Cabin Journal

Last Light

The Native Americans had a name for all the seasons—“when the geese return” or “when the creeks thaw.” Now at the cabin is the time when the pine cones are falling from the trees, when nature has decided it’s the most auspicious time for the ponderosas to try to reseed themselves. Working at my computer, I’m startled by the crashes, as the cones fall on the roof and porch, like some kind of tree artillery.

It’s also the time when the hummingbirds have returned from their winter havens. At the cabin last week, a warm evening, I wanted to absorb the last light of day, that fleeting time when everything is bathed with golden light as the sun gets ready to disappear behind Mount Meeker. I’ve finished my work for the day, and I just wanted to open all my senses to everything around me, turn off the thinking part of my brain.

Down the road, past Claudia’s house, the first thing I saw were the hummingbirds thick among the willow bushes, little bits of emerald green and red among the blooming pale yellow flowers and pale green leaves. It’s the nectar they want, and there seems plenty of it, but the thick bushes are also a good place to hide from predators as well as to launch their straight-up dizzying flights meant to dazzle the opposite sex. I don’t know about the female hummingbirds, but I’m impressed.

On the hillside, the last light hit a grove of young aspen trees, thin, girlish stalks that culminate in a burst of lime-colored leaves. In the thick woods along the creek the golden light burnishes the trees and bushes in 12 shades of green: from the somber pine needles to the pale willow leaves to the psychedelic aspen.

On my way back, I notice  the wooden fence posts, now falling apart since Tom went into the nursing home two years ago, and there’s no one to maintain them.

I thought about how we all have our time to love and enjoy this valley, and then we move on, while new people discover this place. I met a man last week who had been coming here for 50 years, but it was no longer the “Shangri-la” it once was, he told me. Life’s circumstances, including the death of his wife, had changed his feelings toward this valley.

For me, Meeker Park is still a paradise, especially this time of year when life is returning. But watching the seasons, as well as the people who come and go here, I get the sense of the cycle of life that keeps moving, whether we want it to or not. In only four months, these lime green aspen leaves will be replaced by golden ones, as nature retreats again and the cycle continues.  All we can do is hang on for the ride, as long as it lasts.

Rocks and Sky

 

On my hikes, something always resonates with me, captures my attention, sort of like a theme for the day, although I don’t consciously look for it.  Sometimes it’s the flowers or the light on the aspen trunks, or Mount Meeker itself.

On my last hike, in the Twin Owls area of Rocky Mountain National Park, it was the sky and the rocks. Unlike the rest of the park where glaciers carved the valleys and mountains into sharp relief, at Twin Owls the granite base was weathered by a slower and gentler process of rain and wind that produced more rounded rocks. The Twin Owls are two such formations, resembling two overlapping owl heads. (It’s easy to start anthropomorphizing here with all the differently shaped rocks; I’ve seen the body of a slug, a sleeping lion, and there’s one rock formation known as Paul Bunyan’s foot.)

It was a changeable day, with clouds forming and dissipating and reforming, so the light was ever changing, reflecting on the rocks in ways I’ve never seen before. It was a soft and warm light, as tender as the new leaves on the aspens in the valley below, where a huge herd of elk were eating and resting(above).

It’s the combination that seems so powerful and eternal: there’s nothing on earth more solid and heavy than rocks and nothing more spacious and open than the sky. Maybe it’s the yin and yang counterpoint that draws my eyes upward over and over, that catches the flight of vultures and hawks soaring so high they are not much bigger than specks, although I can still delight in their aerial dance. I want to be up there, floating in this unbounded space between the rocks and the sky.

 

Survival Mode

Coming back from the cabin last week, I stopped for a hike at Hall Ranch, a valley surrounded by red rock hills. It’s a dry place with creek beds in which I’ve never seen water, and yet every spring nature puts on a show, with all the bushes flowering and the short-grass fields turning green (though some of last year's brown grasses, right, hang on).

Even after three months of little precipitation, most of the plants were making valiant attempts to put on their best faces. And yet when I looked closely, I could see that the showy flowers disguised the fact that the plant was struggling. The bitterbrush were flowering, but on some plants there were only flowers and almost no leaves, as if the bush had gone into survival mode and the bush was focusing on its most important task: to produce flowers so seeds would carry on the plant’s survival for the next generation. 

The rabbit bush that grow here in huge numbers, sprawling in every direction, have become more circumspect, keeping their branches in check. Even in my backyard, where I often water my trees, this spring most of the trees have produced only a few leaves per branch, while waiting and hoping for more rain.

In times of stress, when nature produces less than optimal conditions for growth, nature does what it has to do to survive, conserving resources and energy.  

I want to respond in kind, curtail my water use, eat less food, reduce the amount of lawn at my home, take shorter showers, and drive less. We just got a day of rain, which seemed like a blessing, but the previous lack of substantial moisture for at least three months and the unnatural heat seems like a crisis. Yet the human world goes on as if everything is normal. Only nature  is smart enough to know to pull back in times of hardship.