Sites of Insight : A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places 9780870817991, 9780870817434

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Sites of Insight

A Guide to Colorado

Sacred Places

E D I T E D

B Y

A N D

U N I V E R S I T Y

J A M E S

L O U G H

C H R I S T I E

P R E S S

O F

S M I T H

C O L O R A D O

© 2003 by the University Press of Colorado Published by the University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Southern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sites of insight : a guide to Colorado sacred places / edited by James Lough, Christie Smith. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-87081-743-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-87081-744-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sacred space—Colorado. 2. Colorado—Religion. I. Lough, James. II. Smith, Christie. BL2527.C65 S58 2003 291.3'5'09788—dc21 2003010936 Design by Laura Furney Typesetting by Daniel Pratt 12

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“Walking in Yampa” previously appeared in High Plains Literary Review. “Into the Rawahs” first appeared in Writing Nature. “Western Wind” previously appeared in Gettysburg Review. “Pawnee Buttes” originally appeared as a chapter in Magpie Rising, published by University of Nebraska Press. “The Bear” was first published in Mountain Woman Tales and Bird Journal 1967 by Bakson Books/Distril Press. CO-WINNER OF THE 2002 COLORADO ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES PUBLICATION PRIZE The CEH Publication Prize annually supports publication of outstanding nonfiction works that have strong humanities content and that make an area of humanities research more available to the Colorado public. The CEH Publication Prize funds are shared by the University Press of Colorado and the authors of the works being recognized. The Colorado Endowment for the Humanities is a statewide, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of humanities education for all Coloradans.

Contents Introduction / vii Western Wind (Glacier Gorge)—R E G Chatelaine (Leadville)—K R I S T E N

BACA

Mists of the Huerfano—T H O M A S J . Walking in Yampa—K A T E

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IVERSEN

Little Bethlehem (San Luis)—F R E D

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SANER

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NOEL

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KRAUTKRAMER

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Pawnee Buttes—M E R R I L L

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GILFILLAN

The Bear (Nederland)—J A N E

WODENING

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Meditación en Dos Ojos: García Lake at Cumbres Pass—R E Y E S G A R C Í A 69 Gore Canyon—N I C K

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SUTCLIFFE

Their Place, My Place (Ward)—A L E X A N D E R

DRUMMOND

Pastoral Emergence (Mount Evans)—A L E X A N D E R

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BLACKBURN

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Written on a Piece of Butcher Paper: El Rancho, Antonito—M A R K I R W I N 129 Where Form Meets Flux: Soft Eyes and Boulder’s Four Cardinal Directions—J A M E S L O U G H 138 The Road Through San Luis—S A N G E E T A Into the Rawahs—S U E E L L E N

REDDY

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CAMPBELL AND JOHN CALDERAZZO

Blanca Peak—C H R I S T I E

SMITH

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Lumpy Ridge: Buson in the Rockies—A M Y

ENGLAND

Belmar Park: Where the Sidewalk Ends—A N I T A

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HARKESS

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About the Contributors 217 Index 223 v

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VII

Introduction

What if it was like an old friend, whom you barely remembered and you didn’t know was near, was eagerly waiting to whisper into your ear, if only you would turn its way, sit still for a minute, and listen?

T H E T A S K O F C H A R A C T E R I Z I N G T H I S B O O K reminds me of an ancient Irish legend about the god Lugh, also known as the Many-skilled, or the Shining One. One day, Lugh wanted to attend a big feast held by a local tribe. But it was a private affair. The skeptical gatekeeper who guarded the walled banquet hall asked Lugh what he could contribute to the tribe that it didn’t already have. Lugh said he was a blacksmith. The gatekeeper replied that they already had a blacksmith. Lugh said he was an athlete. The gatekeeper said they had plenty of athletes. Lugh went on to list all of his other godlike talents: musician, vii

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warrior, poet and historian, physician, sorcerer, and more. The gatekeeper again insisted that they already had all of those things. Lugh then asked, “But do you have a single person who possesses all of these skills?” The gatekeeper thought about it for a minute. Conceding that they did not, he allowed Lugh into the feast. Like Lugh, Sites of Insight: A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places has multiple aspects. First, it serves as a nature guidebook of sorts for readers who already know the value of wilderness but want suggestions on where best to experience it. Second, it proves a handy travel guide for tourists, or those new to Colorado. Third, Sites of Insight contributes to this country’s great tradition of philosophical writing about nature. Writers such as Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard have focused on specific locales—Walden Pond, Sand County, or Tinker Creek— to remind us of the significance of wilderness to our lives, to encourage us to rethink our relationships to the wild and, by implication, to civilization. Fourth, this book deals with nature’s relationship to spirituality. For about long as there has been writing, there have been writings rooted in the perennial philosophy, writings as ancient as those of Lao Tsu, or as relatively recent as those of Emerson. These works have explored the spiritual dimension of wilderness, or at least regarded nature as an apt setting from which to lead a spiritual life. And finally, Sites of Insight reveals facets of Colorado history. The world already has writings on each of these aspects. But, we respond confidently, how many books cover all five? How many focus on specific places and their histories, plus reflect on environmental issues and consider nature’s value to a life of spirit? Most of you probably already appreciate nature. So the first aim of Sites of Insight is not to help you find a greater appreciation of the natural world, but rather to help you find a deeper one. I’ve asked the contributors to choose a particular location in Colorado that is meaningful to them in a deep way, and to explore that spot in relation to their own lives. So although the essays are about specific places in Colorado, they are also about the writers themselves (not to mention their friends and family, and animals both domestic and wild) and what the locales mean to the writers on a very personal level.

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I hope you will identify with the authors’ attempts to move beyond nature that is merely pretty, a photograph on a calendar, and into a natural realm that is also meaningful. This kind of depth requires an exploration not only of the place and its nuances, but also of the person and his or her own subtleties. Just as interestingly, the writers in Sites of Insight reveal how our views of nature have been shaped by personal and cultural assumptions. These days, we have many views to choose from. For some, such as Nick Sutcliffe, nature is a serious playground, an arena for extreme sports, where we put our strength, skill, and courage to the test. For others, such as Amy England, nature is more of a forum to explore aesthetics: who decides what is beautiful in nature and by what criteria? In his essay, Reg Saner doesn’t ignore nature’s beauty, but neither does he ignore the hard indifference of wilderness to our survival in it. Sangeeta Reddy, Mark Irwin, and I myself explore nature as a crucible where, lacking the distractions of civilization, we are forced to face ourselves. And is it so easy to define nature apart from civilization? Anita Harkess’s essay explores her relationship to a private urban park that had gone feral, and then was returned, or reconstructed, to civilization. In addition, can we even look upon a locale and see its natural features separately from the people who live there? The essays of Christie Smith, Fred Baca, Kate Krautkramer, Kristen Iverson, Tom Noel, and Reyes García pose this question. And where do animals fit in? Are we committing the sin of anthropomorphism when we presume to guess what animals are thinking, or even that they are thinking? Or, as Jane Wodening explores in her essay, can we presume some of these things intuitively? Are animals in touch with a more essential form of being that we humans, made soft by civilized life, have forgotten? Do they remind us of our own more primal, savage sides? Or is Darwinism sufficient? Is nature nothing more than a hierarchy of hungry, competing, sharp-toothed mouths, chosen at random to out-power and outlast one another? In the eighteen essays gathered here, you will find eighteen unique visions of what that connection between person and place means. Some authors express their experiences in terms of religion and theology. A few hold skeptical or even atheistic views, but still see in Colorado’s

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wilderness an environment where they approach something more intense and concentrated than their day-to-day experience can provide. When I invited these writers to contribute their work to Sites of Insight, emphasizing that I wanted essays about Colorado locales that had some deeper spiritual significance to them—however they defined it—I was pleased to discover that no one had any trouble understanding the assignment. Something in nature inspires metaphysics. It has always provided a vital setting in the sacred texts of the world’s religious traditions. In the Bible, Jesus goes into the wilderness in order to confront temptation and reaffirm his life in Spirit. The Buddha achieved enlightenment not while sitting in a monastery, but while seated outside beneath the Bodhi tree. Hindu swamis and yogis have always retreated to the caves of the Himalayas for instruction in the divine. Indigenous, or shamanistic, religions, such as those of the Native Americans, have always viewed the connection between nature and Spirit as a given. In all honesty, I’m not convinced that nature is any more conducive to Spirit than civilization is. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson—for many, America’s high priest of nature as spirituality—wrote, “Nature is a symbol of spirit.” Not spirit itself, but a symbol of it. As Emerson put it, “We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.” To some of the more skeptical writers of the early twenty-first century, perhaps only nature remains to stir in us the kind of awe that God once inspired in our ancestors. Either way, wilderness feeds the human spirit. It strips us of our trivial, daily worries, errands, and distractions. It turns our awareness to something larger than ourselves, and paradoxically invites us to turn more deeply within ourselves. I hope Sites of Insight: A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places will help do the same for you. —James Lough

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Western Wind REG SANER

I T ’ S S N O W I N G S I D E W A Y S . My skis leave a trail, blown over in minutes. Good. “Let me get this straight,” says the mind’s other side. “You like mountains best in December and January? When there’s nothing up here but sudden weather and snow?” “Yes.” “And another thing. Why so keen on skiing alone? The obvious motive is fear, isn’t it? Alone, you’re afraid, a little. You know you are. Admit it. Isn’t that the attraction?” The mind’s other side has that twentieth-century quirk of supposing base motives are truest. No use replying that a taste for the out-of-doors isn’t always juvenile. Against one’s own brain, what defense comes to more than a shrug? 1

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“Seems to me,” says that brain, “what you’re really fond of is bad news.” “You mean the truth? Really, isn’t that what we’re here for?” No end to self-skepticism. Out of its duet for one have evolved the power and tediousness of our species, so my in-progress last word to myself on skiing up here alone is only part confession: Colorado’s backcountry in winter is tricky indeed. No secret. But when we look honestly at this world, maybe the greatest risks take place inside us. Last week, near timberline, I skied into a high country made of exactly its own black islands of towering fir, exactly its own snow cornices curled fantastically over thick ledges, exactly its own snowfall of fat flakes. Because the gray sky was stalled, as close to motionless as Colorado wilderness ever comes, its snow floated down almost vertically. Rare. No wind, just air leaning slightly, gentler than breath. Against dark firs, each flake descended apart from the others, a tuft of clumped crystals, a once-and-for-all of intricate stillness made visible. Any “This, Here, Now” so entirely taken with being exactly itself can’t help arresting a lone skier, just as any mind that arrives there takes one look and stops mumbling. Stops cluttering itself with thoughts. Hasn’t a name, isn’t anyone. Becomes what it hears: snow falling through the very mountain silence it ripens. But today, as I ski Glacier Gorge, weather tries to tear off my head. Failing that, wind settles for my knit cap, hurling its burgundy wool like a limp blossom into a naked clump of dwarf willow. Fetching headgear from willow twigs while wearing skis seven feet long will improve anyone’s sense of being the unknown Marx Brother. By the time I get my cap back, snow blown into my hair has already clotted, complementing the crisp feel of January’s edge at the rim of my nostrils. Oh well. I’m out for whatever. Today, whatever is wind, wind, wind. Owing to chill factors, mountain wind can seem triple-sinewed, hyperactive, fanatic. Isn’t it this minute dilapidating the mountains themselves? Even without ice for an ally, it could do the entire job, and has, on summits ground down to prairie before these mountains first lifted. A chip or sliver here, a grain there. Wind and rain have all the time there is. In the central Sahara are mountains that wind has brought down to the humility of floor tiles. Their so-called “mosaic” remnants

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stretch as if hand-fitted—like wind’s anagrams, or a code without messages—level to every horizon. Given air’s origins, that seems ironic. When stone invented atmosphere, how could it have guessed the strongest force on our planet would one day turn out to be air. That same air whose weathers now intend to level the Rockies? Oh, yes. And shall. Nothing can stop it. Meanwhile, our part of North America may not contain upthrusts more naked than these granite faces forming headwalls in Glacier Gorge, whose hierophantic jut rises ahead of me: the cliffs of Longs Peak, of Pagoda, The Spearhead. Against them our life spans have no chance at all, just as their own slab-sided ramparts, against wind, have none. This, too, is where gods live. Minor deities, it may be; forces dumbly, humbly immortal. But godlike in one thing at least: unable to lie. Near Mills Lake, tiny white mushrooms of snow pique my curiosity. Some coyote or fox must have trotted past, compacting the snow just enough. Now wind undermines those tracks till each paw pad stands pedestaled, two inches above the surrounding crust. Amusing. I’ve heard of wind blowing bark off the trees, blowing chickens into the sea— white chickens, in the Hebrides, as it happens—but never of this. Yet the likeness between these ice mushrooms and pedestaled stones in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona bespeaks inanimate nature’s versatile monotony: two or three ideas, varied perhaps less than a dozen ways. The altered state is one. Mills Lake is now a long pool of fluid gone rigid. Over its milky, wind-polished ice there’s a skinny line of ski-packed snow that, like the paw prints, has managed to stick. All the rest, blown clear. I choose the lake’s locked edge, its snow so wind-packed you could quarry or saw it—a crust my metal edges barely incise. Wind, wind, wind. “Restless” doesn’t touch it. The sky, however, has cleared except for rags of fast cloud that quickly veil the sun, quickly strip it naked. That day, wind slowed Ruth Magnussen till it killed her. I was a few miles east, 2,000 feet lower in the same weather. My friend Ron and I were trying to ski up an old mining road to Buchanan Pass. We did okay till our twisting, forested route entered a clearing. There wind had a straight shot at us. We leaned forward, fought with it, tottered comically in it, made headway more and more laboriously against it. I re-

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member how angrily the bee sting of snow peppered my face, and how, shoulder to shoulder, Ron and I heard each other’s torn shouts as noise, not words. In fifteen years of our fairly pedestrian mountaineering together, we hadn’t let weather deflect us, nor have we since. That day we did. Next morning, under “DIVIDE WINDS CHARGE ULTIMATE PRICE,” I read how in that big blow, Ruth Magnussen’s climbing party had let her lag behind, then on their descent from the summit of Mt. Alice found her “not moving.” I knew it wasn’t just any wind; it was that wind. Even so, the incident puzzled those of us who knew that her group was not only experienced but included biologists. They of all people. We like to believe in the avoidable. We? Not those who describe this world as machinery. The Marquis de Laplace boasted that if he could know for one moment the exact position of each particle in the universe, he could predict everything from there to edge of infinity. If. A very big word. Needless to say, he lived in the era of Newtonian physics. In any case, it’s an omniscience most of us feel blessed in not having. To see the wind purely as a jostle of gas molecules de-animates even its most baroque whims, makes them mere products of solar rays heating Earth, and of our planet’s rotation. Which they are. But if our future is physical laws, have we one? We’d prefer weather whose quirkiness is odd as our own minds—random, capricious. Otherwise, strange to say, we can’t take ourselves seriously. The world wouldn’t be real enough. If, meanwhile, the laws of astrophysics have a steely, predictive glint to them, living matter is—happily—a truant to prediction. Our biological past is an unbroken record of the slightly off-center, the slightly imperfect. Praised be imperfection for it! If we owe ourselves to evolution, evolution owes itself to that one continuous, omnipotent glitch. Mere physical laws might have wanted living stuff to repeat itself with cookie-cutter perfection. Nothing doing. Only the flaw, only the glitch in repeatability seems flawless. Its perfection is that nothing repeats, not exactly. But almost. A nudibranch designed to recur without bumps somehow acquires one. The bump somehow gets passed on. Imperfectly,

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though, because that bump gets another—a bump its DNA hadn’t been encoded to ask for, but simply got. And that bump, another, and so on, till bumps grow ruffles, ruffles grow gills, brains blunder their way into eyes. We ourselves are anthologies of birth defects that proved workable—like every creature that is —because life is “error tolerant.” Hence “junk DNA,” a nucleic acid that neither promotes replication nor deters it, just floats around uselessly in our cells. Through the necessity of chance—and perhaps through oddments like junk DNA, whose potentialities can as yet only be guessed at—the small, still wind of minutest difference “blows where it pleases to blow.” Thus the great ash tree Yggdrasil ramifies. Thus the fruit eaten by Adam and Eve sows within living cells its escape properties, their enabling imperfections. A fortunate fall, that. It released us from the tyranny of perfect replication to the creatively flawed: nature alive and ever so slightly askew. Whose creatures we are. But why do these natural quirks become laws while others do not? Among worlds that never happened, I often ask myself, as the soul of certain chemicals made mortal, why exactly these limits and mysteries? Air, for example, has one-sixtieth the viscosity of water. But mightn’t wind have run as rivers now do, in fixed channels? Streamlines. If you didn’t live near a wind’s flow, you’d miss out altogether. Meanwhile, water in its usual state works that way already, a wind too heavy to fly. On the other hand, wind isn’t wholly amnesiac. Lacking fixed channels, it nevertheless shows preferences verging on habits. Winter to winter, my return past particular snowdrifted ledges, boulders, and overhangs reveals air-carved forms I remember because wind remembers how it made them. Each year, it reshapes them so much the same way that I’ve come to rely on and use for landmarks their mimed turbulence. I know, too, that though I’m now damp with sweat from kicking side steps up the deep powder of the last steep ascent over a frozen watercourse, there’s a most chilly blast expecting me at the lake’s lip. No matter how extravagantly the here-there-and-everywhere winds lurch or wheel, one special air torrent, assigned as if by decree, pours down over that lip like the waterfall’s winter ghost. Ordinarily, I’d be braced for it, but the ascent has so belabored my breath I forget. As

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Colorado altitudes go, 10,600 feet is nothing; however, what with skis, ski boots, a winter pack, I notice my lungs have lower standards. Over this wind-crusted snow just below the lip of Black Lake, my metal edges barely keep me on the slope. But the sole risk is looking silly, sliding helplessly down about 100 feet and having to reclimb the same snow. Then it attacks. Air’s avalanche. Like thunder, a wind mightier and older than life itself suddenly lunges past me, hurling, screaming, charged with snow billows like stampeding herds of white bison. My wool headband isn’t enough, needs help from my parka hood—which seems entangled by pack straps. I fumble frantically, because the windchill is instantly serious. With that hood finally yanked over my head, I watch Niagaras of snow boiling past. Between me and the black-green of fir forest below the lake’s glacial shelf, I see the frantic writhe of white crystal, as of some creature spasming. I feel I’m inside a comet, robed with its broken ice and cold gravel. In such wind, even granite might wish for life enough to die, to be killed, “once and for all. To get it over!” No such luck, not for granite. And that may be the sadness of stones. Lives briefly intense as our own can at least expect an oblivion—endless, durable—which the life of granite is far too dim ever to hope for. As the berserk current abates to mere weather, I realize it was the wildest turbulence I’ve ever been out in. Anyone new to Black Lake might turn back here and now; however, long acquaintance has taught me that by skiing another fifty meters farther, apparently into the teeth of the wind, I’ll clear the worst of it. The lake’s outlet being a granite gap in high cirque walls, its breach simply funnels cold air falling off the peaks, and, as from a funnel, those currents stream fastest at the spout. In the great cirque above the lake’s own far smaller cirque, vagrant wind cells lurch around like bullies. Exposed fir trees grow gnarled and twisty, lower to the rock the higher one goes, till, past timberline, their final clumps grovel and surrender completely: wind’s abjects. By now I’ve reached the half-naked banner trees verging on Black Lake’s east shore. Owing to wind, they dare not branch out on their west side, so their leeward-streaming boughs give an impression, even

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in calm, of speeding in place. I pass among them, and through, up a steep rise that keeps my skis pretty much out of sight, powder-whelmed, but the cliff I’m intent on comes into view: an icefall whose half-acre plate of gray-blue runoff has wept down over tawny bulges of granite and frozen like armor, or the ever-thickening shards of a beetle. By edging a few meters forward, I cause the ice’s gray-blues to tinge with five-fathom green, with zones of turquoise, subtle and eerie. The shifting colors fascinate, as if hinting at a world in which the whole spectrum could be frozen. The granite wave they embellish so arrestingly is itself the size of intimidation. Megalithic, tremendous, it rises just 300 or 400 feet above the white plateau of Black Lake. Gawking from its base, I feel the ice-and-stone presence of numb forces crushing my next thought so completely it becomes a barely inhabited stare. I decide to boost energy and morale with a few hunks of milk chocolate. As has happened before, however, the cold makes it wholly flavorless. My mouth must be nearly wind-temperature. Though I chew and chew till the squares feel like sawdust, they don’t melt or release the slightest taste. I tell myself, Wait, it’ll warm, and I do wait—a reasonable while—but to no effect, so I lose patience and swallow. Chocolate incognito, I find, isn’t chocolate. Not having seen another soul for hours, my earlier self-interrogations now recur to mind; I realize that along with good old everyday animal fear, what I love about skiing alone in Glacier Gorge is the abyss between me and its presences. The more distant the nearest things are, the more dubiously I’m tangible. Or even here. Yet I know their grandeur is me. Has to be. I who am minuscule. Without my endocrinal secretions, however, and the neural responses they trigger, all blue-black cliff shadows and white sheernesses remain a closed circuit. Poised on skis, finding no signs now of animals—human or otherwise—where my own tracks disappear, I scan panoramically while mulling that over. The feel is of being in the world alone. And not as if. High in winter mountains, our spontaneous awe makes a gift of itself to what caused it: snowfields whose whiteness is absolute and untracked emotion—even if spattered with rock-and-ice Gothic. And light that can’t make up its mind, shifting all day through cloud, and

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through the snow-shouldering, sun-starved forests. Gargoyle crags where silence and wind are never home at the same time. But ice-quarried rock, we know—or believe we know—is only the random effect of cold and crustal upheavals. Why should raw bigness summon the deepest, oldest feelings we life-forms are heir to? Perhaps by the very size of indifference. Because mountains scorn the astonishments they give rise to, because they pretend to live entirely within the limits of the visible, because they despise our memories, we respect the hugeness of their refusal to confide. Which awes us. And we say so— inwardly. Meanwhile, snow and rock read our minds perfectly. To show their contempt for our least selfish thoughts, they ignore them. Whereupon we’re awed all the more. And we’re grateful. Among fellow humans we’re superfluous at best; at worst, part of the competition. But winter mountains enlarge the needle’s eye of our tiny brains and their labyrinthine trivialities. Thanks to the rude unity of winter’s 14,000-foot peaks, we feel our insignificance expand like a strange prestige—which makes being alive a kind of magic, easy as being not quite real. Small wonder that wherever terrain permits, primitives go around filling their habitats with mountain gods. As for such earth spirits, we moderns—we whose houses are built of retired forests, we whose bodies are made of matter everlasting, and who each night before bed may drink a few sips of cloud—never think of them. My fingers and toes remind me, Get moving. Yes. Often my pause turns daydream, till, finding myself at a standstill, leaning forward on ski poles, I waken when wind smacks the body heavily as cold water. Other times, as my heart pounds with me uphill, the hours of accelerated thump lull my senses into hearing neither its red hammer nor the thump and thud of weather. Suddenly, wind stops: I panic, feeling my heart has too. Then as wind resumes, so, it seems, does my high-altitude heartbeat. This would be entirely ludicrous if the sudden scare were less chilling. Somehow my years in the mountains have tricked me into confusing wind with life signs in the world’s body, including my own. That’s nonsense, of course, but something in me doesn’t know it. It’s that something that gets ambushed by a sudden confusion, mistaking life and mountain wind for a single thing.

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Embarrassing, wholly unscientific. Yet where life forms are concerned, atmosphere on a windless planet might indeed feel inert, cadaverous. Columbine pollen would drop right back onto the lip of its bloom. Thistledown would fall at the base of each stem that contrived it; so maybe there’d be only one, a husky stalk clotted with dwarfish progeny. Pine forests, I recall, are among the earliest living exploiters of wind power, without which the gold smoke of their pollen would be a fine needle-sifted rain confined to the tree that released it. Groves just one tree wide. Happily, our actual forests wander like migrant tribes, mile after wind-sown mile. As it is, spring pools often wear yellow films of wafting pollen; their stones are banded and waterlined with it. I’ve seen impulsive bursts of April wind huff pollen clouds for twenty, thirty yards, still in the shape of its pine, or the shape of whole tree clusters atop a mesa—the soul of a forest suddenly taking flight. Inland temperatures on a planet lacking convection would depend on solar rays, period. The sea would be glass. Sand wouldn’t dune, and lacking saltation, mightn’t even be sand. Snow wouldn’t drift. Cities would be visible beyond the horizon as puddles of fume. Weather would be predictable as arithmetic, or yesterday. Nobody would run up a flag. And I’m not sure all this snow would be here. Microscopically fine dust, as things stand, gets blown about the globe, providing nuclei for flakes and raindrops to crystallize around or condense on. And fallen snow often takes to the air again. I look up where Thatchtop Mountain’s high ridgelines smoke with vortices of blown crystals that wisp and unravel like unruly root systems changing natures with fronds. Backed by an expanse of clear, blank blue and half-violet high-country sky, snow’s turbine shores feed back into air just now raking Mt. McHenry with the generous flow of old beards. Solar explosions prism within crystalline veils and become sun dogs. Fast updrafts arrest themselves, then plunge, as if terrified of their own intentions. Powdered torrents sweep down like waterfalls, coil upward again like sidereal nebulae whose spiral arms pull themselves limb from limb, or ambitions whose first maneuvers destroy them. Wind’s motions: a mind always deciding, never made up. Why should its habits differ wholly from ours? Beyond the practical aims of food and

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shelter, we use motion to assure ourselves a future—as if movement kept our possibilities alive. Thus in watching Wagnerian winds rake the summit of Thatchtop, I feel the paradox of wanting to come again—to where I’m this minute standing. Wanting to see again what I’m seeing right now. A round-trip inside moments of standstill. Skiing back downtrail, I pass the Y-shaped writhe of a particular limber pine I’ve known for years. If trees can have doting admirers, this one has me. Today, for no reason, I decide it’s female, and christen her Yvonne. As limber pines go, her few hundreds of years make her a girl, but her figure nonetheless reveals centuries of violence enacted. I’ve only to glimpse Yvonne’s evergreen torso and limbs to know what wind’s sadism feels like. Even the slab her roots knuckle down into wears the wind’s name etched into its granite like wood grain, a past still in progress. All at once I’m ambushed by a snowdevil, whose bluster can’t stand contradiction. Its spindrift blinds me, making skiing impossible. I halt, bobbing in it like a middleweight boxer, gasping for breath sucked from my lungs. Slowly my clenched eyes dare to blink open, wet, as the snowdevil roars elsewhere. Through clotted lashes I watch its local shamble of powder kick up a ruckus as it goes. Across the gorge, high on the sides of Half Mountain, acres of granitic ruck smoke and howl. Three thousand feet overhead, the flat summit of Longs Peak is also getting dismantled one sunlit grain at a time. Air’s wildest routines, its iciest ways to catch fire, include sudden geysering swirls torn off snowfields on quirks of velocity that spiral high, higher, then explode when cross-currents attack them, just to have something to kill. Impossible not to remember Ruth Magnussen. And because I’m looking at the flank on Longs Peak where he came to grief, James Duffy III. He and his mountaineering buddy were trying to bag two peaks the same outing. Though young, they were experienced; but their decision to go light, leaving heavier clothing out of their packs, belied that experience. Coming down off the second peak, Longs, in colder wind than they’d bargained for, they began slipping into hypothermia. Duffy grew cranky, irrational. Should they try to shelter somehow among boulders and wait it out, or descend? They couldn’t agree. By this time, Duffy’s talk wasn’t making good sense. The friend took off downtrail.

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Desertion? To have stayed with Duffy up there in such weather might well have finished them both. Since Duffy would not come down, the friend would bring help. But they’d already spent many thousands of calories climbing a pair of difficult summits. And it’s a long, rocky trail down. On such trails, the last mile is five. When at the Longs Peak Ranger Station the volunteer men and women of Rocky Mountain Rescue finally began uncrumpling from Jeeps, vans, pickups, and Volvos to head uptrail in foul weather, hoping to find Duffy still alive, they were not mountaineer novices. Nor were they a gang of beer bellies in four-wheel-drives. They were—and are— lean, fit, and—unfortunately—well practiced. And very well equipped. Such people take outdoor gear seriously. If you trek around much in Colorado’s mountains, you hear of people who didn’t. James Duffy’s story was even now being added to the local repertoire. True, there’s a strain of morbidity in rescue work. That day, despite the optimism of their effort, they must have guessed that they were likely to find, if anything, a young corpse. What they actually guessed, however, I don’t know. I do know that if heroic has meaning, the men and women of Rocky Mountain Rescue have often been heroic. And if at 13,000 feet they report running into a snow-charged, eighty-milean-hour blast that forced them back down the mountain, I believe in that wind. But it lifted. Enough, at least, for them to reattempt the ascent. What their search finally turned up was a young man in the prime of life, except that he was dead. Deranged by severe hypothermia, he’d apparently tumbled some 150 feet. What weather had begun, head injuries ended. Duffy was added to the list of those who’ve died on Longs, a list more than sixty names long. Now, skiing over summer in an altered state, admiring wind-billowed snow as it streams thinly, beautifully, off the highest ridges, admiring the late-afternoon blue of clear sky, I’m aware of watching snow blown around by nuclear fusion. If, as is true, solar energy drives Earth’s weather, all winds, strong or gentle, arctic or tropic, arise at the sun’s center. Despite the fact that our planet’s energies take millions of years to seep outward from the sun’s core to its surface, the very cold that now

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tries to refreeze my left earlobe, once frostbitten severely, owes its windchill to that frantic solar core whose fusions produce temperatures at such astronomical degrees Fahrenheit as to leave imagination helpless, empty. Looking around at a seeping cliff’s icicle thickets, at creek ravines cargoed with drifts, I’m bemused by knowing that beneath Earth’s crust, deep in its inner core, resides heat rivaling that of the sun’s surface. As afternoon wanes, Glacier Gorge quickly chills. In open shadow, its east-facing snow slopes go bluer, while sun on opposite slopes tinges warmer, more golden. My pole baskets leave wells of aquamarine light, delicate, glacial. Many levels under their lovely, cold omen abide our oceanic progenitors—strata of tropical fossils, stone fish swimming within the currents of Lower Permian time, then Mississippian levels, then Devonian clamshells, brachiopods, and, for all I know, imbedded in the Cambrian strata, trilobites by the billions—whose light was the way we came. About twenty-five miles below those life-cousins, Earth’s crust gives way to the mantle, and that in turn to the so-called outer core, mostly iron in a fluid state. It has always bemused me that people who perish in local storms—such as I’m watching now—freeze while superheated winds of liquid iron stir at snail-slow velocities underneath them. I imagine white hotness, an incandescence that is at the same time thrice-fiery and red, yet black, totally. Its magnetic fields tell the lost traveler’s compass needle which way to point. And that needle obeys, reliably, even after the mittened fingers holding the compass may have frozen solid. What fascinates yet further is to realize that beneath Earth’s superheated outer core lies an inner core so compressed its superheated iron can’t budge—is thus, at 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit, frozen. When gravity’s avarice grows that intense, its familiar tug seems evil. If wind begins at the sun’s center, Earth’s inner core is surely wind’s antipodes: a whitehot blackness red as lava; dregs compressed to an anvil. Though when wind rages, the crazy flailing of spruce boughs seeming less dance than anguish, maybe forests consider it exercise. Could it toughen their fibers? My reverencing of great-hearted fir and spruce trunks is partly rooted in these atmospheric devastations they defy, and

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thrive on. But wind is now upping the ante with so much blown powder I find myself skiing downtrail in whiteout. Visibility gone, I stop, wait. The blank air roars, a local blizzard that snuffs thought. A snowy nirvana. The fact that nirvana combines Sanskrit words for “blow” and “out” strikes me as funny. But this cold air isn’t fresh from India, and I’m not liberated, just erased; the weather of the mind is words, and for the moment wind has blown every word out of my head. Asian wisdom might do the same thing, though I suspect any sojourn in either Nirvana—as place—or in the fabled well-being of Eden would feel to us like the doldrums. Wind is itself a kind of emotion, even when it behaves like a wild breathing no one has mastered. In windless Paradise there’d be no reason to stir, perfection being what and wherever you are, each moment identical to the moment before. Instead, we postlapsarians are happily animate in a fallen world, which compared to Eden has every disadvantage but one. Ours, at least, never holds still. That makes for a chaotic existence just now in Glacier Gorge. Would it seem so, I wonder, if I watched by the eon instead of an afternoon? To stand in this snow-smothered creek bed and stare unblinking, tireless as gravity itself through a half-dozen centuries of wind, might shake my faith in chance. Snow’s identical patterns, the madly rhetorical gestures of fast-moving cloud, even the warp in wind-twisted trees, might prove regular as the zodiac. I arrive at Mills Lake. Winter or summer, its windward shores are logjammed with grey creatures who, could they but talk, might settle the matter. But they’re not trees anymore, just carcasses. When living they met these very winds and won, or stayed evergreen enough to believe they were winning, or believed—if they weren’t—winning was possible. Their twisted grain has long since been picked into relief by ideal particles and high-velocity snows. Icebound now, blank as drained calendars, with the thaws of late May they’ll revive their hopes of drowning themselves, of at last rotting away, dissolving downstream. They’ve been at it for decades, and still wind isn’t finished with them. On one hand, the squalor of mere physics; on the other, something beyond physics, something for which the lowliest snowshoe hare munching spruce tips in the gorge is just one of innumerable masks. Though

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for long stretches this Earth goes mute on me, I still expect it to be a speaking world. And because we’re made of the same stuff it is, I wonder if certain of its voices—which we humans may never evolve receptors for—aren’t there, all the same, just below the threshold of feeling, however inward and still. Facets of our hidden natures may be less well concealed than we think. At times their secrets seem to stream outward, as if to disguise themselves in the world’s often alien promises. Looking up into air’s gaudy ways with fast cloud, whose edge sunlight iridesces to a hazed, transhifting rainbow, I half suppose I’m looking up at one of my own interior descriptions. At the same time, I know only too well that cloud-tatter is real, other, apart; part of the sky’s punctually restless mechanics. Of which I’m led by either culture or instinct to say, “Beautiful!” And I do. But the fact we like it here, often immensely, wholeheartedly—was that inevitable? In wondering, Why these things and not others?, I can easily imagine a rational species whose nature is simple as a two-spoked wheel: “GO/NO GO” or “NIGHT/DAY,” “USEFUL/USELESS,” “YES/NO.” The luck of imperfection, however, impels us exuberantly beyond so starved a response. But exuberance won’t get us past the actual. “Face it,” says fact, “those voices you hear in wind aren’t there.” True, no matter how often I’ve heard dead trees cry. In thick forest, that’s a sound the wind makes: a dead trunk gets caught in its topple and is held, supported by living trunks that, for decades, as may happen, won’t let that dead one fall, like our habit of taking along those who couldn’t make it. When wind tosses the living tree crowns, that gray trunk rubs audibly against them, as if a creature dismayed. It’s my voice that makes it a creature. Ours. The kind of voice we humans lend things. Especially whatever sighs as it ends. Fact: the late afternoon turns colder. Time to go. When weather’s calm, the very act of turning to leave seems sad; far less so when it’s this windy. For the steepest few miles of descent, I want ski boots firmly laced, and must take twelve or more miserable minutes to do what, without windchill, I could manage in two. Removing pile mittens, I quickly unsnap my left gaiter, find its zipper, pull with numbing fingers,

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and unzip. Then I must thrust bare hands into my knicker pockets to warm. I clench and unclench them, moaning a little. For their next sally, my fingers pick at and untie the yellow bootlaces‘ firmly knotted bow. Back into my pockets my hands dive. Still cold but not frozen, they emerge to partly unlace and relace the boot till each finger—though oddly enough, not the thumbs—feels like a zombie. Then more warming. Whereupon they must rezip and resnap the Gore-Tex gaiter, hardest of all. After that, I coddle them considerably longer, so that they can repeat the whole process on the other boot. They cower in my pockets like children begging to stay inside. Before setting off again, I look up at the sunset-tinted shambles of granite above me and startle. As if I’d never been here before, as if I hadn’t been glimpsing on and off for hours that long-familiar hulk—its mountain cragged with twelve-storey spicules, its Colosseum-sized flakes, its rude chunks and smithereens—wanting to say something important. But it doesn’t. It is itself, no more. Winter stone. I turn from its crush and look back at the gorge headwall. Iron peaks. Against blue sky deepening nearly to purple, loose snow spumes from their turrets in the frenzies and onslaughts I’ve watched all afternoon. Except that now, their distant, slow-motion detonations—soundless as dust blowing off the moon—spell out a presence openly hidden. The lowering sun reddens monolith knobs and snags and minor summits. It sets snow cornices afire till the westernmost ridgelines become one blazing rim. A ski pole in each mittened hand, I lean forward: windburnt, chilled, transfixed. Veils of thrown crystal that plume over high desolations of granite, and over my own whiff of existence, becoming a “we.” We who are. And are being annihilated inside processional volumes, each enclosing the other beyond comprehending. For once in my life, I see all that is or can be, felt not as a thing but a power, and that power, a unanimous, self-radiant motion. I see that we life forms stir, move to and fro a while, then slump down, even while wind grinds our cities to powder. Like everyone’s, my birth and extinction always were, there, inside what I’m seeing. So. Real as a gun muzzle, the eye of my death aims straight into me and fires. My body is shot with its own blood; its redness is fear at the level of despair. Not one of my personal molecules will ever again take any-

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thing personally. The pure animal truth of being utterly wiped out. That terrifies me. Yet I feel its rightness, as part of what is. So be it. For once in my days, I know myself to be completely inside an implacable and luminous power, which, through itself, is also the power of a dark absolutely without edges. Its vastness infuses the delicate force of each particle of each atom. Each echoes it, just as each echoes all others. Tiny globules, pale, spherical, vibrant. Tiny intensities of blue fire, fire-flakes thick as snow. Each tiniest globular intensity hums with a humming imparted out of the very dark against which each is made visible—a darkness so encompassing, so total, it isn’t there. Against which all those invisible, particulate energies making up what we call the world’s surface now pulse and float, one strange levitation. I watch the skyline’s western rim burn. In the backlit and prisming tatters of snow cloud, in their flash against the sky’s high-altitude blue, I see that I’m to be destroyed more immeasurably than I’d ever dreamed of. The awareness fills me. My neck hair rises. This isn’t “death,” the thing people talk about, which is a mere mouth-sound, petty, inconsiderable. This is complete annihilation. But for the only time in my life, I feel who and where I am. Truly within creation, no escaping. No place to dodge or hide. I was drawn forth. And am being even now scattered, taken back. Into everything. Into something that destroys all it makes. As it must. Otherwise it wouldn’t be what it is. So I can’t wish it different. Literally can’t want to. I can’t both see it and want to do that. All I can be is dumb, scared, fascinated—a “yes” never so invaded, never before anything this true. Then the moment fades, like one tremendous presence gone. By comparison, “reality” feels starved, even its grandeurs meager—poor, pinched, desolate things. The gorge returns. Rock and snow slip back to be where I am, among fellow ephemera. The grandly stupid stones of Glacier Gorge, their dusk-blue ponderosities. I sympathize with them, with the dear, wind-haggard fir, living or dead, with the wind-flustered ravens, the pine martens. And with myself. I see that each of us will have been the only one of his species. Our entire, ingenious planet is a single blown snowflake. It is an eye blink. It’s as if admitting there’s no place to go more real than here, no terrain that goes farther, even the

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mind’s built-in critic relents: “Well, at least you came, looked around. You spent the energy. I’ll give you that much.” The whole glacial trough has by now filled with open shadow. Every drifted ripple and snowfield is a skylit and empty blue. So are the snow-swagged pine boughs. Many thousands of feet higher up, the summit of Longs Peak warms itself at remnants of sundown. With alpenglow fast losing color across wind-bitten escarpment, I watch the final rays go dull, watch the life of all afternoon slowly turning to stone— and the sun’s red gold, sucked into granite.

