorbed the rhythms of life in this high mountain valley, he must have slowed down, as we all do when we're here, so all you want is to keep feeling this: the silence and sense of openness that fills your heart.

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.

Sounds of Silence

One of the first things visitors to my cabin notice is the silence. “It’s so quiet,” they say, amazed, as if the silence was something palpable, as if the noise in our urban neighborhoods was normal, the standard we’ve become used to. At my cabin, that noise is shut off, so the silence becomes something noticeable.

It’s a rare thing, I’m starting to realize, and hard to find in this world where we’re constantly assaulted by noise from traffic, planes flying overhead. Even in our own homes, there’s always something going on in the background: the TV, the dishwasher, the radio.

From what people tell me, Meeker Park is quieter than most mountain places.  One neighbor told me her boyfriend preferred her small cabin here to his bigger house on Lookout Mountain above Golden because there is less road noise here. Another neighbor said a friend who lives in nearby Allenspark complained about the noise there, mainly from ATVs buzzing on the dirt roads.

But here, on the north side of Meeker Park, most of the roads dead-end, no fun for four-wheelers, and  I’m two miles from the main road, so I don’t hear the whine of traffic, which is constant at my home east of  Boulder. Most of the cabins around me aren’t inhabited, so there’s little human noise, only occasionally two people stopping to say hi on the road or a child’s voice coming from farther down the valley.

There are the noises of nature, of course: the scolding of the chickarees, the caw of the ravens and jays, the chittering of grasshoppers, the sound of the creek, but those sounds seem woven into the texture of the landscape. The wind through the pine trees feels like the rush of life itself, an electrical charge connecting the forests and mountains and everything beyond.

In fall, now, there’s an urgency to get construction projects done before the snow comes. My neighbors are putting on new additions, new roofs, insulating old cabins and even putting in a new bridge across the creek.  I don’t mind the hammering but one work crew last week was listening to a country music station. It felt like something foreign had been introduced into this  place of natural sounds. It felt like the fabric of silence, woven among the trees, grasses and animals, had been torn, and all the peace started leaking out.

Maybe one of my neighbors complained because the next time I came up the music had been stopped. And the silence returned, like a protective blanket. I sit among the pines and aspens, and let myself get wrapped up in it. I can hear the silence. It feels rich, full of possibilities, like I’m finally hearing the universe.

 

Here, There and Everywhere

It’s what the Buddhists call monkey mind, because it’s all over the place. One minute, the monkey is jumping into the tree, the next it’s hurtling itself to the ground. One minute it’s eating a banana, and next the banana has been thrown down. The monkey is everywhere, unable to settle down.

That’s my mind, leaping from one thing to another. With no work coming in right now, I agonize over how best to use my time. I start one project, then decide I should work on something else. I go on the Internet and then change my mind and start going through the stacks of papers on my desk. Or maybe I should check my email, always a dependable distraction.

I’ve been coming to the cabin for the past two weeks with no editing projects that need to be done. That should be a welcome endeavor, leaving me with more time to enjoy the beautiful fall weather, the last of the aspens changing. Ideally, my mind should be as placid as the pond near the cabin, with the golden aspen reflected (above) in its calm surface. But my monkey mind won’t let me relax. It’s full of “shoulds.” I should be writing, changing the sheets, washing the dishes, reading, walking, visiting the neighbors, not visiting the neighbors.

Finally, my monkey mind settled on a project. Every year, I need to re-stain the back (right) and front decks at the cabin. I have the same argument with the man at the paint store: isn’t there some way to prolong the duration between paintings? “Not unless you paint all five sides,” he says enigmatically. My neighbors blame the high-altitude sun for the decks’ early deterioration.

For all my complaining, once I settle down into the job, I enjoy it. There’s a meditative quality to painting, where I can legally empty my mind of extraneous thoughts, get caught in the back and forth swipe of the paint brush on the deck. Soon I start noticing the rush of the wind through the tall pine trees above my head, the crunchiness of the pine needless underfoot as I walk around the deck and the strong smell of pine mixed with decaying plants.

For some reason, a colony of small ants is constantly criss-crossing the deck, and so I have to work hard to brush them off so they don’t get caught in the paint and die. It’s a constant effort, and sometimes I fail. I also have to be alert to things falling from the sky. In the ponderosas above me, the chickarees are busily tearing off the pine cones and needles, so I’m constantly being dive-bombed by pine missiles. In our own ways, we’re both preparing for winter.

