Cabin Journal

War of the Hummers

Right now, I sit at my table in the cabin watching the hummingbirds come to the feeder, these tiny dazzling jewels of birds, with gold and red platelets for throats, like sunlit armor that catches the sun. They are extremely excitable, hardly able to relax for a moment while sipping the sugar water I put out.

At times, I feel like I’m watching a miniature aerial war, with dive bombing, defensive maneuvers, long buzzing chases, occasional body contact and threatening displays. When I sit  on the porch, they zoom around me, miniature fighter planes criss-crossing the sky, and I can hear the zoom of their tiny motors.

At other times, their movements form a dance, as five sit on the feeder sipping the nectar, nervously eyeing each other for a possible sneak attack. When one twitches, they all back off, their wings thrumming, almost translucent in the air until they decide it’s safe, then return en mass, only to repeat the performance 10 seconds later, an almost synchronized ballet  accompanied only by the thrumming of their wings and the wind.

The rufous hummingbirds (above) are migrating through now, upholding their reputation as belligerent birds, not allowing the broad-tailed (left), which stay here all summer, anywhere near the feeder. I watched one defend the feeder against all, chasing away any bird that came near, even its own rufous females. It stood guard on a nearby thistle, not even partaking of the nectar, just boldly claiming this territory, even after I took the feeder in and it got dark.

There’s a good reason for its fierceness. These tiny birds, about three inches long and weighing less than an ounce, have one of the longest migrations for a bird its size: from Alaska to Mexico, sometimes flying 650 miles without stopping to eat or rest.

It’s a feat no human could ever match. I think of the camping trip I took last week, my car stuffed with tent, a sleeping bags, stove, an ice chest full of sausages, potato salad, yogurt, coffee, Washington state cherries and chocolate bars. And that was for two days. 

Yet in a few weeks these birds will continue their long, perilous journey with no backpack, no water and no extra food, surviving only on insects and flowers they find along the way.

I bow to their fierceness.

 

Touching the Past

In grade school, history bored me: a bunch of long-dead presidents, long-forgotten battles, meaningless laws. It was only when I came to the West and walked the streets of an old mining town, toured  opera houses where singers entertained miners and visited Pueblo villages that had existed for centuries that I felt the weight of history.  

The history of Meeker Park is considerably less important but no less meaningful to me. I want to know who came before me, what happened here, all the different lives and different ways of living. One of the places that’s in the forefront of history here is Big Elk Ranch (below), a several mile long open park between the mountains about eight miles east of my cabin.

Starting in the early 1900s, an enterprising farmer and businessman opened a dairy in this wide valley, had a herd of 65 cows (where elk and cattle now companionably graze) and kept the milk cold with ice cut from Copeland Lake (now at the entrance to  Wild Basin). He  grew root vegetables, lettuce and peas, which he sold, along with the milk, in Estes Park, to the tourists just starting to flock to this resort area.

He also owned a resort on the North St. Vrain, now Shelley’s Cottages on Hwy. 36, which attracted Teddy Roosevelt and Al Capone, among others. Yet today, Shelley’s Cottages  are barely a blip to drivers rushing to their destinations in Estes Park. Time speeds away from us. 

Last month, I finally saw the ranch, which is spread out in a spacious meadow. Two large barns, their boards polished by a century of wind, snow and rain, plus several smaller sheds, were a testament to the once large size of this enterprise.  I was hiking with my neighbor John, who hadn’t been here for 10 years. He and his wife, before her illness, used to hike this all the time, knew the people whose houses we passed. They had visited the retired professor and his wife who lived in a house, probably built in the 1960s, with a large two-story window facing the meadow. She played the piano, and I imagine the music spilling out into this lush green valley.

 

Farther up the road is a house, now in disrepair, where a pilot once lived, who flew his small plane into this remote valley; if you look hard enough, you can see the outline of the airstrip. Past a pond, the road dips down to another ranch, seemingly abandoned, with a long silent tractor exposed in the barn, several outbuildings and a house that looked recently vacated: lawn chairs and a barbecue grill sitting on the porch. The story became apparent when we found that the road had been ripped away by the floods last year—the owners separated suddenly from their home.

