Cabin Journal

The Finest Flower

It’s not the biggest, nor the most beautiful, nor the most colorful. Yet more than any other flower, the pasqueflower lifts my heart every spring when it emerges from the ground—its arrival so meek and understated that I almost step on one while walking from the car to the cabin.

One day I see nothing on the ground around the cabin but the residue of the winter: dead leaves, grasses and pine needles. Then the next day, two or three pasqueflowers have emerged into the sunlight, just a few inches off the ground and hardly noticeable. These are not showy flowers like columbine or Indian paintbrush that make you stop in your tracks. I have to actively look for pasqueflowers (otherwise known as western anemone), carefully perusing the soil for a bit of color—a pale purple, But when I find one, it’s like my eyes have been opened, and I start seeing them everywhere. They are all flower, with just a short stalk, like a big head on a small person.

The pasqueflowers are precededed by the white chickweed and pink spring beauties—both flowers even smaller than the pasqueflowers. Unlike the showy tulips and daffodils that grow in my Boulder yard, mountain flowers are small and hug the ground, keeping a low profile, especially this time of the year when it can snow any time.

There is something so tender and fragile about the pasqueflower—its purple cup filling with light—and yet to survive it has to be tough. Last year, after the flowers started blooming, it snowed about 20 inches. I figured that was the end, but they must have some kind of built-in anti-freeze, because once the May snow had melted, a week or so later, the flowers emerged again—seemingly none the worse for wear.

This week at the cabin, in the morning the flowers were open to the warm sun, but in the afternoon a snowstorm moved in. When I went for a walk in the blowing snow, the flowers had all closed up and were fringed with ice (above).

But I knew that as soon as the snow stopped and the sun came out, they would open themselves again. They're tough but tender: my role model for trying to survive in this harsh but still beautiful world.

Nature as Art, Nature Is Art

I found someone who is as crazy, if not crazier, about nature as I am. Andy Goldsworthy is a British artist whose palette is the natural world. He doesn’t re-create the world on canvas but uses the world as his canvas— creating installations in rock, on trees and in water—with whatever is handy: leaves, sticks, ice, even his body.

There’s some impulse, which I totally understand, to immerself himself in nature. In the movie Leaning into the Wind he claws his way through the top of a line of bare trees, the branches barely able to support him;  lies down in cut-out rock sculptures to better know what it feels like to be part of the earth; wraps flower petals around his hand, so he’s part flower and part  human; and leans precariously over a cliff, while gale-force winds hold him (barely) up.

In one of my favorite scenes, he walks through a small creek in Scotland, climbing over and under downed trees. Maybe he wants to know what it feels like to be a stream: how it spreads out and then narrows, how the pebbles feel, how the water moves around rocks that are in its way.

When he comes to a tree that’s been felled (by winds, old age or disease—or a combination), he stops to contemplate the trunk and branches now spread out on the opposite bank, obviously moved by the tree’s death. In fact, he’s so affected that he comes back again and again to make this tree his project—a kind of respect and homage to its life, maybe like how we leave a ghost bike and flowers by the scene of a fatal bicycle accident.

In this case, he added painted white limbs to the tree and sticks that radiate from its trunk, as if pointing to this tree, so its death can’t be ignored. Seeing what he did made me realize that I’m not the only one who grieves for fallen trees. Last week I saw another tall ponderosa (top) that had its roots ripped from the ground by our strong mountain winds. All I could do was put my arms around it and hold onto it. Like Goldsworthy but in my own way (using a software program), I tried to showcase its death (top picture).

Unlike Goldsworthy, I don’t climb trees anymore, but I try to immerse myself in nature as much as possible. The best way is to be in water—either a lake or stream—but it’s not so easy anymore because of people’s insistence on their private property.

But there are other ways. I can cup myself into the crevice of a boulder, feel its warm and rough texture under me, or lay down in a meadow, feel myself embraced by the earth, staring up at the sky and clouds racing by. I can thread my way through an aspen forest, squeezing through the narrow trunks and over fallen trees. At the cabin, I can push myself into 70-mph wind gusts.

And now that the days are getting warmer again, I need to look for a stream to walk through.