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Chatelaine KRISTEN IVERSEN

O N M A R C H 7 , 1 9 3 5 , B A B Y D O E T A B O R —a western legend from the moment she set foot in Colorado in 1877—was found dead on the floor of her Leadville cabin. Her frozen body formed the shape of a cross. The one-room shack held a wood-burning stove, a rocking chair, an iron-post bed, and a lace-covered table that stood before a gold-framed picture of the Virgin Mary. The cabin was an outpost, a solitary companion to the Matchless Mine, once the richest silver mine in the world. Baby Doe had hidden books and magazines under the bed and, for insulation as well as entertainment, lined the walls with newsprint. A snow-covered lump of firewood stood outside the door, and just inside the door frame leaned an old rifle. She had rocked in that rocking chair until, at the age of eighty-two, her faith outlasted her heart and she pitched forward, gasping for air, the blood pounding in her ears. It was three days before anyone noticed the ab18

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sence of smoke from her tin chimney. Chatelaine, charlatan, mystic, recluse. The legendary Baby Doe was finally dead. Despite waist-high drifts of snow, vandals soon ransacked the room and ripped the newspaper from the walls in hopes of finding hidden silver. There was none. The person responsible for settling her estate found many of Baby Doe’s letters, written-down dreams, and disjointed journals under the bed and carried them to his home in Denver, where he fed them piece by piece into the fire. The iron trunks Baby Doe had stored in the basement of St. Vincent’s Hospital turned out to hold a few bolts of French cloth, a silver tea service, and some water-stained photographs. Many of the photographs were destroyed—by whom, exactly, is unknown. On March 12, the city of Denver agreed to acknowledge its fallen angel and allowed Baby Doe to be buried next to her husband, long deceased, in Mount Olivet Cemetery. She was paraded to the cemetery in an antique casket with her hands clasped under a thin, gray shawl, her leather motoring cap on her head. For the last nine years of her life, she had worn the cap as self-imposed penance. There were no surviving family members in Denver save a great-nephew who never knew her; it’s told that when he pulled the old, dirty cap from her head, her hair was as long and blond as when she was a girl. Even today, Leadville is home to many drunks and eccentrics, ne’erdo-wells and wealthy transplants from the city who shoulder their way through the narrow streets in their shiny new SUVs. For five dollars you can get yourself pretty drunk at the Silver Dollar Saloon, built in 1889 and not much changed since. The bar was named after Baby Doe’s impious daughter, the one with dark hair and dark eyes, the one who ran away. No one knows if the stories are really true. There is a fierce quality to this town that exists at 10,000 feet, where summer is brief and the air thin enough to scare off many tourists. People who come to Leadville are running. They don’t say what they’ve left behind. They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. People who come to Leadville don’t leave. At the Matchless Mine, the tunnels extend for eleven miles beneath the earth in a labyrinth impossible to map. After her fortune had been lost and her husband buried, Baby Doe continued to work the

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mine herself, tapping out holes and tunnels until, locals say, she hit the Pacific Ocean itself and the mine flooded out. She never gave up. It was an early morning in March when I drove up in my old Toyota, my two toddlers bundled up in the backseat, all of us fresh from the minefields of divorce. Spring was still a long way off. Nestled on the high stage of the Arkansas Valley plateau, the town was dwarfed by the surrounding mountains. We drove down Harrison Avenue, quiet as a graveyard, and began the gentle climb up Seventh Street to the dirt road that leads to the mine. I put the car in second gear, and the back tires spun on the ice and pavement until we hit snow—soft, untrodden snow—and then even the sound of the engine was hushed. We began to climb Fryer’s Hill, and between the blue-sage stands of pine that stood on either side of the road were scattered tall, weather-beaten head frames, lanky reminders of dreams abandoned. Only the newspapers called her “Baby Doe.” It started in Central City in 1880, when she caught her husband of three years, Harvey Doe, departing Lizzie Preston’s Parlor House. It was not the first time, but on this occasion she’d brought a police officer as a witness. Shortly thereafter she had her divorce. As part of her settlement she was deeded a mine, and lacking the capital to hire anyone else, she decided to work it herself. It was a scandal for a woman to wear miner’s overalls and a curse for a woman to enter a mine. The local miners noted her cornsilk hair and cornflower eyes and took to calling her “Baby” when she walked down the street. It was said that local women despised her. The newspaper mocked her. The local assayer paid her less than he paid the other miners and thought she couldn’t tell the difference. Her real name was Lizzie, short for Elizabeth. After her divorce from Harvey Doe, Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt moved to Leadville, where she met and married Horace Tabor, a man who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate but was later appointed to a temporary term. He had long been separated from his prim, Victorian wife Augusta, who disapproved of his appreciation for life’s finer offerings and penchant for travel. When they divorced, Baby Doe took the blame. Lizzie wished to be called “Mrs. Tabor, the senator’s wife.” But there already had been a Mrs. Tabor, and the newspapers wouldn’t let go of “Baby Doe.” After the silver strike at the Matchless Mine, for nine

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glorious years the senator and Baby Doe reigned as one of the richest couples in the Rocky Mountain West, with a fortune that rivaled any eastern capitalist’s. Their daughter Lily wore a $15,000 gown on her christening day; baby Silver showed off diamond rings on her chubby fingers. But scandal shadowed Lizzie like a nightmare refusing to be shaken. Townspeople whispered that a long-ago affair with Jake Sands, proprietor of a clothing shop, had led to the tiny hillside grave of a stillborn child, a grave that occasionally sported new bouquets of bright blue columbine and Indian paintbrush. When Horace Tabor commissioned a famous portrait artist from Toronto to paint his young wife, the painter took the liberty of portraying Mrs. Tabor in nothing but a diamond necklace. He was refused payment. When the Tabors bought their mansion in Denver, Lizzie filled the yard with brightly colored peacocks and nude statues from Italy. She rode the streets of Denver in a carriage that matched the colors in her dress and wore hats with over-long feathers. Denver was not amused. No one was amused. Horace Tabor helped build the streets and buildings of Denver and financed its early development. Elizabeth Tabor helped establish the theater, the opera, and the first stirrings of suffragism. Nevertheless, people tended to say, “Well, you know those Tabors. Only interested in pleasing themselves.” Lizzie was just forty-three when Horace Tabor died of acute appendicitis at the Windsor Hotel in 1899. The silver market crash of 1893 had taken their mansion, their four horse-drawn carriages, their opera house, their mines in Chihuahua, and the nanny and house servants. Lizzie pawned her diamonds. The children gave up their French tutor. Horace was offered a job as postmaster of Denver, a tip of the hat from grateful city officials. He died before he could accept it. The family was stricken with the unexpected death. With two daughters to raise, Lizzie offered herself as postmistress of Denver. She was refused. She took in sewing, and Lily and Silver were sent each morning to a dressmaker to learn a professional trade. The following year, frustrated with litigation over mining properties, social ostracism, and her inability to find a job that paid well enough to keep a roof over their heads, Lizzie took her two girls and moved back to the Matchless.

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“I still had my beauty,” she remarked to a friend. “I could have created many a scandal for that elite that snubbed me down there in Denver, but my faith restrained me.”


I can’t remember how old I was the first time I visited the Matchless Mine. I was a child, with my father as itinerant guide. I have no direct connections to the Tabors or to Leadville. Unlike Lizzie with her strong Irish Catholic roots, I grew up outside of Denver with Scandinavian parents who came to Colorado in the 1950s, not the 1850s. My grandfather had been a strict Lutheran minister; I was raised on the blithe spit-and-polish idealism of the 1960s. My ancestors weren’t miners, they were farmers. But the first time I saw that cabin perched next to the mine, with the scraggly town of Leadville spread below, I felt at home. I felt like I’d been born there. It was familiar to me in an old, old way. I began to visit the Matchless Mine regularly. Each visit brought a different story. Sometimes the tour guide would be a local Leadville resident or amateur historian. The dates would be accurate, although the love triangle between Lizzie, Tabor, and Augusta took on soap-opera dimensions. Baby Doe was a gold digger, a husband stealer, a nymphet. Sometimes the guide would be a teenager looking for an easy summer job and the narrative bore no resemblance whatsoever to the truth: the mine shaft was filled with the ghosts of miners crushed and buried under tons of rock; Baby Doe’s gauzy-white spirit stalked the cabin floor. But that early spring morning when I first drove up with my two young sons, there was no one at the Matchless. A rusty chain drooped across the entrance, announced by an old bucket on a pole with the words “Matchless Mine” painted in irregular white letters. I had to park my Toyota on the narrow, icy road. The boys were still small enough to be hitched up on my hips, one on each side, and they squealed with joy as we tromped past the magazine shack toward the cabin. The air was so cold my lungs hurt, and the sky was a deep shade of cobalt, too blue to be real. The head frame stood just as straight as it had decades before, and—holding each hand tightly—I let the boys peer down the black, bottomless shaft.

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The cabin was locked. We stood in front of the weather-beaten door and looked across the valley to the lake glittering in the distance, against the backdrop of Mount Massive and the long silhouette of lumbering rock giants. The scent of the pine trees, the ground beneath my feet, the line on the horizon: they were in my bones. It was in this cabin that Lizzie spent the last thirty years of her life. Her friends were few—the grocer’s son, a hermit who lived up the road, a prostitute who came up from Buena Vista for long talks. People around the country sent her money in envelopes and she sent them back. She refused interviews with newspaper reporters but allowed a few shadows to darken her doorway, including the man who would, after her death, destroy enough of her personal letters and memorabilia so that the legend of Baby Doe, instead of the legacy of Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt Tabor, would take firm hold. Legend has it that Horace Tabor’s last words to Lizzie were “Hang onto the Matchless!” It’s unlikely that he uttered them—the Matchless had been mortgaged again and again, water had filled its tunnels, the silver boom had long passed. Tabor himself lay in a coma for three days, speechless, before finally slipping away. But Lizzie Tabor found a different kind of wealth in the Matchless. She kept records of her dreams and visions and felt a sense of communion with the birds and deer who shared the mountain. She copied down long lists of books she had read and wanted to read and studied every inch of newsprint that lined her walls. She became deeply religious, and in her rich interior life she found a far greater pleasure than she had known when the Matchless was worth millions. Like familiar-looking photographs of people I’ve never met, these images and personalities from the past can seem as comfortable as a pair of bedroom slippers—and as startling as catching your reflection in a mirror and not recognizing yourself. The British historian Arnold Toynbee described numerous times when he experienced a moment of historical transcendence, when he felt transported across time in such a way that he could literally—briefly—see the brick and mortar of previous generations. One such instance took place shortly after the First World War. While he was walking in London, he “found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all

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that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide.” Dream? Vision? Wishful thinking? It might be said that an important part of our experience of the self is our ability—or at least our willingness—to project backward in time. To consider the lives that came before our own, not just as a cacophony of voices and a multitude of populations, one generation after the next, but rather on more singular terms, in the rhythm and nuance of an individual life. We find meaning in the smallest of details: the mundane, the prosaic, the sloppy minutiae of human life. I don’t find much of Lizzie Tabor in the history books that describe the most obvious and sordid details of her public life. Her spirit resides instead in her shopping lists, her dream journals, the tortured letters and telegrams she wrote to her daughters. I think of my own shopping lists, my own journals, my own children. I feel immortalized, somehow, by these inconsequential connections. Elizabeth McCourt Tabor had an unshakable Roman Catholic faith in God that sustained her to her eighty-second year. The roots of that faith were firm, in her family and in the burgeoning but sometimes ostracized Catholic communities in Denver and Leadville. In 1861, Father Machebeuf, one of the earliest Catholic priests to visit the Rocky Mountain area, wrote, “I have to cross the highest range of mountains to visit our poor Catholics, who are almost buried alive in the depths of the mines.” The miners mostly endured, as did Father Machebeuf; he returned to build Leadville’s Annunciation Church just prior to the arrival of Elizabeth McCourt. The Church didn’t approve of her divorce, but Lizzie knew as well as anyone that there were competing institutions for her ethical integrity (or anyone else’s): in 1879, the handful of earnest clergy at the Annunciation Church vied with 120 saloons, 118 gambling houses, 36 houses of prostitution, and 147 lawyers eager to sell their own version of spiritual mediation. Lizzie’s faith was true, but it was not easy, uncomplicated faith. She railed against her God and against the dogmatic trappings of a religion that refused to bend for a woman whose life often did not conform to the conventional expectations of the Church. When she and Horace

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married in 1883, shortly after Tabor was confirmed to serve a temporary thirty-day term as U.S. senator, their Washington wedding was the talk of the town. The Denver Republican reported: Under [Governor Tabor’s] orders and directions a perfect fairyland was made. . . . over three hundred yards of smilax, entwined with rosebuds, tulips, japonica and other rare flowers, were used in festooning the pillars and the chandeliers. [A] table was laid for twenty-eight. In its center, from a floral arch, hung a white marriage bell, and under it lay a wreath of rosebuds, typifying the wedding ring. Surmounting the arch was a heart of roses pierced by an arrow of violets shot from a cupid’s bow of heliotrope. . . . The bride wore a toilet of white embossed moiré, trimmed with feathers, with low neck and short sleeves. She wore white slippers and the traditional veil. The ensemble was striking; for though she wore no jewels of any kind, her exceptional beauty made the toilet brilliant. She is 23 years of age, and of full, fine figure, with dainty hand and wrist. Her hair is plentiful, and of a dark golden, giving a fine effect to her large, expressive eyes of sapphire-blue, while her teeth, when she smiles, are exquisite, being small, regular and white as snow.

But the fairyland didn’t last. The newspapers debated whether or not Tabor’s divorce from his first wife, Augusta, was final, and people thought a man like Tabor should have known better: “When a man of Senator Tabor’s wealth, influence and position, boldly defies society by marrying a woman whose history is as well-known as that of Mrs. Doe, it is high time he was lashed by the scorpion tongues of public opinion and severely censured by every respectable institution in the land,” one reporter crowed. The priest who performed the marriage discovered after the fact that both parties had been married before and immediately declared the marriage invalid. The now questionably wed Mr. and Mrs. Tabor gave up their pew in Denver’s downtown cathedral and attended church quietly on the outskirts of town. Tabor, twenty-four years Lizzie’s senior, was oblivious to the opinions of the clergy, the public, the world at large. Like a smitten sixteen-year-old, he wrote to his beloved, “It seems almost as if it is too much happiness for mortals, but it belongs to us. We give ourselves to one another. Whose business is it? We do not owe anybody of anything

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that belongs to them. We have full right to love and give ourselves to the one we love, and do that we will—to the last days of our lives. And after death we will love each other in spirit.” Lizzie’s response lies in the fireplace ashes of a curator who sought to protect her reputation and burned all her letters after her death. When Tabor died sixteen years later, in 1899, Lizzie retreated to the Matchless Mine. Her faith became even more private. She learned to look for God in more likely places than the Leadville Annunciation Church: in the eyes of deer who emerged at dusk, in the whir of a hummingbird’s wings, in tea leaves and strange dreams and whispering voices. She became a mystic. The months passed and then the years; daughter Lily ran away to get married, and Silver Dollar broke her heart. The days and nights and summers and winters passed from one to the next, and all that mattered were her thoughts, her books, her writings. Next to her bed she kept a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions. “What is time?” Augustine asks. “Where does it come from, by what path does it pass, and whither does it go? . . . It comes, then, from what is not yet real, travels through what occupies no space, and is bound for what is no longer real.” And me? I’m chasing ghosts. I’m squinting at letters transparent and yellow with age, studying photographs blurred and weathered, fingering the cloth of a dress worn 100 years ago. I’m looking for meaning in the lives of people who no longer exist but feel as real as the eyes that follow these words.


One hot Saturday in July, I rented a car and drove from Indianapolis to Chicago in search of Silver Dollar. Like her mother, she had more than one name. Lizzie had chosen the name Rosemary Echo. Horace Tabor, acting upon the enthusiastic advice of William Jennings Bryant, named her Silver Dollar to celebrate the seemingly endless source of their wealth. It was with a heavy legacy that Rosemary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor came into the world. The highway was congested with traffic and construction, and I thought I might miss the one o’clock closing of the office at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. I made it with minutes to spare. An indefatigable

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woman with thick glasses and brunette hair frayed into a twisted rubber band dug around in an old cabinet to find the exact location of the grave site. The grave had few visitors and no one, she said, really knew who Silver Dollar was, although a local reporter had done a story a few years back. She pulled out a wrinkled map representing the oldest part of the cemetery, dating back to the 1920s. “This cemetery was once a racetrack,” she said, “and then the Archdiocese purchased it. Scared all those gamblers away.” She pulled out several files with sheets containing lines and numbers and then with a dull pencil traced a line to a spot. “Here,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s a marker.” “Do you know anything about the circumstances of the burial?” I asked. “It wasn’t a pauper’s burial, although there are a lot of paupers out there. Somebody paid for her funeral. But there was no family present; that’s why we have no records.” I noticed Silver’s age on the list was wrong; it was given as thirtythree. She was thirty-six when the police found her scalded body on the kitchen floor of her apartment. I got back in my car and rested my forehead on the wheel. I hadn’t slept well in the ultramodern hotel where I had stayed the night before. (I sleep best in old hotels with creaky floors and moaning pipes—who can say why?) I waited for the air conditioning to kick in and watched a funeral procession roll by, headlights steadily burning into the sunlight. A minivan pulled up and a family got out—a man, a woman, a bright-skirted girl with a twirling baton—and walked quickly to a grave, laid down a bouquet of flowers, and left. These are people who care for their dead efficiently. I drove through a series of circuitous paths and parked along the section of road that seemed right. I got out and began looking for the names inked in block letters on the map near Silver’s rectangle of grass. In the 1920s and 1930s, cemeteries were organized so that visitors never had to step on a grave. A small pathway led between the two rows of headstones, the occupants pointing their toes in sweeping lines toward the next neat row. I counted the rows and measured the distance by the length of my tennis shoes. And there it was. A simple

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marker. “Rosemary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor, 1889–1926. Rest in Peace.” A small cross was the only elaboration. The grief I felt was fresh. It was easy then to drive to Silver’s last locales, the towering Victorian-style boardinghouses that now lie in tumbled ruins between the tenements of South Side Chicago. I drove with my laptop computer in the seat next to me and used Mapquest, the historian’s newest tool of the trade, to track down the addresses, street names, and numbers I had copied from old letters and telegrams. Two of her previous residences were still standing; the house where she died had disappeared. Silver Dollar’s long plunge from daughter of a silver baron to silent-screen actress to failed author had ended in a small room in a boardinghouse on a cold Chicago night. She had little money for heat or food. In a letter to her mother, she had complained about a racking cough and no strength. Most likely it was pneumonia. As she was boiling water on the stove for cooking, or perhaps for steam to clear her head, she knocked the pot off its burner. The flame was extinguished. Water spilled onto the floor, gas filled the tiny kitchen; she was overcome with fumes. Two hours later the police found the body. Denver reporters paid little attention to the Chicago police report, and screaming headlines proclaimed that Silver was a morphine addict, a prostitute, a disgrace to a family already deeply disgraced. “One more jigger of gin!” she supposedly cried before slumping naked to the floor. Silver Dollar, the Denver newspapers roundly agreed, died deservedly from her own sins, the sins of generations. Lizzie Tabor, living in her cabin at the Matchless Mine, was approached the next day by a reporter eager to lay a newspaper in her hands. “Look how your daughter died!” he said. “A whore. A drug addict. Isn’t this your daughter?” “My daughter lives in a convent,” Lizzie replied. “She lives in the grace of God.” She returned to her cabin, shut the door, and refused to answer to the world. Elizabeth McCourt Tabor lived most of her life in the shadow of the head frame of the Matchless Mine. Two upright poles gently lean toward one another, an ore-bucket hanging from the crosspiece. Miners use the term head frame interchangeably with gallows frame.

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In Hamlet, a clown asks, “What is he that builds stronger than the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?” Another clown replies, “The Gallowesmaker; for that frame outlives a thousand Tenants.” The penitence Lizzie observed for the last years of her life took many forms. The knotted rosaries she constantly twisted; the leather motoring cap she wore to cover her hair; the way she isolated herself, berated herself, prayed and fasted and lamented her lost family. Two years before Tabor’s death, when she was still a young woman and her daughters were eight and eleven, Lizzie wrote in her diary about how difficult it was to balance the needs of her children and the demands of the mining business. Their financial empire was in ruins. Horace was in Mexico trying to raise money for a gold mine; Lily had rheumatic fever, Silver had the flu, and Lizzie had to meet with bankers and mine promoters in the front lobby of their home, no longer a mansion. She kept the girls locked in a bedroom while she conducted business, and her business partners were none too pleased with her maternal obligations. But her writing goes beyond this most contemporary of problems. “Oh,” she writes, “it is fifteen years since every thought and aim of my life was to make my family happy.” The sufferings of her daughters, she fears, are more than mere childhood illnesses. “Don’t let my sins,” she prays, “rest on the heads of my little ones.” People say she was crazy in her last years. That she chose to live among those blue-gray mountains to hide from a world she couldn’t take. That she was scorned by people she had loved and haunted by demons she couldn’t control. But there is too much understanding in her penitence. Too much lively intelligence in her lists of books and piles of newspaper clippings. She writes with true insight, with the eye of one who really sees, in her descriptions of birds, flowers, tender blue columbines—spindles of flowers that insist upon growing in the harshest of high-altitude conditions. Lizzie Tabor’s connection to her mountain and her recognition of its sacredness brought peace to her soul. Augustine wrote, “This is my hope, for this I live: to contemplate the delight of the Lord. See how old you have made my days; they are slipping away and I know not how.” On December 1, 1933, at 8:30 P.M., the movie Silver Dollar, starring Edward G. Robinson as Horace Tabor and Bebe Daniels as Baby Doe,

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premiered in Denver. The foyer of the theater was turned into a replica of the Windsor Hotel, the exterior converted into an old-time playhouse, and many of the costumed guests chose to arrive by stagecoach or horse-drawn carriage. Tickets were made in the shape of silver dollars. The elite of Denver and Leadville society, as well as many Hollywood stars, attended. Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, age seventy-nine and living alone at the Matchless Mine, was offered $1,000 to walk across the front of the stage. She refused.


The last time I visited the Matchless Mine, my life once again had changed. I had thought I would never love again. But I did. I had thought I would never leave Colorado, but now I drove to Leadville with the intention of saying goodbye. It was a warm day in late spring, and this time the tour guide was a retired miner who lived with his wife in a motor home parked next to the cabin. He had spent the day taking folded dollar bills from tourists, and his voice was tired. When he told the story of how Horace Tabor gave Lizzie a $75,000 diamond necklace with the Isabella diamond for their engagement, my companion—the man I would soon marry—looked across the room and smiled. “I would give that to you,” he said. Down at the blasting shed, the guide explained the bell signals and shaft construction with deadly accuracy. “I don’t know that much about Baby Doe,” he said, “save what’s in the newspapers, and you can’t trust them much.” He gave me an old broken blasting cap, and his hands, rough and scarred, shook slightly with the gesture. “To keep a little bit of it with you,” he said. To honor all that had been, all that was, and all that was to come. In Lizzie’s last years at the mine, she carried a rosary made from a long piece of lace tied in knots. She wore a simple gray dress and wrapped her feet in gunnysacks to keep them warm, and was never seen without her leather motoring cap firmly clamped on her head. But in one of her trunks in the basement of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Leadville lay a jeweled mirror, a box of photographs, and her wedding dress in mint condition, neatly folded, the bottom lined with priceless pearls.

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Little Bethlehem FREDERICK BACA

T H E C L O U D H O L D S T H E H I L L like a vague thought. It brings a softer focus to my morning eye. The land is massaged by fog, its own innate softness touched. The effect is spirit. When I am in the forest among the trees in the mist, I know that the trees whisper. Whispering is an act between sentient beings. I don’t pretend that the trees are aware of me, but I know that some atomic action within them is a kind of communication. Electrons leap from one to another like a contagion. Electrons do leap, and sometimes I am in their path. It is in that same way that the little hill says to me, “Come.” We are led where we want to go. White rocks are arranged on the brown hill to proclaim SAN LUIS OLDEST TOWN IN COLORADO. The fog enshrouds most of the boast except for COLO. The second vowel looks like a D. It is winter, and yes, the valley is typically cold this morning. I have come from the other 31

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side of the Sangre de Cristos. I have awakened at the coldest hour to bear witness to the work of my cousins. In their certitude, the gente of the valley have placed stations of the cross on this new Calvary. I am not on a pilgrimage. I am not a believer, though I think I believe in their belief. A church outside makes sense to me. It makes so much sense, the way the forest makes sense. I have chosen this frosted morning because I wish to experience the stations viscerally. The cold always makes me withdraw a bit, like a turtle tucking its head. A narrower perspective might let me see more. I know enough to know what I don’t know. My questions are the obvious ones. What compels the construction of such an extensive iconography in a place regarded as the poorest as well as the oldest in Colorado? I want to look at it as an act of art, but I already know that it is more than that. A certain integrity compels us to art. That kind of compulsion is here, but it goes beyond my understanding of simple integrity. In art we are the intended audience. This open church doesn’t seem intended for people. It is situated for God to see. The ascent begins across a bridge. It is a sweeping climb. Obscured along the trail are squat piñon trees rimed with icy vapor. Revealed through the diaphanous drapery of fog, they are a fantastic, spectral display. It is a silent morning. If the roosters are crowing, their alarm can’t cut the frost that creates a dreamlike transition, helping my scattered mind ponder the racial memories of those who made the path. Adapted to the shift in time, I encounter the first station. Jesus is accused. The bronze figures are smaller than human. They, too, are the color of the rock. The statues appear less to have been placed there than to have been lifted from the ground during some past eruption, a natural manifestation of the land. Like the boulders on any mountainside moving imperceptibly in time, these figures are in motion. They are dynamic on a universal scale. Jesus! What a Jesus! Like none I have seen, and yet like all I have seen, but didn’t recognize. It is not a Jesus of European origin, nor even of Jerusalem. This Jesus has thick lips, large hands, worn feet, and a stout and hearty stature. I know his deep eyes are the eyes of my grandfathers. Like them, he, too, is a Penitente. A Brother of Light. Verdad.

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This Jesus is the Jesus they know, the Savior they have imitated for centuries in this land. But it is His hands that are most informative. This Jesus is the image of the people as they find themselves on the land. His hands are disproportionate, larger than His face. The people have isolated the hands. The hands represent what they value most about themselves. Their concept of life is struggle through hard work. They are in constant struggle with the land. They accept their fate in their hands. They touch the soil and reap its benefits. Of course that would be how they see their God. The path continues, sweeping back and forth from one station to the next. The story is familiar, but it is distinctive in how it is revealed. It follows the procession of the Penitentes on Good Friday. It is a reenactment of the Crucifixion as all stations are, but this depiction has clearly been influenced by a specific tradition. The Hermanos of Light celebrate their faith by making themselves as intimate with their God as they can be in this life. They do this by literally reliving the Crucifixion. The statues are an imitation not so much of Christ, but of themselves imitating Christ. These bronze sculptures that appear to be stone are more likely the petrified flesh of the Penitentes who have lived long in this valley. Jesus is given his cross, which might have been hewn from the pines in the surrounding hills. The weight of the timber bears on His strong body. His stricken face is the face of burden. The gente know this face. It is their own. Who among them hasn’t carried that kind of weight in his life? But the weight is not unbearable. The figure of Christ is never turned away from His ascent. His body stumbles and writhes, but it is always moving up the hill because salvation is up. That is what the people understand. Heaven is a summit. Unlike others in our world, whose religions tell them that they deserve heaven, these people believe that they have to earn their place there. The most fatuous among us are those who are able to lie to our own God. There is none of that here. These people have reflected their image of themselves in their Christ without compromise. The people, half Spanish, half Indian, became who we are in isolation. Our grandfathers were with Coronado, Onate, and Ulaterri. Our

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nameless grandmothers were the daughters of the Ancient Ones. The stations of this cross tell their story, how they were blended in the harshness of the inevitable. The Spanish, the first immigrants, were forced to accept what the natives already knew about the land. They had come here to claim it, but it claimed them. They came to understand that they couldn’t own the land; they were part of it. They adjusted their Christianity to reflect that irresistible reality. For 300 years, the mestizos, whose children came to this valley, practiced the religion that they found necessary to survive this place. That is why they are poor today. When the latest immigrants, the Anglos, came, they came to own the land. Because the gente had already smoothed the way for them, these newest immigrants found it easy to invent claims and commit usurpation. The Vecinos worked the land communally and in perpetuity. They had not claimed ownership, so the Anglos, as they always do, decided that it belonged to them. The insult to the gente is that any claim of ownership of the land is a claim on them because they believe that they are part of the land. That is part of the struggle. The posture of every figure in the procession reveals a truth. Each character in the drama—Jesus struggling, the women lamenting, disciples assisting—is in ascension amidst turmoil. The world around them is in a gradual state of erosion, but the people are undefeated. The mortal anguish depicted is accepted as the condition imposed on them for the blessing of their existence. We are all born to this terminal illness we call life. The people of the valley understand that the struggle should be about the challenges of life, not the inevitability of death. The statues climb the mountain, knowing that the struggle is the meaning. The fog begins to lift like a cataract removed. Halfway along my journey, I turn to see the village below revealed as a new Jerusalem. Portions of the worn buildings poke through the cloud. They look even older than they are. The sun strains through and catches the flaming, amber branches of the willow trees along the acequia. They look like burning bushes in the wilderness. Next to me, the statues of three women are told by Christ, in the accompanying inscription, to weep for themselves and for their children. I think of how my grandfathers hurt my grandmothers, and I

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want to weep for them. I think of how their children have been denied the communal life, and I want to weep for us. The light at my back beckons me, calls me to face the exposed summit. The argent light that now fills the air seems to emanate from within the structure there. The chapel is not a modest morada, it is a brilliant vision, the very temple of heaven. It is the reward, the forgiveness for all we have to weep about. Before it leads me to the temple, the path sweeps me around to Golgotha, “the Place of the Skull,” the place where Jesus is exhausted of this life. The crucified martyr is marked with the scars of life in a harsh environment. No one in the valley has skin any smoother. Christ’s countenance is peaceful, the expression of an accepted fate. A little farther, around back, is where His Resurrection will take place. The people haven’t finished their cycle. The glorious ascension is wrapped in a cloth. I don’t know why. I don’t want to ask. I am content to believe that the people will know when to reveal their idea of salvation. I turn my eyes to the temple. Behind it, the sky has cleared completely. The vivid blue canopy reveals the valley, surrounded by spiring peaks. The architecture of the chapel imitates them. The white domes that crown it are the last billowing clouds in the distance. Clearly, the church is a reflection of nature. Before I go in, I survey the entire hillside. As remarkable as they are, the stations blend into the earth as if they had appeared spontaneously out of that ancient eruption I first imagined. Likewise, the chapel is a neatly formed butte, not a symbol for heaven, but somehow heaven itself, at least the heaven we find in the world we have. Inside the chapel is a place within. The architecture is adobe, vigas, and latillas. Actually a small structure by the standards of cathedrals, the vaulting dome is, nonetheless, a gaze into the ethereal. The silence in there would frighten the dishonest, but it must offer great solace to the pilgrims who bring their integrity with them. I would stay longer, but I have run out of thoughts; I have been overcome by the visceral. My presence there is too much to bear. I feel that I am being frozen in time. Death is enough of rest for me. I must move on. Still not a true believer, but a firmer believer in their belief. Standing in front of the chapel, I reflect on the artists. The sculptor is well known, and has received deserved accolades. The other

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contributors have earned recognition as well. But I am thinking more of the anonymous carpenter who built the spiral staircase for the Sisters of Loretto in Santa Fe. Of the many unknown craftsmen who constructed the great cathedrals in Europe. Of the builders of monuments around the world throughout time. It is about the finished work, after all. All true artists understand that. The greatest of artists should remain nameless. Anonymity, I think, makes their art greater. To honor the artists of San Luis, I will not name them. Descending the hill is a kind of defeat. The sun touches the frost fingers of the piñons, and the trees themselves seem to melt around me. The town has begun to bustle discernibly. Trucks cough their way through the cold. Slow-moving people mingle with no sense of urgency. The day will last longer in the valley than it does in any city. The people know this. They are at a pace to live every moment of it. That is what defeats me. Partly it is the return to a horizontal plane where boundaries are carefully marked and politics direct our collective conscience. But mostly it is the sense of time that I know my car will return me to in too great a hurry. I am urged to return to the top of the hill and take refuge in the patience of that place, but I know that I am already too much a part of the prosaic world. This is Bethlehem. I am no wise man and no angel. My wings are only buds, and my weight is too great to be lifted. Like most of us, I have not yet earned my way.