Somehow, the painting process works. I feel my monkey mind slowing down, concentrating on the task at hand, as well as this fine, unnaturally warm fall day. And when my mind starts to wander again, there’s the sure-fire wake-up call: a pine cone crashing down inches from my head and the chickaree’s loud angry call to tell me I’m in the way of its urgent endeavors.

As the World Turns

 

When I came up to the cabin last week, something felt different. The season had turned, and with it, something was missing, some liveliness. It’s still summer, but the lushness and abundance of June and July are gone. Everything feels a bit dissipated and sad.

From what I see in my rain barrel, it’s hardly rained at all here in the past week. Wednesday, clouds massed, the skies darkened, and a few raindrops fell, but then it passed and the sun would come out. A couple of hours later another attempt would be made, promising rain, but always reneging.

It feels as if everything is struggling. Some of the needles on the small pine in the front yard have died and turned red, the leaves on the plants have curled inward, and the thistles have already gone to seed. The patch of tall green grass that I love to watch blow in the wind has shrunk to a small area. And the flowers are long gone.

Even the animals are fewer. A few weeks ago, they seemed underfoot. I couldn’t sit on the deck without having a chipmunk or ground squirrel practically run over my feet.  But last week I saw one rabbit, one chipmunk, one ground squirrel, one hummingbird. Have they succumbed to predators?

And yet, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, one of the bleakest books I’ve read in a long time. It depicts a post-apocalyptic world where a man and his son wander through a landscape that is mostly grey, composed of ash, after some unnamed devastation has killed all the vegetation and animals and most of the humans.

I have to keep putting it down every few pages and listen to the crickets outside the window. At the cabin I look up at the tops of the pine trees and the blue sky and piles of white clouds, or the ground squirrel stuffing its cheeks with grasses.

And I feel comforted. Yes, it’s dry here and not as lush as I’d like, but life is still rich. The world is precious, and I can’t lose sight of that.

My Refuge

I came to the cabin three weeks ago after suffering from an emotional setback, what felt like a huge betrayal. I came here to sit and absorb all the sweetness this place provides. Sitting on the front porch, gradually the world around me comes into focus while the pain dissolves.  All the stillness and peace of this place seeps into me, gradually replacing the pain and anxiety.

I’m not sure exactly what that peace derives from: the aspens and pines? the birds? the small animals? the clouds? the view of Mount Meeker, so much bigger than any  problem I have? Each one is comforting. To me, the sound of bird calls can pull me out of any unhappiness or inward fixation, like pulling my brain out of some obsession and into something outside of myself, something purer and more real, even startling. In the same way, the sight of the chipmunks, ground squirrels, and rabbits running around the yard is a happy distraction.

But it’s something beyond the sound of the wind through the aspens and pines or the enjoyment of the animals. I’ve come to realize that when I come here, I drop all my defenses, all those barriers I put up when dealing with the human world. Here I trust everything, so I open myself to everything, and then something melts in me, some softness opens up, and I start to feel everything: the quiet, the warm sunlight, the sheer strength of the mountains.  

It means dropping all the analytical and distancing techniques I use in my daily life. My work, for one, requires some mental concentration that ignores or excludes feelings. How often have I found myself at the cabin deep in editing a book on economics, hardly aware of where I was, and looked up to see a ground squirrel on the fence opposite me, looking at me quizzically? Wake up!

Everyone needs a refuge from the world, a place where the barriers dissolve, and where we can let ourselves feel everything—all the good and the bad. I know I’m lucky to have this cabin. I would wish a place like this for everyone.

 

 

Life Returns

It’s been more than a month since I’ve been able to get to the cabin. My parents were in Colorado for a long visit, and work and other obligations kept me from getting up here during the month of March.

It was hard being away so long. I even had a frustration dream in which I was driving in the area near my cabin with some relatives, but couldn’t talk them into going to the cabin. I realized that it’s not just the cabin and surrounding landscape that I love but that every time I come here I reclaim a piece of myself.