But the gem of this valley is the pond. Its blue waters pull together and reflect the circle of this meadow: the hills that encompass it, the aspens around its edge, the huge bowl of the sky filled with swiftly passing clouds. Sitting by this unruffled surface, hearing only the quiet lap of the water and the soft brushing of the aspens, the stillness and huge space filled me up so entirely that I felt weighted to the ground, as if I something wanted to hold me here.

On our way back, we encountered a large truck pulling a trailer. The woman told us she was the niece of the owners of the house with the piano. As a child, she and her siblings had spent summers in this valley, riding horses up into the hills, with miles of wilderness to explore and play in.

From all these fragments of the past, I weave together a story of this valley. All these lives over time left their traces on the land, like the weathered buildings and faint outlines of the airstrip.  These are people whose lives were so different from mine—ranching, living off the land, enduring hardships I can’t imagine— while I pick up smoked salmon and kale at Safeway, drink from bottles of purified water and sit at my computer all day.

Yet we’re all connected. I stand in a long line of people who have inhabited this valley, put our feet down here, breathed the same thin air, watched the clouds soar over these same hills, our gaze pulled upward to Mount Meeker.  Our lives intersect, like the pond, pulling all us together.

 

(For the history of Elk Park Ranch, I am indebted toWeaving Mountain Memoriesby Lorna Knowlton.)

The Sweet Smell of Success

Every week at the cabin now, a new flower emerges from the earth, with little warning, almost no sign beforehand that something glorious will make its appearance. Three weeks ago, the purple flag, aka wild iris, were showing off in every low-lying, possible wet spot. Next came golden banner (right), the showy yellow cinquefoil and purple penstemon (below). At the same time, white chickweed filled in the green grasses, and small white daisies covered the rocky soil in the northeast corner of the yard. Last week the purple lupines and yellow mountain parsley spread out in the front of the cabin, and the wild roses started climbing over the front fence, while the golden giardia (blanket flower) opened its large red eye.  On the rocky hillsides, stonecrop grow out of the vacancies in the rock, apparently not even needing proper soil.

Two weeks ago, the first columbine started opening, behind the back deck, just the stalks and unopened bud. This week, they are everywhere, in the shade of the aspens, lined up against the wall of a nearby cabin and on the hillside next to the dirt road. The columbine amaze me because they look less like something Mother Nature created and more like what an artist working in wax put together to create what she considered the perfect flower, everything arranged symmetrically: outer purple petals lined with creamy white petals surrounding a yellow stamen/pistil, and for, an added flourish, curved spurs jutting earthward, as if it’s entirely possible that the columbine could also propel itself into the air, if it so desired.  

It looks too darned perfect. Yet flowers amaze me in general because their lives are so short-lived. For more than 11 months, they are invisible, not even revealing their outlines in winter, like the aspens or willow bushes. Although the flowers are announced in the spring and summer by their stalks and leaves, they offer no real hint of what’s to come, of the complexity and variety of colors, each with a different arrangement—some flowers clustered together on top of a stalk, while others are lined up lengthwise, and still others comprise a single flower balanced on top of a the stalk. And the petals and leaves have their own arrangement—parallel or opposite, round or long. You could say that humans are just or more complex, each with different size and shape, but we live for 70 years, on average, while the flowers exist for only a week or two, then disappear, invisible until next year under dirt, rock and snow.

It almost seems like a waste of effort. When humans create works of art, we enshrine them in museums, install them in public spaces. But maybe that’s part of the beauty of flowers—that they are transient, that we can’t make them permanent, can’t hold on to them. If we try to bring them inside, put them in a vase of water, within a few days they are wilting and brown—sad replicas of what exists outside. 

Of course, all this beauty is not mean to delight humans but to attract birds and insects. Just like the progression of different blooming flowers all summer is not meant to keep humans enthralled for months on end but to reliably coordinate with the schedules of insects and birds that rely on the flowers.

But, with climate change, the seasons are not so reliable, and birds and insects sometimes are not reaching their food source at the right time. I think of all these things when I ponder climate change and how this society is so easily  willing to get rid of centuries of what evolution has wrought: a carefully timed and executed performance of flowering plants working in tandem with the birds and insects.

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