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Mists of the Huerfano THOMAS J. NOEL

A U G U S T I N O G A R C I A S A LT E D T H E T O P O F H I S perspiring Coors can and nodded a welcome as I entered the dimly lit tavern. He was the only person to be seen, this cantina the only flicker of life in the southern Colorado village of Gardner. Once a busy ranching center, Gardner is now little more than a ghost town of crumbling adobe. Glad to find another human being, I bought Augustino a beer and took the stool beside him. We sat surveying the silent main street through the murky tavern window. “A long time ago,” he began slowly, “there was another town here. I never saw it, but my grandfather told me about it.” Augustino took another pinch of salt and washed it down. “Chavez Town, they called it. It lay down in the valley next to the old bed of the Huerfano River. My great-granddad lived and died there. I dug there once. I found only ashes and broken dishes. But the old Chavez Town cemetery, where my 37

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family are buried, is still there, up on the hill.” Chavez Town was a child of the Huerfano. By this life-giving river, Mexicans had planted their village, naming it after one of the oldest and most prolific New Mexico clans. Don Pedro Gómez Durán y Chavez was among the Spaniards who established Santa Fe around 1610. Later, Chavez became commander general of all royal troops in New Mexico. The general and his offspring tended to produce more sons than daughters, thereby disseminating his name to hundreds of Hispanic pioneers. Many of them settled in the remote valleys of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. One branch of the clan presumably founded Chavez Town, probably around 1860. Today, Chavez Town survives only in the stories of old-timers like Augustino Garcia, who remembers the stories he heard as a boy. Chavez Town church he recalls vividly. It had a flat, dirt roof that leaked indoors days after the rain stopped outdoors. Churchgoing was damp for years until a stranger came into the village one day and offered to repair the roof. “He was a man so strong,” Augustino claims, “that he needed no ladder. He just threw shovelfuls of mud up on the roof. After that it did not rain inside the church.” Some of the old-timers called it a miracle. Some of them said the strong man must have been Saint Joseph come to help his people. Not much else is remembered about Chavez Town, but its life cannot have been greatly different than that of the neighboring towns of Badito and Farisita. These surviving Huerfano villages still cling to the old ways, ways rooted deeply in the soil and in the Catholic Church. Each spring, villagers push corn and bean seeds deep into droughtresistant furrows. And each spring they celebrate the most important week of the Spanish calendar—Holy Week, commemorating the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ceremonies are conducted by Los Hermanos Penitentes, who have made the Huerfano Valley one of their last strongholds. This radical sect—recently re-recognized by the Catholic Church, which had banned it in 1886—held its grim rituals in remote regions of Colorado and New Mexico. On Holy Thursday, when Christ shared the Last Supper with his disciples, the Penitentes slipped away to their morada (meetinghouse) to atone for the sins of the this world. Singing lugubrious Spanish chants,

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the brothers lashed themselves with razor-sharp yucca blades; the more fanciful knelt before a sangrador (bloodletter) who carved crosses into their bare backs. Before the sun touched the Sangre de Cristo peaks on Good Friday morning, the bleeding and barefoot Penitentes led Cristo, an especially devout brother chosen to play the role of Christ, uphill along the stony, cactus-padded path to their secret Calvario (Calvary). Atop Calvario, the Cristo was lashed to the cross and raised against the Colorado sky. Not until Easter Sunday did the gruesome Passion play end. The mournful chants changed to hallelujahs. The whips, cross, and crown of thorns were put away and the bloody wounds of the Penitentes were allowed to clot. Once again the life of the carpenter from Nazareth is brought closer to the people. And their lives, also often poor and painful and short, are given a meaning and a promise that they, like Cristo, will rise again. Penitentes and moradas survive to this day, but the self-torture and re-enactments are a thing of the past. If the people of the Huerfano Valley commemorate the pain of Christianity, they also celebrate its joy. El Dia Santiago, St. James’s Day, July 25, is a holiday devoted to festivals and games and a night of feasting and dancing. El Dia Santiago is also El Dia Gallo, or the Day of the Cock. Traditionally, a rooster was buried in the sandy main street and the best caballeros of the town took turns galloping by, trying to pluck it from the dust by its head. Women of the village have rejoiced in El Dia de Santa Ana, St. Anne’s Day, one of the few holidays for the hardworking señoras and señoritas. Domestic duties are suspended and open house held up and down the valley. Traditionally, women are given the family horse to visit friends and relatives in neighboring villages. No one remembers when the farming and festivals came to an end for Chavez Town. Every spring the Huerfano swelled, and often it flooded. One year, after a particularly heavy spring snowmelt or summer flash flood, the river rose angrily out of its banks and spilled into Chavez Town. The people rushed to higher ground. Looking back, they saw their village sink into the river.

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For days, for weeks, the people of Chavez Town waited. Always before, the Huerfano had returned to its bed. But that year, despite all the rosaries of a pious people, the river did not leave its new flood bed. Chavez Town never rose from its watery grave. The people moved higher up the hill to a new town that another people, the gringos, were to call Gardner. Gringos had named the town, and they controlled it. Men like Herbert Gardner, the son of a governor of Massachusetts, came from the East and began amassing land. Land which the Hispanos had divided up among all residents was acquired by ranchers and speculators who built up holdings of thousands, even millions, of acres. Some gringos owned so much land that they never even saw it all. Augustino ordered two more beers. “Now, nearly all the land around Gardner is owned by a man from Texas,” he said softly. “Or by a fella who lives in Pueblo. We hardly ever see either of them here. People say they bought it as a tax write-off. And they bought it from the poor ones here who have to sell their land each year to pay their taxes.” As they sold away their land, the original settlers of the valley grew poorer. “When I was in my twenties,” Augustino went on, “we had to leave this place most of the year in order to live here. In the spring, we would start out for Wyoming and Idaho and Montana for the sheep shearing. Then summers we moved back to the mountain valleys of Colorado for sheep herding and haying. When the first snow came, we brought the sheep back down to their owners. Come fall, we went to the San Luis Valley to harvest potatoes. Not until October did we come back to Gardner. And we really didn’t bring much money home with us. We were lucky to make a dollar a day. Sometimes they gave us only room and board—no money. With what little we had, we made it through the winters. In those days, you didn’t need much money. We grew or made most everything. I remember my grandaddy buying big bags of flour, sugar, salt, and coffee each spring, and with that and what he grew, he fed sixteen kids.” Gardner was a large town then—next to Walsenburg, it was the most populous town in Huerfano County. “There were maybe 400 people here in the summer,” Augustino guesses, “and twice that in the winter, when all the migrants came home. But the town started to go down

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during World War II. Many of our people moved away to the big cities for the good-paying war jobs. Only a few of us stuck it out.” Augustino turned to the darkening window. He gulped his beer and walked to the potbellied stove at the rear of the cantina, where the low sloping roof met the cracked back wall. He put in some piñon, waited for it to crackle, and came back to his stool. He looked out the window at a patch of plastic flowers and wooden crosses that lay down the road. “My father gave the land for the cemetery back in 1925. Said he wanted to be the first buried there. He was, later that year. But my grandfather lived until 1941. He was seventy-eight then and had always said that he came to this valley with his folks when he was only three.” Like Chavez Town, these two pioneers, father and son, lived on only in the memory of a son grown old. On the drive back to Denver, I wondered if there would be any recorded trace of Chavez Town, any way to verify Augustino’s story. Stopping off in Pueblo, I checked with Ralph C. Taylor, a leading journalist and author of Colorado South of the Border. “Nope,” Taylor said, shaking his head, “I’ve never heard of Chavez Town. But that doesn’t mean it never existed.” He explained that many small Hispanic towns have disappeared, leaving few, if any, traces. On the record, these towns did not exist until gringos put them on their maps or gave them post offices. Dozens of dead and dying Spanish villages await modern-day explorers of rural southern Colorado. Towns of melting adobe wrapped around venerable plazas, towns with somnolent-sounding names like San Pablo, San Francisco, San Acacio, Mesita, and Garcia. Some belong to the new breed of ghost towns—settlements that died when the interstate passed them by. Such was Greenhorn, a stage stop where Kit Carson, Uncle Dick Wooten, and other legends once lingered at the inn. After the Denver–to–Santa Fe stage route became U.S. Highway 85, the old Greenhorn Inn became a service station, as well as tavern and general store. And the Fosseco family made it one of the liveliest gas stations in the Rocky Mountain West. Motorists pulled in for gas and found a zoo, where Mr. Fosseco wrestled the Asian bear on slow days between gas pumpings. After the zoo tour, wide-eyed tourists hung around for drinks and talk inside the

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roadhouse while their children investigated the wayside well. The water was free, but the Dixie cups cost a penny. The well water, gas, and beer all ran dry after 1961, when Interstate 25 was completed miles to the east. Today, U.S. 85 has returned largely to dust, and only tumbleweeds wander around the ancient waystation and empty zoo. Eighteen miles south of Greenhorn’s ghost, travelers rarely take the Colorado Highway 69 exit off Interstate 25. On the lonely trip up the Huerfano Valley to the site of Chavez Town, the road bends around adobe and concrete skeletons before reaching a river-crossing town. The road sign—BADITO—survives, although the residents and post office have vanished. A century ago, Badito bustled with prospects as the first seat of Huerfano County. Badito’s hopes ballooned in 1872 when William Green Russell reappeared in Colorado Territory. Russell had discovered the Platte River gold that gave birth to Colorado Territory and had founded Auraria, the first permanent settlement in the Denver area. Abandoning the gold rush he had fathered, Russell joined the Confederacy. Like many other Georgians, he was a broken man afterward when he returned to prospect again for wealth in Colorado, to establish a new Denver in Badito. “Gold is where you find it,” Russell read in his Bible and believed. He found none in the sunbaked trickle that passes for the Huerfano River. Selling all his Colorado claims, he started back for the smoky green hills of Georgia, only to die of fever in Oklahoma Territory. Badito fared no better. When Walsenburg was chosen as the new county seat, Badito became a ghost, like the nearby Spanish fort where Russell once camped. The fort went up in 1819, when Governor Don Facundo Melagres grew concerned about Yankee invasion. Today the gringos possess the land, and only the faint triangular outline of the fort still commands the hill, with its view of the valley spilling down into the plains past the solitary butte called Huerfano, the orphan. Beyond Badito, there is Farisita, with its suspicious, gothic-windowed barn and lone flicker of human activity, Abe’s general store. Nearby, John Faris, the Lebanese immigrant who built the store decades ago, rests beneath a heavy, granite tombstone. As postmaster, Faris changed the name of Fort Talpa, whose adobe bulwarks still stand

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beside the store, to Farisita, Spanish for “the little Faris lady,” in honor of his daughter, Jeanette. Five miles above Farisita, dead and buried Chavez Town rests markerless on the edge of historical oblivion. Surely there must be some written evidence to prove or disprove the existence of the town so vivid in Augustino Garcia’s mind. The State Historical Society in Denver is one starting point. The librarian there lugged out a collection of nineteenth-century Colorado maps and carefully blew off the dust. She spread out the oldest, the 1887 map of all the post offices. Neither it nor the giant Rand McNally maps for the 1880s and 1890s showed Chavez Town. The standard ghost-town guides, the multivolume Colorado histories, the various place-name files all revealed nothing. A day-long search at the State Historical Society library and the nearby Denver Public Library proved equally fruitless. It appeared that Chavez Town has escaped historical record. Both the town’s life and its death have gone unreported. Chavez Town lies buried and forgotten under the Huerfano River that once gave it life. Except for a few ashes and bits of pottery and a tumbledown boneyard overgrown by cholla cactus, Chavez Town is gone. Only in the minds of a few old-timers, sitting around the Gardner tavern with Augustino Garcia, is there even a memory of Chavez Town, the lost city of the Huerfano.

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Walking in Yampa K AT E K R A U T K R A M E R

W H E N W E G E T O U T O F T H E C A R , I notice that Marguerite’s shoes match. This is a rarity, the first time I’ve seen it. In the middle of winter, I have often seen her in a “pair” of shoes—one a dingy blue flat that we would have called a boat shoe in high school, the other a Chuck Taylor Converse All Star high-top sneaker, at least two sizes too big. At first I thought that Marguerite was old and absentminded; sometimes she wears two unmatched lefts or two unmatched rights. When I got to know her better, she started telling me about her shoes. Her feet are wide, so she prefers men’s sizes. Sometimes she wears whatever she can find at the thrift store. Whatever she has, she wears until it is worn out. Once, in January, she told me she thought it would be best to wear socks and nothing else because she could get better traction on the ice that way. Today, Marguerite has on a matched pair of sturdy Reebok running shoes that I have never seen before; she’s dressed for an occasion. 44

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The three of us and the two dogs begin up Greenridge. Evelyn is sure that I will be “bored out of my head” spending the day with two old ladies; we giggle about this. She knows that I love to be outside and to walk. She also knows my name, though she almost never says it. She knows I am a poet, and she knows where I live, just down the street from her. I’ve told her that I once lived in Africa, but she is perhaps unimpressed or doesn’t remember. Rarely do Marguerite and Evelyn ask me about my life, and never do they ask anything personal. It seems, in fact, that we have little in common, yet we walk all day and never stop talking. On our way up Greenridge, Marguerite and Evelyn point out a hill where they used to ski. With a long piece of grass hanging from her mouth, Evelyn explains how their mother, Louise, made them skis. “She took boards and planed them down in front. Then she shaped the noses on them. She stuck the noses in water, then put them in the kitchen stove and bent them as far as she wanted. This took a while. Sometimes they caught fire, and she’d stick them in a pail of water. When they were done, she fastened leather straps about midway, then melted paraffin on the bottom so as they’d slide.” Marguerite is quieter, but she sometimes tells a story, too. She tells about her brother Bill, who married Mildred. “Oh, Mildred lived up here on Greenridge. Bill knew she was in school, so one day he climbed up in a tree that hung over the path where she walked on her way home. He always said he just happened to be in that tree, just happened to lose his balance as she happened to come walking by. He just happened to fall on the ground right in front of her.” Marguerite pauses to look and see that I am getting the gist of the story, then says, “Shortly after that, they just happened to get married.” Marguerite is eighty-four years old, and her sister Evelyn is eighty-three. I met them walking near the small town of Yampa, Colorado, where we all live. I grew up thirty miles away in a resort town, Steamboat Springs. I went to college, went around the world on a boat, lived and taught in Africa, went back to school, and moved to Idaho to write a thesis. I fell in love with an old friend, a forest ranger, and somewhat reluctantly moved back to Yampa. When I was growing up, Yampa was a place we hardly thought of. We drove through it.

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When I moved back to Routt County with John, I didn’t know what I would do. Fresh out of the world of fast-talking poets, writers’ workshops, performance art, and film, I was accustomed to lively discourse, literary criticism, and hours of yoga. I was no stranger to the mountains of Colorado, but I had no idea how my lofty poetic consciousness would be filled. Further, all of my grown life, I had been moving, always traveling and always with thoughts of where I would go and what I would do next. Moving home with the intent to stay was a radical life change. I hardly knew how to begin or end a day in a place where I might be indefinitely. I had always been a renegade, a gypsy. When I moved to Yampa two years ago, I began to take walks on Eagle Rock, a short county road that goes up Greenridge, the long mountain east of Yampa. An offshoot of the Gore Range, Greenridge rose here at least 25 million years ago as part of the Laramide Orogeny and Park Range Fault Block. Morrison Creek defines the mountain’s eastern side; the Yampa River flanks its western edge. Eagle Rock Road crosses the Yampa River about half a mile from the town of Yampa (population 400). From my house to the second cattle guard on Eagle Rock Road and back is about five miles; a roundtrip is a ninety-minute walk. It was here that I met Evelyn and later Marguerite and learned that they had been walking in the mountains around Yampa since the 1920s. When I walk with them, I silently calculate. Evelyn was fifty-four years old when I was born, seventy-two when I graduated from high school. It seems at once impossible and comforting that Evelyn and Marguerite have been walking here as long as I have been alive. Evelyn is a handsome woman. She stands about five feet tall, even with a decided lean to the left. Her body is hard and compact; when she wears tight knit slacks to work in the yard or to walk in summer, the bulge of her thigh muscles shows through the blue or yellow polyester. Evelyn’s face is leathered; wrinkles reach deep around her eyes and mouth. In summer, her face and smooth hands turn the color of walnut shells. A willful shock of Evelyn’s white hair occasionally escapes her headwear. I have never seen her without either a hat or her wig, an old blondish swab she attaches to her head with thick, obvious bobby pins. Under her wig or hat, Evelyn’s blue eyes jig. When she tells a story, when she

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stoops in her yard to pick dandelion heads to fry for supper, when she stands at a pasture gate, counting new calves, Evelyn’s vivid eyes are telltale of the joy and good humor that seem always to accompany her. Marguerite’s eyes are the same blue, but harbor a less playful expression. Her face is more rugged than Evelyn’s. She had four children and a husband and worked hard ranching her whole life; the years testify through her face, which is square and framed by loose, dark gray hair. Marguerite’s hands are gnarled and usually black from loading coal or ash into or out of her stove. Marguerite is less talkative than Evelyn and more forgetful, but equally strong in body. Evelyn claims that Marguerite, whom she refers to as “Poochy” or “Poodle,” is also more surefooted, more agile. Marguerite glances sideways at Evelyn when she says this, at once thanking her for the compliment and casting an eye of weathered love and admiration on her sister. There is no explanation for how my simple interactions with Evelyn and Marguerite became endearing. We would meet out walking and talk about our dogs, the weather, and the turning seasons. There is no explanation for how familiarity sometimes turns to love. After I had known her more than a year, Evelyn gave me some trimmings from an elk her nephew Sonny had shot. She said her dog was too old to eat them, it might upset his stomach, but maybe my dog would like them. I took the bloody bits of meat home in a bucket, at once horrified at the stench and amazed that I had somehow become friends with Evelyn. A few days later, I returned the bucket with a little loaf of banana bread, and Evelyn invited me into her house. That was when Evelyn first showed me photographs of her family and the house on Greenridge where they used to live. On one wall was a photograph of Marguerite and Evelyn and their brother as little children, all of them sitting in a wagon. We leaned across Evelyn’s old organ to get a good look. Noticing the organ and the piano opposite, I asked Evelyn about the next time she was going to play at church. I had heard that she sometimes played accordion and mentioned that I would love to see her play. Her eyes lit up, and she laughed. “Really?” “Yes, really,” I said. To my surprise, she dug the accordion out from behind an old striped sofa with claw feet. As she strapped it on, she explained that Mrs.

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Bolton, whom she used to work for, helping with the sheep, bought the instrument for her from Montgomery Ward. She taught herself how to play. Before she began, Evelyn leaned down and addressed the dog, who looked up at her mischievously. “Now Bobbie, you be sure to sing along.” She started pumping the accordion back and forth, then stopped to turn on the organ, which she set to play a samba backbeat. She adjusted her accordion, concentrated a moment to find the beat, and, with an immense grin on her face, performed a medley of familiar songs including “High Hopes” and “Let the Sun Shine In.” The performance went on for ten minutes or more while Bobbie sat at Evelyn’s feet and howled with the music. Evelyn’s fingers poked with decided precision at the buttons on the accordion, keeping the beat even as she lifted her chin to the ceiling, closed her eyes, and wailed and yowled along with Bobbie, her face flushed and happy. Almost a year later, I met Evelyn and Marguerite walking together on Eagle Rock Road. It was June, and we talked about how the wild iris had been replaced by lupine and how the aspen trees had lost their spring green and settled into the rich color of summer. Marguerite told me she had been hearing coyotes singing around her ranch every night. Eventually, the conversation came around to how beautiful it used to be this time of year on Greenridge, and, with little forethought, we made a date to go up to their mother’s old house. Although the sisters rarely ride in cars, they agreed it would be easiest if I picked them up and we drove to the Rossi place, thereby avoiding a walk on the highway. We’d park the car on the ranch and set out from there. Marguerite and Evelyn are locally famous for their walking. When they were young and lived on Greenridge, Evelyn and Marguerite would often walk to Yampa or nearby Phippsburg and back—a round-trip of about twenty-two miles—in a day. They walked to parties and to teach Sunday school. The sisters taught together and so would make the trip to Yampa at least once a week; according to Evelyn, they thought nothing of it. Once I met Evelyn on Eagle Rock in August, and she told me this was the time of year she had once walked to Trapper’s Lake and back in a single day. I called her a liar. “No, I wouldn’t lie to you,” she said. “I know it’s a long way. It’s fifty-one miles, but I did it. I started at mid-

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night, and I didn’t stop until I got home, about seven o’clock the next night.” I told her that I was really impressed, so impressed, in fact, that she was my hero. I told her I was going to get her a great big letter and sew it on her chest, an S for “Super Evelyn.” She chuckled and said, “Or you could just get me an E,” and then, by way of explanation, “for ‘Idiot.’ ” In recent years, the sisters have taken to camping. Marguerite’s son, David, called “Sonny” by everyone in the valley who has known him more than a day or two, rigged some old shopping carts for his mother and aunt. The shopping carts are not the grocery-store kind that are pushed from the rear; they are the taller variety that can be pulled along behind the shopper. The old women pack a few things in these carts, and off they go without maps. “I wouldn’t know how to read one if I had one,” Evelyn told me once. “We just decide where we want to go, and, why, we go there. Then, when we want to, we come home.” No other explanation seems to be required, although Evelyn often expounds on how she loves to sleep outside, loves to hear the frogs in the evening and the birds in the morning. In summer, she sleeps in a little bed she has made up in the shed outside her house. She shows this to me one day, pointing out the tin roof and explaining how she savors the sound of the rain on it, especially so close above her head. There is childish delight in her face when she points to the bed and says, “When I sleep here, it’s almost like camping.” It is a town pastime in Yampa to talk and worry about Evelyn and Marguerite. When they go camping, they have no particular destination and no set time to return. They sometimes walk together or alone all day. I’ve seen them on roads or crossing meadows miles from town. Their particular forms and gaits have become distinctive and dear to me. Marguerite walks slowly, usually with her hands joined behind her; her back is humped at the top, and she carries her head quite forward from her body as she walks. Evelyn’s steps are livelier, but Marguerite never falls behind. In summer, Evelyn’s silhouette is easy to pick out because of the sunbonnet she wears to shade her face. This actually consists of two hats, a straw one with a stiff brim, over which is pinned the more decorative but faded old-fashioned calico bonnet. Evelyn ties the thing

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on her head with the bonnet strings. The ragged edges of the straw hat have been kept from fraying by brown postal packaging tape stuck around the circumference of the brim. Evelyn has a slight limp, and she leans obviously to the left as she walks. Both Evelyn and Marguerite are tiny—maybe five feet tall and 110 pounds each—but their strength shows in their persistent strides. So I am not reluctant to take them on the walk to their former home. I pick them both up at Marguerite’s house, the house where she moved with her husband, Carl, more than thirty years ago. Carl has been dead for several years; Evelyn once showed me his place in the Yampa cemetery, which is about two miles from town on another county road, suitable for walking in spring when Eagle Rock is too muddy. She also showed me the place where Marguerite will be buried when she goes, her name already carved in stone beside Carl’s. I assume Evelyn will also be buried here somewhere near Marguerite, as she was never married and never cared to be. As we make our way out the gate, Evelyn concedes that Carl was a good man, then adds as a sort of disclaimer, “as far as men go.” After two or three hours of walking, we come near to “Mam’s place.” When I ask them why they always say “Mam’s place” and never “Pap’s place” or “Mam and Pap’s place,” Marguerite and Evelyn answer in unison, “Because it was hers.” Their mother inherited some money when her mother died; with that money she bought the 160-acre ranch here on Greenridge. Since Pap was often away hunting, I gathered Mam did much of the work on the ranch as well. When we catch sight of the house, the women are silent. I look on, incredulous at the view and the thought that they actually had lived here. Although in poor condition, the house is standing. The setting is pristine, idyllic. The front door opens on a sprawling meadow. The back is skirted by aspens. Beyond the meadow, we can see Yampa nestled by the river, and beyond that the Flat Top Mountains under a lumpy quilt of clouds. In less than a moment, I know why there is a kind of melancholy longing in their voices when my friends speak of this place. Columbines bob their heads in the aspens’ shade. Everything is still but for a few mosquitoes and a slight breeze through the tall July grass. The moment seems to go on as far as we can see.

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Finally, Evelyn speaks out about the house, a big, two-storey building with a porch wrapping most of the way around the second floor. “Don’t that porch look like arms just saying welcome?” she says. “When I see that house, it just always seems to be saying, ‘Welcome. This is your home.’ ” We push open the door to look inside. Paper is peeling off the walls and ceilings, cobwebs dangle from rafters, and the floor is covered in droppings of bats and mice and chipmunks that have taken the house for their own. There’s an old stove quietly disintegrating in the corner and a rusted, broken shovel in the middle of the floor. It’s dark inside. I can’t guess what Evelyn and Marguerite are thinking. Even though we agree it isn’t safe, Evelyn and I go up the stairs. She shows me her room, where light now pours in through the square that was once a window. We open the door that used to let onto the porch but now opens only onto air and a few dying boards. We wave at Marguerite, who is standing in the grass below. After a few photographs, we lunch at an old table behind the house. While we eat, Marguerite and Evelyn argue about where the bunkhouse was and where Mam kept the chickens and where the garden had been, who planted it, and what had grown in it. Marguerite remembers when her old pig Rosey, named after the woman who had given it to her, got into the bunkhouse, ripped open a featherbed with her snout and hooves, and was eventually found fast asleep in the feathers. When I am with these women, I spend a lot of time trying to remember exactly what they say. I listen, entranced by them, although there is no explanation for my being so charmed. In many ways, Marguerite and Evelyn are the epitome of ordinary. But they are also extraordinary in ways they could not even have planned. I like them because they are old and I will undoubtedly learn something from them. I like them because they are unself-conscious (although Marguerite and I have more than once discussed her distress at the “whiskers” she has grown with old age). I enjoy them because they are honest and, like me, they walk. Mostly because they have been here all their lives, they exude a purity—a strange, old purity, a purity that has come about not through discipline or intent but despite old age, and perhaps the aging process itself.

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Evelyn and Marguerite do talk about wrinkles and whiskers and pain. They never complain, but neither do they pretend that they will never die. Last year I made some calls for Evelyn (who does not have a telephone) concerning her coal stove. She was afraid she would no longer be able to get lump coal and that she would have to convert her old house to electric heat. When I informed her, after talking to a representative at the mine, that lump coal would be available for at least ten more years, she sighed audibly before she laughed and said, “Well, then, that will do it.” She has told me that she is not afraid to die, and I believe her. When I listen to Marguerite and Evelyn talk, I begin to see how I might come to the end of my own life, should it be long, with satisfaction, maybe even in peace. I begin to see that, yet it remains unfathomable to me that they (or I) will die. For lunch Marguerite has two raw “weenies,” three slices of white bread, and a 7-UP. Aside from a long-sleeved shirt tied around her waist, this lunch in an old bread sack is the only baggage Marguerite has brought along for the trip. Evelyn and I fish our lunches out of our backpacks and we all share. I have some of Evelyn’s BBQ Lays potato chips, and she has some of my chocolate raisins. She tries to toss one in the air and catch it in her mouth, tries a few times before she decides she is too old to do this trick anymore. Then, because I am sitting in front of her on the ground, she gets the idea to throw the raisins up so that I can catch them in my mouth. It turns out that we are a good team, and Evelyn takes such obvious satisfaction in this game that I catch raisins in my mouth until I am more full than I care to be. She and Marguerite laugh out loud through the whole act. While we are eating, Evelyn tells about a little bear the family had when they were young. Evelyn and Marguerite’s father, “Pap,” was a government hunter. He killed mountain lions, bears, coyotes—anything that might be threatening to stock or people. The baby bear had been caught in one of Pap’s traps. Pap brought the bear home, couldn’t stand to let the little fellow die, and the cub was kept as a family pet for more than a year. Evelyn recalls the day a man from a zoo in Louisiana came to take the bear away. “I couldn’t stand it. That bear loved us, and we loved him. We fed

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him, hugged him, and slept with him. Then here comes this fella from Louisiana, puts him in a cage to take him away. Long as I live, I’ll never forget it.” When she gets to this part of the story, Evelyn puts her face very close to mine and nearly yells. “That bear cried, ‘Maa! Maa! Maa!’ so sadlike I couldn’t stand it. I ran inside, put my head under the pillow, and bawled and bawled.” She looks like she’s going to cry again, then lets her face relax, sighs and stretches, signifying the end of lunch. We stand a few moments in the meadow and take pictures of the Flat Tops. Although their tabled-off summits give them a subdued look, they are the highest mountains in this part of the state. From our vantage point, we can see their whole wildness and splendor as well as the tranquil pasturelands and our houses in the valley. Our next destination is “the big tree.” Marguerite and Evelyn argue as to its exact location, but as we fumble along guessing, we eventually see it in the distance. I’m amazed. It is a ponderosa pine, not common to this area, and it is indeed immense. As we approach, they tell me it was big when they were young. Full-grown even then, it seems no bigger now. Evelyn points out a branch that has fallen to the ground, saying that the branch alone is bigger than most trees around here. I snap a photo of the sisters; standing abreast in front of the tree, holding hands, they show how large the trunk is. The three of us, reaching around it, cannot touch fingers. When I tell them that ponderosas smell like butterscotch, Evelyn and Marguerite don’t even consider that I might be fooling; they plunge their noses into the old bark. The ancient tree does give off a sweet odor, but only faintly. The women are unsatisfied, so we make our way to the other, smaller ponderosas, the great tree’s offspring, sniffing each one. When Evelyn puts her nose to a tree, her hat hides her entire face, but she’s determined, stands there breathing in and smelling. Finally, she puts her cheek to the tree. “Well. I never knew any tree could smell just as fine as a batch of cookies baking in the oven,” she says, looking satisfied and thankful. We debate about which Greenridge destination to visit next. Every spot on Greenridge is a “place,” I learn as they talk. “We could go right to the Nelson place, or we could go to the Brown place,” Marguerite says.

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“Well, either way, when we get off Mam’s place, we’ll have to cross the Wright place,” Evelyn answers. I spend the rest of the day trying to figure out the boundaries of the various places and their significance to Evelyn and Marguerite. We decide to head for the Nelson place. This is where Marguerite lived with her husband and parents-in-law when she was first married. There is a large house standing on a hill, and this dwelling is probably still inhabited, although no one is home at the moment. There is a steep gravel road that might be passable by a good vehicle with high clearance. There are two barns filled with odds and ends of old machines, tools, scraps of leather, and buckets of rusted nails and screws. The windows are broken; cobwebs hang from every place a cobweb can hang. On the way out an overgrown driveway, we spot some rhubarb. Marguerite tells us she planted it there years ago. We each pull a piece, and the sour is refreshing as we suck it from the red stalks. On a hill behind the house is an old graveyard. It takes a few minutes, but eventually we spot the fence. The land it encloses is barely distinguishable from the land outside it. Serviceberry bushes, lupine, sagebrush, and rye grass cover the stones. We push the plants away carefully to find the markers for Carl’s parents and for a little girl, Mattie Louise, who was born dead. I look to Marguerite for an emotion, but she is matter-of-fact. “Named for her grandmothers,” she says. “My mother’s name was Louise; Mattie was Carl’s mom.” The date on the stone is 1948. Unable to squelch my curiosity, I ask quietly, “Did you know? I mean, did you know she was dead inside you?” Marguerite tells me no, she hadn’t known, although in retrospect it seems like she ought to have felt it stop moving. She even offers that the baby had likely been dead in her for a long time, that the poor thing’s flesh was tender and soggy, almost came right off the bone when you touched it. Even if this was more than I had wanted to know, I wasn’t surprised by Marguerite’s frankness. Both Marguerite and Evelyn remember particulars from the distant past even when they cannot remember what happened last week or yesterday. Marguerite offers this detail of her dead child not to shock me or to shame me for asking; she tells me

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simply to explain. As we leave the small cemetery, Marguerite does not look tired or sad or even sentimental when she states, “This may be the last time I come here.” She says it almost without regret, and as the old women lead me up the hill, now bound for the Brown place, I keep the practice of wondering why I’ve become so fond of them. Part of it, I decide, is because they speak plainly, say what they mean and offer most interactions with a sense of humor, even mirth. But there is more. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in life. My father’s parents were dead before I was old enough to remember them; my mother’s parents are still living. My parents, too, are living and married, to each other no less. I’ve never been accidentally or deliberately pregnant, never lost a brother or sister. My friends who have passed away have been either not close enough to really make me feel the loss or old enough that it seemed they had lived full lives. I’ve traveled all over the world, often alone, and have never been stabbed, shot, or otherwise mortally threatened. Certainly, I’ve had my share of romantic heartbreak, and I was once attacked and bitten by an Ethiopian monkey. But these seem almost trifles compared to what misfortunes might befall a person in a lifetime. Evelyn and Marguerite both worked hard. Marguerite worked a ranch and raised children with Carl for many years. Evelyn worked for a ranching family, looked after children and sheep, and even spent one summer trapping muskrats. But I would not say that their lives have been particularly unfortunate. Of course, because they are old themselves, they have lived through the deaths of their parents. Marguerite outlived her husband and also buried the stillborn Mattie Louise. Evelyn and Marguerite had two brothers who are both now dead. But it is not only their bearing the loss of loved ones that intrigues me. These women have also gone from young to old, enduring the change with grace. They have wrinkled faces, and their skin has the transparency of old age. Evelyn has almost no hair. They’ve outlived vanity for the most part, and yet they are honestly attractive and strong. They’ve lived and walked in the hills. They talk of the past with relish, but equally do they enjoy the present, always bringing attention to common and beautiful things, listening to insects, smelling chokecherry

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blossoms, laughing at an old crow scolding from the branches of a cottonwood. Nothing they’ve encountered in their years has made them bitter, and I follow them around like a little child after sugar. It is already late in the day, but we decide to walk up to the Brown place. This is where Marguerite lived with Carl after they left the Nelson place. A thin layer of cloud relieves us from the afternoon sun as we make our way, waist-deep in grass, across the fields. We ford a little creek and lose each other, happily calling out in a copse of high skunk cabbage. Before we get to the Brown place, we come upon a huge field ablaze with yellow daisies. Because of its long, oval leaves, this plant is called mule’s ear, but Marguerite scoffs at the dazzling field and calls it rosin weed. She says Carl would roll in his grave to see his hay meadow covered in the flowers, and she gives an indignant snort. At the Brown place we find a house, a schoolhouse, two barns, a lot of fence, and an icehouse, all in various stages of decrepitude. In the schoolhouse, Evelyn explains how just a few years ago they slept here when they were camping. When they woke up, their sleeping bags were dusted with perfect squares of snow where it had fallen through the chimney hole in the roof. We go to the house. The windows are missing and the roof has caved in, gray boards sticking up out of what was Marguerite’s kitchen. This is where her children were born and where she poses for me. She stands by an aspen tree into which she carved the words to an old song, fifty, maybe sixty, years ago. The lyrics can no longer be read; they have turned into indecipherable scars. She and Evelyn try to remember the words—“This old house once knew my children, this old house once knew my wife”—but we won’t get all the lyrics until weeks later, when Evelyn pulls out her old record player and plays the song for me on a scratched 33. I tell her I’ll give her and Marguerite copies of all the photographs I have taken today, and as she has done four or five times now since I have known her, Evelyn stands, throws her arms out wide, and declares with a certain vigor, “I love you,” then waits for me to come hug her. We argue about whether or not she is allowed to pay me for the photos.

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We are friends. Evelyn and Marguerite have let me in on a secret, but it’s not a secret I can relay or even fully understand. It is a secret I must repeat to myself as I walk around Yampa, as I walk around in the ironies and paradoxes, all the mountains, the flowers, the seasons that become familiar and somehow a life. When I come close to the end, perhaps I will know how to say audibly what Evelyn and Marguerite have passed on to me. Shuffling our way back down the mountain in fading light, Marguerite suddenly admits that she cannot remember my name, even though she heard Evelyn say it just moments before. Evelyn scolds her, “It’s Kate!” And without pause, in unison they begin to sing a song I loathed as a child but now, in vain maturity, love the sound of perhaps more than any other. “K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore. When the m-m-m-moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting by the k-k-k-kitchen door.” They sing it twice through, and I try to absorb the moments and hide my tears. This is a time, a trip, I will keep in my hopelessly sentimental heart for a very long while. Marguerite and Evelyn might think nothing of it. The walk we have made this day is a walk they have made hundreds of times in their lives. Yet, their love of the places we visited is clear and uncommon. When we get back to the car, it is almost eight o’clock, and we figure we’ve walked about fifteen miles. The dogs hop in the back and flop down in contented exhaustion. I drop Marguerite off at her house first, then, after stopping at the post office, I drop off Evelyn. Our partings are unceremonious. When I get home, I cry. This is always the case at the end of a journey. When the airplane lands, when the train wheels squeak to a final stop, when I park the car in the garage after a cross-country mission, there are always tears. Whether they are tears of relief or thankfulness or whether there is simply no other appropriate action to express the simple yet great pleasure of coming home, I’m never sure. That day, I had another familiar feeling, a feeling that I forget over and over, for as surely as I end some travel, I determine to begin another. Perhaps, like Evelyn and Marguerite, I will live in this valley for

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a long, long time. And maybe, if I am lucky, I will still be grateful, even stunned and joyful, to hear the coyotes howl, the crows scold, and to walk from one place to another just noticing things. The feeling I had that evening after we finished our walk on Greenridge was the same feeling I’ve had after returning from months in Southeast Asia, years in Africa, or a week in the Utah desert. It is knowing that I went a distance in order to discover what I already knew. The task is to keep that discovery at the front of my thoughts, to know Evelyn and Marguerite are out in the hills around Yampa, making it home again and again, by walking.

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Pawnee Buttes MERRILL GILFILLAN

I S P R E A D T H E C H E A P E A S T I N D I A N S H E E T atop the east Pawnee Butte in Weld County, Colorado, and sit in the midmorning September sun. I have been craving heights like a cat. Meadowlark calls and Hereford coughs float up, faint and dislocated, from far below. Big cumulus clouds throw their eastbound shadows on the plains. Through field glasses I spy a badger shuffling and nosing along one of the arroyo walls in the fierce Pawnee Creek drainage pattern at the base of the butte. Up here, close at hand, flies drone; a Say’s phoebe family suns. Rock wrens, creatures of the edges, comb the lip of the butte and the nearby escarpment daily, picking and feeding, a troupe of eight at the moment, there after every shower or blow, exploring the newly eroded edge, maybe an eighth of an inch more exposed than yesterday. I am basking, idly envisioning a conceptual core sample of the Great Plains poetic magma, a dotted line connecting the hamlets of Orion, 59

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Seven Persons, and Many Berries, Alberta, the triangle to be cut and plucked like a melon sample, when, way out there, I see a speck of color move. I find it through the glasses: a hiker, wearing a backpack, cutting across the grasslands toward the escarpment, on a course that will pass within half a mile of the butte. Blue T-shirt and cutoff shorts. A girl or young woman, I think. She rises and falls, crests and disappears on the topography like a small boat at sea. Her pace is steady and efficient, her walk unique and thoughtful; her thumbs seem hooked in her belt in a contemplative way. At one point she stops and stoops to examine something along the trail, a track or dead bee. A yellow kerchief is tied around her head. Finally, she passes the butte at her nearest tangent and continues south-southwest. As she recedes, I realize I’ve been watching her, completely absorbed, for fifteen minutes. And now, as she moves away, there’s something more desperate about the thing. I’m not so far from home, I’m not so long alone, but for a minute there when I think I’ve lost her for good over one of the rises, it’s small-scale panic. Then, a minute later, she surfaces again, moving steadily. After another ten minutes, all I can pick up is the occasional flash of the backs of her alternating calves in the sunlight. I never did see exactly where she entered or climbed the escarpment. For the next hour, as I descended the butte and hiked off myself in the same general direction, I half expected to see her topping a ridge in the distance and kept a nonchalant eye out for a footprint. It is part of the valence of the plains, part of the endless looking, the hard squint. It is the space in the face you see in certain of Edward Curtis’s portraits of prairie people. Watching any human figure in this setting for half an hour stirs the tendency to form a bond—or even, some days, in a vague aerated way, to fall in love.