And when I arrived last week, even though everything was still brown, no sign of the first pasqueflowers, it was evident that spring had arrived. I was greeted with a flock of noisy  and rambunctious chickadees. Soon, I saw an Abert’s squirrel (below), the black squirrels with prominent tufted ears, being chased, strangely, by a fox squirrel, the denizen of city yards. And I saw my first ground squirrel of the season, sitting on the fence, looking a bit sluggish and its fur mussed up, as if it just woke up (at bottom). What does it feel like to be out in the world again after sleeping for five months? And keeping up a constant chatter were flocks of blackbirds and Steller’s jays, those dazzling blue birds with the cocky crests.

After a winter in which my only animal companions were the jays, an occasional chickaree (gray squirrel) or rabbit, this seemed an abundance of life. When I went for my walk around Meeker Park, Tahosa Creek was mostly free of ice, noisy and exuberant, like a surge of life coming back. It may be predictable, but every year it seems more amazing. I don’t take spring for granted anymore.

Maybe it was the signs of spring that made me want to turn things around. Each time I take my circular walk around the edges of the valley, I head south and then east on the road. But this time I wanted to do something different, so headed north, bushwacking up the hill that I usually come down. It’s a strange thing but the world looks different from the opposite direction. I saw things I hadn’t seen before: trees, cabins, a new view of the valley and Mount Meeker (above). It was like taking a little vacation, seeing a new landscape.

Freed temporarily from work obligations, I had come up here to do a two-day meditation retreat. My first morning, my thoughts were as rambunctious as the creek, flinging everywhere, pinging off the walls and floor. I thought about job letters I could send out, how I would do my taxes this year, emails I needed to respond to.

But over the next day, my mind settles into this place. I “practice” being aware of everything I’m doing, so when I’m washing the dishes, I’m aware of the plate I’m holding. When I go for a walk, I notice each tree and the circular mass of grasses. When I make my lunch, I’m aware of the avocado I’m mashing.   

Even after one day of this, when I meditate the next morning, my mind had stilled, and I am happy just to sit and feel the sun on my arms as I eat my breakfast, drink my tea, and watch the steam curl. Outside two rabbits are chasing each other, and the jays are calling from the trees.  All is right with the world.

My Japanese Cabin

I was at the Denver Art Museum recently and found myself on the sixth floor with the Eastern art—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Buddhist. I’ve always loved traditional Asian art because of its delicacy, its portrait of a way of life that appreciates, even elevates, the small bits of beauty: a delicate watercolor of a single branch with a few cherry blossoms or a perfectly shaped teapot. Even something as prosaic as a lunch box is elevated into a piece of layered bamboo art.

My favorites are the paintings of a solitary house perched on the edge of a stream below an impossibly steep and yet at the same time delicate mountain. Inside a holy man or poet sits in contemplation (or sometimes drunkenness). In the paintings, much of the canvas is left blank, so the viewer can let her imagination drift off into the clouds behind the mountains. To me, this art evokes a way of life that hardly exists in the 21st century. The paintings have a stillness or hush, an appreciative contemplation of beauty but also of simplicity.

It’s a far cry from the world outside the windows of the museum where downtown Denver looks dirty on a gray wintry day. Streets criss-cross and overlap, with cars going in every direction. Homeless people mill around City Park, toting their gatherings in shopping carts.  On nearby I-25, cars  speed along while the world passes in a blur: large outlet stores, high-rises, factories.

But the other world, the one of delicacy and simplicity, is one I try to recreate at my cabin. I’m not sitting by waterfalls composing poetry and letting the sheafs of poems drift down the river, and I’m not holding tea ceremonies. But I try to simplify my life there as much as possible, keeping the cabin as free from clutter as I can, the better to admire the early morning sunlight on the ponderosas (above) or the white-barked aspens framed by the bedroom window. Without other distractions, I can contentedly watch the snow drift down in big thick flakes in winter or aspen leaves float down the creek in fall (left, above).

 Without the noise of the city, I can hear the loud call of the Stellar’s jay or the sound of the wind. And there’s emptiness, too, like in the Japanese paintings, enough to let my mind float up and out, unencumbered.

Since I discovered Japanese art in college, I’ve always wanted to enter into the delicate world of these paintings, find the place where poets sit in small shacks next to steep waterfalls. Maybe aspen leaves floating down the creek aren’t the same as cherry blossoms, and the rugged  Rocky Mountains don’t really resemble the delicate Japanese landscape, but in every other way  I’ve found my Japanese landscape in the Colorado Rockies.