Cabin Journal

The First Snow

We got our first snow at the cabin last week, although I wasn’t there to see it. I wasn’t ready to experience winter yet, so stayed home for the worst of the cold and snow. But when I went up on Friday, when the sun started to come back out, the high peaks were still bathed in snow, a dramatic sight against the golden aspen. I waited until Saturday morning to walk down the road from my cabin to get a picture of the first snow on Mount Meeker. But I was too late. The morning sun had melted most of the snow on its broad face that faces east (above). It was another  lesson in impermanence or in expecting something to always be there, when it’s changing.

Last week, the dense aspen grove down the road was a blaze of yellow but this week most of the trees have lost their leaves. The hummingbirds are long gone, and I haven’t seen the ground squirrels, although the chipmunks and rabbits are still running around, and I’m seeing more stellar’s jays, the striking blue birds that stay here all winter.

I have a favorite set of autumn trails that go through aspen forests. A trail in nearby Wild Basin goes up the side of the mountain with views to the north of the top of Mount Meeker. Among the dark pines and firs and huge boulders, the few golden aspen stand out like lamps, illuminating the hillside around it. Along the trail, which heads east up the mountainside, the trail is littered with aspen leaves (above) and bordered by bushes and plants, turning 100 shades of red. There’s a sharp smell of rotting vegetation. And when I turn to look west, the high mountains are covered with snow, and I get a hint of that sharp tang of winter.

When I went to bed Friday night at the cabin, the temperature outside was 38 degrees. For the first time since last winter, I started a fire in the wood-burning stove. What is it about a fire that is so evocative? It must rouse some ancient memories of days before furnaces and forced-air heat, when fires provided heat for food, kept us warm, kept away the dark.

It’s also a powerful force. Watching it in the stove, when the fire gets strong and the flames are licking at the edges, I wonder if I built it too hot, if the whole stove will melt and the fire will come exploding out of the small metal container in which it’s trapped. I enjoy it the most when the fire dims down to just the orange coals, blinking in and out as the fire within ebbs and flows. I’m tired, it’s past my bedtime, but I can’t pull myself away. There’s something captivating about those orange coals, the heat and fire swirling around them, something that seems to break the bonds of the material world.

And then the fire winks out, like summer.

Lily Lake, Soon to Be Lily Marsh

We all have a neighborhood, a place that is familiar and includes our favorite walks, the closest grocery store, a good place to walk the dog. At the cabin, I’m slowly expanding my neighborhood, finding new roads to walk and places to hike. 

Just down the road from me is Lily Lake, part of Rocky Mountain National Park. Before I bought the cabin, I spurned the lake because it wasn’t wild enough; it’s right next to the road and is small. But now that it’s in my neighborhood, I visit it as much as I can, kayaking on it or walking the path around the lake.

It doesn’t take long to circumnavigate the lake, either in the boat or on foot, but there’s so much to see that I keep going round and round. Just one more time, I tell myself, and then finally storm clouds chase me away.  
In every season and in every circumlocution and from each side of the lake, I see different things—or see things differently. From the north side, I can see the twin towers of Mount Meeker and Longs Peak, and from the east side, I can look west to the high peaks of the park. In June the marshy area on the south side of the lake was full of green grasses that have now turned golden.

Last June, there was a field of wild iris (purple flags) on the east end, and when I went to take a closer look, a cloud of damselflies emerged, as if the iris had given birth to these almost translucent insects. Near the iris, two young bull elks had their heads down among the tall grasses, so at times only their antlers were visible above the grasses, like strange but beautiful velvet sculptures. On the lake was a mallard mom with five young ducklings following close behind.   
   

 In July, when I arrived at the lake with my kayak, I saw a strange sight: a swimmer. At about 8,500 feet altitude, Lily Lake is not your usual bathing pond and the water was cold. But the swimmer, a middle-aged man, was one of those people (like my friend Julene) who loves cold water swimming. In fact, he told me he had swam the previous week at a lake above 11,000 feet. 

When I took my boat out, I saw that the baby mallards had gotten bigger, and there was a new crop of flowers blooming around the lake’s shores: purple penstemon, columbine, golden banner. But the elk were gone, having moved up to the high country for the summer.

 Last week, when I kayaked, there was no one swimming. In fact, it would be almost impossible to swim, because in the intervening months the lake has almost totally filled in with aquatic plants. In June, a ranger there told me he thought it was part of the natural cycle of lakes becoming meadows and then forests. I’ve seen this happen on the Cub Lake trail in the park, where dozens of ponds are turning into marshes, the water slowly drying up. Fifteen years ago I saw fish and salamanders in ponds that today hold mainly grasses. Maybe it is a natural cycle but I can’t help but think that global warming has speeded up this process.

It’s hard to know what’s going on, but now that Lily Lake is in my neighborhood, I’ll be watching the progress.

Keeping the Heart Open

    We live in a world where multi-tasking is considered a skill and an art. The more we can do at one time, the better the person we are. Even at the cabin, where  my tasks are few, I can get caught up in my work, feel I need to accomplish something and then forget where I am.
     Sitting at the table in front of my laptop, I become engrossed in whatever I’m working on, when suddenly the sound of a bird cry or a flash of wings outside the windows brings me back to where I am.
    I’ve started giving myself breaks, so every few hours I put the computer on standby and sit on the front or back deck and just notice everything around me. It’s not until I stop working that I realize my heart is racing and my mind churning. Slowly, sitting under the ponderosas, I feel myself calming down.
    A couple of weeks ago, I took a break with a book, sat on the back deck facing the prayer flags and aspen trees and started reading. But there was an insistent voice: Put the book down and look around. I realized I still wasn’t paying attention and once I put the book down, I started listening to the wind through the aspen leaves, watched the bright colors of the prayer flags, a chickaree running along the top of the fence and the distant spires of the Twin Sisters peak.
    Gradually, I felt myself becoming attuned with everything around me, as if I had to remember to keep my heart open to the world. Now why is this so hard to do?