It is daybreak. I am up and sipping coffee in the chilly air. From the Crow Creek campground trees comes a steady chorus of small sounds from early fall migrants in the only real grove for many miles. The coyotes have been in top form all night and continue sporadically after sunup, alternating with the roosters of Briggsdale a mile away. After a century of reciprocal influence, the two sounds are curiously similar.

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The morning is so clear as I drive out to the creek that things are magnified, slightly oversized—a marsh hawk looms as it quarters the short-grass prairie and the Rockies shine loud on the horizon. I park and head off up the creek. The summer has been a dry one, and most of the holes that usually hold water—modest quarter-moon wet spots from ten to forty feet long, just enough for teal—are dry. Rabbitbrush and snakeweed bloom brighten the blanched buffalo/grama grass rolling away. A handful of yucca shows dark on a far rise. Here and there a horned toad scurries. There’s a Paleolithic feel to this solo teal shooting that has always engaged me: the long hikes across the plains, the slow crouch and crawl on hands and knees through the prickly pear to get within range. If you miss or spook the ducks at one spot, the next one might be a mile farther on; by midday you’re so far away from everything, you break into a commemorative fandango. Finally, an hour from the car, I find a fair-sized puddle of water. As I edge in, I see ripples emanating from the near bank and know there are ducks. Seconds later, four blue-wings jump, and I shoot two. One drops into the water, so I retrieve the bird from the grass and sit down to clean it while the breeze slowly nudges the other one in toward shore. Somewhere off in the Pawnee grasslands, down one of those ingratiating two-rut dirt roads that leads to blasted shells of ranches abandoned in Dust Bowl terror, someone is sighting in a rifle—p-pow, p-pow, p-pow. Late afternoon I split the birds, rub them down with butter and salt and pepper and grill them over a half-wood, half-charcoal fire with sweet potatoes banked along the edges. Deep meat, dark and Orphean as liver, washed down with a bargain burgundy before the mosquitoes get too bad. After dinner, I walk over to the old half-wild ball diamond on the north edge of the campgrounds. There’s no one else in the area. Sunflowers grow along the baselines and here and there across the outfield. A thick row of them crowds close around the backstop fence. It is all bathed by the peculiar pearly, second-magnitude glow of early twilight. Utter silence. The white metal posts of the outfield fence trace a gentle digital arc, a geometry brilliant and beneficent as a gift. The Chinese elms on the low ridge beyond sink from green to umber. The tall wooden light poles emerge as delicate, filled with the momen-

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tary peace of things done, lovely with the afterlight reflecting from their common western edges. It is a culture. It is a people, now, in this place; an arrangement of things in space. As on the legends of maps from the wilder arctic, where “culture” connotes a simple toehold, a passable road or jeep path. What’s left on the plains that speaks of the plains, from the plains, with the deep chords and roundness of things long in place and timeless in intent? Coyote, good friend and great Digester. Some of the most telling highway stretches in the world. Cattlemen in winter. Faces at Standing Rock. The way today’s Comanche settlements in Oklahoma reflect in miniature the territorial layout of the tribal bands in the nomadic days. The sky and the longspurs and the fugitive native grasses and thousands of mouths to feed. Up in Wyoming, a man named Geno Dreamer. What’s gone, gone forever? Most of the kit foxes. The Mandans’ buckskin Map of the World and the field songs of their women. Most of the prairie chickens. Who knows how many tongues, entire mind/heart/ body systems, eddied onto the plains to be lost forever—the people unheard of again, just gone, like the mysterious A’s, or simply squashed one afternoon, like the Ku’ato, a Kiowa band with a distinct dialect, exterminated about 1770 by the Sioux “somewhere near the Black Hills.” (The thought of the extinguished songs and soft words is the hardest.) Most of the elk-eye aphrodisiacs. There is still the space so powerful as to render time silly. And the land continually challenging, calling for the worthy words: quaver and rip, ekto and endo. There are the mobile mixed-blood garlic-loving peoples plains-destined somewhere in the future; they will thrive by virtue of their sense of skyline. And there is the crusty artifact I brought in this morning with the teal: a fence weight, I think—a shoe-box-sized chunk of beige stone I found in the midst of nowhere out there, bound neatly a generation or two back with heavy wire, once around each way and knotted, Christmas-present fashion. Cut and tied and used well enough to admire for a day on the campground table. Maybe I’ll take it home to the wife tomorrow. Maybe I’ll leave it on the pitcher’s mound. It is an eloquent, cultured thing.

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The Bear JANE WODENING

I M E T H E R M O T H E R T W O Y E A R S E A R L I E R in the middle of the night and watched as she, with sensuous concentration, cleaned the table scraps and birdseed off the downstairs windowsill, even pulling up the two-by-four I had nailed on with sixteen-penny nails to keep the bird food from spilling, intent on licking up the millet and sunflower seeds that had slipped underneath. My flashlight batteries were about gone, the light very dim, but I got a good view of her face, very close, just through the window, before the flashlight faded out. Then I went upstairs, saw her dark mass pressed up against the downstairs window, and watched that dark shadow move back and sit for a while after the windowsill was all cleaned off. Until I quietly said, “You run along now.” At which she stood up on her hind feet and looked up at me for a full five or ten seconds before trundling off into the woods. 63

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To my regret, I never saw her again. It’s strange how conditioned our reactions are. I watched with intense joy her calm and logical vitality, yet the whole time, my nervous mind was racing: I can’t believe they let these creatures run loose in the woods. She might be dangerous. Why am I not protected? I realized that I knew nothing of bears beyond the scary stories I had heard or read— stories passed on to children to keep them from venturing into the woods alone. I have gone out into the woods here in the Rocky Mountains since I was a child, alone or in company, usually that of other creatures— dogs, goats, donkeys. And in decades of such walks I had never seen a bear. But my current home is the farthest from town of anywhere I’ve ever lived. A few years ago, a law was passed that bears would not be hunted in spring, thereby allowing the mother bears to train their cubs for a few months at least before being shot and killed. This must have been what happened to the bear by my window. She had a cub one winter, had raised and trained that cub during spring and summer, and then was shot in the fall. How that cub fended for herself across the following winter and spring, I can’t imagine. But I saw her in June. She was maybe sixty or eighty pounds and thin, but her shaggy, black coat looked healthy, and her brown-muzzled face was the dead spit of that other bear’s face I had seen through the window two years before. The bread was rising in its pan on the windowsill. I had moved the bird feeder to the upstairs window in April, but the little bear was there outside my door, looking for scraps. I put the bread in the oven and watched her out the window till I couldn’t see her anymore. Then I opened the top half of the Dutch door for air and sat down to read. Suddenly and without warning, her head appeared in the open door, her head and one paw, low down but massive. Her face wore a curious, startled expression. I moved my book and she vanished. I went slowly to close the door, saw her standing on the trail, looking over her shoulder at me, sheepish. It took me the whole hour that the bread was baking to realize that the smell of that bread was holding her to me like a leash.

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I didn’t see her again that summer. The following year, in July, I walked away on a five-day backpacking trip. She must have broken into the cabin early on and more than once, because if she had eaten all that she ate in a single sitting, she would surely have died. She did not disturb my ham radios or my books, did not go upstairs to rummage. She only ate, poking a claw into each container to sniff the contents and determine whether they were worth eating, tearing open plastic bags to get at the food inside, climbing onto the counter to reach containers on the high shelf. She broke in using her claw as a pry. She inserted that claw through the old window putty under a small pane of glass in the door. After pulling out that pane, she went to work on the others. Three of the four didn’t break. The fourth, well seated on one side, shattered. But all the glass fell outside. The same proved true with my car window. I had left it open a crack on the driver’s side to let out the afternoon heat. Attracted by a large jar of Cajun-flavored seed mix, she pried and broke open the window, climbed in, and scrounged among the considerable mass of camping gear I keep in my car. I replaced the car window, cleaned up the cabin, attached an old piece of half-inch plywood over the windows on the door with deck screws, brought up a large container with the last of my dried fruit from the storage shed, and waited. On the third evening at twilight, she came. And the munching sound of her efforts to break through the plywood resonated through the cabin. I had already planned an escape route—out the upstairs window, across the solar panels, and down the ham-radio antenna mast. I yelled out that upstairs window, “Gwan! Getouttahere!” But she was concentrating on chewing her way through that door and didn’t hear. Finally, by banging a metal bar on a rock, I got her attention, and she came around the corner of the house, looked up at me, and then was simply gone. She didn’t return again that night. I estimated her weight at maybe 150 to 200 pounds. “Claim your property with urine,” people said, so I dutifully peed twenty feet on either side of the cabin every day. And every evening I listened for her. And soon she came again.

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The moon was approaching full, and very bright. When I heard a thump, I looked out the window at the foot of the stairs and saw her shadow— round body, round ears. She seemed to be sniffing from a distance at that urine. She knows I’m here, I thought. Very quietly and slowly I opened the upstairs window and shone my brightest flashlight onto her. And with a really gentle voice, I said, “You run along now.” She tore off into the woods as though she had been shot. And I got a good view of her—plump and agile, very fast, and more than a little spooked by me. I had a distinct feeling that she stopped in the trees beyond the reach of my flashlight beam. I don’t know where that feeling came from, but the next morning I went to check, to look for signs. She was obsessing me. And sure enough, there was a fresh bear turd in the middle of the path. I kicked it away and made sure to deposit my own fresh urine between it and the cabin. I am in communication with a bear, I thought proudly. On the night of the full moon, I was in town and didn’t return until midnight. Somehow I couldn’t face walking the few hundred yards steeply uphill through the woods to my cabin. It could have been some psychic knowledge of her whereabouts or it could have been panic. Or simply logical probability. I felt that if I walked to the house, I would encounter her, and I was not prepared emotionally or any other way to handle that. I’ll just sleep in the car, I thought. I put the sleeping bag onto the folded back passenger seat and made myself comfortable. But she broke into the car once before, I said to myself. There’s no food in here now, I argued back. What about air? I’ll have to leave the window open a crack. Well, in answer to that one, I told myself I would jump up at the slightest sound and close that window. And I went right to sleep. I can tell you what she did by the muddy paw prints on the roof of the car. She came to the driver’s side, where she had broken in before. And she looked in, saw my sleeping bag laid out flat on the passenger side with me in it. Then she moved along to the rear driver’s-side window, which somehow I had neglected to roll up completely. She must

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have sniffed through that tiny crack, and from sniffing I’m sure she knew everything—that there was no food, that I was in there asleep. Knew, too, who I was, the woman of the cabin. And who knows what else—my age, gender, state of health, maybe even what I had for dinner. She then walked around the back of the car and rose up again to look at my face through the rear passenger-side window. And finally she made a noise. At which I woke and madly rolled up the window while looking at her close-up through the glass. She turned and vanished, but not before I got a very clear view of her face. And I was astonished. It came to mind immediately, the phrase “a profound intelligence.” But that wasn’t all that struck me. There was, of course, that tremendous vitality that you often see in a healthy wild creature. But there was also unmistakably a tremendous joy. She was looking at me with intense delight. From that moment on, I have loved her. I felt quite sure that she wouldn’t return that night, and I slept until dawn. When I got to the cabin, I saw that she had chewed through the plywood and broken in again. Even with my poor nose, I smelled her scent, and from that alone I felt sure she was a female. But this time she made very little mess. She pried open the container full of dried fruit, carefully removed all of the plastic bags, and ate every raisin, every apricot, every slice of dried banana. She took the butter crock and carried it beyond her turd—away from my territory and into hers— and licked the butter clean. She left another turd within ten feet of my door. I believe my first act was to get the shovel and move that new turd down by the other one in the trees, then empty my chamberpot into the hole that left by the house. I had no intention of allowing her to claim territory that close to my cabin. The following day, my son-in-law Ethan brought up and installed a stout bear-proof door. A few days later, The Denver Post published a front-page article with a color picture, saying that if a bear damaged your property, you could send a bill to the Fish and Game Department and they would reimburse .

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you. And then hidden on page twelve, it said that if there were two complaints against the same bear, that bear would be removed. I announced as publicly as I could that if “my” bear were killed, I would send in a bill, but not before. It may have been a week later that I got out of the car and smelled her scent—so strongly that I felt she had to be within a few feet of me. She had been there just moments before. Her face kept haunting me, that intelligence. What was she thinking about while she looked at me? What was it that so delighted her? Finally, I told the story to a man I know who has worked with bears and thought a lot about animal behavior. “What was she thinking, looking at me with such delight on her face?” I asked. “You must realize,” he said, “that she’s a lot more sophisticated about people than you are about bears. She’s watched people drive up and get out of their cars and toss their leftover food into garbage cans and then sleep in their cabins or pitch a tent. Then here you are—she’s just eaten your food at your cabin, and she finds you asleep in your car. So she’s thinking, ‘Look at that, she’s asleep in her car! I never saw that before. She’s asleep in her car!’ ” Well, that made sense. At least, some sense. It didn’t account for the intensity of her expression, or for the immediate recognition I had of a profound intelligence, but it seemed to be heading in the right direction. Then days went by, and weeks, and I began to worry that perhaps two people had complained about her and she had been removed. I found that I cared deeply about her. I even regretted that I had gotten that bear-proof door. Because now I missed her, worried about her. But then one morning, I saw a fresh, muddy paw print on my car window—that same window through which she and I had looked at each other’s faces with mutual recognition and delight. “Don’t worry about me,” that paw print seemed to say. “And I’m still thinking of you, too.”

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Meditación en Dos Ojos: García Lake at Cumbres Pass REYES GARCÍA

For before this I was once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea. —Empedocles

A F E W Y E A R S A G O , the day after Thanksgiving, my dead mother’s house on the river ranch where she and my brother lived burned down. My mother had spent the last thirty years of her life in that wonderful house, with its intricate oak woodwork, set back among los alamos, the cottonwoods, on the ranch next to mine. It was a short distance from la casa de mi hermano mayor, the house of my older brother, and close to El Rio de los Conejos, The River of the Rabbits, which snakes down from high in the San Juan Mountains to the west for seventy miles to El Rio Bravo del Norte, known in the north as the Rio Grande. Her house was my home. For a whole year after her death, the house remained untouched. It was as if the house expected her to return at any moment. During that 69

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time, I would walk through las vegas, the meadows, from my house to hers and sit in her favorite easy-chair, looking out the big windows at the sunsets as she used to do each evening. I would walk into her bedroom, with its rose-colored wool rug from her original home in El Rito, New Mexico, to look at the old photographs under the glass top of the dark mahogany dresser that had belonged to her own mother. There was a crumpled Kleenex on the floor next to her small bed. I picked it up and smelled it because it smelled like her. I sometimes smiled through my sorrow, knowing that I had inherited her nose and her hands. Eventually, she came to live a mythical existence in my heart. The house, too, I still remember in that way, in a forever place inside me. One of the photos under the glass showed her mounted on a dark horse, my father next to her on a white one that she once told me he called “Blue.” They were at the cabin on the lake below the area known as Cumbres—las cumbres means “the heights,” or “the snowy peaks”— before they were married in 1935. Lost for a while after she died, I finally learned from my mother, beyond the grave, to be at home in myth (from the Greek muθos, originary story) and to make a home for her in myself. Likewise, I have also taken into my soul the lake, el lago, in Cumbres and its two springs, sus dos ojos. There are mythical and magical dimensions—ojos magicos, magical springs, or eyes—to every person and to every landscape, and there are special times in special places when a person is opened and awakened to those dimensions in a way that Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche describes in terms of “the heart of sadness”: What are you, who are you, where is your heart? If you really look, you won’t find anything tangible or solid. . . . If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. . . . [And] this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. There is no skin or tissue covering it; it is pure raw meat. . . . For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness.

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Reading over this passage entices me to put my sadness over the recent losses in my life into the context of my Chicano heritage. This linkage reminds me that I live my life as an intersection of different worlds and different mythologies, like a point, which has no magnitude but which by virtue of that fact can generate and be touched by multiple dimensions: a line, a plane, a solid. I think of the lake in Cumbres in such geometric metaphors but also in terms of a mestizaje, the “mixedness” that defines Chicanismo, wherein many different kinds of persons share a common, very basic value system and sense of identity: a point of emergence that is also a point of entry and a destination. Such is the significance of carnalismo. “The philosophy of the brotherhood of the flesh” would be my translation of the word. To me, the idea that the world, my world, is made of flesh has always been obvious to me as a Chicano from the San Luis Valley. Especially my brother taught me that we were in this adventure of our lives together. “We eat out of the same pot,” he used to tell me. Built into the ideas of carnalismo and Chicanismo as well is the realization that the people, la gente, are one because we share not only the same language-flesh but also the same Spirit—a Spirit that flows through time like a river. The word Chicano, or Chicana in the feminine form, became widely used in the late 1960s during the Chicano phase of the Civil Rights Movement. It emphasized and symbolized the indigenous heritages of Spanish-speaking peoples of Mexican origin in the American Southwest. “Mexican” in this context is a somewhat problematic term, because the word predates the establishment of the Republic of Mexico in 1821, of the United States in 1776, and of Spain herself in 1492. Chicano is derived from Mechicano or Mexicano, which comes from a tribal name for the Azteca, who spoke Nahuatl and who also referred to themselves as the Nahua or Mexica. To be Chicano is to be a mestizo, or a person of mixed blood, who identifies primarily with his indigenous rather than his European ethno-cultural origins. Identifying with this pattern of Chicanismo denotes reverence for the land and respect for rural values like reciprocity and communal self-sufficiency. My family owns a lake in Cumbres and the two springs that are its sources. For me as a García, the lake and the springs symbolize a number of archetypal connections to indigenous heritages. For example,

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when I lived for a winter in Mexico City, I was constantly aware of the fact that the city was the capital of the Aztec empire until the Spanish destroyed it, starting in 1519. Its Nahuatl name was Tenochtitlán, and it was located in the center of Lake Texcoco. The Mexica Azteca are only one indigenous group that Chicanos and Chicanas associate with both their literal and mythical ancestry. Nahuatl-speaking people settled into the Barrio de Analco in Santa Fe, founded in 1610. Four hundred years earlier, the Azteca are believed by some to have migrated to the Lake Texcoco area from what is now northern Mexico, or possibly even from the same area of the present American Southwest to which a few returned with the Spanish. More ancient is the city of Teotihuacán. Its ruins are well preserved outside Mexico City, and it has been the most studied of all “prehistoric” sites in the Americas. At the heart of the city is the huge Pyramid of the Sun. In the 1980s, I learned from the only Chicano teacher I ever had, Davíd Carrasco at the University of Colorado (now at Harvard), that this pyramid had been built on top of sacred springs. Since then, I often imagine the Pyramid of the Sun when I bend down to drink from one of the Cumbres springs. I say a short prayer to and for any possible Mexican ancestors who might have had anything to do with Teotihuacán. And standing by the Cumbres lake, I pray similarly to and for possible past or present relatives of Tenochtitlán and Mexico City.

El Lago Words are the enchanted mirror: when our words lie, the reflection deceives. —Calvin Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth

According to mi tio, my uncle, Castellar, the lake should be in New Mexico. But su abuelo, his grandfather, José Victor, drew the state line so that it jogged six miles straight south from the lake, placing it in Colorado, before continuing the line again east to west. He was surveyor general of the Territory in 1876, and he wanted the lake in Colorado with his other lands. The half-section has been passed down through his oldest son, José Amarante, who was sheriff for many years and then

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judge of Conejos County until his death in 1918. Title to the lake then went to his wife, mi abuela Teodora Espinosa de García, and has been held in trust in her estate since her own death in 1952. Although she offered to deed it over to Castellar alone before she died, he told me once that he had refused: “It belongs to the whole family intact.” Dos ojos can mean “two eyes” as well as “two springs.” My conception of the two springs embraces a link between natural and human phenomena. For the Cumbres lake is formed when underground rivers emerge from the earth as two springs and pool together in one body of water, just as our own two eyes sight together to form one image of the world in depth. My mother always used to say the Cumbres lake was bottomless. Gradually, I have come to believe that the world itself is bottomless, unfathomable, infinitely deep. Camping by the lake, looking out at the sky at night, I also believe that the stars are innumerable. I know for a fact that many of the “stars” I see are really entire galaxies so far away that they appear as a single point of light. Swirling within each one are perhaps 200 billion star systems. Furthermore, when I am at the lake, I am most aware of the fact that human eyes are able to see light streaming down from places 100 million light years distant. For me, the lake and the springs symbolize such depth perception. Of course, the spring is a traditional symbol of Nature and its power and goodness. I easily perceive los dos ojos de Cumbres as the two nipples from which flows Mother Nature’s abundance. I see my own story emerging from symbolic, mythic, and spiritual dimensions of Nature, from the story of my people and many other individuals, and from the story of the universe as a whole. This view of self-identity is ancient, archetypal, and common to cosmologies east and west, north and south. When the Buddha achieved his complete liberation, he could remember all his past lives. He could remember being a drop of water in a waterfall running to the ocean, a blade of grass, a deer, and innumerable other incarnations. When a single human being is liberated, there is a sense in which all the lives that preceded it in its evolution are also made freer. This is the sense of a basic genetic principle: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” During its nine months in the womb, a human fetus undergoes three-and-a-half billion years of vertebrate evolution

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from a single-celled animal zygote to a human newborn. Fossils of single-celled animals of such antiquity have been discovered recently in dried lakebeds in Australia. A human being is a process of transformation or transmission that extends back even further mythically: to the Creation itself. To see the world from an anthropocentric perspective is to fail to see in a properly human way, as if depth perception were possible with only one eye, or without the inner eye of Spirit, as if the story of the universe could flow from the story of only one person or one people or one species or one part of the world, in a single, narrow narrative that extinguishes all others. This is why the Cumbres lake will never be for sale. It is a place where many different realities are allowed to intersect. My initiation into the mysteries of the lake occurred when I was camping among the small circle of Engelmann spruce at its southern end, when I really learned to trust what Trungpa refers to as the “basic goodness” of every being and of the cosmos as a whole. At the lake, I learned to be truly grateful for the gift of life. I learned that I would have to become a different kind of person, to mature into a wiser sort of warrior. This is the fruition of warriorship: the complete primordial realization of basic goodness. At that level, there is absolutely no doubt about basic goodness or, therefore, about yourself. When you expose your naked flesh to the universe can you say: “Should I put a second skin on? Am I too naked?” You can’t. At that point, there is no room for second thoughts. You have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. You simply expose your heart completely.

During a night and a morning there by the lake, such a “primordial realization” came to me in the form of animals whose beauty and grace brought on an epiphany. (More about them later.) In the fall of 1986, I went on a long run from the top of Cumbres Pass down toward the New Mexico border and back up to García Lake. That day, running seemed like a good way to celebrate finishing my doctoral dissertation. As it happened, however, what I wrote that evening at my ranch home northeast of Antonito, forty miles from the lake, became the final lines of that culminating work of my formal Western European education:

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I put my hand finally down through the cold pure water after drinking and in slow motion push a yellow Aspen leaf under the surface. I rise up, conscious of the movements of water deep underground, to run a loop around the lake and back to the two springs feeding it from the South. At the bigger spring, after an intricate silence, I say: “Ancient water spirit who has always been here, remember me and my family and my friend Tony here on your long journey.” I speak as well to the moss, still bright green, though snow is falling thickly. I pick a bright red strawberry leaf for Lana.

Those precious moments at the lake marked a final destination after the long journey home, rendered in the dissertation’s academic format. But long before that, I had gone to the lake and had an epiphany about the meaning of life. I had just returned from Vietnam. The war was a mirror in which I could not stop seeing myself and the world. I lived in fear of what I saw until, on the night I nearly fell into the sky, I let go of fear. Until the next morning, when I looked into the mirror of the lake, not the mirror of war, and knew very clearly the beauty and grace of the beaver and the geese. I understood for the first time that “the horror, the horror” would always come to be counterbalanced by the good and the holy. To sit by the lake, I learned, is to sit in the circle of the power of place. To the east, to the west and the north, the high country still resonates with the sometimes violent logic and purity of Colorado wilderness and sky: the fatherland. To the south are the lower, multilayered landforms of New Mexico and the warmth and the acequias, ditches: the motherland. Earth. Air. Water. Fire. Blood.

La Familia A García belongs making hay in his meadows by the river or on horseback up in the mountains, looking after his livestock. —José Eduardo García

For me, there are symbolic connections with the geography around Cumbres that I also associate with calling myself a Chicano. My father’s

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family, on the García side, migrated into Colorado in 1852 from San Juan de los Caballeros, the Hispano area surrounding the Tewa pueblo of San Juan in northern New Mexico, where there are still many Garcías. My mother’s family, on the Gonzales side, settled in Abiquiu, twenty miles north of that pueblo, in the 1750s. They were probably Sephardic Jewish conversos, converts to Christianity. I was named after my maternal bisabuelo, great-grandfather, Reyes Gonzales. On the desk that was my father’s, I keep a photograph of him when he was fairly young. He wears a black coat and white shirt and has a long, black beard and huge hands. My mother’s mother, oddly named Ludgarda, married John Sargent, one of three brothers who became prominent landowners and political figures in New Mexico, as had the Garcías in Colorado generations earlier. My ranch house on the river was first built and occupied by my paternal bisabuelo José Victór García and later occupied by his secondoldest son, Celestino, who was the district representative to the state legislature for many years. Mi abuelo was José Amarante, a powerful man named after a flower, whose local obituary in 1918 described him as “a father to his people.” As sheriff and judge, he, with his brother, ruled the county for decades. I have a photograph of him conducting what my aunt Nea describes as the last hanging in Colorado. My father was also named José Amarante and, like his father, was always addressed by his second name. My mother was named Margaret after her father’s mother, who was a Burns, born in Ireland. My mother’s family lived in El Rito, New Mexico, where she was born in 1905. She moved with her parents and two younger sisters to Antonito in 1920. In the winters, for twelve years, my mother and her sisters attended boarding school at Loretto Academy in Santa Fe. I am a mestizo, very much of mixed blood, but I know where I come from and from whom, and to a large degree where I’m going. I am strongly affected by the geo-genetic symbolism of the waters from the two springs in Cumbres that flow into Wolf Creek, whose waters then flow east for three miles from the Continental Divide to the Chama River, which flows down to San Juan Pueblo, where it joins the Rio Grande, with its waters from the Conejos River, seventy miles south.

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While I am in Cumbres, vivid archetypal images of the confluences of bloods and of waters come to me. My earliest memories of Cumbres involve mi hermano mayor, José Eduardo, whom I’ve always known simply as “Joe.” He was the one who answered the telephone when my sister, Teresa, called from San Diego, California, to say our father was dead. A few years later, she herself would be killed in a gruesome car accident. My older sister was a second mother to me. My older brother, however, was not a second father; for our entire lives, he has rejected that role for reasons I cannot yet fathom. Maybe he thought it would make me stronger. Nevertheless, it has seemed to me that there has always been a kind of love between us. I myself count those next half-dozen years after our father and sister died among my happiest, because my brother and I worked together in the summers while I was home from boarding school at The Abbey and later from Georgetown University. We often stopped at the Cumbres springs and lake to drink water and fill our containers on trips between the winter ranches on the Conejos River and the summer ranch west of Chama where my brother grazed most of his 400 head of cattle and his horses. At that time, the road over Cumbres Pass was a one-lane dirt ribbon following the land’s natural contours. During those years, I would help my older brother put up the hay from the meadows along the Rio Conejos. He would cut it with a mower attached to a Ford tractor, and I would rake with a small Massey-Ferguson. He would bail. Together we would buck and stack the bales, letting his ten-ton flatbed truck drive itself while we took turns being on the ground or on the truck bed. The haystacks looked like pyramids. Four summers in a row, we also plowed up and replanted at least 1,000 acres of the Chama ranch with crested wheat. While I was away getting higher-educated, my brother built several stock ponds and many miles of fence. Today, I regret not having been home with him and my mother year-round. He chose for me, however, a different apprenticeship. In many ways, el lago represents ese otro sueño lo que mi hermano mayor ha vivido, that other dream which my brother has lived. While I was away at school and in Vietnam, and thinking about those days with my brother, I gradually began to acquire the tender heart of sadness

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that has enabled me to move beyond regret over a way of life almost lost to me and to other intellectuals like me. The lake was the scene of remarkable family reunions. For two decades, our indomitable primo, first cousin, retired navy commander Zeke (Ezekiel) Cortéz, son of Hernán Cortéz—no kidding—seemed always to preside over our reunions because that was his role in the family. And because he had the only other cabin there, constructed out of spruce logs off the land, besides the small one that grandfather José Amarante had built by the lake in 1910. The Fourth of July brought together tios y tias, primos y primas inumerables, innumerable aunts and uncles and cousins. My father was one of thirteen children. One of his sisters, mi tia Nea, had more than 100 direct descendants by her husband, Maclovio Gallegos of San Luis. During the summers of the early 1970s, Zeke took up residence in Cumbres. Although it was Zeke or some other uncle or aunt or cousin or no one in particular who hosted these gatherings, it was obvious to me that my own brother was the fire that had forged the bonds of the family structure and the mortar that held it together up there in the mountains. No one could resist his unfailing hospitality, his subtle diplomacy, and his ranchero, or rancher’s, courtesy and warmth. Without exception, everyone in the family respected and admired my brother; many even loved him. The good ranchero is reliable as only a doctor can be, but to this feature of his character, Joe added unpredictability. He might suddenly show up with fresh steaks for the multitudes or horses for anyone to ride. He might nonchalantly throw his own chair in the campfire when the dry, chopped wood ran out late in the night. The instinctual, bred-in respect that Joe has for himself flows out to others in a stream of generous actions, making it easy for others to reciprocate. One wants to be around him, especially up there at the lake. In the Chicano tradition that goes back countless generations, no one but the ranchero has quite the authority or dignity that comes from making a living completely from the land, season after season, for a lifetime. To every member of the huge García clan who would loyally undertake the pilgrimage to Cumbres, Joe symbolized the freedom and sovereignty a person gives up when he or she works for someone else.

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El ranchero ultimately answers only to himself and to the land. In my brother, I, too, see a human being who could give away or lend nearly anything he owned, a man whose word was good; the model of a humble, hardworking, often solitary caretaker of the earth who could do everything on a ranch himself—from raising hay and birthing calves to horse-shoeing and fixing machinery—and could efficaciously maintain lifelong relationships with difficult people. My mother, raised in that tradition, was even more generous, more kind, and more interconnected with her community. She, too, knew everybody and their family histories. She, too, kept her word—and many, many secrets. None have had more influence on me than mother and older brother, who were often at their most gracious, most themselves, while at the lake. Of all the Garcías, mi hermano mayor seems best to exemplify the ambiguous motto on the family crest: Diga de García: Arriba nadie. They say of the Garcías: Above no one. For me, the lake holds memories of a way of life and an engrained morality rooted in giving, helping, and caring unconditionally, a way of living grounded in the knowledge of natural abundance. Through the presence of family in Cumbres, I witnessed these simple but wise teachings transmitted, like rivers, from generation to generation. Once, back in the mid–1970s, I had been backpacking to Dipping Lakes, the source of the Chama River, twenty miles or so from Cumbres, in a severe thunderstorm replete with lightning strikes so near to me on the Continental Divide that my hair stood on end and the fillings in my teeth hummed. I walked without stopping, except to crouch down to escape the relampagos, lightning strikes, all the way back to my camp at García Lake. Making my way wearily down the little private dirt road into the lake area, I immediately saw signs of bulldozing. As I slowly moved on, I noticed that the giant double spruce at the edge of the lake had been knocked down flat. I stared in disbelief, and in a fury tried to run at the truck that was rolling hesitantly toward me. I recognized mi tio Castellar’s silver Chevy, which had something like 300,000 miles on it even back then, and which he drove until his death last year. He was my father’s slightly younger brother who, one day by the lake, had told me that he “slept in the same bed in which he was born” in his parents’ house in Conejos.

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Castellar got out of his truck and waited. He could see I was furious at the destruction, and I had not yet even seen the new road tearing past the springs. When I reached him, a tall, thin man who looked most typically like a García, his aquiline face exhibiting what I always imagined to be a Puebloesque equipose, he merely said to me, “All of it will grow back eventually. Let it rain, Reyes, let it rain.” He looked far into me as he spoke, por que, because, mi tio never liked to see me troubled. He had a way of reaching me. Somehow he went to the heart of my anger. He spoke to me as the guardian of the lake. And he appealed to me for my own sake. At that moment long ago, my immense anger began to subside. The anger was not just about the changes in Cumbres. It was an older anger that had exploded in earnest in a nightclub in Can Tho, South Vietnam, a few weeks after arriving in-country. It was 1969. On the TV behind the bar was a broadcast of a presidential address. Nixon spoke from his desk in the Oval Office. We all put down our cue sticks. He was earnest and emphatic: “I want to assure the American people there are no U.S. forces in Cambodia, nor do we have any plans to deploy any at any time in the future.” I knew he was lying. Instantly, I hated him and the ugly war he waged under false pretenses. That morning, Colonel William J. Maddox, Jr., the commander of the 64th Combat Aviation Group, for whose Headquarters Company I worked, had swaggered through my office, bragging about how he had flown the lead Cobra helicopter gunship into Cambodia early that very morning. Fanatically, he had described a firefight—Cobras carry machine guns and rockets—with Vietcong. It left him exhilarated for weeks. Listening to Nixon lie, I felt whatever political naiveté that remained in me evaporate, to be replaced by rage and self-incrimination. I had been duped by the rhetoric justifying the war. When I returned to the University of Colorado at Boulder a little more than a year later, it took me only a week to join the anti-war movement and get tear gassed. The summer after being discharged from the army, I backpacked up over the Continental Divide to Dipping Lakes, from which a thick waterfall descends 300 feet to form the Chama River. I camped in Cumbres to renew my spirit, only to encounter, upon my return to the lake, the work of Zeke’s bulldozer.

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My uncle’s advice to “let it rain” has stayed with me. Indeed, it has rained a lot. But more and more I feel the gift of mi tio’s steady patience and calm faith in life being transmitted directly into my bloodstream like a slow transfusion. For me, any form of destruction—even someone mindlessly killing an insect—had reawakened the trauma of war. But when my uncle spoke of the healing rain and looked into my soul, flooding me with his own love for the lake and the double spruce— which we later discerned was 487 years old—I realized that our family and the lake and the springs would outlast war and death itself. My marriage to Susan Scarberry in Cumbres was a historic family event that expanded the clan. Those in attendance were all family and close friends—fifty to sixty of the most special people in our lives. The springs were packed with fine champagne. The long table that I took from the cabin and kept under the grove of spruce where I camped was covered with fruit and seafood and flowers. Our friends Carl and Peggy from El Guique across the river from San Juan Pueblo had, the day before, returned from Kauai and presented us with fresh leis. Flora Romero, una vecina, a neighbor, who lived two ranches across the Conejos River from the Garcías and was one of my mother’s closest friends, sang a special canción de boda, wedding song. Several cousins from San Luis, led by Lorenzo Martínez, serenaded us with other traditional Spanish/Mexican/New Mexican songs as we came up to the lake, where another San Luis cousin, Judge William Martínez, pronounced us man and wife. We were dressed in black velvet suits; my shirt was white, hers scarlet. Once we had recited the vows we had composed, there was a procession to Zeke’s half a mile away, accompanied by more traditional music. More tables of food—platos Mexicanos y postres, Mexican dishes and desserts—which Susan and I had made the previous evening, awaited us. Later we all danced, and those who danced with the bride pinned money on her. My mother beamed for months. My brother approved. How good it was to share such happiness with la familia. There are special people who have become like family in Cumbres. Dr. Clara Martínez, of Mancos, Colorado, once met me there for an afternoon with her two young children, Armando and Amorina. Mark Irwin came with us. The children wanted to go pick flowers right off. I

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told them to be careful not to get too near the mucky edges of the lake and to ask the flowers for permission to be picked. A while later, they returned with bunches of colors. Armando came up to me and announced very seriously and sweetly, with all the innocence of childhood, “They all said yes!” Before departing, we all collected pieces of broken glass around the old log cabin by the lake. A few cousins like to target-shoot bottles off the volcanic rocks behind it. At first, Amorina didn’t want to help, but her mother persuaded her by saying, “If you handle the glass gently, it won’t hurt you.” Then Amorina seemed to enjoy picking up glass as much as picking flowers. Another time, while camping by the lake with Susan and our children, Lana and Tania, I took the girls down to Wolf Creek to fish with worms. They were excited when I pulled out a medium-size rainbow trout. “Una trucha para comer esta tarde!” I shouted, though I knew they didn’t understand Spanish: “A trout to eat this evening!” But after I hit the fish’s head on a rock to end its agony of suffocation, they refused to speak to me for the rest of the day. After ostentatiously frying the trucha with its head on for supper and making a show of savoring the cheek flesh and eyes, I finally found their disgust quite unsettling. Since then, I have been careful to eliminate such insensitive behavior. I haven’t been fishing for years. To this day, Lana is a vegetarian. Tania won’t eat fish.

