Cabin Journal

Sitting Still, Standing Still

In the summer, it’s warm enough at the cabin to sit outside and meditate in the morning. I sit in the back yard, my back to the shed, and watch life unfold from all around me. My feet planted solidly on the bare ground, I become just another tree, part of this quivering, breathing mass of life: from the small bits of vegetation on the ground to the white-barked aspens surrounding me and the tall pine trees that cause me to lift my eyes to the heavens.

Breathing in and out softly, I hold still enough that the small forest animals get close; unless I move, they are hardly aware of my existence. As the young rabbit gets within a foot, so close I want to lean over and pet its soft fur, I watch it pull shoots from the ground, with the grass disappearing into its mouth. Chipmunks run over my shoes, while a woodrat nervously pops out from the shed and grabs a piece of grass, close enough for me to see its long gray tail, its knobby dark eyes and large ears. A hummingbirds buzzes me, staring me in the face, before it decides I’m not a flower. On the ground a family of juncos peck through the dirt, looking for some choice morsel—a bug?—to feed their young one.

A gray squirrel jumps on the picnic table in front of me, eyeing me with curiosity, while another squirrel emerges from underneath the cabin bearing wads of pink cotton—insulation, I realize, that it’s carrying to its nest in my neighbor’s shed. Already, the chickaree is preparing for its winter home.

Last week, I was at the family cabin in Wisconsin. My sister and I kayaked to one of the few undeveloped spots on the lake, where I swam along the shoreline of birch and pine trees. Afterward my sister and I stood knee deep in the water, wrapped in our beach towels, enjoying the feel of soft sand beneath our feet and the breezes that ruffled the lake’s surface.  As we stood there, a bald eagle that roosts on top of the hill behind us swooped down to the lake, alarming a pair of loons that screamed a warning and then dived into the lake.

Meanwhile, taking a cruise around the lake on the pontoon boat, my sister’s husband came by on his second loop. Seeing us still standing in the same place, he yelled, “Are you two stuck in the sand—or what?”

Yes, we were stuck, maybe even awestruck. While we stood still, the world revolved around us—the lake, the birds, the sky, the clouds. Sometimes the only thing to do is stand still and keep quiet.

Of Mice and Moths

I’ve been having a hard time sleeping this summer at the cabin. Usually the darkness and quiet tend to lull me into a comforting state. But all night I hear the small crashes of moths as they fly into the nightlight and the windows. This is accompanied by the sounds of mice running around, scratching in the walls, rearranging plates in the kitchen sink, and small thuds of unknown origin. In the morning I find the wings of moths—in the bathroom, under the dining room table, behind the kitchen sink—but no bodies.  I have to assume the deer mice  are killing the moths and eating their bodies but leaving behind the papery wings for me to clean up.

All summer long, I’ve tried to end this carnage, not just because I want my precious sleep back, but I’m tired of having to clean up the mouse poop and moth wings. I’ve put out three different live mouse traps, but, so far, only one worked. After I caught the first two or three mice and marched them across the road to release them, I realized that it wouldn’t take long for them to come back to the plentiful feast in my cabin. The next one I drove across the creek, hoping it wouldn’t be able to cross the creek, but these animals are smart. Several times I put out live traps with peanut butter, only to find in the morning that the peanut butter was gone but so were the mice. (The one below is checking out the mouse trap.)

I’ve looked for cracks in the walls and floors where they might be entering from the crawl space below and stuffed them with a mouse deterrent —a cloth with a sharp citrus smell they presumably don’t like. But either their portals are somewhere else or they are stuffing the cloth back in after they let themselves in, because the cloths are undisturbed.

Nor do I know where the moths comes from, because I never see them during the day. At night, when I open the door to the supply room, dozens of moths suddenly are whirring around me. When I enter the bathroom, they are clinging to the wallpaper,  floating in the water in the sink or hurling themselves into the nightlight and the windows where moonlight floods in.

The worst night was in July when I thought I could safely sleep in the attic and not worry about mice jumping into the bed with me, which one did in the downstairs bedroom in June. But when I got into bed, I found mice poop; it was also in the base of the lamp. And soon I saw mice scurrying up the chimney from the kitchen below and chasing each other around the attic. On top of that, dozens of moths materialized out of the darkness, swarming the lights and me. Needless to say, I hardly slept that night.