You’re in Human Country Now

   Last month I was at the cabin with my friend Sally and I heard a commotion from next door, looked out and saw a bear in my neighbor’s front yard. She was yelling something like “Shoo,” and a little later her husband came out with a broom to chase away the bear, which had been attracted to the bird feeders my neighbors hang on a line in their front yard.
    Sally and I watched as the bear ambled away and then came down the road and into the yard across the way. It didn’t pay any attention to us and seemed in no hurry, while I grabbed my camera and tried to get a few photos (below). 
     It’s thrilling to see wildlife in the wild, and this was only my second bear sighting at the cabin. My first was last summer, in July, one early morning when the bear walked through my side yard and onto the road. I’ve lived in Colorado for 40 years, and up to that point had seen a bear in the wild only once, in Roxborough State Park south of Denver, on top of a mountain across the valley and seen through binoculars.
    But when I was at the cabin this week I found out that a local bear had been shot by the wildlife division after becoming a nuisance. It had managed to open the screen door of a nearby cabin and had broken into my neighbors’ car several times looking for food. On top of that, the bear had made attempts to break into the Meeker Park Lodge several nights in a row. I don’t know if that’s the same bear Sally and I saw last month, but, because there’s so few bears here, there’s a good chance it was. I keeping thinking that the bear that was shot was one smart animal, able to figure out how to open car and screen doors rather than use its brute strength to pull the door off, as most bears would do.
    The prevailing belief is that when bears get used to people and starting trying to break into homes, they need to be killed. But I can’t help but wonder how much responsibility we mountain dwellers have. I think most of my neighbors are well aware of the dangers of leaving food outside or in an open garage. But we’ve built our homes in bear country, taken over their landscape so they don’t have as much room to roam. We put our cabins next to the creek where some of the best food sources are, put in roads where noisy vehicles (including ATVs) chase the bears away, and allow cattle to roam freely, providing more competition for food sources. Human beings have even altered the climate, bringing different weather patterns that provide more uncertain food cycles.
    So we’ve restricted their food sources while, at the same time, offered tempting smells of human food. What choice do they have?  Bears have to eat massive amounts of food each day to survive. In their efforts to avoid starving to death, they enter our human landscape, where they’re met by the barrel of a gun. 
    If you visit almost any store in Estes Park, you’ll find hundreds of items relating to bears: as lamp bases, carved wooden statues for the yard, stuffed toy bears, on dishes and towels, night lights, in paintings and photographs. It’s obvious we worship bears, are in awe of them, that they exist as mythic animals for us. 
    We imagine them existing in some hallowed wilderness where they happily eat all day long throughout summer and into fall, then curl up for a few months of hibernation. Yet the truth, as witnessed all over Colorado every summer, is that there’s not enough food for the bears—and not enough wilderness. We love the idea of bears and wildlife, as long as they don’t intrude on our country, human country.
    I don’t know what the solution is, but part of my mountain home just got less wild.

The Family Cabin

     A family cabin is like a revolving stage, with new characters and storylines almost weekly. All summer long, one family (or group of individuals) arrives, unpacks, sets up the cabin and lakefront the way they want, enjoys a week at the lake (or not), and is replaced by the next group. The cabin might be quiet for an afternoon or a day or sometimes a week in summer, but then another car pulls in, another family piles out.
    My family cabin in the north woods of Wisconsin is surrounded by two other family cabins  Two weeks ago, at my cousins’ cabin next door, my cousin Mike arrived with his wife and two of his grown daughters. His wife has no interest in the great outdoors, stays inside the cabin reading, while Mike takes out the sailboat, despite a severe case of asthma, figuring he would rather die doing something he loves than stay safely on shore with his oxygen tank.
    His family was replaced by Sam, his wife, daughter and grandson. In contrast to Mike, Sam, at age 68, is in top shape and swims long distances. One cool morning (both air and water temperature in the 60s) he swam around the perimeter of the lake, accompanied by his wife (my cousin) in one kayak and me in another, both of us chatting while Sam's arms and legs churned past all the houses on the lake, the long piers that held large pontoon or motor boats and empty deck chairs waiting for the weekend visitors. 
    When Sam left, my cousins Marlene and Karen arrived, followed by a suitor for Karen, and so for a couple of days we followed the story: how he brought and barbecued pork chops for the whole group, offered his truck to take things to the dump, took her out to dinner.
     Meanwhile, on the other side of my family’s cabin is one belonging to the family of my sister’s ex-husband. By some strange coincidence, he chose the same week as his ex-wife to be up at the cabin with the family. The divorce was a long time ago, both remarried, and there appears to be no acrimony. In fact, my sister’s son and her ex’s son are both 9 and became playmates for the week. So there’s the children of two people who once loved each other finding some common ground. 

    But my favorite story is the one my dad, now 87, has told over the years and which I never tire of hearing. It was September of 1948, after the war, and he and his brother had come up from Chicago to look for property in northern Wisconsin. It had been a long, hot day, and nothing they looked at was quite right. When you drive Wisconsin’s roads, you see farmland and forests but only glimpses of the lakes, hidden in the deep woods. You don’t know they exist until you find the right road that takes you to the water’s edge. When my dad and his brother, then in their 20s, were driven down the sandy road, they couldn’t see the lake until they came over the crest of a small hill and there was Thunder Lake, glistening blue in the late afternoon sunlight, and it was love at first sight.
    Some 60 years later, my dad sits on the bench on the pier, watching the eagle soar over the lake. And if there was ever a story with a happy ending, this has to be it.