La Epifanía Because we share with them the same life force, to know the animal other as worthy, alive, and even as a beloved peer is to be truly in relationship with the powerful forces of creation itself. To acknowledge and even cherish the intelligence in other forms of life is to sustain our own futures. To honor intimacy across the seeming boundaries of species is to return the sacred to the world. We are all the same world inside different skins, and with different intelligences. —Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson (eds.), Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals

The waters of the springs called me, and I went and camped among the Engelmann spruce. An epiphany came to me that began in the evening,

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after much thunder and lightning, while I was sitting in my army poncho, watching raindrops splash on the glass-smooth surface of the lake. In slow motion on the water, they made indentations innumerable in number and variety. The grace and beauty of their dance and song existed beyond words. Each splash and dimple contributed to a rain of roundnesses of infinite perfection that seemed to go on for an eternity, as if a switch for continuous repeat had been flipped. I seemed to enter a mythic time and space within the rain on the lake. In this strange mood, after the sun had gone down, I lay face up, army bag and poncho under me on the grassy shore, looking up into clear night sky. I began to feel an uncanny fear of the vastness of the starry night. Fear became horror when suddenly, with my whole body, I sensed that I was looking down into the cosmos, beyond the Milky Way and down, down into an abyss. My heart was pounding as hard as it had during mortar attacks in Vietnam. I spread my arms wide and clutched the grass, holding on to the earth. I did not want to fall into the night. I was hanging by grass from the bottom of the earth, the endless darkness burning with terrifying nuclear power, pulling me into itself. Just as suddenly, and with an absolute lucidity, I remembered exactly where I was. I could hear the two springs easing into the lake, the tinkling of their pure waters. “I am in the heart of my homeland,” I whispered to myself, and I let go of the grass. I said aloud to the night sky, “Llévame si te gustaría! Take me if you want!” My total fear became total trust. I fell asleep smiling and woke up smiling. Memory of that night still brings on an unassailable confidence, not in myself per se but in this marvelous planet, spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun in a cosmos so big, so complete in itself, so full of mystery that, at such times, surrender is the only sane response. I remember waking next morning to birdsong on the lake in the changing light of dawn: the light transforming itself in infinitesimal increments, glinting like innumerable prism-eyes of crystal; the light lifting off the lake like an eyelid; the lake a single mirror-eye adoring the sky; the lake saying with its singular gaze, “You are my other self. We belong to each other.” On the shore of the lake, I sat spellbound with the onset of epiphany. As the mist rose above the mountains ringing the lake, two white geese, minutely synchronized, mirroring one another and mirrored in

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the water, flew down through the line between the mist and the clear air below. I saw double pairs of geese, as if my eyes had lost their focus on the ordinary world and could also see into a magic one. How far had they traveled together? What had brought them here? As they swooshed onto the lake, it was obvious they were mated for life, so harmonious were their movements. In those moments of intense awareness, I realized I was a witness to wild birds in a state of grace, living in perfect accord with natural law, without fear and at home in the world. The lake itself seemed to become perfectly round as they swam in a perfect circle, passing very close to me, then waddled with great dignity onto the opposite shore, where they turned to face me. They sat and watched me with the composure of royalty, drawing me into their stately presence. A slight motion on the lake caught my attention. A slow-moving V was approaching across the water’s surface. For an instant I felt fear, then there was a space between the fear and who I was. At my center, there was an empty serenity and a sense of surrender through which I looked out. The V came closer, until it was only a few feet away, then disappeared. In the next moment, a furry dark brown head broke through the mirror of water. Two black eyes full of light locked into mine. The eyes were grinning. I shifted my sight to the geese. We made eye contact. There was a light in their eyes, and they, too, were grinning. I looked from the geese to the beaver and back. With my eyes I asked, Is this what it’s all about, this unconditional love? The geese, still grinning, waddled jauntily back into the lake and swam a circle in front of me, passing the beaver going the other way. Their curving wakes seemed to hang in the water for an inordinately long time. At opposite ends of the lake, the geese took flight and the beaver dived and was gone. I don’t remember what happened the remainder of that day and night before I went home to El Rancho Celestial on El Rio de los Conejos. I knew that I had been blessed, that I had been accepted, and that I belonged permanently to the world. I learned what it meant to fall in love, not merely with some one person, but with all of it.

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The only other times I have known such love were when I saw my daughters born and sang them their birth songs. Ellas son para mí dos ojos, tambien, en forma humana. They are for me two springs, too, in human form.

La Teoría The geese and the beaver came to me as persons. Further, when we looked into each other’s eyes as equals, it seemed in essence that they were the same eyes, the same person looking out and into the others who were “other” selves, other myselves who were ourselves, too. I am here invoking a way of seeing common to many traditions worldwide— for example, Hindu or Inca—where the heart is the gateway to higher consciousness, where Mind understands itself and others in terms of relationships rather than individuals, where Soul is a vibratory medium of interaction and communication, where Spirit is the universal energy that makes uniqueness, unity, and union possible. At the lake that morning, the geese and the beaver showed me a potential Self that was not any single individual. They exposed the heart that opens the mind to others with an electromagnetic jolt and lets Spirit circulate like blood in endless rounds, bringing nourishment to each component of a system, recycling “waste,” reusing cell fragments to repair damage, and generally transforming negativity into basic goodness. They showed me that heart, mind, Soul, and Spirit rise up into being in the space of a universal flesh. Here, I think of the metaphor Barry Lopez employs when he writes, “To put your hands into the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece.” I can now see individuals as rivers that flow into more-encompassing bodies of water-flesh, just as separate languages are encompassed by a multilingual voice for which “the lake” is simultaneously also el lago, and “two eyes” or “two springs” are also dos ojos; for which a “ditch” is also an acequia, in both Spanish and Arabic; for which meadow “hay” is also zacate in Spanish and Nahuatl; for which “little hand” and “little brother” are manito. Everyone in these threads of the story I am telling, but especially the geese and the beaver, has taught me to see Mind as a self-conscious sea of reality comprising an infinite number and variety of minds. They

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taught me that Soul is the potential or power present in all beings to be both the self-in-Self and the Self-in-self. All this is difficult to put into words. For me, sharing a slice of my story of the two springs and the lake represents an effort to see clearly and to seek life in its purity. When I gaze into spring or lake, I am hoping to return to that place of dreams again and again, for affirmation not of narcissism but of loyalty to the spirit of water, the blood of life. When I bend down to the springs to drink their purest water, I see the faces of my daughters. The story that began as I drank there a decade and a half ago and then, that fall, brought a small red strawberry leaf home to Lana Kiana continues. Todavia viven las canciones de los ojos. The songs of the springs live on. Next time, I will bring home a fall leaf for sixteen-year-old Tania Paloma, the daughter who was, back then, not yet born. If the leaves say yes.

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Gore Canyon NICK SUTCLIFFE

A L I T T L E S O U T H W E S T O F K R E M M L I N G , the Colorado River, which has swirled and tumbled with relative lassitude for the preceding forty miles or so, breaks into Gore Canyon and in an adolescent frenzy tears down this ancient cut for eight miles before regaining its composure on the plateau below. For whitewater paddlers, it’s one of the more challenging river sections in the state, and it’s probably the hardest whitewater I’ve ever encountered. I had a really difficult time my first time down and was uneasy about ever going back. But eventually I did return, and that trip stands out as one of my most memorable days paddling whitewater ever. Because I associate such contradictory emotions with the place, it has gained a particular significance for me. I am powerfully drawn, yet haunted at the same time. Three years after I first ran the canyon, minute details of the most difficult rapids remain clear. When I recall 87

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critical moments, the memory sometimes triggers an involuntary twist of my hips or a raised knee—movement I should have made but didn’t. And in a different way, recounting this adventure captures a personal struggle concerning whitewater paddling. I’m a father now, and I strive to reconcile the responsibility this entails with my passion for a sport that necessarily involves risk. So this isn’t a heroic tale of an intrepid expedition down a ferocious river. I’m not intrepid. This river scared the hell out of me. And there is nothing particularly heroic here. I’m not an outstanding paddler, just average. This is about my psychological struggles surrounding a pursuit I’ve come to love, in the place that brought it all to bear. I am obsessed with this sport, and it’s not just the adrenaline. I’ve been skiing for years, windsurfed so fast I felt like I was flying, sailed hundreds of boats of all sizes in far-flung parts of the world, climbed, surfed, and scuba dived, but nothing has so completely captured me as whitewater kayaking. I was probably six or seven the first time I ever paddled. My older brothers would bring their boats to the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales, where we camped for six weeks or so every summer. I mainly just paddled around the protected cove below the cliffs near our campsite. I’d been in larger sailboats before, but this was different. There was so little boat between the water and me. It felt daring to be out over the deep waters of the cove, to feel so vulnerable to all that lurked beneath. In my early teens, I went out on whitewater a few times with my older brother. I’d learned to roll in a swimming pool at school and was finally rewarded by an expedition down the river Exe in Devon. I felt clumsy as I battled my way down the brown, flooded river in the winter rain. At one point we stopped to surf a big wave. Under the right conditions, rivers kick up standing waves that can be ridden much like an ocean wave. Time after time, I tried in vain to catch it. There was another guy there. He was in his mid-twenties and paddled a sleeklooking aquamarine slalom boat. I was dazzled by how well he controlled it. He moved across and into and over the wave with such ease and grace. I watched how, pulling out into the current from the eddy, he was immediately propelled sideways to where the wave was steepest. From there he could cut to the right, back to the left, slide sideways to

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the current, and rotate his entire boat 360 degrees. A few powerful strokes, and then he just dipped his paddle in here and there, using the energy of the current and the wave in a graceful balancing act, a dance. I wore myself out simply trying to get out on the wave and stay there. I capsized again and again, sometimes managing to roll, once or twice having to swim back to the shore, and then arduously paddling back upstream to try all over again. Cold and exhausted, I eventually moved on downstream, but I’d seen what could be done with a kayak and I wanted more. However, without a driver’s license or a boat, I was dependent on my brothers, who were all soon busy working in London. It wasn’t until my early thirties that I picked up the sport again. I was teaching at a high school in Virginia when a friend returned from a rafting trip on the New River. He’d been brought up on the ocean, surfing most of the year, but now he was landlocked. From the raft, he’d seen kayakers surfing huge standing waves, and he wanted to buy a boat. The timing was perfect for me. I had just gone through a divorce and needed to have some fun. Together, we honed our skills on increasingly challenging water until we were bobbing down the New River, enthusiastically launching ourselves into huge, churning rapids and emerging at the bottom right-side up and grinning. I remember the first time I caught a wave in the New River’s Ender Gorge. It was five feet tall, and from the crest, I raced down, my boat bouncing as it planed on the rushing water. It was what I had been trying to do all those years ago on the Exe, only much bigger and a lot more fun. Two years later, I moved to Seattle, where I paddled almost every weekend for a year. Slipping past ancient redwoods and thick undergrowth, I probed my way down river after river. One cold, rainy November day on the Green River, lagging behind the rest of my group to enjoy a little solitude, I found myself in a narrow gorge where the rock, scoured by years of eddying floodwater, had been strangely sculpted into grand, magnificently smooth, rounded forms—caves, spurs, sheer overhangs. Above, tall red cedars arched across the river, filtering the winter light. Carried slowly downstream by the current, I was for a moment a part of the ancient river, perpetually and yet fleetingly connected to that place.

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My paddling improved considerably during my year in the Northwest. I took on harder and harder water, learning to negotiate broad, powerful rivers swollen from winter rains, and steep sluicing creeks. As my skills improved, and as the boat became an extension of my body, I was increasingly able to respond without thought, channeling the river’s energy into my own intentional maneuvers, and learning to read the current with greater and greater accuracy. As I shed the awkwardness of having to think about what to do next, as self-consciousness diminished, the sense of oneness with my boat and the river grew. I used every opportunity to get out, often dragging myself out of the water in darkness, having used the four hours of daylight after work. During that year, I took my first multiday river trips. The first was on the Illinois River in Oregon: a two-day expedition through a remote wilderness close to the California line. Just two weeks prior to our arrival, there’d been a flash flood; a huge storm system had rolled in off the Pacific, dumping four inches of warm rain onto a heavy but not very cold snowpack high up the watershed. The river rose ten feet in three hours and, tragically, two rafters were drowned. This lent a rather haunting quality to the trip, but it was nevertheless a magical two days. We passed through virgin forests of towering redwoods, a calm, narrow, deepwater gorge where we watched a pair of Bald Eagles wheel along the cliffs, and the whitewater was exhilarating. Later that spring, I spent ten days descending the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho. The river passes through one of the largest wilderness areas in the United States. During those ten days and 120 miles, we passed under only one bridge. I’d never felt so far away from civilization, from the press of crowds. There were eleven of us: two rafters and the rest in kayaks. We took turns cooking dinner and breakfast, collected wood and swapped stories around the fire at night, soaked in hot springs along the river, and played in the endless whitewater. It was a blissfully simple and elemental existence. While living in Seattle, what time I didn’t spend kayaking was spent cultivating a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend, Lillian, in Colorado. We had met in Virginia through mutual friends and dated each other for two years. However, due to a fairly short-lived breakup, we were now living 1,000 miles apart. Every month or so, one or the

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other of us would get on a plane to Seattle or Denver, where we’d enjoy a few precious days of togetherness before our jobs pulled us apart. In late summer 1998, I took two weeks off and drove out to Colorado instead of flying. With my kayak on my roof, I headed east across the rocky semidesert of eastern Washington, up into the mountains of northern Idaho, and across Montana. I stopped to paddle on Clark’s Fork, a half hour west of Missoula. There’s a great wave there, almost directly under the highway, and it made a refreshing stop after eight hours of driving. Lillian and I spent ten days together. She was able to take time off, so we went backpacking in the Collegiate Peaks with her dogs. Two days before I was due to leave, on a ridge overlooking Arapahoe Glacier, I asked her to marry me. She didn’t say yes right away. She hadn’t expected it and said she needed some time to think. The next day I drove out to Kremmling to paddle Gore Canyon. I’d run a few other rivers along the Front Range and kept hearing people talk of Gore Canyon. There weren’t any other rivers to kayak this late in the summer, and it sounded like a great run. I learned that it was a Class V, which means it’s not inconsequential whitewater (a very few paddlers run Class VI rapids, but most people think they’re a little insane). In my mind this meant that, although it might be a stretch for me, it was within reach. I’d run several Class V rapids before and managed fine. However, I needed to find someone to go with who knew the river. After doggedly calling everyone I could think of, I found a man named Greg who worked at a paddle shop in Fort Collins. He was heading up there the next day anyway and was happy to have company. We arranged to meet at the river, exchanging information about the color of our cars and what we looked like. As I pulled into the parking area the next morning, there were several parties preparing to launch. I saw Greg’s red truck and parked nearby. Shaking his hand, I thanked him for having me along and quickly assessed my guide. He had a long scar on his forehead, a faraway manner, and a frenetic energy. I was pretty confident he was a good kayaker, but I also needed a good communicator, and his detached air didn’t inspire confidence. I wanted details ahead of time, and I didn’t think Greg would provide them. But I wasn’t

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about to turn back. With a slight sense of foreboding, I changed my clothes and hauled my gear to the river’s edge. On the long flat-water paddle to the mouth of the canyon, Greg proved me wrong by explaining, in intricate detail, the best lines for the five major rapids. Everything went fine until we got to Gore Rapid. Just as we were getting out to scout it, a raft with seven people on board got stuck in a huge recirculating hydraulic just below the second big drop. Hydraulics form when water plunges over a drop; the force of the downstream current burrows deep and creates an upstream countercurrent that looks like a huge, curling wave. It’s easy to break through smaller hydraulics, but larger ones can stop a fast-moving craft dead and keep it bobbing in the crease where the downstream current meets the upstream countercurrent. This raft, manned by seven burly guys, had been moving fast, but its momentum was not sufficient to carry it through the wave, and it came to an abrupt stop. It was tossed around for ten or twenty seconds before washing off, but then got well and truly pinned on Decision Rock, its upstream side completely submerged. The crew scrambled to the top of the rock, where they clung to each other. On the bank, the crew from another raft yelled and gesticulated as they put together a rescue plan. It took at least forty-five minutes, but using several carabineers and a couple of ropes, everyone made it to safety. A pulley system had to be devised to winch the raft off the rock. With the way now clear, a black-helmeted guy took the same route in a kayak and managed to get caught in the same hydraulic. He was tossed around for a while, eventually washed off upside down, missed his roll, and ended up pinned underwater against Decision Rock. Being pinned underwater against a rock by a strong current is extremely dangerous. The forces involved are huge, and sometimes there is very little that can be done by the paddler, or anyone on shore, to free the boat or the person inside. As I watched, I didn’t breathe, thinking of how long it had been since he had breathed. I’ve never been in this situation, but it’s one that every kayaker imagines—can’t help but imagine. I don’t know how long he was trapped there. Probably only a few seconds, but it seemed longer. When he was washed off into an eddy and rolled back up, everyone around me heaved a collective sigh of relief.

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By this point, I was growing pretty wary of this rapid. Instead of going down the middle, I took the “sneak” route, which avoids the big hydraulic but still leaves Decision Rock to negotiate. Decision Rock is so named because you must postpone deciding which side to pass until the last fraction of a second, depending on where the current carries you. It hadn’t been described to me as a particularly critical or difficult move, so I wasn’t really prepared for what came next. Even now, I go over this again and again in my mind. I am often paralyzed by decisions, stunned into inaction because I’m unwilling to let go of unexplored possibilities. I cleared the eddy with a couple of strong strokes and was immediately hurled toward Decision Rock. Directly toward the rock. My kayak was nosing neither right nor left, so there was no clear choice. Any effort at avoidance would be too late. I piled into the rock, my bow riding up its angled face while my stern sank and caught in the tearing current, swinging out to the left and then flipping me over just above a biggish drop. I tucked as much as I could, pressing my cheek to the hull of my boat to minimize the danger of hitting my head. At the bottom of the drop, there was a jarring thud as the boat hit a rock. Then I managed to roll up and pull into an eddy downstream. My stern now had a pronounced ski-jump-shaped curl from the impact. Jarred, I sat there in the eddy as a kind of mild shock set in, the cumulative effect of the day’s events. I stiffened with fear. I’d seen it happen to other kayakers and read about it in paddling books: a loss of confidence, a mental numbness, and a significant loss of flexibility. This list of symptoms was always followed up with a warning to get off the river immediately. The loss of flexibility is a serious problem. Maintaining flexibility is one of the most important elements of the sport. In the middle of the most chaotic, complex, and intimidating rapids, one must remain physically relaxed. Unexpected waves throw the boat this way or that, the upper body gets hit by a breaking wave, edges of the boat catch in cross currents. If one’s torso is relaxed and the right response is there, the energy is absorbed and control maintained. If the body is stiff, one is much more likely to tip over—like a toy soldier nudged from behind. I knew what I should do. However, in my current situation, walking out of the canyon would have been extremely difficult, and I rationalized that with the hardest rapid behind me, it was okay to go on.

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Running the next rapid, I felt awkward, unresponsive, and vulnerable. At Pyrite, I managed to make the boof, launching myself off a flat rock into the swirling pool below. However, my apprehensions grew as we approached Tunnel Falls, an unpredictable drop that channels almost the entire river into a single nozzlelike fall. A column of spray constantly rises from this awesome concentration of hydraulic energy. Feeling unprepared, but riding the momentum of the river and the high spirits of our small party, I launched myself over the falls, landed, went completely underwater, and rocketed back out, almost totally clearing the surface. On a different day, this would have been exhilarating; today, I was glad simply to be down safely. All I had left was the last big rapid, Kirshbaum’s, a quarter mile long, with many small and medium-sized drops, huge boulders everywhere, and a couple of nasty hydraulics to avoid. I asked Greg where the big hydraulics were, but he could only tell me vaguely: “Sort of river left halfway down, and right in the middle at the bottom.” I tried following his line, but early on I struck a rock, got turned around, capsized, and rolled back up just before going over another drop. By the time I collected myself, he was way downstream. For the rest of the quarter-mile rapid, which gets more intense toward the bottom, I scrambled blindly to avoid one hazard after the next, all my composure gone, fighting the current with wild, thrashing strokes—brittle reactions to what was immediately in front of me—and a raw fear within. I was expecting at any moment to go over a lip and drop into the jaws of one of the large, churning hydraulics. As a pourover caught my stern and upended the entire boat, I almost capsized again, but I braced and the bow crashed back down. Then I passed a huge, mauling hydraulic off to my right in the middle of the river. I was down. Still dazed by the takeout, I put the boat on the car, changed into dry clothes, said goodbye to Greg, and began the drive back to my girlfriend’s house in the mountains above Boulder, the anxiety still couched in my gut. At a family wedding in North Carolina a week later, Lillian climbed off a freshly painted wooden fence she’d been sitting on and said, “Yes.” We were married in May.




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A year later: Lillian is now four months’ pregnant. Given what happened the last trip, and considering my changed circumstances, I feel a little foolish coming back to paddle Gore Canyon. I’m not a better paddler now than I was then. I’m running the river with Phil. I used to paddle with him back in Virginia. We lost touch when I moved west, but then ran into each other again quite by chance on Clear Creek above Golden. When I arrive, Phil isn’t there, so I walk down to the river and splash water on my face. It’s already getting hot. The river is sedate at this point. As I recall, the last mile of the canyon is a fairly gentle float after one reaches the bottom of Kirshbaum’s. I skip a stone across the river. It clatters against the rocky bank opposite. Phil pulls up a few minutes later, craning his head out the truck’s window. “Sorry I’m late.” The pickup’s engine is still running. He gets out and opens the camper top so I can slide my boat in. He’s lean and very fit, with a head of curly reddish-blond hair and a deliberate economy of speech and movement. An engineer through and through, he’s built shelving in his truck bed, and it’s lined with boating equipment. Once I needed a padlock and cable to secure a spare boat to my car while we ran a river. He immediately pulled out three padlocks and several lengths of cable to choose from. He’s also a really good kayaker. This year, at the peak of the spring runoff, I watched him run a complicated Class V rapid on Clear Creek, effortlessly threading his way down this raging torrent that had put the fear of God into me. I couldn’t have a better guide for this trip, and I’m grateful—he’s been down Gore Canyon seven times this year alone. I don’t want to exaggerate the difficulty of Gore. Many paddlers think of it as a play run, opting to go down in short, low-volume rodeo boats. These boats are designed for doing tricks and stunts, but they are slow and unstable. I’ve brought my much more conservative, barrelshaped creek boat built for stability and speed. I’m really nervous about doing this. I keep thinking of Lillian back at home, of our child and our future together. We drive east along the dirt road toward the put-in. To our left, rocky and quite sheer, the Gore Range rises dramatically from the grassy valley floor. Off to the right, flanked by high mountains on either side,

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the Blue River Valley stretches away to the south, flat and broad with rolling pastures. Out in the middle of a field, an old wooden barn leans precariously. I swing open a rusted metal gate and we navigate the mile of rutted road, weaving a path between huge puddles and large rocks down to the launch. Several cars are parked at the end of the road, and two guys are taking boats out of an old Ford pickup. Anxious to get on the water, we soon have the boats off and gear scattered around. Throw bags are carefully stowed, floatation bags blown up, water bottles filled, spray skirts attached, PFDs strapped on . . . this part is always the same. The routine bolsters my confidence. Before we set off, I walk over and exchange a few friendly words with the two guys about to launch. One is running the canyon for the first time. His boyish face betrays some nervousness. The other guy, pulling on a battered yellow helmet, seems more experienced and assured. We slide down the muddy chute that is used as a launch and begin to paddle the three miles of flat water before reaching the canyon. We have actually launched onto the Blue River, which drains into the Colorado. As the crow flies, it’s only about a mile to the confluence, but the river approaches circuitously, meandering its way among tall grasses, as if reluctant to give itself up to the larger river. It’s almost 200 yards wide in places, and never more than a couple of feet deep. To avoid going aground, I try to stay with the main current, which isn’t immediately obvious. Twice, I grind to a halt on a shoal and have to wrestle myself off, retrace my path, and probe for another route. It is almost noon, and the sky is clear. The deepest water runs mostly on the outside of each looping bend, so I stay wide. It’s possible to cut off nearly a mile by carrying one’s boat across a narrow isthmus, but it’s private property and the owner objects. The water is perfectly clear, and mica fragments sparkle on the sandy bottom. The current is barely perceptible, except for the odd dead leaf rolling and bumping along the sand. Periodically, I splash water on my head and neck. At last, there comes a low rumbling. I feel a cool breeze that must be blowing up the canyon. The swifter water of the Colorado joins us from the right. The canyon walls close in as the water becomes more boisterous. I feel confident running down through these straightforward standing waves and try surfing a couple of them close in to the

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right bank. Phil paddles on ahead. The walls of the canyon rise steeply on either side, dry grasses and a few small trees clinging to the steep rock. We both drop through the first big rapid without incident, and I get out of my boat above Gore to take a look. I’m probably going to carry my boat around this rapid, but nevertheless I want to watch Phil run it before I make my final decision. He drops down into the pool, taking the same sneak route that I took last time. Now he has to pull out into this roaring plume and get around Decision Rock. I’m intently watching his moves: his angle as he pulls out into the current; whether he tries to keep his bow pointing upstream so he is pushed across the current, or whether he lets the current bring his bow around; what stroke he uses to make the last-minute maneuver. But he doesn’t get through clean. Instead, he practically mimics my last performance. Hitting the rock, his bow rides up, but instead of going backward down the drop to the left, he ends up getting washed off to the right into an eddy. As I watch him momentarily out of control, my muscles contract in sympathetic response, as if I, too, am trying to get off the rock, leaning downstream. And then he’s safe in the eddy. But I’m taken back a year: my stern is forced down and sideways, I get flipped, tuck my head, and press my cheek against the upturned hull. I walk back to my boat, drain the little bit of water from its bottom, and hoist it onto my shoulder. I’m thinking of Lillian and our unborn baby, and for an instant I play over the horror of not being a part of that. I’m not going to take on this rapid again. Maybe not ever. I may gain as much skill as the guys that run it every weekend, but, as I’d just witnessed, even the best kayakers have trouble with it. It’s too much of a crapshoot, and I feel relieved to acknowledge it. My life has changed. Nothing so completely awakens my senses as plunging through a challenging rapid; a year ago, I would have given it another try. But there’s a big difference now. I have always resisted growing up, but there’s a tightening and narrowing here that I can’t avoid—don’t want to avoid. A few years earlier, I was paddling with a friend on the North Fork of the Skykomish in Washington State, and we decided to walk a nastylooking rapid. As we passed the rapid, my friend got down on his knees and touched his forehead to the ground. He made out like he was jok-

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ing, but he wasn’t. Paddlers often feel a profound respect and love for rivers—rapids in particular. That act stayed with me, and now, as I carry my boat past the crux move on Gore Rapid, I repeat the gesture, touching my forehead to the rocky ground. Back on the river, with Gore Rapid behind me, my confidence is buoyed. The walls of the canyon close in toward Tunnel Falls. There are several old mine shafts that disappear into the sheer rock faces; the remains of rickety wooden scaffolding hug the walls outside. The rock here literally sparkles—with what, I don’t know, but a strong incentive must have lured the miners to work such an inaccessible spot. I wonder how they ever managed to bore the shafts, to work the ore. Just hauling in supplies and meeting basic needs strikes me as enough to keep up with. Higher up, I see the lines where the rock folded and settled, and I imagine the ages of scouring that brought the river down through each layer. In places, I can see the beginning of the Pennsylvania Marine Shale—an ancient layer of rock that underlies the entire Gore Range and much of the Continental Divide. It was deposited about 300 million years ago when a shallow sea covered the area, and it contains countless fossilized shellfish. A wind blows upstream. Some buzzards wheel high above against the blue sky. I remember the line for Tunnel Falls. As the entire river funnels down toward the narrow falls, a ridge of water forms midstream. I need to keep just to the right of the crest. Phil goes first; his line appears to be good, although I can’t see him once he drops over the lip. I wait for a few seconds, pull out into the current, and plunge down the falls. As I land, my bow goes deep. With the combination of my forward momentum and the current behind, I pitch forward in a somersaulting action. Plunging headfirst into the water, I lift my paddle reflexively to protect my head. Just as the boat settles, at the full extent of my reach, the paddle’s shaft hits a rock and snaps in two. Underwater, in a desperate and irrational response, I go through the leveraging motion of a roll; the two ends of my paddle flail stupidly in the current. I drop one end and repeat the attempt, this time managing to gasp in a lungful of air before going back underwater. The third attempt is more thought-

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ful. I feel for the blade, orient its angle on the surface of the water, relax, and initiate the unwinding action. I pop back up and clumsily make for the bank. Despite being designed for the most turbulent conditions, whitewater kayaks are extremely unstable. It is the paddle, constantly translating the water’s resistance, that provides stability. In anything but flat water, a paddle blade remains almost continuously in the water and is worked reflexively to maintain stability much the same as muscles in our feet and legs work constantly to maintain balance while we are standing and walking. With just one broken paddle end, I feel terribly vulnerable. Before reaching the bank, I almost capsize again. Holding tight to a rock, I breathe hard and cough up river water. I scan the eddy, hoping to see the paddle’s other end floating. Thirty feet away, Phil is getting back into his boat. I wonder why he got out, but spare my voice; it’s nearly impossible to be heard over the roar of the falls. After a few minutes, he comes over. “I swam,” he yells. “I broke my paddle,” I yell back. “Shit!” We go downstream a short way. The simplest obstacles have now become hazards as I struggle with my half paddle to stay upright and avoid getting pinned. Normally, this section of river would be utterly straightforward. The current has slackened and there are no significant drops. But even so, I’m maneuvering clumsily and slowly. I can’t negotiate a big rapid this way, and Kirshbaum’s is still downriver. I’ll be walking part of the route. It would have been wise to bring a breakdown—a paddle that comes apart in the middle to be stowed in kayaks. In a quiet eddy a few hundred yards below Tunnel Falls, Phil and I stop to talk. We agree that I shouldn’t try to run Kirshbaum’s. I’ll paddle the easy sections and walk around the rapids. I’m disappointed but confident: I managed to roll in the chaos below Tunnel Falls, and that feels good. We are about to set off again when a battered yellow helmet appears upstream. The two guys we’d chatted with briefly in the parking lot pull into the eddy. “What happened?” I explain, and it turns out he has a breakdown stowed in his stern.

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It’s an immense relief to have a paddle back in my hands. I slip around the ugly-looking ledge drop known as Toilet Bowl. It’s a riverwide hydraulic that looks like it could hold a boat all day. You have to duck under a low rock to access a small shoot and bypass the hydraulic on river-left. It’s a gymnastic maneuver that involves more bending and ducking than paddling. Kirshbaum’s is next. As we approach, I am feeling extraordinarily focused, collected, and sure of myself. A year ago, this rapid undid me. The incident on Gore Rapid had dissolved my nerve, but it was Kirshbaum’s that really frightened me. Now, apart from a normal level of apprehension, I feel fine. When I was in high school, I used to high jump competitively. Almost every time, as I approached the bar, before I’d even initiated the short, quick steps of the launch, I’d know if I was going to clear the bar or not. Perhaps it was a metacognitive assessment of my mental and physical readiness; perhaps thinking I would get over the bar helped me to do so. Whatever it was, the prescience was almost always accurate. As I teeter above the long rapid, looking down into a seemingly endless maze of rocks, pourovers, and waves, I know I’m going to do this well. When the training is there, paddling down a raging torrent of whitewater can be utterly transcendent. There is something magnificent about moving through and with so much turbulent energy, out in the middle of a broad mass of fast-moving water, making the moves one needs to for a safe descent, working with the forces of the river, and finding the zone within one’s own psyche where one can navigate the changeable and unknown with minimal thought, reacting appropriately because the body has learned how to do what it needs to. It is into this rare space that I now move. Alert, focused, and physically relaxed, I drop down through breaking waves, thread narrow slots between rocks and skirt-churning hydraulics, and catch tiny eddies, all with an acuity I rarely achieve. This rapid that mauled me and spat me out a year ago becomes child’s play. Whereas before I felt bombarded, hazards blazing at me one after the next, this time I slow it all down, each maneuver measured and precise, with time to spare between. This is why I came back. Phil is waiting at the bottom as I arrive, beaming and laughing.

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“It’s a great rapid, isn’t it,” he says. Down at Pumphouse, we lie on the grass by the river and drink cold beer. The boats are loaded and all the gear is packed up. It’s three o’clock, and the sun feels intense on my bare skin. My eyes are closed against the glare, and a kind of delirium has taken hold. I keep exclaiming stupidly how great that was and Phil responds with enthusiastic grunts. After a short while, we wind our way up the hill, away from the river, drive the nine miles back to the rusted gate, and bump our way down the road to where my car is parked. There are no other cars by the river. From the grasses on the opposite bank, a high-pitched songbird calls across and is answered from somewhere above us. It feels strange to be back in a place I left such a short time ago, but to feel so different.

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Their Place, My Place ALEXANDER DRUMMOND

“ I C A N T A K E Y O U A S F A R A S B O U L D E R , ” I said, perhaps at risk of my life. “Okay,” he said. A slight twist to his nod seemed to add, “That’s a start.” The hitchhiker was a powerfully built man, square-shouldered, deepchested, big-boned. His hands were scuffed, cut and puffy, and his face, a perfect oval, was smeared with dried blood from wounds in three places. High, strong cheekbones emphasized his fierce black eyes, eyes like a hawk’s, eyes that looked like they could grip till whatever they gripped stopped breathing. Yet a quick evaluation told me that this recluse could be trusted, that his strength, like the hawk’s, contained no meanness or malice. Furthermore, I was used to practically anything when it came to picking people up along the main street of Ward—the steep street that 102

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winds down past half a mile of junked cars that are one of Ward’s statements to the world. This guy was not from Ward, but Ward’s own selection of resident hitchhikers had put plenty of wild characters in the seat beside me. One memorably stricken soul—poor, not old, but somehow diseased—died two days after I gave him a ride. Three days after that, he was elected town mayor over two other candidates on a too-late-to-change ballot. Choosing a dead man for its highest office was Ward’s original contribution to the theory of anarchy. My fierce-looking passenger with coal-black eyes and coal-black hair wore no braids or tribal belt buckle or other trademark feature of a modern Native American. But I thought I knew where he came from. “You from the Lakota camp down in the Gold Lake Valley?” “I guess you could say that. But everybody’s leaving, prob’ly already left. Indians start early.” Indians start early. Hints of ethnic stereotyping dispensed from within the ranks. My mind locked onto the subject of Native Americans, mentally scanning photographs of the great Sioux chiefs—Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud: all stolid, unyielding, unflinching in their bearing, gazing with implacable determination, yet visibly struggling with the sad realization that no matter what they did, they would lose. Powerful, proud men, with powerful, proud features—classic representatives of the Plains Indian, with some of the finest heads and facial profiles ever produced on the North American continent. A man carrying that lineage had just entered my car. Why I was going to Boulder at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in September 1994, I can’t remember. But I do remember that it was chilly— almost frosty—and that overnight showers had left the road still wet. “Where to after Boulder?” I asked, picking up on what I sensed when the guy got in. I was certain there was no overlap between his view of life and Boulder’s. “To the train yards in Denver,” he said. Anticipating my need for further explanation, he added, “There’s freights going to L.A. Freights every few hours. That’s where I’m headed.” “Do people still do that, hop freights?” “There might be ten, fifteen guys down there,” he said, surprised at the need to prompt me on the basic facts of life.

