Cabin Journal

Opening Up

Two weeks ago, my brain lurched in an unexpected direction. It felt a little like the ground opened up before me. It’s a scary thing to happen, because I found out that there are things beyond my control.

Meditating afterward, I instinctively felt that there were two directions I could take: to retreat to the safety of familiar places or to open my mind as much as I could. A couple of days later, I found myself on the tundra, where there is nothing but openness and space, and no place to hide

The Ute Trail is an old Indian trail that parallels Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, starting at an elevation of more than 11,000 feet. For the first time in a month, the skies weren’t white and pale from the fires. It was like seeing an old friend again:  the blue Colorado sky, so deep the color was a substance in itself, one that enfolded this high alpine bowl.

 This is a land of rocks, barely covered by a thin carpet of alpine grass and a few flowers. The granite emerges everywhere, piled up high in a huge formation called Tombstones, or scattered across the tundra in strange shapes and colors—pink, grey, white—gleaming on the tundra grass, framing the mountains all around.

To the east is the line of mountains that form Glacier Gorge, ending with Longs Peak, with its characteristic gray metal rock cap, bereft of  snow (left). To the west is another line of mountains, the Never Summer Range.

Below is the dark, forested canyon that is empty of trails and therefore humans—to me a mysterious place that offers solace, the possibility of other worlds beyond human entanglements and beyond my entangled mind.

And in between is emptiness and space, unbounded, and so I start to breathe again.

 

 

Paradise Lost and Found

Lately, when I’m at the cabin, sitting on the back porch, another place of natural beauty haunts me. It was the first place I felt touched by nature--a cabin on a lake in the north woods of Wisconsin. When I bought my cabin in Colorado, it was with some desire to recreate the place that I had fallen in love with as a child: the same knotty pine walls and ceilings; the same smell of the pine trees; the same chipmunks and other animals scurrying in the grasses; the cries of birds echoing through the forest.

But it’s more than the sum of all these bits of nature that connects these two landscapes, which are more than a thousand miles apart. In both places the forest is intertwined with summer cabins, so there’s a sense of being on the edge of nature, of getting a glimpse of wildness; one foot in the civilized world with the other in a place that whispers of a life beyond civilization, something wild and unknown, with possibilities I can only imagine.

But the sadness for me is that the place I loved so much as a child doesn’t exist anymore. No, Thunder Lake wasn’t drained, but much of the forest around the lake’s edges has been replaced by big houses made of brick that would fit right in suburbia. Wild blueberry bushes, scrub oaks and wild grasses have been pushed out by artificially green lawns. What to me, a child of suburbia, was a bit of wilderness has been refashioned by those who see it as an extension of their suburban life, an opportunity to play with their outdoor toys: motorboats, pontoons, Jet-Skis, ATVs. I think they appreciate the beauty of the lake but want to enjoy it in air-conditioned comfort, with satellite TV service, big kitchens, and granite countertops. Gone are the days of living simply, when we bathed in the lake, used the outhouse to supplement the single toilet, and kept cool at night by opening all the windows.

With the now sterile lakefronts, the frogs and chipmunks are gone; I no longer hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwills at night. Gone too are the places we hiked to in the woods—replaced by chain-link fences with “no trespassing” signs, a product of a new culture that doesn’t trust anyone else.

That’s why I treasure my cabin here in Colorado so much. There’s still a lot of wildlife: rabbits, chipmunks, ground squirrels, chickarees, occasional sightings of bear, elk, deer, even last week a female moose and her young one.  Most of the cabins in Meeker Park are the originals, when people built small cabins to fit into the woods. And not many people would attempt to put in a lawn in this rocky terrain.

And yet I can’t help but grieve for Thunder Lake, for what’s gone, a place and way of life that has been pushed aside in our quest for comfort, civilization imposed on a place that was beautiful, fragile and tender.

Tuning Out the World

In Rocky Mountain National Park last week, I was preparing for a hike up to Cub Lake, when I noticed the car parked next to mine had its engine running.  Fuming, I  decided I had to say something and rapped on the tinted windows.

“Do you know your motor is running?” I asked the man in the driver’s seat.

 “Yes, ma’am.” It was a polite southern accent. “We’re just waiting for someone.” In the back seat was a girl reading her book in air-conditioned comfort.

Heading up the trail, where the grasses were almost as short and brown as they were in winter, with record-high temperatures (above 100 in Denver), a parched valley after little snow last winter, and fires erupting all over Colorado, I wanted to cry.

I couldn’t help but see this black SUV as emblematic of our times. Close yourself off in your big SUV, turn on the air conditioning, and let the rest of the world, which you don’t even see  because of your tinted windows, go to hell. It didn’t matter to the man that he was pumping more warm air into an already warm day, more carbon emissions into already polluted skies, partly from the smoke from the fires. He and his little girl were in cool comfort.

It didn’t matter that outside his tinted windows was a stream that meandered through a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains, that he and his daughter could have cooled off in the river or sat and read under the shade of the aspen trees.  Instead they had boxed themselves off from the natural world, seeking refuge in an artificial environment.

So when I started out on my hike, I was in a foul mood. In my own way, I wanted to do the same thing as that man in the car—cut off my feelings, put blinders on to avoid seeing the landscape that was suffering from the extreme heat and lack of water. Here in Moraine Park, the flowers were few and far between and half their normal size, while the sky was pale, filled with smoke from the fires to the north, and the stream was half full. I didn’t want to feel this horrible anxiety that nature was going away, that I would lose the thing in life that provided me with the most solace. And so I hurried up the trail, unmindful, just wanting to reach the pleasures of Cub Lake, dip my feet into its cool waters.

But, of course, gradually, I started letting down my guard, started connecting with the aspens swaying in the wind, with the shape of the rocks, with the ferns that gathered around the tall boulders where it was damp and shaded, with the still green grasses that swirled around the boulders near the lake (top). I started hearing all the bird songs around me, rousing me from my apathy.

 At the lake, I took off my socks and shoes and let my feet bathe in the cool waters, watched the lily pads be uplifted by the wind (above) and peered into the lake to see all the busy life—baby salamanders and what looked like a swimming beetle—while dragonflies darted above the water. I felt myself opening up to this abundance, and the gloomy thoughts started to dissipate. On the way back down, I noticed what I wasn’t aware of coming up: the grove of tall ponderosas, the warm breezes, the calming sound of the creek, the small duck that dove into the  ponds, birds everywhere. At one point a swallowtail butterfly—yellow, black and blue—almost flew into me, and it felt like a blessing. Here was life, continuing, despite everything.