I found out that it's not the lamps or heat that attract the moths but the moon that causes them to hurl themselves against the windows. Apparently, moths navigate by moonlight, and their frantic fluttering shows the need to follow their instincts. I wish I could release them from their torment, just like I want the mice to return to their natural habitat. Maybe the pandemic quarantine has made me more sympathetic to the moths’ frantic need to get out. Maybe we’re all beating our wings against the windows looking for light or a way out of this nightmare.

Summer Disrupted

It’s been a summer unlike any other. It started out late but full of promise. With snow and cold temperatures in April, the pasqueflowers didn’t start emerging until May, but when they did these first flowers of spring were profuse—covering hillsides with their cups of purple light. Soon came the aspens and willows leafing out, then the purple lupine, columbines and wild roses.

But by July, all that was left around my cabin were the shrubby cinquefoil and drought-tolerant sulfur flowers.  Every summer gets warmer now. When I first bought the cabin, some 12 years ago, I enjoyed temperatures in the 70s—a welcome respite from the heat on the plains. But  with the temperatures in Denver and Boulder creeping up to the high 90s for at least the past month, even at the cabin it’s been in the 80s and uncomfortably warm.  At night, the cabin barely cools down.

From the cabin I can look east and see the huge cumulus clouds (above) developing, which occasionally produce destructive hailstorms on the plains but no rain for the mountains. With almost no moisture for several weeks, the heat and drought have taken its toll. On the east side of the cabin, the grasses that grew tall and profuse in past years are sparse. The rose bushes (left) that line the road in front of the cabin are almost bare. The yard around the cabin looks more like October, when all the vegetation has dried up, than mid-summer.

 

It’s not just the natural world that has been disrupted this year but also the human one. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t been able to get to my usual hiking trails and my favorite alpine lakes. To get in Rocky Mountain National Park, I need a reservation, and they are often booked several days ahead of time. But when I do manage to find an opening, the trails are less crowded, because the government limits the number of visitors. Meanwhile, other trails that don’t have similar restrictions are  packed with more people than I’ve ever seen, with cars parked a half mile down the road from the trailhead.

This week, while hiking up the Arapahoe Pass trail in the nearby national forest, a friend and I encountered a parade of people coming down. One woman told us the crowds forced  her to turn around, as there’s almost no room on this narrow, steep trail to step aside for other hikers—a concern now when state rules mandate keeping six feet apart. There was a time, not so long ago, when my biggest fear on this trail was fording the sometimes high streams. Now it’s making my sure my mask is on when I see someone approaching and trying to move off the trail as much as possible.

Still, on the trail the blue harebells, orange Indian paintbrush and purple monkshood were blooming on the hillsides. When I look at my photos from the past two months, I’m happy to see the red crossbill (above), a bird whose beak is crossed so it can pry open pine cones to get the seeds. In June I was lucky enough to see the startling pinkish-purple of a group of Indian paintbrush (above) at Brainard Lake and a profusion of columbine growing among aspen near my cabin.

Either because of the bare ground around the cabin or a population surge, I’ve seen more small critters this year than in the past. Chipmunks and ground squirrels come up on the deck (left) to check me out, while gray squirrels scold me from the trees, and voles, a small rodent that lives mostly underground, scurry through the short grasses. With equal parts dismay and an appreciation for their adorableness, I watch as the chipmunks and ground squirrels eat the tops off my dwindling flowers.

Some of the birds that kept me company in May and June have fledged and gone—the house wrens and the Western bluebirds—but the swallows still cut through the sky at alarming speeds and angles. Last week I watched juncos pick bugs off the ground to feed to their squawking babies.

Like everyone else, I want to return to a normal summer—with plenty of rain, cool temperatures, no crowds on my favorite trails nor worries about getting infected. But I have a feeling that the world has passed some tipping point and that life will never be the same (and probably never was). I need to accept that and enjoy  the natural world that still teems with energy and beauty—even if some of that life is eating all my flowers.