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Had I actually seen this guy among the small group of Lakota Sioux who had camped a mile down the valley from my cabin for most of the summer and the two summers preceding it? I hardly knew any of them, but had learned from some that they migrated each summer from North Dakota to the cooler mountain temperatures in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, or Idaho. They traveled and lived in their camper trucks— except for this guy, now obviously on his own without wheels. How the group happened on its idyllic campsite four miles northeast of Ward was not clear, nor did I know where they went when the summers ended. The first time I walked by the Lakota camp—and blinked to discover them there—they gave no greeting and barely answered mine. A nod at best, without smiles, without enthusiasm. There were about six middle-aged families. Some seemed to have elderly parents with them, but there were no children. They obviously did not want to be on exhibit, obviously preferred their privacy. The camp was messy and never well defined because a lot of the chores took place inside their trucks. At each summer’s end, however, they left several fire rings and an assortment of lumber from makeshift camp tables and an improvised latrine stall. And they left the rock-and-earth ring from their sweat lodge. It was fifteen feet across and scraped to bare earth. Half a mile above their camp, they habitually detoured their trucks over untracked grass rather than remove a fallen tree from across the jeep track. By the end of the first summer, they had created a road where none existed before. Such easygoing negligence was disarming to my rigid environmental expectations. The sweat lodge was, of course, evidence of adherence to old traditions. Equally suggestive to me was a place of retreat my neighbors had found half a mile from their camp. It was a rock outcrop with a commanding and dramatic view, yet a place of quiet and serene beauty. A place I had never discovered in years of wandering the few square miles of forest and meadow around my cabin. It is, in fact, at my own cabin that I ought to pick up the story of my Lakota neighbors and the battered hitchhiker who left a lasting impression on me. My 100-year-old cabin was hauled to its present site two miles northeast of Ward in the early 1970s. It was one of fourteen log structures near Brainard Lake, eight miles west, known as Camp Audubon. The

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complex served, variously, as a hunting camp, children’s camp, and work camp. My cabin acquired the name “President’s Cabin” after Teddy Roosevelt stayed in it for two nights while bear hunting in 1905. When the Forest Service reclaimed leased land parcels around Brainard Lake in the early 1970s, eight of the cabins were demolished and six were hauled to other sites. Log cabins don’t haul easily, and some cracked apart as if earthquake-riven. My cabin, restored to rustic habitability, now occupies the west end of a chain of large meadows that runs for about two miles downhill and east. The meadows end at a small, private guest ranch that was also a children’s summer camp half a century ago. As a modern guest facility, the ranch has been a money loser under several sets of owners in the twenty years I’ve observed it. Mismanagement, exploitation of hired help, and too many long, windy, winters have stunted its economy. Some might also say that bad luck is the penalty for encroachment, because the area’s heritage rightly belongs to the Native Americans. Until the Arapahos were removed to reservations out of state, tribal families came up from the parched plains to spend their summers in these beautiful aspen-fringed meadows. To the west, they could see the high, rounded summit that now bears the name of one of their distinguished leaders, Chief Niwot. The Arapahos were close allies of the Lakota Sioux in their struggles to retain Native homelands. Did my summer neighbors know the rich heritage of the ground on which they camped? The meadow scarred by their camper trucks has a small pond nestled in tall grass, where, each June, frogs breed with a nightly chorus. Like two other ponds down the chain of meadows, the frog pond is losing its struggle against encroaching grasses. Someday it will be only a damp meadow, and then a dry one. The tiny kingdom of frogs will perish, or perhaps wander and wail in search of a new home. Vestiges of wetland grasses surrounding the ponds reveal their former size; one can suppose that 150 years ago they supplied enough water for the summering Arapahos. And then for a cattle-raising homestead, which along with local mining activity, drove the Arapahos from their summer paradise. The old homestead house near the frog pond had vanished by the time I knew the area in 1980. Only the leveled foundation and one set

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of bedsprings remained. By 1985 the bedsprings were gone. A row of currant bushes, barren most years; six rhubarb plants; and some rusty wire nailed to a pine tree to hold fencing are all else that remains of the vanished homestead. The rhubarb ripens each June to stalks barely six inches tall, after a hard struggle with wind and snow. I take the stems and leave the leaves as mulch. The leaves always have edges browned and curled by frost damage. At 9,000 feet, and subject to cold air drainage off the Indian Peaks, it has frozen here as late as June 25 and as early as August 25. Whether there was a period of overlap between white settlers and the summering Arapahos, and whether that sharing was friendly or forced, I cannot say. Once I had a vision of children playing together, but that vision—a mere daydream—carries a bias of harmony not borne out by facts: the Arapahos had been largely exterminated from their Colorado homelands by 1869, only seven years after the Homestead Act of 1862. Chief Niwot was reputed to have had a favorite meditation place near Gold Lake—a natural lake later enlarged by a dam at its outlet— but my Lakota friends found their own spiritual retreat and marked their path to it. I found the spot after they had departed following their third summer, a few days after I had taken the hitchhiker to Boulder. The route to the retreat site ran southeast from the Lakota camp to where the meadow narrowed to a gateway of aspens before widening again to a last bay of grass. At its far end, small tatters of red and blue denim hung from a few trees as way markers. Then the path, not trodden heavily enough to wear down the grass, was bordered by dead aspen poles laid on the ground, end to end. The route turned east again for a short quarter mile, bent sharply left to pass through a gap in a rusted old cattle fence, then sloped gently down to the base of a granite outcrop. Four small piles of stones about six inches high formed the corners of a resting place. Each held an upright stick. A thick mat of grasses and flowers made a cushion for sitting or sleeping. Just beyond that, a few easy steps led up onto the rocks, whose east side dropped off about 200 feet into a steep gulch. The panorama from the rock opened widely to views east and south, yet the place felt hidden and private. It was a place to reflect, meditate, or pray.

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Several times in the next two or three years, until about 1997, I went there and paid homage to those who had found it first. I made their place my place, inheriting a tradition not my own, yet adaptable to my own. It was a place for all who seek quiet and peace. Then the pace and pressures of my life caused me to neglect and almost forget this lovely sanctuary. Though I felt I had known the place well, when I went back this year to show it to a friend, I had trouble finding it. I knew where to start from the campsite, with its still-visible remnant of the sweat lodge. Beyond the last meadow, we found two cloth streamers hanging from the trees. We found, then lost, the pole-lined path before picking it up again. And after much uncertainty and investigation, we found the four small rock piles and the now dried and faint bed of herbs. I had remarked to my friend that on my visits a few years ago, I had been struck by the fact that the rock outcrop, though dramatic, was less dramatic than a higher one only eighty feet away. “The Lakota,” I had romanticized, “prefer the lesser over the greater, the subtle over the more obvious.” And I had taken that as a lesson to me, whose Yankee instinct was to go for the biggest and the best. But my musings had evidently been pure concoction, for this time I found, half buried in the sand, a thread-wrapped colored cloth marking the way to the higher summit. The Lakotas, too, had chosen the greater over the lesser, the more obvious over the subtle. With compass bearings, we checked the sunrise point of the June 21 solstice and found it to be far to the left—just visible from the higher promontory, not visible at all from the lower one. Nothing else suggested that the choice of meditation site bore any relation to sun, moon, or stars. I cannot say with certainty what the site’s use or meaning was, but I don’t think it was any kind of energy center, or related to anything magical or mystical divined through Native prescience. This much does seem certain: the site was a splendid choice for both grandeur and privacy, and the path to it was made with care. The bed of herbs and the four tiny cairns marking its corners emphasized tradition, aesthetic sensitivity, and an intent to spend more than just casual time there. Together or singly, members of the group probably went to the site for spiritual uplift, self-understanding, prayer, worship,

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or some combination thereof uniquely theirs. Perhaps they even sought visions in the old Sioux tradition. The place, and what one felt of their presence there, transcended and cast a forgiving light on their disputable camping and driving habits. They had found a place of beauty and dignity and made it theirs. What about my passenger on the drive to Boulder that September morning? What was his connection to the meditation site? Having heard the story of his life, I sense that he might have made the place a sacred site and a place of intense personal ritual. But I met him before I had been there and could connect him with it only later, in retrospect. Back, in any event, to that early morning drive down to Boulder. My passenger—I wish I knew his name—volunteered the information that there had been a farewell party at the campsite, a summer’s-end celebration before the group’s departure. A bunch of other people had shown up, and the party had gotten out of control. “We got into a brawl,” he said. His husky intonation suggested that brawls were nothing new to him. “Before that, I went over to my girlfriend’s in Nederland. We had a fight, and she pushed me out and slammed the door.” With a gesture to the civility he must have sensed I was waiting for, he added, “We only yelled at each other. I never struck no woman.” The double negative was the only bad grammar he displayed on the entire drive to Boulder. “I hitched back in the rain to Ward,” he said, “then walked down the meadows to the party. Then I drank a lot and fought until there was nobody left to fight.” His battered hands suggested that he had dealt more blows than he had taken, but his face told of a few solid blows received as well. “Then I started walking toward Denver,” he said. “What about the camper trucks?” “They’re all heading north toward Laramie.” As he talked, I noticed his black-cloth, high-top gym shoes—the same ones I’d seen in the Ward free-box a couple of weeks earlier. I even knew who their original owner was. In a perhaps grotesque lapse of sensitivity to a man’s privacy and dignity, I made a dumb stab at familiarity. “Looks like you got some shoes from the Ward free-box,” I said. And without waiting for a response, “A guy named Derek put them

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there a couple of weeks ago. I would’ve taken them, but they were too small.” My passenger turned stony, I felt like a dope, and nothing was said on either side for at least two miles. But then, slowly and with emotion either absent or concealed, he said, “They’re too little for me, too.” A long pause set in, at first awkward, then ominous. He finally added, “But they’re shoes.” He was silent again, and I began feeling a moral weakness in having shoes that fit. Then, at last, as if arriving at a solution, he said, “Sometimes shoes need a long time to find the right man. And the only shoes that really fit a man he has to make with his own hands.” The conversation seemed to be past the danger zone, moving into the safe area of the General Philosophy of Shoes. He had, I hoped and sensed, worked through or risen above the indignity of being reminded of what pauper’s bin his shoes had come from. I quickly thought to myself, My shoes seem to fit okay, even though I didn’t make them. Ergo, fit, to this guy, means something deeper, something like “crafted by your own hands exactly to your foot, to the size and shape of your character, and to the path you’re walking through life. I liked my own quickly invented interpretation and was ready to ponder it some more. I even remembered a friend in Montrose who does make most of his own shoes; when he occasionally buys a pair, he soon tears them apart in a rage and rebuilds them. I was brought back to the present when my companion raised one foot to knee level and thumped the black gym shoe with his hoary fist: “Moccasins plenty history.” Grubby, used, K-Mart gym shoes upgraded to moccasins. And distinguished by “plenty history.” The humor and his satire of movie-Indian talk—the classic verbless sentence—were unmistakable. I laughed, he knew I got it, and he laughed, too. But then he offered what appeared to be honest bumland information: “Some guy down at the freight yards will have shoes too big. Maybe we’ll trade. If they fit that guy, they were meant for him from the start. Or maybe they’ll fit, but he’ll find something better, and he’ll toss these off someplace. Then somebody else will find them. ‘Shoes always tell a story.’ Old Lakota saying.”

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Lakota saying or not, it was true. Shoes do tell a story, whether they belong to a quarter-time truck mechanic in Ward, a Lakota Sioux, or Imelda Marcos. That brought the shoe conversation to a happy conclusion. What had started as a blunder had become an icebreaker after all. I ventured, “I walked by the camp quite a few times, but never saw you.” “I was working.” “What kind of work,” I started to ask, but he followed up instantly. “Spirit and flesh.” And I felt agitation in him as he gave me the quintessential fact of his life. “I was at Pine Ridge in 1975 when the two feds were shot. They put Peltier away on charges of murder. Peltier was framed. I know he was framed.” I agreed completely, but was surprised he thought I’d even know what he was talking about, especially after displaying my ignorance about riding freight trains. In radical politics, I was on firmer ground. I slipped in Peltier’s first name and a few other hints to let him know I was on his wavelength. “I got eight years in federal prison just for being there, just for trying to run away. I was only nineteen.” He let that soak in for a minute while I downshifted the steep switchbacks on Lee Hill above Boulder. I caught a quick look at his eyes. The fierce eyes of a hawk again. But this one chained to a post. Talking about prison gave him the eyes of a hawk in captivity. “When I got out, I was half crazy from what they do to you in prison. Indians are treated worst of all. Treated like shit every day. It changed me. I had to start over, start looking for myself, my true self, the true way through life. The Lakota way. That’s my work.” A pause. And then, “When I want answers, I hang by my flesh from trees. From hooks on trees. I hung a few times three days, three nights. I had to be taken down once. I couldn’t pull myself back up.” He grimaced. He hit his fists together. He rubbed places on his flesh through his shirt. In the quick glance I stole at his face, he now looked anguished and enlightened, in a single complex expression. “Sun Dance?” I asked. “Yes, but more, and longer. Nobody can understand it unless they do it.”

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Then, through some stream of narrative I can no longer reconstruct, he came back around to his girlfriend in Nederland, a Native American woman living there full-time. I gathered that she wanted to change him, clean him up, march him down the treadmill of ordinary life. Maybe living in a largely Anglos-only community, she was trying to escape something in her own background. Or maybe she had New Mexico roots and hung out with Nederland’s small group of Spanishspeaking Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I will not change one thing in my life to please anybody,” he said. The immediate reference was to alcohol, a major issue between them. But the declaration seemed to be his hard-earned motto for life in general. He seemed to have acquired an unshakable sense of who he was and what he stood for. That, in turn, had made him a man who lived without compromise. His path, his quest, whatever exactly that was, came before relationships, came, it appeared, before everything. Refusing to compromise, to be anything for anyone, inevitably cost him in missed opportunities and failed human contacts, but it was his form of integrity. He said he needed money, and was going to the one place he knew he could get it: Hollywood. “I train horses the old Lakota way,” he said. “Whenever I show up, Universal hires me.” There was no boast in that, but I gathered from it that he had a rare talent with horses, perhaps rare even among other Lakotas. He had, if he wanted it, a full-time, paying occupation. “I also have a couple of kids in L.A.”—said this time with a combination of emphasis and evasion. I quickly sensed pride in fatherhood, spotty involvement with the kids, and a sense of loss. When I asked him how old the kids were, he didn’t answer, almost as if he couldn’t remember. In the silence I thought back to a bar conversation in Mexican Hat, Utah, where a Navajo guy had told me how much he missed his kids, withheld from his visitation by endless custody battles. He’d finally given up trying to see them. We were in Boulder now, and a few minutes later, my rider got out at the deserted bus station. His parting was offhand, but his hawklike eyes fixed me for a moment, and something in them expressed both gratitude and connection. As he made his way around the corner, a

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couple of early-morning joggers steered an arc around him. It had started raining again. Practically from the moment I drove away, I sensed that an authentic spiritual presence, struggling but powerful, had blown through my life. I could still feel his presence, as, on several occasions, I’ve felt the hovering presence of people who’ve just died. I say this as one not given to spiritual experiences or explanations, as one distinctly put off by fuzzy New Age appropriations of Native American spiritual practices. When I discovered the meditation site a few days later, I imagined that rugged Lakota man there, sitting, fasting, praying, sleeping at night, looking east toward the Dakotas and his childhood—and perhaps hanging from a tree. Where would his quest for the “true way” take him? Would he gain in power and insight, find a way to love someone, to be a father for his kids? Or would he flame out and lose what he had struggled so hard to gain? Life is precarious for all of us at times—would it prove even more so for him, given his past and where he was seeking to go? Who can judge what progress he had made or not made since leaving prison? Too much alcohol? Of course. Despite his obvious physical power, he showed alcohol’s ravages. He looked fifty but was only a couple of years past thirty-five. Yet he was following, in some way, Sioux prescriptions for the spirit, and he appeared to take that as his life’s work. Anyone able to take the physical pain of the Sun Dance must acquire forms of knowledge I can’t even imagine. Maybe hanging by his flesh was his way of feeling that if his body were torn open, his spirit could come out and fly free. Maybe getting into brawls felt to him like fighting his way out of prison. The way he spoke about being locked away while practically still a boy revealed deep anguish countered by horrific determination. Of course he had to keep his body hard, to shelter a vulnerable soul. Of course ferocity had to be part of his spiritual quest. And of course, I was at last able to articulate, this powerful man was a warrior. Where is he now? Has our society, which fears and loathes his kind of primal power, locked him up again? Did he swap shoes with some other guy on the way to California? If he did, I hope both men, satisfied with the trade, dangled their feet out the open boxcar door as they

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rolled over the Nevada desert. Whenever—to this day—I see movies with horses in them, I wonder if the animals were guided by the gentle offscreen whispers of a certain Lakota man with cheap whiskey on his breath but with courage in his heart to go forward through dark and uncertain territory.

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Pastoral Emergence ALEXANDER BLACKBURN

I T A L L L O O M S N O W A S A P R O M I S E of immeasurable America, that summer of 1949 when I found in Colorado my spiritual—and future—home. Without fully realizing the nature of my quest, I had been looking for a home, for a sense of belonging. My parents had split. Durham, North Carolina, the hometown where I had been born and raised and which had been my anchorage until a scholarship to a private school uprooted me to Andover, Massachusetts, at the age of fourteen, had become a minefield of emotional turmoil. Another scholarship had swept me into college in New Haven, Connecticut. But I couldn’t feel at ease at Yale. Its roots tapped into Puritanism, into an attitude expressed by one Robert Cushman in 1622 when he lamented, “Our dwelling is but a wandering; and our abiding, but as a fleeting; and, in a word, our home is nowhere but in the heav114

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ens.” By confession of this Pilgrim Father, the New World was not the promised land. The tone at Yale, moreover, seemed to be set by a smug elite who uniformly wore Harris tweed jackets, gray flannel slacks, and white buckskin shoes and who already possessed the confidence of the corporate executives that many of them would become. Of course, considering myself lucky to be at Yale at all—and I was lucky—adaptable, too, and kept rebellion to myself—I had no objection to working my way through it. During semesters, I washed dishes in the beaneries; during vacations, instead of going “home,” I performed odd jobs. In the Christmas blizzard of 1948, for instance, I made on-foot deliveries for the U.S. Post Office to the whorehouses by the railroad tracks, noting that the smudged cards were addressed in pencil to “Sally” or “Ginger.” If not as marginalized as those personages, I still felt displaced. I was as yet uncertain as to why. Then the following summer, some boys made plans to head west. They would follow, they said, the wheat harvest, starting in Oklahoma. One could earn, they said, ten dollars a day plus board and lodging as an itinerant laborer. I decided to go along. I already had a Grapes of Wrath uniform, army-surplus chino pants and a weather-beaten Henry Fonda snapbrim hat. I teamed up with Mal, a Kentucky boy who owned a pickup truck. When we arrived in Alva, Oklahoma, work proved hard to get and harder when you got it. The temperature hovered around 100 degrees, even at midnight. The Yalies scattered, God knows where—to swimming pools, I supposed—and Mal and I were left to sweat, at first inside grain elevators in the explosive, pressure-cooker heat, later as tractor drivers in the vast oceans of golden wheat near Oberlin, west Kansas. Our society consisted of ex-GIs, ex-cons, high-school dropouts, and drunks. The ten dollars a day proved real enough—good money in those days—and a farmer’s wife at harvest time can spread incredible feasts for workers, but “lodging” proved to be the cement floor of a hog pen under a corrugated tin roof. We camped out nights on the prairie. Easing out of cramps caused by heat exhaustion, we watched in apprehension the far-off, gigantic webs of lightning that spun the big sky into sheets of rippled black foil. Unemployed between gigs, we only broke even that summer. When

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I returned to the Ivy League in September, my previous life there seemed effete and impertinent. Something transformative had happened. At graduation from Andover in 1947, a chum, Bill Davis from Denver, had introduced me to his mother. Mrs. Margaret Evans Davis had invited me, should I ever venture near the Rockies, to “drop by” her home. As sincerity came to her as naturally as breathing, I had not forgotten that courtesy. Then suddenly, that summer of 1949, there I was in west Kansas, our crew of workers laid off after harvest. A lightbulb came on in my castaway’s brain. The town had a pay phone. I used it. The operator in Denver put me through to an operator in Idaho Springs who put me through to Mrs. Davis, who said, heartily, “Welcome.” Mal and I drove west all day. Late in the afternoon, from 100 miles away, I saw the Rockies for the first time, a caravan of gray, hunchbacked giants marching across eternity. That night, high in those mountains in the village of Evergreen—nowadays an upscale suburb of Denver—we backed up to a creek, curled up shivering in bedrolls. Nothing could compare with the delight I felt that night, almost freezing in the thin air, falling asleep to the murmurings of snowmelt. Next day before dawn, we rattled up Beaver Creek Road, over a cattleguard at approximately 9,000 feet in elevation, and up to a redrock ranch house perched on a green hill at the foot of Mt. Evans. Bill Davis had never told me what I would soon learn, that the ranch had belonged to Mrs. Davis’s grandfather, Colorado’s second territorial governor, John Evans. At that moment, though, as Mrs. Davis emerged from the porch with her arms open wide and a warmly beautiful smile on her face, the ranch didn’t seem like a place that ever could have belonged to someone; rather, it seemed an earthly paradise over which people held stewardship. Upon this pristine world, the sun was now descending with a dramatically sudden fall of brilliance. A crystalline stream sparkled as it meandered among putty-colored aspens. Mt. Evans, snowpatched and scintillant against a sky bluer than blue, arrested my soul. So it must have been for Wordsworth on vacation high in the mountains: “Gently did my soul/Put off her veil, and, self-transmuted, stood/Naked as in the presence of her God,” he would write in The Prelude.

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It is said that humankind’s quest to surmount earthly existence has been associated with mountain worship, or with worship in manmade mountains—pyramids, cathedrals, and the like. If there is an influence or quintessence that gives sacredness to mountains, then the devotee desires to share in it by partaking, as it were, of its flesh and blood. It’s an accession to a kind of grace. Certainly that morning at the foot of Mt. Evans, I experienced a sensation of awe, whatever religious connotation that may have. A few days later as we were preparing to leave, Mrs. Davis proposed that we delay our return to the rough life and join her at the Aspen Institute to hear a presentation by Dr. Albert Schweitzer, at that time world-renowned as a missionary physician in Africa as well as a philosopher and musicologist. Wonderful as was the prospect of hearing Schweitzer in the Rockies, I had sworn to support myself, not to wire for help from financially strapped parents. Turning down the invitation, I added vehemently, “I’m coming back some day.” It was a vow. Then I, with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took my solitary way.


Twenty-five years would pass before the vow became reality. Because there was a war, the Korean War, upon graduation from Yale I enlisted as a private in the army. Among some other close calls, I was dutifully irradiated during an atomic test in the Nevada desert on October 29, l951. After being discharged from the military, determined to test myself as a writer, I enrolled in a workshop in New York and was blessed with encouragement from my teacher. But not, unfortunately, with a means of making a living. Consequently, there were years devoted to earning advanced degrees, to teaching at schools and colleges, and also to raising a family. Once I taught at an Ivy League university; the old uneasiness returned, and I resigned instead of accepting promotion. A literary aspiration superseded bread-and-butter practicality. I needed to write a first novel. One day in the early 1970s, while I was living in a 200-year-old stone farmhouse near Oxford for a rent of 13 guineas (about $30) a

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week, that experience at the foot of Mt. Evans surfaced to imagination, whispered to me the pastoral message of a better life, and incorporated itself into the novel-in-progress. Finally, on April 5, 1973, completed manuscript in briefcase, I fled the fog and marrow-deep chill of England. On April 16, driving an old, overheating car east from Santa Barbara, I rejoiced in the feeling of coming home not just to America after confining exile in Europe, but home to the Rockies. The shining mountains of the Colorado Plateau once again expanded my mind. On April 18, I arrived in Colorado Springs. I have, ever since, been lifting a meditative gaze out my study window and up to 14,110-foot Pikes Peak. Frank Waters (1902–1995), perhaps the greatest writer the American West has ever produced, was born in Colorado Springs. This is what he said in The Colorado: “Next time, by hook or crook, make sure you’re born with a mountain in the front yard. It comes in mighty handy all the way around.” Maybe I was reborn here, because Pikes Peak has been coming in mighty handy for the past quarter of a century. In the crepuscular dawn before the sun is up, while commuters are strung out on I–25 like a necklace of Hope diamonds, it swells with a pinkish glow as if the planet herself wants us to see and share the warmth of her pulsing heart. In the evening, when the westering sun snags on blue and purple rimrock, it sings you to sleep with its lullaby of immutability. It is your constant companion, your physician, your national anthem. Zebulon Pike, impressed by the height of the peak that bears his name, reported that only a bird could scale its lofty summit, but the peak has been scaled, measured, desacralized—inside its cone lies the town of Cripple Creek, once the richest source of gold in the world— and it is annually subjected to the indignity of a motorcar race to the top. Personally, I don’t believe it has lost its dignity, its magic, its mystery. It inspired Katherine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful,” praising purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain. And the birds up there, I suspect they might could bring us a message from the spacious skies that this peak is the axis mundi, mythic center of the universe, umbilical cord through which the energies of eternity break into time.

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Here from the novel published in 1979 (The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost) are excerpts quarried from memories of 1949. Max Stebbins and Kitty Pentecost are in flight, she from an abusive mother, he from wartime nightmares including the decapitation of his co-pilot, Sculley, a native Coloradoan who had a cabin in the Rockies and wanted Max, a romantic, to open his eyes. The cabin was almost two miles high among the great rugged mountain ranges of Southwestern Colorado. A winding, precipitous highway took Max and Kitty to a pass at nine-thousand feet; here he found the half-concealed gateway that the Sculleys in Denver had described for him, a rocky snow-patchy road that ended half a mile further up. From the end of the road they made their way on foot, carrying supplies for about a mile before the trail descended slightly to a green vale or mountain meadow. This was the place. A blue lake was another sky. Wild deer grazed among the putty-colored aspens. A sliver of a brook jinked past wind-rippled grasses. On the farther side of the lake stood Sculley’s redstone cabin. And behind everything rose a majestic range of snow-peaked mountains glistening in the sun beneath the sky of cobalt-blue. But in his heart Max knew something was wrong. Perhaps it was the mountains. Now, he loved mountains. He had grown up in the mountains of the East. The presence of mountains satisfied him spiritually. But these mountains of the West, these gleaming white peaks, disturbed him. Their whiteness. Their austerity. Their sublimity. Their indifference! That was it. They cast their cold eyes upon the antsy mortals crawling on their flanks. They were neither cruel nor kind. They were neither contemptuous nor approving. They were impervious to conquest. They did not create, although they could destroy. They were Anarchs. Contemplating these mountains that first day and on successive days that stretched into weeks, Max realized why Sculley had wanted him to come. It was to discover the anarchy of the mountains—and of himself. Himself and others. That inherent rebellion, that quintessence of lawlessness, the heartless element, the ideal, the soul of freedom.

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There are two feelings registered here, one sentimental, the other ironic and complex. My personal experience of a natural world worthy of worship has been carried over to Max’s implied felicity, an unquestioning acceptance of nature’s liberating beauty. Upon reflection, though, he links the inscrutable dynamism of nature to human actions, especially the perverse and violently destructive ones. He knows that humankind is not the measure of nature but only a part of it, and he realizes that our natural selves are ambiguous: unbridled liberty, so wonderful an ideal, means a lack of requirement. This lack, implied by the word anarchy, is disturbing to him. It should be. The spirit of place signified by the mountains seems to promote indulgence of personal liberty even though experience says the country can only be successfully tamed and lived in through a high degree of social cooperation. On the one hand, there is the unrestricted hallelujah of the individual ego—solid, separate, and alone in typical Western novels and films—and on the other hand, there is an ethic of integration that demands an organic relationship, free of ego-fog, whereby an individual is dependent on the existence of all other persons and of all living things. The conflict here, simplistically stated, is that between nature and society, a conflict that is at the heart of literary and cultural studies called “pastoral.” “The pastoral ideal,” observes Professor Leo Marx in his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden, “has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its hold upon the native imagination. The ruling motive of the good shepherd, leading figure of the classic, Virgilian mode, was to withdraw from the great world and begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape.” Obviously, after 500 years of conquest by European civilization, the virgin land of the New World has been defiled. Still, we have designed two kinds of pastoralism. The sentimental kind, widely diffused in our culture, insinuates itself into many kinds of behavior, an obvious example being the “flight from the city,” involving a longing for a more “natural” environment and a contempt for urban life. Sentimental pastoralism manifests itself in our leisure-time activities, in the piety toward the out-of-doors expressed in the wilderness cult, and in our devotion to camping, hunting, fishing, gardening, and so on. The mass media,

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moreover, cater to our taste for retreat into a primitive or rural bliss, knowing that Americans are most likely to buy cigarettes, beer, and automobiles they can associate with a rural setting (in one TV commercial, the ad agency has even gone so far as to put a sport utility vehicle atop a pointy butte in Monument Valley). Complex pastoralism, on the other hand, calls into question or brings irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture. It perceives that the ideal—withdrawal from industrialized, technological civilization—is a romantic perversion of thought and feeling. Whether we like it or not, our home lies in civilization and its history. A temporary retreat to an untainted garden, to the Colorado wilderness, for example, is regarded as therapeutic and morally validated, but in the long run, Marx concludes, cherished values accrued in the land are doomed to defeat. On sociological and political grounds, he is probably right. Reconciliation of the contradiction between the machine of civilization and the garden of nature has eluded sociopolitical thinkers since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly, in our typical fables such as Walden, Moby Dick, and Huckleberry Finn, the American hero is either dead or totally alienated, alone and powerless. But if we shift our attention to psychological solutions, we discover that one of the versions of the pastoral not discussed by Professor Marx and other doomsayers is emergence. Herein the issues raised by the pastoral have more to do with a feeling on various levels than with beleaguered ideals. For example, pastoral’s evocation of a feeling of wholeness in rural life may serve as host to myth’s evocation of the mystery and order of the universe. If indeed pastoral has the ability to move us honestly, the power may be due to projection of awe as if from a numinous source. A psychological path to an enduring reality in nature does not necessarily mean that we are masking the real problems of modern civilization, not if we are perceiving them for what they are—an illusion. What at first may appear to be an escape from urban life is actually a creative exploration upstream, past the city with its riverside factories, on against the current of time and change, to the clear waters of a source. We move from a metaphor of contradiction, the machine in the garden, to the heightened conviction of a mystery in nature and man. Granted the

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shock to our imagination that for more than 150 years modern civilization has administered, we can still envision the possibility of a fable without defeat: an American hero goes on an inward journey away from the world of outward forms to an eternal source and returns to the world with the message of life renewed. No machine can dominate the inexhaustible source of life nor prevent a human point of view from springing up in relationship to it. In another novel, Suddenly a Mortal Splendor, I attempted to dramatize the psychological journey of pastoral emergence. I had been inspired by a visit in 1975 to a hot spring in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains not far from the Great Sand Dunes in the San Luis Valley. There was evidence there of past mining; someone told me the place-name was Iron Springs. Whatever, my initial description drew details from that experience. A Hungarian-born American soldier, Paul Szabo, narrates the story of his return from Vietnam to Colorado Springs, how on arrival he discovered that his beloved stepdaughter, Teapot, his wife, Bluejean, and her lover, Woolpack, have disappeared in a South American country currently in the throes of a violent revolution. To discuss this dangerous situation, Paul and his Navajo buddy, Virgil, go to the hot spring. Next morning Virgil and I drove west alongside the winding flash of the Arkansas River to Salida, then south over Poncha Pass to the high wind-rippled grasslands of San Luis Valley, finally east and up to the hot spring at 9,000 feet elevation in the Sangre de Cristos. We pitched camp in a cluster of aspens near a half-frozen waterfall. We put on swim trunks and eased into steam-frantic springs, let the bright sun and chill air breathe on our faces the diastole and systole of the earthly pulse.

Paul recalls taking Teapot to the spring on a previous visit: I was alone, remembering Teapot. How she had loved the spring one summer’s afternoon when we came for a picnic and a swim! At that time of year the place was crawling with tourists and nature-freaks, with nudists showing off their lack of Puritanism: inhibited one moment, then born again. A college girl from Boulder, stoned, waddled from the springs, covered pubic hair

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with jeans, cupped peachy breasts, and proclaimed, “I did it!,” then seated herself on a motorcycle behind a hipster and roared off to a life of predictable respectability. Masaccio’s Eve, anodyne life style. About that time a bullsnake came, black and bulging, slithering nonchalantly out of the aspens between styrofoam chests full of Pepsi and watermelon and into the water, like a magic dragon guarding gold. Such panic and shrieking! Naked men, women, and children were scrambling, some of them sprawling as if clotheslined. But not Teapot. Teapot, all peaches-and-cream complexion, her blue eyes wide, had befriended the monster. It coiled and uncoiled around her shoulders like a serpent in a primal myth. She laughed with pure pleasure and ran her tiny fingers over the seven-foot slimeball. “Can I have him, Daddy?”

Imagination was now added to the remembered experience. The hot spring suggested a source in the Genesis bowels of the earth. It could serve as a back-to-first-things pastoral backdrop for Paul’s emergence. The scene opens with Virgil, a white-schooled Indian, in his Dantean role as spiritual guide. “I left the reservation eagerly. Indians are not where it’s at, man: that’s what I believed. I wanted to become individual, a white man. I considered going into the ministry. But I found myself sorely troubled by your namesake.” “My namesake?” Virgil nodded to my comically surprised look. “Saint Paul, like you, places highest value on the act of atonement. Unlike you, if I guess correctly, he regards the sacrifice of Jesus as a ransom to Satan, one that redeems mankind from sin. Jesus, I believed, was teaching something more psychological than that—that another person’s life is your own life, in the sense that God is not separated from man but exists in all persons.” He paused to sip his coffee, adjust the glasses on his nose. Then went on. “When you perceive the mystery that another person’s life is your own life in fact, you arrive at a point where time and eternity intersect. You’re not a separate individual anymore, someone with only that kind of standing, for you look through that level of existence and discover your relationship to other levels, to humanity, to nature, to the universe. You discover that

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life is whole and that the great teachers like Jesus and Buddha saw us joined together in the presence of compassion. “In ‘Matthew’ it says, ‘For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust.’ So atonement, it seemed to me, is affirmation of the mystery that is in us, here on earth. . . . Waken to the mystery, and you are prepared to put your life in peril for the sake of another person. “You may also discover that you’ve been an Indian all along.” Virgil threw back his head and laughed his great laugh.

Virgil is a fictional character, a persona. I don’t always agree with him. In this instance I do. No great matter. He knows that Paul has been traumatized by experiences in Vietnam that include putting his life in jeopardy for the sake of others. He already perceives that Paul must go to South America to rescue his loved ones. Hence the preachy tone. Presently, Virgil leaves. Paul is suddenly visited by a spiritual experience for which his rational consciousness hasn’t prepared him. In predawn stillness I woke feeling cold, disconsolate, and lost. Virgil was gone from the tent. I reached for my rifle. I didn’t have my rifle. . . . I was close to flipping out. That close. Peering through tent-flap, though, sobering on frigid air, I saw freshly fallen snow shining with the silence of a full moon, spring waters steaming, and heard, as if for the first time, the waterfall’s hushed rampage. Then I heard, or thought I heard, something else. Not a noise, but a perturbation at the soft spot or “open door” of my head, the kópavi or Thousand-Petalled Lotus about which Virgil had taught me in Vietnam. Across and upslope from the spring, a shadow ghosted: a doe. She had the rounded, dream-laden eyes of Bluejean McQueen. It seems I vanished into non-rational consciousness. It was as if I had been shot through with spears of the sun and inwardly whirled on interstellar winds to the drumming of waterfalls. Into a world of light I was falling, head aflame as if bolts of lightning had entered its door to the thunderous drumming of the falls, and the falls within became incandescently rivers of molten blood. Then I heard a sound so familiar, so instantaneous, so deafening that I wondered why I had not recognized it in one-millionth of a second—the crack of a pistol! In a time-lapse that was not time.

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I felt the bullet moving nonchalantly amongst innumerable nerve fibers, like a spaceship’s delirious probing of the Milky Way. Then I saw it. It was the body of a woman in a cave. I recognized Bluejean. She lay dead as an arc of blood gushed from a hole in her head. . . . Then I was cold, breathing snow. When I recovered rational consciousness, nothing had changed. Weightless as a dream, the doe was ghosting upslope beyond pillows of moon-blanched steam. The waterfall murmured. Smoke from the black snowcovered fire inscribed S-shapes through aspens. Not a shot had been fired, but the snow was crunched, the deer, spooked, leapt into darkness, and there before me stood Virgil, his arms laden with tree branches antlered in silhouette against the steam. I watched him while he knelt and rekindled the fire. How mysterious this man in writhing light and crackling sparks! And yet how equally mysterious had I, but a few moments before, become to myself! I had come to an inward place where he had gone before. I still lay half-tranced in the abyss I had seen. I cleared my throat and called Virgil. He came and knelt by the tent and peered at me over the dim orbs of bifocals. I asked him if he’d heard a pistol shot. “No,” he said, studying me now. I asked him if he had experienced any ill effects from what we had been drinking and eating. Again he replied in the negative. I told him about my vision. “I heard and saw everything as if it were actually happening!” He did not resettle his bifocals. I could tell that he believed in my vision more than I believed in it myself. Yet I believed in it, too. “Am I going nuts?” He glanced away. “Maybe have breakfast, break camp early,” he said.

