Cabin Journal

One Winter Day

Last week at the cabin, it was warm enough to sit outside bare-headed, gloveless and with no jacket. The thermometer said 50, although more likely it was in the 40s. In the sun and out of the wind’s way, that felt positively balmy. The only snow on the ground was in the shaded places that still retained the few inches we got weeks ago.

The night before I had waited for the outside temperature to drop before building a fire in the wood-burning stove, because if it’s above 40, the cabin gets too hot. At 8 p.m., with the temperature still 48,  I gave up.

It felt like spring, like we had already gone through winter’s snow and cold, and the warm weather was returning. But at 8500 feet, I know we have at least five more months of possible snow and cold.

I had come outside that morning to find out why the Steller’s jays were making so much noise. It’s often because there’s a predator nearby: a bobcat on the ground or red-tailed hawk in a nearby tree. But I saw no obvious source of their wrath. So I sat and listened to them, at least 20 or 30 in the pine trees around the cabin. The more I listened, the more varied calls I heard, at least four or five. The main one is a scolding sound, but another resembles the grate of a saw, and Wikipedia describes one as sounding almost exactly like an old-fashioned pump handle. Amid this cacophony came a strangely melodic song.  

Not only does the jay have an amazing repertoire of its own calls, but it can mimic other birds—around Meeker Park notably the red-tailed hawk, although in other places it might be an osprey. These jays are smart enough to have figured out that the sound of the hawk sends other birds fleeing, letting the jays eat any available food.

Since I didn’t see any predators around, I wondered if maybe the jays were just having a get-together, a meeting called perhaps to discuss this extremely dry, warm weather. Did this congress of birds support it or were they troubled? Did they enjoy it like me, sitting outside enjoying the sun’s rays, but also feel like something was not quite right?

But this week a correction came, in the form of snow and temperatures in the seasonable teens. Sitting at the dining room table, I watched the snowflakes swirl lazily, with no particular hurry to descend, floating in different directions at the whim of the slight gusts of wind.

When I went for my afternoon walk, the snow had utterly changed the landscape from the week before: from a harsh, dry brown to something soft and dreamy, a landscape tinted with a blue and white light, the clouds softly clinging to the tops of the mountains. The fir trees were brushed in white, and the aspen branches punctuated in ice.

I was happy to experience the snow and to feel the cold—to approximate a normal winter, even if just temporarily. In our new climate, it’s winter for a day. Tomorrow, it’s back into the 40s, and the sun will melt the few inches we received.  Tomorrow, I’ll be able to sit on the bench on the side of the house away from the wind and enjoy spring until the next winter day.

Ponderosa People

It’s taken me a while to appreciate the ponderosa tree. I grew up in the Midwest among  maple, oak and elm trees. I didn’t realize how much these huge deciduous trees formed my landscape—both exterior and interior—until I moved to Colorado, where the natural environment (as opposed to the urban one) is mostly devoid of large leafy trees, except for the cottonwood.

I read an essay recently by a native American woman whose tribe came from the upper Midwest. She identified herself as being from the Maple People, who used the trees’ shade in the summer, burned its wood in the winter, and shared a habitat with the animals her people depended upon.

As much as I love the maples and oaks, now that I’m in Colorado, I’ve become a member of the Ponderosa People. At first, I didn’t see their worth—no leaves to change color, to flicker in the wind or to spread a canopy of green or golden light.

But living among these pine trees at the cabin, I’ve come to see their perfection—the qualities that make them hospitable to humans and other plants. Unlike other evergreen trees, such as the spruce and firs, ponderosas don’t branch out until about 15 to 20 feet up, leaving space for sunlight to penetrate underneath. That means a ponderosa forest is full of life: bushes, flowers and grasses get enough sun to thrive under the shelter of the pines’ branches.  

The ponderosa also leave space between each tree, which seems the mark of good co-habitation. I can walk easily among them, enjoying their rich odor that has been described as butterscotch or vanilla. Their wide trunks make it easy to lean against and feel the bark’s warmth as well as the sun’s.

This wide spacing, however, isn’t for my enjoyment but is essential for the trees’ growth. Their huge root systems (right) can spread as much as 100 feet wide and burrow down as deep as six feet in porous soils and 40 feet in fractured bedrock

Their deep roots are mirrored by their height—which can reach 40 to 160 feet. These trees can lift my spirits at the same time I want to sink my own roots as deep as possible.  In the past winters we’ve lost a lot of trees to high winds, and I can see the empty spaces where a tree once stood. The whole valley feels diminished.

When I sit at my favorite rock perch on the hill facing Mount Meeker, I’m looking across a green valley dense with conifers. And yet as thick as these trees seem to grow, they are not to be taken for granted. Each tree is a miracle, a result of just the right conditions. For ponderosa seeds to germinate they need sufficient sunlight, higher-than-average moisture and heavy seed production, writes Audrey DeLella Benedict in her wonderful book, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Southern Rocky Mountains. “This fortuitous pairing of events may happen only once every sixty years.”

So these trees that fill the valley here in Meeker Park likely germinated at some point in the last century when there was extra snow or rain. As the climate grows warmer and drier, I worry that we will start losing them, that all the empty spots where the winds took them down won’t be filled in.

I try to do my own small part to keep them going. Two tall ponderosas anchor the front of my cabin (right), one nudging up against the front porch. In the winter, when I clear snow from the porch, I throw it around the ponderosas, to make sure they get enough water. If they died, it would be like losing a member of my family.

On dark nights, I sidle up to them, stretch my arms around them, hoping to absorb their strength. Benedict says that the largest trees in a mature stand can be 300 to 500 years old. I don’t know how old my cabin patriarchs/matriarchs are, but I sense some ancient wisdom, something learned from centuries of withstanding floods, winds, cold and humans.

I’m not the only one who is drawn to these trees. In Rocky Mountain National Park once, a young boy of about 6 came running up to me to take my hand and lead me to a ponderosa tree that he pressed his face to, one with the strong scent of vanilla.

“Can you smell it?” he asked me eagerly.

Ah, I thought, another member of the Ponderosa People.