Cabin Journal

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.

 

 

Continuous and Uninterrupted Beauty

 

On my walk around Meeker Park last week, something remarkable happened: I didn’t take any photos. On every other walk, I record the changes I see from week to week: from winter to spring to summer to fall; from snow and bare branches to a valley full of green grasses and thick willow bushes, hummingbirds darting everywhere and butterflies lingering on the thistle flowers.

I wanted to take photos, wanted to capture this fertile scene, because everything was brimming with so much life and richness. But when I tried to focus my camera on one thing, I couldn’t do it. The tall grasses with their seedheads blowing in the wind were surrounded by yellow and red rudbeckia and purple harebells and white bistort (left), and when I tried to photograph them, they blended into the fence posts and then the willow bushes. And when I tried to shoot the aspens, there was no end to them, a line going up the hill and then down to the creek.

The swallows were flying up high, silhouetted against the big puffy cumulus clouds, but they moved too fast, darted too swiftly for me to catch them in my camera. All I could do was follow their flight, with my eyes, into the clouds. And when I tried to catch the light on the mountains, it flowed into the next mountain over.

Everything was deeply connected. This valley is like a big bowl that has no beginning and no end, so everywhere I look is a different view. I can make myself dizzy turning around to see the continuous rim of mountains and hillsides that encircle the valley.

I take no photos, but I carry with me an overflow of images that linger for days.

 

(The photos were taken in July.)

Rare Wilderness

 

 Before I left for a trip to Alaska in June, I was looking at a map of the state but  could find only a few roads. I thought they must be poorly marked, until I realized that in most of Alaska there are no roads.

This abstract realization was borne out by flying over parts of Alaska in small planes. For hundreds of miles, you look down on wilderness, a vast and mysterious landscape where there are no towns, no roads, not even a stray building. It would be like flying over Colorado today and seeing two roads and a few towns but otherwise buffalo running across the plains,  bears and wolves inhabiting the mountains.

  In so many ways, much of Alaska exists as it has for thousands of years. And to me that was both comforting and frightening. It’s exciting to think there are places still in the world where humans are a small and insignificant part of the landscape, where bears, wolves, moose, and eagles outnumber humans. We flew over mountains and lakes bereft of humans. Without roads to get you there, lakes stay empty, mountains untrod and unnamed. I saw lakes in the distance, probably 10 miles long and 5 miles across, with no boats, no marinas, no campgrounds. To see places where no human has set foot is an amazing thing in this world where it seems every square mile has been claimed by someone or something.

I started thinking about how little of the world has any wilderness left. Besides large parts of Canada and Russia, much of the rest of the world has all been plotted out, staked out for human consumption. What I mean by wilderness is places that we don’t know anything about; we don’t know what’s back there, what lives there, what grows there. It exists without human interference. Colorado is wilder than most places, and yet most state agencies know the layout of each national forest, what animals live there, how they are surviving, the status of the forests, what kind of minerals can be found.  But the fact that there are places in Alaska where no one knows this information is exhilarating.

And yet, in one of the wildest place on Earth are signs of trouble. In the Kenai Fjords National Park (top), in the southern part of the state, the sea lion population (middle photo) is down by 70 percent  for no apparent reason. The beluga whale population near Anchorage is getting smaller. In Kachemak Bay off Homer, one of the most biologically rich bays in the world (with, among other animals, sea otters, above), the herring population has never recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill more than 20 years ago.

If the rest of the world can reach its tentacles out to such remote and wild places, what hope is there for wilderness?

I believe the places that haven’t been touched by humans are different from our civilized human-filled world. Wild places carry a different spirit, a different smell even, and feel different in ways I can’t describe. I believe that we need such places for our sanity. The fact that they may be threatened is what scares me.