Later in the novel, Paul discovers that Bluejean has been shot and killed in the South American country, her body flung in a mine shaft. As nearly as he can reckon, the murder occurred, time zones accounted for, at precisely the moment when, 5,000 miles away, he experienced the harrowing vision. Now, admittedly, the description of the visionary event is fanciful. But the event itself is not a fantasy. Unusual, perhaps, but more com-

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monplace than many people may think. And it is not abnormal. Whether the coincidence is categorized as precognition, clairvoyance, or telepathy, it has a long history. In his play Agamemnon, fifth-century-B.C. playwright Aeschylus gives Cassandra similarly uncanny powers but does not condemn her as a lunatic. Something else: the novelistic tradition in which I work, that of the modern novel, which begins with the publication in 1554 of a Spanish masterpiece, Lazarillo de Tormes, eschews the marvelous and commits itself to truth, the truth of the human heart. Permit me a personal anecdote. Early one afternoon in New Haven, while I was walking down College Street on the way to my dormitory, I was overwhelmed (or stunned, possessed) by a feeling that my mother was in some kind of desperate condition. She had not been in my thoughts. After her divorce, she had moved to Richmond, Virginia, and was, according to her letters, enjoying unusually excellent health. Yet here was this intense feeling, with her as its singular focus. The feeling persisted well into the afternoon. I was frightened, embarrassed, bewildered. Never before had I been visited by such a strange awareness, and I’ve never experienced anything like it since. Anyway, upon telephoning my mother’s landlady in Richmond, I was informed that earlier that afternoon my mother had been rushed to hospital in an ambulance, suffering from a sudden attack of pneumonia. Imagine my incredulity. I boarded a Trailways bus, and the next day, I surprised my mother as she was sitting up in bed at the Richmond hospital, where she was recovering nicely. As nearly as we could reckon, she had been at the verge of death at the very moment the previous afternoon when my rational consciousness was overwhelmed. The great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung used the word synchronicity to describe the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events that have the same or similar meaning. According to his theory of synchronicity, archetypal energy can manifest in both internal imagery and external events. This coincidence of a psychic state and a physical event means that time and space have been transcended by and in a timeless dimension. The bad news is that a synchronistic event may be horrifying. It was for me in New Haven, and it was for the character Paul Szabo at

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the Colorado hot spring. The good news is that synchronicities display a positive pattern. Activation of energy deep within the psyche leads to explosiveness, to something that reaches a peak and then bursts, like a bomb. After reaching their peak, however, synchronicities generally disappear as the individual becomes consciously aware of a new alignment within his or her personality. The individual’s consciousness has expanded through the emergence into it of the unconscious, instinctive, or intuitive life. The emergence, signaled by the experience of timelessness, helps to integrate the mind in a holistic fashion. “Mind” is no longer limited to rational consciousness. Jung’s psychology is not our only evidence. For several decades now there has been a scientific movement toward mysticism, the basic assumption being that the universe is unfolding according to a hidden, dynamic, and enfolded order. Experiments indicating that matter is alive—responsive, relational, and self-modifying in response to the activities of other matter—point to a constant creativity in nature, an external unfolding of the universe’s potential from an all-encompassing background. Indeed, David Bohm, Einstein’s protégé and one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists, proposes that in the background’s inward recesses both matter and mind have their source. One can no longer claim that mind is one thing, matter another. True, the Judeo-Christian tradition insists otherwise: man is commanded to multiply himself and to subdue the earth. Here is the origin of our all-pervading materialism, whereby matter is simply “out there” to be subdued and exploited. Not so, says the new physics. We are connected psychically to a material world. We are enfolded in a total wholeness and unity of the universe. If one thinks of an infinite, numinous power welling up from an underlying creative source and then considers this movement as evolution, one begins to grasp the idea that evolution proceeds on psychic as well as on physical levels. We already exist in a numinous world and have but to be awakened to the reality. When so awakened, we may find ourselves in the vanguard of a new age that is coming to birth as an old age reaches its climax. I am not endorsing “New Age” fads but alluding to a Native American myth—it is called emergence—whereby life moves through successive worlds on the evolutionary road. When

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a civilization has reached the verge of extreme development, it is replaced by another civilization. Frank Waters considered the emergence myth as an allegory about consciousness gradually expanding to its own new world. That is why, earlier, I suggested that in pastoral emergence, one perceives as an illusion the real problems of modern civilization because it may well be approaching the verge of extreme development and may well be replaced by a more balanced civilization. Let us recall that the pastoral ideal was to withdraw from civilization and begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape. Let us recall that this ideal crumbles before the onslaught of history, leaving those of us who still have close access to rural felicity and the liberating beauty of nature—as in Colorado—to fear that time may swiftly be running out as the machine of civilization encroaches upon all our gardens. But let us also recall that there is a version of the pastoral—pastoral emergence—that does not concern itself with beleaguered ideals, with escape, with withdrawal, with retreat. Sentimental pastoralism still has a hold over the native imagination, as does Puritanism, with its concept of the “elect” or “saved.” Put those two cultural impulses together and you have the contemporary urge to abandon Mother Earth altogether and send a few righteous, enraptured, and sexually potent pilgrims into space to find a virginal planet amongst the trillions of stars. We mortified earthlings, of course, as the pilgrims blast off, will be left on a sinking ship to ponder the words of the earlier Pilgrim Father, “Our home is nowhere.” There is, notwithstanding such misanthropic dreams, a new world. It is here, a new world of the mind. The fresh landscape toward which our minds are increasingly, on the evidence from psychology and physics, moving—accessed in whispers from a mountain or in a hot spring or on the pavement of a city—is an underlying creative source. In a continuous Genesis, we emerge from it. This pastoral emergence is in an evolutionary perspective our greatest voyage of discovery.

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Written on a Piece of Butcher Paper: El Rancho, Antonito M A R K I RW I N

Waking IN MY SLEEP I THINK I HEAR ROOTS OF GRASS being torn from the wet earth. When I wake, roll away from the cold plaster wall toward the window, I am looking directly into the eye of a horse, his nostrils steaming in the cold May dawn, the grass vanishing behind his pink tongue and yellow teeth. I think, This is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. Shlrump, shlrump: over and over the Appaloosa rips and chews, and we stare at one another, less than three feet apart. He stares deeply into my sleep, a sleep scattered now like the black markings inked over his white coat, and I stare into the wide, brown eye braced in a shock of white that seems the very earth itself. I am staring into the earth. 129

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The chattering of sparrows, their evaporative music, breathes itself into the first shell of light. A swallow crosses the sky, and above the horse’s flank, Arcturus, yellowish-orange, pales alongside a constellation that looks like the Big Dipper. Suddenly, I have never felt more awake as I stare out onto the U-shaped portico of this hundred-year-old adobe house whose turquoise posts begin to take shape alongside the horse, which is moving away, probably toward the wrought-iron gate I must have left open last night.

Geography/History The ranch—El Rancho, as we call it—lies in the San Luis Valley, five miles northeast of Antonito. Its 3,000 acres are bordered to the north by El Rio de los Conejos (The River of Rabbits) and to the southeast by a vista of Mount San Antonio, an extinct volcano whose caldera is still partially visible. Twenty miles east, the Rio Grande slows and widens toward Taos, while in the background, the Sangre de Cristos, jagged and purpling like a great reptilian spine, always seem to gather shadows of cloud. Northeast, Blanca Peak, mythic and Himalayan in appearance, floats, always snowcapped and Buddha-like, on the horizon. The San Luis Valley is primarily inhabited by Chicano farmers, some of the most kind and generous people I know. They run cattle and sheep; they grow potatoes and alfalfa. Deeply religious—mostly Catholic, with a scattering of Mormons—they live simply and close to the earth. Each Christmas, members of the San Acacio Church dress up as Mary, Joseph, and the Wise Men, and they re-enact the manger scene (Los Posados), often visiting nearby ranches. Need I say more about community? The ranch belongs to my dear friend and former colleague, Reyes García. The Garcías originally migrated to this area from north-central New Mexico, from the region around San Juan Pueblo, in the 1850s. Built with adobe bricks taken from the nearby riverbanks, the threefoot-thick walls keep the house cool in summer and warm in winter when the two woodstoves are well stoked. The scent of juniper burning on a winter day, an intoxication that draws one out of the body, is unforgettable.

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Working A hawk’s ragged wing will grow whole again, but so will not a poet’s. —Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, June 15, 1852

As you may have guessed, I am a gringo, and though these surroundings continually entrance, I am often jealous of the deep personal history that my friend and other nearby workers and farmers share with this land. I cannot inherit its history or beauty, only use them for inspiration, although I have often felt this was a home for me, and more importantly, a home for the poetic imagination. There have been times here when I haven’t spoken for days. Surrounded by animals, mountains, and trees, I am continually astonished by their almost brooding presence, and from this place words float up, veiled in a kind of otherness. In the nearby town of Antonito, I am as conspicuous as a deer walking down Main Street. Once in Kelloff’s, the tiny grocery store, I approached the meat counter in hopeless anticipation that there might be fish of some miraculous variety. It was a warm spring day and the west winds off the San Juans were blowing right through the store. While I perused that glass case containing all its slaughtered shades of red, the boy working behind the counter was flirting with a cute Chicana who’d just bought some carne adobade. Dumbfounded when asked what I wanted, I lied and asked for a piece of butcher paper in order to write my shopping list. I walked out to my Jeep and scribbled the following poem on the torn white paper and drove, foodless and happy, the five dusty miles home. Written on a Piece of Butcher Paper I think the body writes itself beyond. The calf sleeps in warm spring light chorused with blackbird trills. And when I enter your body you birth me you sing. Stars bleed crystal into a night sky: Heart, this great sponge of emotion. It shunts and pulls the days

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where a found stone sleeps like a fool’s kiss. I am your fresh slaughter of spring grass, blue rivers veining the earth. I remember touching bodies of water, opening a dress of fire that went on walking before me and that would never close. Now you are the sweet fast darkness of a church where I enter on a hot day. “Backstraps of loin are best.” The customers couldn’t believe it: I love you written in lipstick hanging on the torn air. She was the checkout girl, he the boy with blood on his apron.

Silence There is an awesome silence here, one that undoes and recomposes the mind. By “silence” I mean the absence of man-made sounds. There is also an overwhelming sense of stillness. By “stillness” I mean the sense of repose that things, people, animals have within themselves. But there is also a silence imposed by the nearness of death, for death is one source of silence, and among so many animals living close to the earth, death is always near. I have always believed that the deeper connections between humans and animals lie in silence, that field upon which we, they, issued our first groans and cries, and that language, though evolved from silence, rarely seems capable of achieving the physicality that accompanies the coyotes’ howl into the distance, a distance occasionally touched by only the highest music of humans. According to Max Picard, “The silence of animals and nature would not be so great and noble if it were merely a failure of language to materialize.” If anything, finally I have begun to learn a language of silence from the animals in order to understand that pause and interval are also a part of the howl. I come here to write poetry. Poetry is heart music composed upon a field of silence, and because death is one of the sources of silence in poetry, I’m reminded of a haunting and brilliant poem by Goethe:

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Wanderer’s Nightsong II On all the hilltops there is peace, in all the treetops you can hear hardly a breath. Birds in the woods are silent. Just wait, soon you too will rest. (Trans. Mark Irwin)

Time May 9, dusk. The year doesn’t matter, for it could be any year in the last decade. Time changes little here in spring, though light and space do. Fields green with runoff. Blackbirds nest, chortling in the meadow. Frogs, having crawled from the mud, thrum and thwang with all their existence. Spring changes time, skews it with sudden greening and proliferation of space. And spring skews the mind, makes it fall in love with nothing, everything—makes us feel eternal. I walk 300 yards down the gravel drive. Venus glows in the west as if it alone had sucked all the day’s remaining shell of light. I walk toward the cattle pen in the south meadow and begin to climb the giant hay bales. They are stacked eight high, each bale about three feet tall. In autumn, from a distance, these bales stand like a ruined Troy. Now I lie atop them, shirtless, and stare into the night sky. Below, I can hear mice peeping in the straw; above, the juiced light of the Milky Way seems the wing of something beyond. Cygnus, long-necked in the slow black, floats south. Vega, high above, shines in Lyra, and on the southeast horizon, Antares, red, glares in Scorpius just lifting her hooked stinger (Shaula) above the horizon. The pupils of my eyes soak up the darkness as the space of my vision becomes that of the sky. Distance vanishes and I flinch as shooting stars seem to come within inches. I am surrounded by everything and nothing.

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Memory Besides the uncompromising beauty and serenity of this place, there is another reason that I keep coming back. The extreme isolation, often too much for the occasional visitor, forces one to confront him- or herself. There is no phone, no television, and the nearest town, Antonito, population 900, is about five miles away. I go there occasionally to call my family. This confrontation of self as a result of isolation allows me to read and write more deeply than I ever have. Often the most vague memories present themselves, and with them, various streams of emotion. Memory and imagination are the primary forms of entertainment here.


December 12, 1998. I arrive at three o’clock in the afternoon after a five-hour drive from Denver. (My normal stay varies from three days to a few weeks, depending on my teaching schedule.) The fields are bleached a pale yellow and the sky is losing its color and heat fast. Cows linger along the drive. The Sangres, snowcapped, catch and volley their purples and golds. In the distance one small cloud hovers ghostlike over Blanca Peak. My father died unexpectedly on November 12. I spoke to him for the last time, long-distance, on November 11 while he was in the hospital. As we spoke, Alexander Borodin’s “Dance of the Maidens,” from The Polovtsian Dances, began to play on the radio. It is an ethereal, almost transparent melody, and now, whenever I hear it, it seems to come from very high and very far away. I unpack my Jeep and start a fire in the living room where I can see my breath. I go to the kitchen and open a can of cat food and, walking out onto the porch, tap the spoon against the can and whistle for Rio, one of the stray cats I saved once from coyotes. When she wanders in from the field, I am overcome with joy. From the living room window, I watch her eat ravenously, and then I sit down to eat my own dinner. Suddenly I begin sobbing uncontrollably, unusually overcome by the isolation and my father’s death. I gather my belongings and drive back to Denver. I will have spent ten hours in the car.




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May 23, 1999. Eight o’clock in the evening. De la terre, je connais que la surface. Je l’ai embrassée. Of the earth, I know only the surface. I have embraced it. —André du Bouchet

Reyes arrived this afternoon, and at dark, because the mosquitoes are so bad this year, we don our hip-length irrigation boots and head out into the fields, into the acequia madre, the mother water, the runoff from the nearby mountains. I love saying the Spanish words, feeling through their assonant syllables the water sink into the earth the way our boots do now into the mud. We walk toward the north meadow near the dirt road where one of the larger ditches has been clogged with deadfall lodged in a culvert pipe. Water has backed up three feet deep as we wade through a pond and the skeletal constellations of stars—dead heroes, animals, lovers. Reyes pulls a large branch out of the culvert and we fall in the now swift current, laughing as the heavens sweep through our hands. The end of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus suddenly reminds of our fleeting glimpse of identity: And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am. (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Death, water, and the night trace us with stars.

Poems In this spacious valley surrounded by mountains, and between each slow flash we call day—and its absence, night—I often sense there is no time, only a kind of shivering eternity, as one occasionally glimpses in poems. Words come easily to me here, and if it weren’t for the bawling of calves and deep moans of cattle, the darting swallows and the distant chortling of blackbirds, I would tell you it’s all a kind of sleep lit by a world lost.




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September 9, 1999. The temperature is 70 degrees. Beneath billowy cumulus clouds, the yellow cottonwoods, tall and still full, slowly exhale their brilliant colors against the blue sky. I am walking in the west meadow (a wetland of interconnected ponds drained by the Conejos River) toward the boneyard, a place where ranchers drag dead cattle, sometimes burying them in pits, other times laying them in arroyos where scavengers pick their bones. Because it’s autumn, there are only a few carcasses, skulls, vertebrae, and the occasional loose bones of the ribcage. I come here each time in awe. A light rain begins to fall and then the sky clears again. The nut-ripe scent of leaves is rich with dying, and I think of my father. Before closing a tight gate I trim some wood off an aspen fence pole and nick my hand. I can smell in my blood all the scents of this meadow. Later, outdoors, I write this poem: Asking They asked a dying man if life was everything. He said yes. They asked a young man if love was everything. He said yes. “But we only live through love,” they said. They were like a cloud and spoke as though they’d been here before. “Please,” he said. “One more day, week, year.” I remember the happiness I felt when the knife-blade slipped on my finger in the open field. The smell of blood, rain, earth. I saw the wild iris’s sheer violet silk in the late sunlight and I knew. I saw the cows bowed to the wet earth and wild timothy, shagging the flames of their tails, and I knew these things were true, outside, beyond the moment the way the wings of the swallows blown sheer gauze in the light seem beyond the sheer body of sky, or how a place remembered with a friend is lifted beyond all maps when that friend is gone. Memory is beautifully static, and yet we move while life and its events arrive lifted in a sudden wind, or are held there unnoticed, arranging themselves into a bouquet. In this way eternities pass until we are gone and happy and in want of nothing.

November 13, 1999. Three o’clock in the afternoon. No clouds. Sky held fast by the fading yellow earth. Hay bales scattered across the fields, ruins of some impossible city. My father’s been dead exactly a year.

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I walk out into the north meadow where I begin collecting, dragging deadfall. I light a fire whose color seems all hidden in the greater fall of yellow, ochre things. I take off my shirt and begin dragging more and more limbs—aspen, cedar, piñon. Five o’clock. The fire blazes in the open field; its enormous orange ripens against the paling dusk sky. I stand, its maker, facing it. I am its captor, but how quickly that could change in a wind. The flames’ orange tongues reach higher than I am tall. The fire is all estrus, and I can feel the presence of invisible beings, ghosts from afar, come to push their muzzles into the flames, to talk the endless talk of longing and departure in the fast, ripe light. Only the night will free them.


May 13, 2000. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The cottonwoods have leafed out and García Lane is arched within their green. Rising and falling, blackbirds roost in the south meadow. Their chortles and cackles are fresh and cold as the acequia madre that flows through our ditches. I sit outdoors within the house’s U-shaped portico and read the first line from Rilke’s “Eighth Duino Elegy”: “Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the open.” As I read, swallows (golondrinas) rise and fall, their rush of feathers only feet from my head. They are carrying mud from the ponds, from the riverbanks, from the ditches, building their mud nests, cone-shaped between the porch ceiling and the blue vigas. I have sat still like this for almost two hours, hoping they would come. They have, and there are moments when I shut my eyes in the wind of their braked arrival that I glimpse the music of their flight. Evening and I stare toward the west, everything green now haloed in an enormous and invisible flame. Spring, the dusk of it slowly extinguishing in the cool, watery air. Stars, faint, begin to connect their dots. Frogs banjo from the meadow. The swallows’ dark paths become indistinguishable except by their audible swoops, and I listen with eyes to an Invisible I can almost touch.

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Where Form Meets Flux: Soft Eyes and Boulder’s Four Cardinal Directions JAMES LOUGH

B O U L D E R I S M Y H O M E T O W N , but I don’t feel at home there anymore. Something has packed up and left, something wild— not in the nature, but in the people—something that was untamed and experimental. I was only a child during Boulder’s swinging Sixties. But I remember it vividly. The wildest thing I remember was a natural phenomenon: the violent windstorm of January 1969. Wind funneled down through Boulder Canyon at speeds up to 160 miles per hour and blasted the city. It peeled the roof right off our next-door neighbors’ house and sent it crashing into ours. It knocked our six-foot wooden fence over and smashed my swing set flat. We took our neighbors in to spend the night. We all slept—or more likely couldn’t sleep—in our unfinished basement to the wail of the wind and the weeping of Mrs. Springer over the loss of her house. And I remember, that night, looking up at the 138

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mountains and seeing bright orange flames. The mountains were on fire, those very bastions of permanence and solidity and power were burning! To an eight-year-old boy, there could be nothing more exciting than that night. But Boulder’s wildness back in the Sixties wasn’t limited to nature. I remember riding down Broadway toward Central Park with my mother and my aunt in our 1966 Dodge Coronet. “My gosh,” my aunt exclaimed, “there’s a woman with her blouse off!” Sure enough, talking on a pay phone with her suntanned back toward us stood a lithe blonde wearing only bell-bottoms. As we passed her, she turned in our direction. She had no breasts. She was a man! “With that hair? It’s got to be a wig!” This was the first longhaired man any of us had ever seen, and it threw us all into cognitive dissonance. We couldn’t stop talking about it. I remember visiting the student union on the CU campus with my mother. The tables in the cafeteria had been pushed aside, and people were dancing to unbelievably loud rock and roll music. Bruce Babcock, a friend of my mother’s—a person my family actually knew!—was dancing wildly—even though his hair was still short—swinging his arms and shaking his head so violently that his black plastic eyeglasses flew off his face and skittered across the floor. I remember riding in the car on the Hill, next to the campus, and seeing a shopkeeper standing guard on the sidewalk outside his store. He was holding a shotgun, protecting his property from hippie rioters and looters. It’s not as if these sorts of events weren’t happening elsewhere in Colorado during the Sixties, but they happened with distinctive intensity in Boulder. To a boy not yet ten years old, it was all pure excitement. Even I could feel that things were changing, though I couldn’t say how— or in what direction. But energy was in the air. It was unmistakable. And along with all the wildness came the spiritual seekers. Boulder was beautiful enough, and close enough to nature, to attract earnest hippie pilgrims from all over the country, pilgrims seeking a guru, seeking truth in nature, seeking satori, that single, grand-scale mystical experience that would transform their lives once and for all. On through the Seventies, and right up into the twenty-first century, Boulder’s spiritual

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entrepreneurs have sharpened the seekers’ hunger with a Whitman’s Sampler of alternative religions. They range from the tawdry and fly-by-night, like Eckankar, the science of soul travel, or the thoroughly innovative, like the Divine Madness long-distance runner’s club, to the ancient tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, whose local Rinpoche, or master, was hand-picked by the Dalai Lama to represent its venerable legacy in the United States. Seekers of all stripes—the serious, the whimsical, and the wounded—convened in Boulder, where spiritual paths converged like tracks in a Chicago rail yard. And they haven’t stopped. Boulder is still seen by many as a unique spiritual hub, a sacred spot, not unlike Sedona, Taos, or Big Sur. And it’s not hard to understand why. Boulder is beautiful. Its charm is undeniable. To the west loom the Flatirons—dramatically steep, pine-draped mountains against which lean dozens of enormous, nearly vertical slabs of sandstone and granite. In addition, several ecosystems overlap at Boulder, providing it with a unique and varied mélange of flora and fauna. Despite the encroachment of industry, primarily high-tech, it holds onto its college-town feeling with a lovely campus that sports Italian Renaissance halls built from the local red sandstone. Boulderites are very aware of their city’s charm. They are provincially proud of it, and determined to keep it as charming as possible. Around twenty years ago, the city passed a “greenbelt” law forbidding developers from buying up much of the pristine land at its fringes and covering it with cookie-cutter suburban houses. And regulations limiting the size and glitter of business signs prevent the town from looking like Denver, its sprawling metropolitan neighbor. Boulder’s older houses are, for the most part, rustic Victorian. As stone is plentiful in the area, many of them are made from it, which adds an old European feel to some of its neighborhoods. Here and there, a house has been built entirely of smooth, round stones gathered from mountain streambeds. Tourists visit Boulder and immediately want to move there. Its charm, its aura, its vibration seem to whisper promises. Simply by living there, a person might find happiness, health, and holiness. Just by breathing its air. But all this promise puts subtle pressures on the town and its residents. There is a dark side to Boulder’s transcenden-

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talism. In a town where you’re supposed to be happy, there’s something wrong with you if . . . there’s something wrong. If you insist that everything’s okay when, in fact, it is not, then your shadow, your repository of repressed negative feelings, begins to grow. Take very basic human fallibility, which of course exists everywhere in the world, and add it to Boulder’s unique atmosphere of spiritual aspiration, and you get an atmosphere that can be harshly judgmental. For example, to be overweight in Boulder, according to its unspoken brand of New Age Puritanism, is a sign of spiritual shortcoming. To eat meat is regressive, a biological throwback, and to a smoke a cigarette is to invite being slapped with a healthy fine. A city law bans smoking in any establishments open to the public, even in bars, which seems to me like banning reading in libraries. And charm doesn’t come cheap. Because Boulder is beautiful, it has become a haven not only for spiritual aspirants, but also for the rich. Real estate prices are absurdly high, ruling out most homebuyers except for the white upper middle-class and higher, educated and rosy-cheeked from lots of leisure time and exercise in the clean mountain air. Like most anywhere, there have always been rich people in Boulder, but they came in waves during the Reagan era. Around 1980, I was a junior in college at CU. I and most of my friends still looked back to the Sixties and Seventies for our values, our hairstyles (or deliberate lack thereof), and our faded blue jeans, ragged flannel shirts, and beatup hiking boots. We listened to country-rock bands with names like Firefall, The Eagles, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage—bands whose reputations had flourished in Boulder in the Seventies when Caribou recording studio was up in Nederland. But around 1980, everything changed. A sudden influx of alien freshmen poured into the school. The boys wore khaki pants, buttondown oxfords and Sperry Topsiders. The girls wore plaid, knee-grazing skirts, pastel sweaters, and ankle-high duck shoes. These preppies weren’t majoring in philosophy or poli sci or environmental studies; they were in business school. They listened to cheery, poppy New Wave music— bands with names like The Cars, Blondie, and Pet Shop Boys. These college students were Republicans. They actually liked Reagan. I would

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like to believe that they saw us as dinosaurs, as throwbacks. But the fact was, they didn’t see us at all. They paraded onto campus as if it belonged to them. And in a few years, it did. This proved to be the harbinger of a bigger change in Boulder. Not long after the moneyed students arrived on campus, the moneyed adults also discovered our town. As Boulder’s reputation spread, it attracted the burgeoning high-tech industries. The technocrats, at their salaries, could easily afford to buy the quaint houses. And as more and more techies arrived, the real estate prices rose ever upward. The flavor of Boulder had changed. It was no longer as fashionable to live like Thoreau and learn Buddhist meditation. It was now fashionable to own a BMW. This isn’t to say that the spiritual seekers were pushed out, though by now, most of the real Bohemians were gone. Since the majority of the new, materialistic settlers (and the native converts) were Boomers, they had already gotten a taste of the spiritual revolution during the Sixties. And many of them still yearned for something nonmaterial to help put it all into perspective. So they became Buddhists in three-piece suits. Now, instead of riding their old ten-speed bikes to the ashram, they drive their Lexuses. Boulder’s native wildness had been domesticated. The town, once dubbed by Newsweek as the place “where the hip meet to trip,” had become thoroughly bourgeois. Now, Boulder’s only notoriety comes from its police department’s inept bungling of the JonBenet Ramsey case. For many, what once was feverish, passionate, spiritual experimentation has now become puritanical dogma. So, Boulder is my hometown, but I don’t feel at home there anymore. In fact, I find that every time I visit the city from my home in Denver, I enter it with a chip on my shoulder and an inclination toward dripping irony, which, if not antithetical to the flow of my own spirit, certainly plants a log squarely in my eye. No doubt, I have projected many of my own dark feelings upon Boulder. Many of the city’s qualities that I resist were my own qualities when I used to live there. Visiting Boulder now is like looking into a mirror image of myself twenty years before: my unhappiness and self-distrust, which led to my grasping for spiritual vision, and to compensate, my smugness about living in this self-styled mecca of the New Age.

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But let’s leave twenty-first century Boulder and travel back in time. Before the technocratic Yuppies arrived in Boulder, before the spiritual seekers, before even the prospectors of silver and gold, the high-plains area around Boulder belonged to the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, both Plains peoples who followed the bison. According to a local legend, when the gold and silver prospectors arrived from the east, the Arapaho chief Niwot gave them permission to mine in the hills. But Niwot insisted that the greedy white men make a promise: once they took their rocks from out of the mountains, they would then leave the area for good. The miners quickly agreed to the promise, took their rocks and . . . stayed for good. In response, Niwot put a curse on all people who came to Boulder: no matter how hard they tried to leave the area, they would always come back. “Once you gaze upon the beauty of the valley, you will never be happy anywhere else.” And, in truth, it has always seemed difficult for Boulderites to leave their fair city and stay away permanently. They may move to California or New Mexico, but they manage to find a reason to come back. They try out city life in Denver, but, as the legend has it, they always seem to return to Boulder. Without a doubt, the Boulder Valley is enchantingly beautiful. It has a palpable energy about it, a spirit. You can feel it, especially when walking in the mountains to the west or wandering the scrubby foothills to the north and south of town, hills that are studded with sage and yucca. The grasslands to the east, home to thousands of prairie dogs and the eagles and hawks that feed on them, have a similar feeling. The wilderness around Boulder has a feeling of lightness that is somehow allied to its beauty. A Buddhist friend of mine once speculated the following: great tectonic force, over millions of years, pushed the massive Flatirons from a horizontal stone floor up into the thousand-foot pillars that they are today. This same force continues to surge fountainlike up toward the sky, infusing the place with upwardmoving earth energy—lightness, levity, and spiritual grace.


Throughout all three Americas, the collection of peoples whom we call the Native Americans shared remarkably similar worldviews, or

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cosmologies. Of course, there were differences. Different local spirits represented different crops, animals, or deities indigenous to each location. But all Native American religions, as far as I am aware, share a fundamental reverence for Grandmother Earth, which they divide into four quarters, the four cardinal directions. North, South, West, and East are more than arrows on a map to the Natives. They are forces of nature, each possessing its own singular qualities and powers, that give us our bearings—physically and spiritually—in life. Surrounding Boulder stand four distinct geological landmarks that I have always believed to be, in the local cosmos, its four cardinal points. In the Indian cosmology, they would each represent certain qualities. In November, I decide to take a pilgrimage of sorts, a tour of these four cardinal sites. I start with the north at Haystack Mountain. Between earth and sky sits the anomaly of Haystack. On the plane-smooth prairie, it rises suddenly like a bell curve. It’s humble by local standards, a yucca-dotted knoll near the foothills, but it’s the tallest hill east of the mountains, and it offers a spacious view of the entire Boulder Valley. In spite of the farms, ranches, and even suburbs surrounding it, Haystack retains its autonomy, its modest desert dignity. When I arrive at the base of the hill, a hard, cold wind is blowing. The four o’clock sun, low in the sky, hits the earth sidelong, lighting up the tassels atop tall stalks of grass. They look like a thousand flames floating at my knees, dotting the gentle grade up the hill. The wind has cleaned the air, leaving it extraordinarily clear. Above the shadowy Flatirons to the west, a jetliner has scratched a bright, salmon trail against the pale, gray-blue sky. It’s but a few minutes before the high winds scatter the jet trail. Although most of the birds and animals have moved on for the winter, there are signs of life everywhere. Occasionally, I find spots where the tall grass has been mashed down in clusters, spots where groups of deer have lain down for the night. There’s dried deer scat everywhere. But right in the center of this rest stop for deer, I find the scat of another animal. I’ve never seen scat like it, striated and twisted, shaped into a flattened C, and comprising mainly, it seems, some kind of undigested fur. A piece of bone, half as big as my thumb, sits lodged

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in the furry remains. Before it was chewed to pieces, this had been a big, sturdy bone, and it was eaten by a large animal. The only predator I can imagine visiting this area is a mountain lion. It had caught and eaten a deer, I guessed, and then had passed it out again right in the middle of deer territory, as if to leave a message. The thought of a cougar roaming around here prompts a surge of nervous excitement. Above me, a big, dark hawk hovers, suspended over Haystack’s summit. Facing the wind, the hawk pumps its wings hard merely to stay in the same spot. All of a sudden, a spot-bellied Flicker bursts out of a brambly stand of bushes that winter has stripped of leaves. The woodpecker blusters erratically away, showing its orange underwings. I hike toward the top of Haystack. The wind is blowing so hard at my back that it actually helps carry me up the hill. At the summit, I gaze out at the Flatirons to the west, and then turn and survey the tawny prairies in all other directions. Below Haystack, big, bare cottonwoods line the dry streambeds winding through the valley. To the northeast, Haystack’s own pointed shadow cleaves into a farmer’s patch like a wedge. I bend down and pluck dime-sized white balls of fluff that flutter like banners from the branch tips of some bushes scattered around the summit. They are the tiny down feathers from hawks and eagles that have landed here. Some of the sandstone has been spattered with chalky bird shit, lavish streaks of it that no doubt came from big birds. Because the wind makes it hard to stay balanced up here, I start back down Haystack, taking a different way, along the stony bed of a rivulet. I notice, at the foot of a yucca plant, a deep hole, just big enough to slip my closed fist into. A canny prairie dog has dug his nest right at the base of the yucca’s saberlike spines, which would sting any big hawk diving down to pluck the rodent from its burrow. I also find, in sharp contrast against the red-brown dirt, the bleached white skull of a prairie dog. A good sign, though exactly why, I don’t know. I drop the skull into my coat pocket. Rumor says that it’s possible to find arrowheads—Arapaho or Cheyenne—around this hill. When I was six or seven, I visited this spot with my Cub Scout troop and a couple of den mothers. No one found any arrowheads, but the place struck me anyway, this odd, bristly bump

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rising out of the ground. Haystack Mountain became a totem to me, a symbol of something hard to articulate, something to do with stateliness despite small stature. North, or tonal to the Natives, is the domain of the mind. But not the mind as we’re accustomed to thinking of it. Not the active, curious, rational mind of western European heritage. To the Native Americans, the mind is an organ of reception, a kind of antenna set to receive subtle impulses from the world, from what we call the unconscious and they call the spirit world. In the Native cosmology, the stars in the night sky are associated with the North. Not the stars of our astronomers, as Walt Whitman speaks of in his poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” Not the stars that we regiment into charts, columns, and diagrams. Whitman left the arid astronomy lecture to take a walk “in the mystical moist night-air.” Occasionally, he “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” When the mind is silenced, it becomes more than an astonishing computer. It becomes a receiver to the cosmos. And Soft Eyes is one of the fastest ways I know of to open the mind this way. The Indians also associate the North with a particular plant: sweetgrass, a yellow-green prairie grass that grows wiry and high. Burn a braid of dried sweetgrass, and its smoke will carry your prayer to the stars. The smell of burning sweetgrass has always given me a feeling of déjà vu that I have never been able to explain. Soft Eyes is a skill taught in many traditions, including the Native American. Soft Eyes opens us up and enables us to feel the energies within ourselves, and also to feel the unmistakable, upward-moving energy of the earth. This simple eye exercise instantly expanded my awareness. The practice of Soft Eyes eases us back from the hard, focused gaze. In modern times, we use our eyes primarily by focusing them. We narrow our gaze onto an object centered in our field of vision. We are trained to limit our vision to the confines of a book’s page, or the screen of a computer or a television. For lack of a better term, I call this skill Hard Eyes. This rifle-scope ability to focus our vision has borne us many fruits. With such a searching, focused gaze, we have learned to identify an object visually by discerning it from the objects around it.

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From this basic visual identification, we then begin to divide and to classify. “A” is not “B,” and “B” is not “C.” And with the powers to divide and classify, we acquire the power to control. Modern Western civilization gives privilege to the visual sense over the other four. “Seeing is believing.” The hard, focused gaze, with its powers to divide and classify, has helped make possible the Western world’s material abundance. Without the focused gaze’s powers of close observation, we could not have developed the scientific method. We could not have wrestled as much control over nature as we now enjoy— our abilities to erect enormous, climate-controlled buildings, to warm ourselves in winter, to bring light to the night, to talk instantly with people on other continents, to observe infinitely distant galaxies as if they were floating right in front of us. The focused gaze has also enabled the Western world, with its sophisticated technology, to expand its empire and control the New World. During the Renaissance, such “hard-eyed” optical tools as the telescope and the sextant enabled the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English to master the seas. And it’s all too easy for “divide and classify” to become “divide and conquer.” Focused vision is power and control. Unflinching, it can stare a person down. Like a guided missile, it can zero in on its target. It can seek and destroy. But the hard, focused gaze also tends to cut people off from their surroundings and context, not to mention their feelings and spirit. An acutely focused pair of eyes draws a person’s attention into the head and away from the heart or the gut. Native American shamans train themselves not to over-rely on the focused gaze. If you practice Soft Eyes well, you are able to look in three of the four cardinal directions at once. For example, when, from the summit of Haystack Mountain, I face Boulder with Soft Eyes, I should also be able to see the Flatirons to the west, the prairies to the east, and straight ahead to the south, the entire town of Boulder. To practice Soft Eyes is to relax the concentrated, controlled gaze. Soft Eyes loosens the focus and lets in the peripheral vision. Suddenly, you begin to notice what’s around you as much as what sits directly in front of you. You not only see your computer screen, but, to your left, the painting on the wall; above you, the crease where wall meets ceiling;

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below, your lap; and to your right, the venetian blinds on the window. What the gaze has lost in visual depth—the perspective that Renaissance painters were first to recognize and depict in their paintings—it has gained in breadth. As a matter of fact, Soft Eyes is just the kind of vision required to find the secret picture in the “Magic Eyes” section of the Sunday funny pages. Some people have trouble with this exercise. In order to find the hidden picture, you must relax your focused vision. You must stop your eyes’ active searching for the hidden picture, stop peering around and inspecting the page. Instead, you must simply steady your gaze and allow it to naturally widen. Then you will see the secret picture as it suddenly levitates out of the perplexing dots and swirls of color. The next stage in my pilgrimage takes me south of Boulder. As far as I know, the high point that borders Boulder’s southern edge has no name. It is a giant, grassy plateau that stretches almost a mile from the Rockies on the west toward the prairies in the east. In the valley below the plateau runs a gulch lined by trees and clusters of homes constituting the tiny town of Eldorado Springs. This is where, some twenty years ago, we used to drive for water. We lugged our dozen or so one-gallon jugs to the hose that siphoned the fresh, delicious glacial water up from the springs. After we had taken our fill, we stuffed a few dollars into a coffee can as a donation. Now, of course, the water is commercially bottled and sold at grocery stores. You can buy custom dispensers in the “Floral” or the “Southwest” designs. From where I stand above Eldorado, an irrigation ditch, its high bank flattened into a dirt road, snakes along counter to the gulch. The bare valley is dotted with an occasional long-needled pine. Not much would distinguish this sage-strewn bluff from the gentle hills surrounding it, if it weren’t for the mini-Stonehenge that sits on top of it, a stone’s throw from Highway 93. These ruins are the foundation of an old restaurant, The Matterhorn, which burned down in the Sixties. Rumor has it that the restaurant’s owner set the fire himself for the insurance money. Now all that remains are ten or twelve rough, jagged pillars rising from the concrete foundation, pillars of concrete studded with chunks of local sandstone. They look eerie, otherworldly, not unlike the natural rock formations, eroded by water and wind, that

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you might see at Bryce Canyon in Utah, or at California’s Mono Lake. On one of the stone pillars, someone has sprayed in green paint, “The Dream Goes On & On.” Other than a hawk that took wing as I approached, I see few signs of wildlife on this southern bluff, maybe because too many barbed-wire fences are stitched along it, maybe because it’s so close to the highway. The only scat I find belongs to the cows that graze these fields. But remnants of humanity abound. Among the bits of sandstone and quartz in the restaurant’s ruins, I find shards of old brown crockery shadowed by scorch marks. Something resembling an old, white clothes dryer is lying on its side. It has been riddled with .22 holes. At this southern edge of Boulder, I’m reminded of sage, the plant associated with the South. Any Native American peoples who lived around sage regarded it as sacred. They believe that if someone wafts the smoke of sage around your body, it will help protect you. The South, to the Native Americans, is the realm of protection, where the qualities of trust and innocence are allowed to grow and thrive without fear of being violated. The South is the domain of children, of unstilted emotion. We can pray to the South to keep us supple inside, childlike, to prevent us from ossifying into something hard, certain, cynical—or just emotionally frozen. These are adulthood’s spiritual perils. I have decided that, to the west, Boulder’s cardinal landmark must be Bear Mountain. When viewed from the city, Bear is a classic peak, its pine-covered slopes rising sharply to a pointed top. A steep trail winds up Bear Mountain through dense pine forests and around massive granite boulders. The hike takes two or three hours and is difficult. The peak’s summit is an imposing granite nipple. To get to Bear Mountain, you start on the Mesa Trail, which winds along Boulder’s foothills at the foot of the Flatirons. I remember when I was six or seven, my father and I would walk up to the Mesa Trail. We always helped each other through the same barbed-wire fence. And then we would hike up the side of a foothill to its top and search for the plaque. The metal plaque, if I remember correctly, was embedded in a small, concrete block placed near the top of the hill. It read something like “Future Site of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.” This seemed ominous to me, a promise of important things to come.

