Cabin Journal

Succumbing to Light Ethereal Influences

 

Now, during these warm summer days at the cabin, when the whole world is alive, I sometimes feel

as if I’m entering an alternate universe.

 

Not wanting to miss one instance of summer in the mountains, a few weeks ago I brought my laptop computer outside, sat on the front porch, and let myself be immersed in this complex landscape: the wind through the pines, stirring up the yellow pollen, which was blowing in sheets across the landscape; nuthatches, hummingbirds, house wrens, and other birds making flight patterns from the trees to the ground and from tree to tree, with bird calls piercing the air all around me;  a new crop of rabbits, their fur brown and soft, enjoying the fresh spring greens (below); all the newly sprung flowers:  purple  and white lupine and columbine and the wild roses; and, best of all, the aspen trees, the sunlight through their leaves casting a clear, holy light on everything and the sound of their leaves shimmering in the wind the most beautiful sound next to silence.

 

At some point, I realized that the rest of the world beyond this front porch where I was sitting had ceased to exist. There was only this thick layered world of pine trees, grasses, and sky—a saturation of smells and sounds.

 

Thoreau says it better than I can. In his journal, my favorite naturalist wrote, “You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. . . .  True, out of doors my thought is commonly drowned, as it were, and shrunken, pressed down by stupendous piles of light ethereal influences.”

 

They may be light, but they feel all absorbing, as if I could drown in all the sensations.

I can see that I have two existences: one is the world of computers, where I spend most of my life and where feelings are subsumed to the hard and cold reality of lines of type, of opening and deleting e-mails, of web pages where information comes in the form of boxed pages. For me, it’s an artificial world, one I can’t touch, smell or feel.

 

And then there’s the cabin and the natural world that surrounds it, where it feels like my mind could go deeper than I can hardly imagine, where I feel everything. There are no borders or straight lines here: the creek weaves its way through this valley, the trees bend to catch the light, the ground squirrel zigs and zags across the yard, its nose alert for food. Not one thing here responds to a punch of my computer key.

 

To be here in the summer is to live by my senses, to abandon any pretense that I have any interest in the artificial world of work, and to succumb to the natural world in all its richness. Let it go.

 

Highway to Nowhere

Last week I was driving through the Colorado mountains over the Fourth of July weekend.  It was early in the morning when I was going through the San Luis Valley (right), so there was hardly any traffic, and I decided to drive as slowly as I could  in order to enjoy one of my favorite landscapes. The clouds were low over the Sangre de Christos, obscuring my view of these tall and rugged mountains, but the clouds diffused the sunlight, so everything looked precious, this dry high-mountain valley suffused with a glowing light.

 

I was driving 5 miles under the speed limit (of 65), which was fine at first because the roads were nearly empty.  But then gradually more cars started piling up behind me, and by the time I got to Poncha Pass, I had a whole brigade of SUVs breathing down my tail.  I could feel their aggressiveness, even their anger—get out of my way, you’re slowing me down—and I wondered where they were all going so fast.

 

Presumably most of the people on the road this holiday weekend were heading to their favorite mountain destinations: a campground, a lake, jeep roads, or the mountain passes. That is, they wanted to be in the mountains, and yet they barreled through this landscape as if it were the suburbs of Denver or the plains of Kansas, intent only on getting to their destination. When they got to the campground or put their boat in the lake, would they finally relax, pop open a can of beer and look around to see where they are?

 

There was a time when getting there was half the fun. Old postcards from the 1920s and 1930s show a line of Model A’s snaking up dirt roads through canyons or going through snow tunnels in Rocky Mountain National Park. These were billed as sightseeing tours, cars going slowly enough that you had time to notice everything around you: the river in the canyon, deer or bighorn sheep on the hillside, flowers growing along the edge of the road.

 

Driving 285 through Colorado’s central mountains, I felt nostalgic for those days. This road takes you through some of Colorado’s most spectacular scenery: the foothills west of Denver through the lush valley of the South Platte and the huge expanse of South Park to the 14,000-foot range of the Collegiate Peaks. What if we drove as if we wanted to see our surroundings, as if we were sightseeing,  noticing everything: the waving grasses in South Park, the dark purple and black mountains to the west etched with snowfields, the horses standing in grass almost to their bellies, their tails flicking,  the clouds fleeing across the sky.

 

Instead,  we are on a manic highway, flying around the curves and going nowhere fast.