Cabin Journal

Getting Above the Chaos

It’s easy to get lost on familiar ground when the landscape changes around you. Sometimes you just need to climb out of it.

With the snows finally melted, a lot of places that were inaccessible to me since the floods are now open. So last week, I hiked up Tahosa Creek, which I hadn’t explored since last fall.  Amazingly, it looked like the floods came through just yesterday, unlike the roads going through St. Vrain Canyon. Since last fall, the highway crews have been busy removing dead trees and debris, using bulldozers to straighten out the creek, get it to flow in an orderly way. It will take decades for the vegetation to grow back, but there is a semblance of order, as if humans had tidied up the landscape, leaving it open to revegetate and replenish.

But on the small Tahosa Creek, there’s no one to take on this chore, so the fallen aspen trees clog the creek, creating their own stream diversions— smaller branches, twigs and grasses caught in their arms. The tall, leggy branches of the willows are yanked down to the ground, still in submission to the flood waters.

Untamed by CDOT’s bulldozers, the creek bed is now two or three times bigger than it was before the floods, so the creek is free to divide and spread wherever it wants, sometimes splitting into three channels. Away from the main flow, gravel and rock deposits litter the valley floor, with an occasional deposit of fine sand, as if the remains of a child’s sandbox or a faraway beach had been dropped here.

Hiking up the creek was slow going. In places where the path had been claimed by the forces of the flood, I had to either scramble up the hillside over rocks or crash through trees and bushes, or walk on the uneven creek bed. There were also barbed wire and wooden fences to crawl over and under.

Somewhere up ahead was a bridge that crossed the creek and gave me access to the road that would take me back to the cabin, so I wouldn’t have to bushwhack my way back. But this newly formed, chaotic landscape didn’t look familiar. I had never seen the new road across the creek, and farther up the stream, it looked like a bulldozer had come in and flattened out the stream bed. Where was I? How far was the bridge? And would it still be there after the floods?

 I started to feel that I was losing my bearings, so I hurried faster, intent on finding something familiar. When I realized I was just hurrying along, not seeing anything, I decided it was better to go back than push on, because I knew what was behind me but not ahead.

But I needed to climb higher, get out of the mess, even the sadness of seeing all this destruction. I found what looked like an old game trail that took me higher and higher on a relatively level path. When I finally stopped and looked behind me, I could see the mountains to the south and Meeker to the west, and the seemingly endless green pine forests. Below was the tangle of river, trees and brown rushing water. But up here was spaciousness, room to breathe and gain a new perspective.

Sometimes life is as simple as making a choice: stay in the chaos and entanglements or climb out of it.

Looking for a Little Human Touch

In the process of setting up my new computer, I lost the ability to send emails, which puts a big crimp in my daily communication. Unfortunately, the companies that sold me the  software and Internet access on my computer don’t provide any human contacts for help. Instead, I got assistance in the form of community forums, where I posted my problem and then get 50 different replies from “community” members, each of who has their own solution. I spent more hours than I care to remember chasing down rabbit holes until I felt I had fallen into some alternate universe. It’s one where all the humans have disappeared, replaced by disembodied names: John42 and MX57.

The next day I talked to a friend who had no luck online trying to use a voucher for Frontier Airlines to make a plane reservation. When she finally tracked down a human voice at Frontier, the woman referred her back to the non-functioning web page.

On my way to the cabin this week, I ran into the grocery store to get a few things. At that early hour, none of the lines were open where human checkers greet you and take care of you. Instead I went through the self-checking aisles, where I had to figure out how much the cilantro and mushrooms cost, where the machine balked at my bag and issued unreasonable statements to “return my items to the cart” when I didn’t have a cart. What would have taken five minutes with a human checker took 10 minutes, which only seems like a lot of time in a time-driven world.

And even when you can find a human being on the phone, they don’t seem to have human emotions. A friend wanted to end the irritating daily messages on his phone: “Your time is limited to reduce your credit card fees.” When he called the number given and asked to be taken off the company’s list, the male voice on the other end repeated “That’s not my problem” and then hung up.

John lives in a cabin near mine, and when I told him about my difficulties in finding human assistance in a world increasingly dominated by machines, he was somewhat baffled. “I don’t have to deal with that,” he told me, and I envied him.

Retired from the work world, he doesn’t own a computer. He rarely travels outside of his small community of Meeker Park and Estes Park. A big trip is to Boulder, down in the “valley.” There’s the mountain world where he lives, where life hums along at a slow and steady pace, and the valley with its frenzied urban activity.

Most people would look at his circumscribed world and feel sorry for such a narrow existence. But his life is rich with human contact: the philosophy and religion group he belongs to, the community theater he is part of, the restaurants where he eats weekly and knows the owners, even the checker at the town grocery store who greets him by name every time he comes in. John has been visiting this part of the world since 1972, before he permanently moved here, and can tell you who lived in each cabin going back more than 40 years.  He can tell me which contractor to trust and which handyman to avoid.

John lives in a world that is fast disappearing. I envy him his ignorance of the new one.