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And indeed, for more than twenty-five years now, NCAR has stood, a Modernist citadel atop Table Mesa, almost blending in, as if it were another Flatiron. It was on these trails that my father taught me to pull a piece of tall grass from the ground, suck on its white root, and taste the sweetness. It was on these trails that we encountered the million-gallon water tank, shaped like a gigantic aspirin. He showed me how, when we tossed pebbles at its steel surface, it would make a strange, metallic “peeeowng” sound, which, even now, I find fascinating. It was on these trails that I let my imagination run wild with thoughts of elves and goblins who lived in these woods, woods that were dry and crackly in summer, but which, in spring, positively flourished with elephant-leaved plants and huge, bushy ferns, and the quick, gurgling gush of little creeks running off the peaks’ snowy summits. And yet, I’ve always had a spotty rapport with Bear Mountain. To me, it’s never been the friendliest. There is something vaguely menacing about it, unlike Green Mountain, its gentler sister. Local hikers swarm up to the top of Green Mountain, but not nearly as many people choose to climb Bear Mountain. More than once, I’ve set out to climb it and failed. Either the weather turned bad, or something else got between the summit and me. It’s as if Bear Mountain has a spell over me. During my last attempt, about a month ago, the hike started well enough. From the Mesa Trail, I forked away onto Bear Creek Trail. The new trail’s character was immediately different. While the Mesa Trail was mostly well-trod brown earth, free of stones, the Bear Creek trail was bright red in color, loaded with clay. And it was clotted with rocks, more challenging to the ankles. And the trail edged along a cliff some 200 feet high. However, seeing the Flatirons from the side was worth the trouble. They’re even more imposing in cross-section. You see how massively thick they are, and sense the unfathomable, abiding force it took to break these slabs apart like soda crackers and lift them vertically. As I stood dwarfed beneath their edges, they hung there above me in the silence, neither comforting nor menacing. Not even indifferent. Half an hour later, after fretfully hopping no less than fifteen times across Bear Creek, swollen beyond its banks with spring runoff, balancing myself gingerly on slick river stones and fallen tree branches, I

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finally realized that I was on the wrong trail. I had feared it all along, waiting for the trail to switchback up the mountain, but I had stubbornly pushed on. By the time I admitted my mistake, it was already two o’clock, the sky had turned slate gray, and a wind was whipping up. I didn’t have time to backtrack and find the right trail, so I turned back. Bear Mountain had defeated me again. It was a disappointing, damned hike, and I left the trail in a bitter mood, convinced that time was better spent in front of the television than in nature. In spite of that, I did take something home with me that afternoon. I realized why I prefer to hike alone. Any time I hike, either alone or with other people, at some stage of the journey, usually when it starts to get strenuous, my shadow rises to the surface. Hard feelings and dark thoughts boil up into consciousness. I wonder why in God’s name I ever wanted to climb this mountain in the first place. I think about turning back. I grow cranky and judgmental, of myself and anything else in my path. If I’m hiking alone, I can deal with the shadow well enough just by letting the gloomy thoughts well up and watching them pass. It may not be pleasant, but it’s manageable. But when I’m with other people, it’s all too easy to sling all of my inner mud upon my fellow travelers and use them as scapegoats for my own dark feelings. If someone else is leading the hike, at their own natural pace, and it doesn’t match my own, then I’m always catching up or slowing down. I’m always adjusting to someone else, which forces my mind to compare. And comparing breeds judgment, and judgment breeds scorn and condemnation. As Sartre so candidly put it, “Hell is other people.” But this is the complaint of a narcissist whose solipsistic reality tunnel has been invaded. The last time I actually succeeded in reaching Bear Mountain’s summit was with a friend on a summer afternoon. The summit was swarming with flies, and we could not stay long. We foolishly decided to take a shortcut down its east slope. Both of us fell. I flew eight feet down off the top of a boulder whose top was blanketed with dried pine needles, making it as slick as ice. My companion slipped on the needle-covered earth and twisted his knee pretty badly. He found a makeshift walking stick and proceeded to limp and swear roughly all the way down the mountain.

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The West, to the Natives, is the province of death and transformation. “Walk with death,” shamans say. “Keep death as your constant advisor.” There are many ways to walk with death. One way is to continuously remember that death is always near. All cultures know this. In the European tradition, this notion was called memento mori, or remembrance of death. A scholar might have kept a human skull on his desk. Medieval kings kept a jester, or fool, and one of the fool’s symbols was the skull—often posted at the end of his mock scepter. One of the fool’s jobs was to remind the king that he, like the miller, the butcher, and the whore, would inevitably die. The idea was to keep the king humble, to keep him thinking in the long term, to keep him from growing drunk with power and making rash, cruel, or selfish decisions. Things other than flesh can die. During life, we can die emotionally, cast off old husks and discover fresh, tender selves beneath. Every time we cry, for example, something static in us has died, has yielded, has given up the ghost. Soft Eyes is one way of killing our rigid habits. Relaxing the eyes’ grip frees up the energy for other things. Often, when I practice Soft Eyes, whether alone in my room or out on a walk, I find my eyes welling with tears. I have relaxed my body, especially around the chest, and feeling rushes into my face. Sometimes the feeling is sad. It can be a little frightening, opening up this way. But opening up is crucial to emotional growth. It comes more easily to some people than others. It’s usually easier for women than for men. Conversely, we can also die emotionally by choosing to lose our trust, by hardening into bitterness or fear. But this is a slower kind of death, a death without rebirth. Likewise, the hard, focused gaze is one way of holding on tightly to yourself, of allowing what’s tender inside you to wither and die. Holding onto the hard visual focus also burns up a good deal of energy. I keep death as my advisor by consulting it whenever I make an important decision. I say to myself, “I know absolutely that one day I will die. How, on that day, will I look back on this particular decision? Will I feel that I have chosen wisely or that I slipped up?” The answer is always clear; it is usually instructs me to take the braver of the choices. Whether I always obey is another story.

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The West’s sacred plant is cedar. I have always had difficulty getting its flat needles to burn for long, but when they do, the smell is rich and piney. Here’s how to practice Soft Eyes. Let’s say you are outdoors, in the woods surrounding Bear Mountain to the west of Boulder. Straight ahead of you stands a tall, dead pine tree, its bark long since fallen off, its trunk gray and twisted with age. Now, without moving your head, let your eyes turn to the left, and find an object that is sitting at the edge of your peripheral vision. Let’s say it’s a yucca plant, with its long, threatening spikes. Again, without moving your head, move your eyes to the right and find what’s sitting there at the edge of your peripheral vision. Let’s say it’s a flat granite boulder, as tall as you are. Now, return your gaze to the object in front of you, in this case, the dead pine tree. Without moving your eyes, let your vision become aware of the object to your left—the yucca plant—and the object to your right—the granite boulder. Relax your gaze and allow all three of these objects to remain present within your field of visual awareness. Notice what happens to your vision, and to your entire body. Perhaps your shoulders will relax a little. Maybe you’ll let your belly hang out a little more than usual. Soft Eyes increases your receptivity, including receptivity to visions of the unconscious, or the spirit world. And the East, to the Natives, is the province of the vision, or dream. These two terms are more or less interchangeable. The sun rises in the East, and so appears the nagual, or the domain of the sorcerer. We pray to the East for a vision, or a dream. The plant of the east is tobacco. The Native Americans have always recognized it as a powerful substance, and use it mainly for ceremonial purposes. When Raleigh’s men brought it back to England from Virginia, they inaugurated its merely social use. Valmont Butte, at Boulder’s eastern edge, is my favorite of the four cardinal sites. This is partly because of its dramatic profile against the sky, and partly, I suppose, because it is doomed. The massive block of granite that makes up the core of this butte serves a local quarrying company nicely. The quarry has located itself at the butte’s base and is gradually shaving away at its south slope, grinding the butte’s rubble

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into gravel and cement. At the butte’s western base, not far from the big mounds of gravel, processed into varying colors and grains, sit ten or fifteen big trucks, cement mixers. The butte stands there proudly, nonetheless, like a gigantic battleship. A backbone of yellow-tinted granite stretches along its ridgeline. Nature has cracked the granite into cubelike chunks that seem stacked haphazardly, like a child’s pile of toy blocks. The butte’s sides are dirt. It looks as if some gigantic hand has spilled sand down over the high granite ridge, and the dirt has piled up the sides in steep slopes, slopes that provide a foothold for the roots of prairie grasses, cactus, and yucca. Beneath the dirt, the granite core, I would guess, reaches all the way down to the prairie floor and probably below it. Of the four cardinal sites, Valmont Butte is the most endangered by urban incursion. If I stand at the summit and face south with Soft Eyes, I can watch the continuing story of commercial development as it encounters raw nature. A half mile or so west of the butte, Boulder’s sprawling industrial park, made up of uniformly bland, rectangular, corrugated steel warehouses, inches its way toward it. To the south, what had for decades been a brick factory is now entirely gone, razed and replaced by an acre or so of naked red earth, graded smooth. It looks as though the locals now use it as a graveyard for old Christmas trees. But in spite of civilization’s approach, evidence of animal life is everywhere on the butte. At the top of the ridge, I spot one of the largest hawks I have seen in this area. We glance briefly at each other before it flies off from its rocky perch, its long, dark wings tinted red. In the dirt trail that runs between the rocks along the butte’s ridge, I find a couple of deer prints, a week or so old. Narrow deer trails wind through the mesquite bushes all over the butte’s north side. On my way down, I stumble upon the skeleton of a coyote strewn amidst the loose dirt, and scattered clumps of its coarse, ochre hair. When you practice Soft Eyes, the sheer amount of activity, or flux, that goes on within your field of vision increases dramatically. Instead of simply seeing a person approaching you on the sidewalk, you see that person coming toward you while the branches of the trees to your left sway in the breeze, while a car in the street swishes by you, while sparrows fly by overhead against a backdrop of clouds moving in the oppo-

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site direction. You apprehend it all at once, and see clearly that things in life are in a constant state of motion. This, you realize, is how life is. Things constantly move and change, and change again. Poets around the world have different names for the same phenomenon of constant change, for moments that are transient, mutable, impermanent, transitory, ephemeral. It is an age-old theme in poetry East and West. Poems about mutability are often tinged with sadness, the pang of loss. Something beautiful was here for a moment, but now it is gone. Following is an anonymous thirteenth-century English poem about mutability: Merry it is while summer lasts Wild birds sing But now approaches the wind’s blast And weather fierce Alas, alas, how this night is long! And I will feel much grief Sorrow and mourn and fast.

According to Robert Frost, the medieval poet was writing not only about the changeable weather outside, but the weather inside as well, the poet’s own unpredictable moods. The Japanese haiku, a poem of only three short lines, also emphasizes impermanence. Here is a haiku by the Japanese master Buson that catches the same flux and continual motion that can be witnessed through Soft Eyes: A heavy cart rumbles by and the peonies quiver.

But if Soft Eyes sometimes opens us up to constant flux, to the fact that things always move and change, come into our lives and pass out of them, it can also help us to let go of these things. It is not transience itself that hurts; transience is just the fundamental state of things. When something close to us is torn away, the stretching and breaking cause pain only when we try to cling to what is lost. This clinging in the face of constant change, according to the Buddha’s Second Noble

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Truth, is the root of all misery. Soft Eyes can enable us simply to watch the change without trying to build a fortress against it. Not only does your field of vision expand with Soft Eyes, so does your field of experience. The constant motion is not only outside, but also inside of you. The sparrow overhead may gently startle you, making your heart jump. The clouds may inspire feelings of awe. Because Soft Eyes has opened you up, created space inside of you, your emotions begin to move more freely, in concert with the actions around you. In fact, what’s inside of you seems deeply intertwined with what’s outside of you. Your emotions reflect the external world. Notice the word motion in emotion, how we can be “moved” by something powerful, a movie or a book or something we see on the street. With Soft Eyes, it is almost as if the unfocused gaze has wrapped around the head, and your peripheral vision has somehow entered into the domain of the ears. Eyesight and hearing seem to merge into a single, simultaneous sense. Your attention spreads more widely outside of yourself. This is the opposite of self-centeredness, of narcissism, in which one’s gaze is turned resolutely toward oneself—not at one’s deeper Self, which is introspection, but at one’s superficial self, or ego. The spiritual teacher Adi Da has defined narcissism as humankind’s central problem. In the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, our hero is so captivated by his own reflection in a pool of water that he neglects to eat or sleep and consequently dies. And this preoccupation with one’s own beauty— physical or spiritual—is a web in which many of Boulder’s spiritual pilgrims are tangled. Boulder is beautiful, and its residents are keenly aware of this. Boulderites are wealthy, educated, and often spiritually minded, and they are all too aware of this, as well. Boulder is preoccupied with its own image. It’s as if its citizens carry mirrors everywhere in order to watch themselves. The sad thing to me is this: the creative spirit really is alive in Boulder. Not always in the people, but in the earth. And that spirit does move upward out of the ground. It’s buoyant, living, playful, and graceful. It’s everything that many Boulderites, for some puzzling reason, are not. Never mind the fact that money has transformed the town for good, that the invasion of technocrats, yuppies, and well-heeled moun-

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tain jocks has turned a gritty, individualistic mining town into an antiseptic, politically correct, self-righteous, conformist spiritual Disneyland. There’s something deeper at work. There’s a tentativeness in many of these people who dream of being spiritual masters or artistic visionaries. It’s as if everyone is walking on ice. It’s as though they suspect that somebody else can see the color of their auras and know the truth about them. It’s an undercurrent of shyness, of anxiety, of inadequacy—of fear that they’ll be seen too clearly and exposed as fakes. Whenever you have a community of idealists, a good portion of them will secretly fear that they’re not living up. In the Greek myth that bears his name, the beautiful Narcissus finally sees his own reflection in a pool of water and says with surprise, “Now I know what others have suffered from me, for I burn with love of my own self—and yet how can I reach that loveliness I see mirrored in the water? I cannot leave it. Only death can set me free.” This story’s similarity to the curse of Chief Niwot is unsettling. When the whites betrayed him, he predicted that they would never leave: “Once you gaze upon the beauty of the valley, you will never be happy anywhere else.” A cosmology is a model, or a map, by which internal, or spiritual, realities are projected upon the external world. But as the cliché goes, “The map is not the territory.” Likewise, the four cardinal directions, which the Native Americans use to map their cosmos, are not absolute. One person’s North is another’s South. So what is the purpose of the cosmic map? What is the purpose of any map? To bring momentary order to a world that otherwise might seem to be in constant flux. The Renaissance astronomer Giordano Bruno wrote, “There is in the universe neither center nor circumference.” By practicing Soft Eyes, we move out of ourselves. We put down our mirrors. We remain always at the center of activity while the circumference continually widens around us. We align ourselves, remind ourselves that—north, south, east and west aside—we reside always at the center, at our own center, at the center of the universe.

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The Road Through San Luis S A N G E E TA R E D D Y

O N T H E O U T S K I R T S O F T A O S is a Hanuman temple that we heard about early during my parents’ summer visit to Denver. Not only were they intrigued that it was housed in a renovated adobe building, but that it was started solely by American devotees. So a week before we were to leave for New Mexico, when a phone call comes out of the blue from a gallery in Taos (that I had sent my slides to months ago), everyone declares it propitious, and canvases tied firmly to the roof rack of the car, we set off in great spirits. A few blinks into Fort Garland at the foot of Blanca Peak, a right turn past the “Realtor of the San Luis Valley” sign that is just crooked enough to catch your attention and make you read it, the briefest of stops at the gas station for the children to lick a couple of drippy vanilla bars, and we are headed south on state highway 159 toward Taos. 158

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We left early in the morning to take in Great Sand Dunes National Monument on the way. Of course, Prakaash fretted over the unnecessary stop and complained over the lost time, but now that we are headed south again, at about five in the evening, he drives straight as an arrow, exactly five miles over the speed limit. Impulsively, I reach over to rub his shoulders until I can feel his corded muscles untense, then I lean back into my seat to enjoy my favorite stretch of highway. As I look out my window, endless wire fences demarcate property lines. Chorus lines of gray-green Russian olive trees dividing stubbly fields rhythmically swing toward us and away again. Rows of poplars line dirt roads that disappear dustily into mounded hills. Clumps of river willows shadow ditches. Shrubby arctic willows meander in the distance, indicating stream paths, their woody canes obliterated by the pale green of a full June blur. Oceans of sagebrush curl and thicken toward the edges of the hills, which in turn, rise to just below the white mountaintops. As I look north from this vantage point, several bluishpurple mountains rise like dark bruises, straight up from the desert floor, and seem to connect in altitude with the fourteeners of the Sangre de Cristo Range that circle our view like an austere garland. Ahead, the desert skin is taut and bristly. Its thick stubble stretches over the gaunt and deeply gutted hills. Here and there, outcropping ridges of rock push through like dinosaurs emerging from stone. Their spines seem to slowly undulate as we drive through the rough countryside. It must have rained here recently. On both sides of us, tall, yellow weeds burst through cracked edges of the tarred road and wave us by with their cadmium-light banners. With the exuberance of life revisited, their seeds sprout almost overnight on disturbed land, along roads and around landfills, filling spaces between dumped car parts, doorless refrigerators, and rusty kitchen sinks. I noticed them first when the builder turned up the earth near our house and left before the landscaping was finished. Come June, the dirt lots reminded me of an unforgettable movie scene of mustard fields seen from a train speeding across the Indo-Gangetic plain. I ask Amma about it, but she doesn’t remember. Where do these millions of seeds come from, I wonder? They must be always contained in the earth, just waiting to be upturned. And here, in this subtly modulated, gray-green landscape, they seem almost

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too lush. In any case, the road crews will be out soon to mow them down and prevent the “nuisance” weeds from reseeding. To the west of the road, on this harsh, ancient land, grow some of the hardiest plants—blue sage; the tall, elegant chamisa; and the shorter, vivid clumps of rabbitbrush. Viewed up close, the sage is actually a gray-green, I tell my mother, almost silver. Seen however, in the vast repetition of a rolling boil as we pass, it has a pale bluish cast, which melts into the horizon like vapor. Now the chamisa and rabbitbrush are still fresh and green from the rain. But in the fall or late summer, they will be bleached gray, heavy with gold blossoms and flattened by the incessant wind and the weight of their own structure. Spreading endlessly before us, the desert floor is simply the rooftop of the deep canyons that are eroded from it, I tell my family. “We’ll be able to see them further up,” I say. “Like giant cracks in the earth’s floor. You wouldn’t know until you crossed over them. As if the earth simply sank into the gorge one day.” “Like Sita, Mom,” Paapa says, nudging my arm. “In the story Ammammoo told us. When the earth opens and swallows her up.” “It’s an epic,” Achyu corrects her derisively. “Not a story. Ramayaanaa. And anyway, Sita is just a girl.” Daddy is delighted. “Well, wonders never cease!” he says. “At least the children are learning something. And I thought our efforts were simply being wasted!” Now that they have joined in the conversation, I identify for the children the piñon pines and juniper, which dot the landscape in still, clumpy mounds like dark thunderclouds churned up from the soil. Among the lower hills, I point out the gashes of dark red earth between them. And to the upper parts of the hills where the trees grow so thickly they completely blanket the slopes in a densely matted pelt. And how, behind them still, with the snow mostly gone, the highest mountains rise with the sudden nakedness of freshly shorn sheep. But the children lose interest all too quickly and spend an hour rearranging the back of the station wagon. Half of what was in the back when we left Denver is now in the backseat between my mother and me. Then, tired from that enterprise, they doze heavily among the assorted bags, pillows, and blankets.

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Amma’s hands rove restlessly over nearby objects, smoothing wrinkles, touching, caressing absently, as if settling the nerves of everything around her. It’s the same effect she has on people. I think of the many times I have seen Paapa’s head sloped into her chest in sleep, when earlier she outright refused to go for an afternoon nap, before Amma’s hands stroked the irritability gently out of her. These are immutable images in my mind: Amma rocking Arjun to sleep, her veins like swollen green rivulets under turmeric-stained skin, meandering toward her incessantly moving fingertips and rippling under the drumbeat of some unheard melody that twitched constantly in her mind, but which also had the effect of calming everyone around her. Lulled by the insulated capsule of the speeding car, we watch the landscape reveal itself in full nuance. Away on the western horizon, a late afternoon thunderstorm is building. In the wide expanse of sky, the clouds look ominous but contained. Out here, storms seem to come out of nowhere, then after a fierce lashing of lightning, wind, and rain, disappear back into nowhere. Right before the rain, clouds saturate the landscape with as much intensity of color as the high noon sun seems to leach from it. The light changes continuously before our eyes. The wind has picked up, and Prakaash is having trouble keeping the car centered in the single lane when the gusts kick in. “Looks like a thunderstorm, Prakaash,” my father says just as the weather slams into us with a suddenness that catches us by surprise. He looks up from the map he has been studying in the book about Colorado, reading aloud the Spanish-sounding names, Prakaash correcting his pronunciations: “O-ho Caliente, not O-jo. J is pronounced as if it is an H. The “Luis” in San Luis is long like a long ‘ee’ in Hindi. And the S is more like Z. San Lueez. Eez.” Then, abruptly as a train entering a tunnel, everything outside is obliterated. I remember as a child, waiting for the tunnels to come, the exhilarating suddenness with which we would be swallowed by them. For just those brief moments, the absolute mind-numbing darkness inside the confined space and the echoing scream of steel wheels tearing on the polished steel track. When I was old enough to sneak into discotheques,

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I was overcome by the same sensation. Dancing to deafening rock music when the strobe light goes on, you are strung briefly into a cessation of reality as you know it and vaulted into a strange unreality you have never before encountered. Nothing matters, because no one around you has encountered it either. All of you feeling this same thing. You are conscious only of yourself, yet at the same time, you realize that this state goes beyond you. When the lights go back on, everything is normal again, though a little slower, and just a bit unreal. Here, in the San Luis Valley, surrounded by the harsh, flailing grayness of the rain, the strobelike flashes of lightning that seem to rise from the valley floor, and the amplified pelting of rain on the roof, drowning out Hemant Kumar’s plaintive song on tape, I relive those same sensations. Prakaash has slowed the car to a crawl. Between lightning flashes, all we can see through the hysterical sweep-swop of the wipers and the rain exploding against the windshield is a middle distance of gray. There is nothing beyond that. The noise of the storm awakens the children and they whine restlessly in the back. Within minutes, the windows fog up. Prakaash’s shoulders slump with frustration. He pulls the car to the edge of the road and stops, the headlights on, the wipers still going furiously. The fogged windows become surfaces to draw on, and the children spot their potential immediately. “Stop messing up the windows!” Prakaash snaps. The sharpness in his voice betrays his tiredness and impatience with the storm. But the children can barely hear him. “What is the harm? They are getting bored.” Daddy rushes to their defense. “It has been a long trip, and after all, they’ve been so patient.” “All those chips they’ve been eating, their oily fingers will make it impossible to get the windows clean again, Uncle,” Prakaash fusses. Prakaash prefers to call my father the generic “Uncle” over “Maamayya,” which in Telugu would be the correct way to address one’s father-in-law. “They’ve brought enough toys with them to keep them busy. They don’t need to be messing up the windows.” Prakaash rolls his eyes meaningfully at me in the rearview mirror. I suppose this is where I step in to keep the peace. I’m not as adept as Amma at pouring oil over troubled waters, but I give it a shot.

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I use the first thing that catches my attention to try to distract them. “Here, why don’t you guys finish your knitting?” I gesture toward the grocery bag that holds their handiwork. Both have gnarled pieces of knitting started under Amma’s supervision. Paapa cooperates and slithers over the seat into an untidy clump. Amma cleans her hands with a wet wipe before handing her the mangled mess of her knitting. Achyu prefers to remain in the back, spreading himself out in a sodden silence. In a few more minutes—I’m sure of it—those toes will be inching up toward the side windows. I silently debate whether to insist on his participation, hoping to avert what I can predict with complete accuracy, or whether, in the interest of temporary peace, to cross that bridge when we come to it. Fortunately for all of us, I’m spared that intervention. Within a few minutes, the pelting screens of rain thin, and with a sigh of relief, Prakaash pulls back onto the highway, picking up speed, the water on the blacktop slapping shrilly at our heels. The foggy windows clear and the soaked countryside emerges gradually beyond them. Again, the lines of now drooping poplars and Russian olives swing toward us and away again. Wet fields whiz by. The yellow weeds, now heavy with rain, sag and sway uncontrollably as we pass. And the storm clouds soon pass into the high mountains, obscuring the naked peaks. “San Luis, oldest town in Colorado,” Daddy reads aloud from the signboard. “Eighteen miles.” Predictably, he reads all the signs along the road aloud. “Private road,” he says emphatically. “No trespassing. Right lane must turn right. Population 760. No U turn. Stop. Do not enter.” Listening to him, I wonder whether he does it to pass the time, record distance, or inform the rest of us, just in case we haven’t been paying attention. Then I realize that he has begun to do this type of thing a lot. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet at home, his bifocals just barely engaged with the bridge of his nose while Amma does her pooja with Paapa by her side (the flower-and-incense child), Daddy rocks rhythmically, reciting Sanskrit verses all the while. I don’t know if what he recites has any relevance to what Amma does. Used to his parallel and irregular recitation patterns, she doesn’t seem to mind. But her eyes

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remain closed as she silently murmurs prayers of her own. It is only sometimes when my father takes a deep breath to energetically render a particularly complex verse that she partially opens her eyes to glance at him. But then, almost without a break, she goes back to whatever she was murmuring under her breath. I’m not used to thinking of my parents as old people. But on this visit, I have slowly come to acknowledge the actual physical presence of their aging, the habits and mannerisms I’ve previously associated only with other, older relatives. It is unsettling to find these habits in my own father. The constant repetition and vocalizing is almost childlike. I remember several times coming across Achyu, when he was younger, reciting the national anthem or multiplication tables as he sat by himself on the pot, or crooned himself to sleep like a bird warbling by itself to fill the silence of the sky. Is Daddy trying to fill the silence in his mind? Does he take particular pleasure in remembering trivial facts to reassure himself that his memory hasn’t dimmed? Each morning, he wrestles with the crossword puzzle in the paper, even though he doesn’t get the American references. I wonder if he misses his cronies; at home, he meets with them every day. Maybe it’s easy to imagine life is passing you by when you’re retired. Or perhaps he is simply growing old, and so, does his pooja absently. This last thought changes my amusement. Although not very old at all by American standards, Daddy is frailer than I imagined him to be. In the last year alone, people we know have lost their parents and have had to rush back to India for the last rites. I cannot imagine facing a similar situation, although I know that sooner or later it will come. I look over to where Daddy’s hair appears unnaturally white above the dark gray splotches that have been spreading across his pale scalp like a storm. I’m overwhelmed by a quick rise of emotion and filled with gratitude for this opportunity to spend time with them. We do what we can, I think, while time is at hand. In front of me, Daddy’s head moves like a spectator’s at a three-way tennis tournament, bobbing back and forth from his library book on the geography of the region, to the map of the western United States unfolded untidily across the dashboard, to the correlating signs on the

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side of the highway. He reads all the signs he can manage, then tries to bifocally locate them on the map. “Right lane must turn right,” he continues to chant pleasurably. “Population 760. Do not stop in the middle of the road. Do not enter. Wrong way. Icy road. Taos, eighty miles.” Achyu’s clear voice joins him from the back, playfully racing ahead. “Watch out for slower farm traffic. E-que-stri-an crossing. High winds possible. Speed limit sixty-five miles.” Prakaash’s eyes are trying to meet mine again in the rearview mirror. It’s clear he wants me to end their nonstop chanting. I raise my eyebrows to signal helplessness and try to avoid looking at his return accusations of betrayal. It occurs to me that this meeting of our eyes is the only private conversation we have had since my parents’ arrival. I am suddenly tired. I slump in my seat and wish I could squirm like Paapa at the tightness of my seatbelt or whine about the cramping in my muscles. Finally, I spot the monumentally large clump of old-growth native willows that mark the edge of the town of San Luis. Here, the highway curves sharply and turns into the main street. Soggy buildings line the narrowing highway in this tiny community tucked into a narrow valley. Ristras—ropes of red chiles typical of the region, I tell Daddy to divert him (this for Prakaash’s benefit), paying particular attention to the soft pronunciation so similar to ours—drip from traditional porch beams. The town is too small for the familiar golden arches, but a few neon signs do light the brasher newcomer stores, mainly quick-stop businesses. Prakaash’s “Anyone need a pit stop, or should we carry on?” is met with sturdy denials from everyone. Needing no more incentive to catch up with his own as-yet-unmet goals, he drives straight through. “There was an article in the Friday paper about a historic church here,” I remark, sitting up and peering into the gloom to look. “You should see some of these old Hispanic churches, Amma. There is something about them, the thick mud walls, the massive wooden beams, the darkened solemn interiors lit only by candles, the ornate altars. They give me the same feeling as the temples we used to visit when we were little. Like you can’t even whisper inside. They feel so sacred, somehow. Unlike these modern structures you see nowadays.”

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“Imagine,” Amma says, nodding, “we come all the way to America, and we are off to see a Hanuman temple in New Mexico!” A wide swing in the road brings into view sudden vistas of fields and a range of magnificent snow-topped mountains. Even my father stills his litany, if only momentarily, to gasp. “These are the true temples,” he says reverentially. “Man-made is only man-made, after all.” Then the road curves again and heads south. Stretching out in front of us, it is a glistening wet ribbon rising ever so gradually into the deepening horizon. I glance to my right, where my mother sits against the window and the setting sun. Amma is magnificent, luminous against the sun that is pouring through the clouds. The slanting light causes the tips of her ears to glow orange. Her traditional seven diamond studs glitter against the translucency of her ears. From everywhere, the rays seem to pierce her, shining like a halo around her head, through the soft white fibers of her hair, around her neck and shoulders. The light irradiates her. She glows as if from an internal incandescence that seems to convert her into pure energy, pure spirit—an apparition without physicality. At this moment, sheathed in her self-contained stillness, she appears more eternal to me than the goddesses she worships daily. In this land where santeros carve and adorn saints and madonnas, Amma is a pagan deity. Bent in concentration over her knitting, only her fingers move with silent repetition in the shadows of her lap over the brightly colored wool. It is one of those moments that I know, thirty years from now, will remain etched in my memory. I lean back in my seat, my mind suffused with her image. “One day—I know Prakaash doesn’t feel the same way, but one day,” I say, “I want to buy an acre of land right here in the San Luis valley and build a house on it. Nothing fancy, just a couple of rooms surrounded on all four sides by a large porch hung over with bright red ristras. And a couple of rocking chairs to take in the scenery. Can you see it? A row of Russian olives to the east, and fields of vegetables and sunflowers as far as the property line? There is something magical about this land,” I tell Amma. “I’ve always felt it. From the first time we drove through here.”

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Prakaash, who to my surprise has been listening intently, irritably breaks his silence. “Come on now, with all your romantic nonsense,” he says. “Except for the scenery, there is nothing out here but some chile farmers. You’d get bored with their conversation in no time at all. It’s the middle of nowhere, for God’s sake!” He tries to meet my eyes in the rearview mirror, but obstinately I look away. “We are entering New Mexico now,” Daddy informs us, just in case we missed the momentousness of the crossing. He cranes his head to see the end of Colorado. Then he peers at the speedometer racing in front of Prakaash. “Speed limit fifty miles,” he warns in the same monotone. Prakaash ignores him, trying to make up for the time we lost slowing down in town. When we travel, Prakaash’s goal is simple; to make it from point A to point B as quickly as possible, with the minimum of stops along the way. He researches the route extensively and decides on rest stops and towns likely to have easy highway exits and quick getaways from fast-food stops. Having reached his destination, he immediately begins planning the return journey. The point of exploring is lost on Prakaash. Sightseeing lazily is out of the question. It is as if only the going has importance and the ability to excite him. He has a CB radio to warn him of police cars. He calculates how much gas he puts in the tank each time, and how many miles per gallon the car has given him. If it is less than anticipated, he chews over the possible reasons. He opens the hood to check the oil level. He calculates average speed upon the hour. His goals are structured, meticulous, and predictable, and success or failure is measured by the margin of deviance. We are now less than an hour north of Taos. Very few rest stops or restaurants exist out here. Now and then, a few small roads seem to exit into nowhere. As the car swings into higher land, the sage grows taller but more scattered. The road meanders in restless undulations, cutting through the thick scrub of juniper and piñon pine. It dips and rises as the land changes elevation. The vistas are now regularly interrupted by stretches of dark pine. In the deepening dusk, you can still see raw scars of scree running alongside the shoulder of the highway where the road was cut.

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In the car, our bodies have succumbed to the length of the journey. My father’s collection of classic Hindi film songs has been rotated three times since we left home. Lata Mangeshkar’s “Melodies From Haunted Films” are fraying the edges of my brain with their shrillness. In front of me, the muscles in Prakaash’s shoulders are in a virtual death lock with themselves. “Prakaash,” my father speaks confidentially, “is there a bathroom around here somewhere?” “Out here?” Prakaash asks in disbelief. “I wish you would have asked me earlier!” There is an edge to his voice that makes me sit up and take notice. Looks like Lata Mangeshkar’s haunted voice and the eerie sound effects got to him, too. Prakaash rarely listens to Hindi music. But we are out of range of his favorite jazz station, and in our hurry this morning, we forgot to bring any other tapes with us. “We should have stopped in San Luis,” Prakaash frets. “Come to think of it, we should have just eaten there. Everything could have been taken care of at one time.” At the mention of food, the children perk up. “I want a Big Mac from McDonald’s. And some french fries. And lots of ketchup.” Achyu states. “No-oo! Wendy’s. I want to go to Wendy’s!” Paapa whines, swatting at her brother’s face. She leans forward into Prakaash’s seat and looks pleadingly at him. Her fingers grip his jaw, forcing him to turn his face. “Stop it, Prerena! Can’t you see I’m driving?” Prakaash explodes. “Do you see a Wendy’s out here? Or even a McDonald’s?” He pries her fingers away. “I should have stuck to my original plan of going straight to Taos. I knew we should not have gone to the Sand Dunes. It never fails,” he says, turning his ire onto me. “Every time I listen to you, Vijji, I regret it.” Prakaash only calls Paapa by her full name, Prerena, when his patience has reached a certain limit. Paapa, for once, pays attention. But her restlessness needs an immediate salve, so she turns to someone she knows won’t let her down. “Ammamma,” she complains softly, scratching and twisting, “there is something in my ear. And in my hair, too. Can you see what it is?”

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I glare at her. She stares back accusingly at me. “There is sand everywhere down my back, Ma! It’s itching, I’m not joking! They’re all sharp pieces!” I give her an “Oh c’mon!” look before turning my attention to my husband. “It’s okay, Prakaash,” I try to settle him before the whining gets to him, too. “How could Daddy have known how desolate this road was? Can’t you just pull over somewhere? And anyway, Sand Dunes National Monument was on the way.” “On the way?” Prakaash’s tone drips with sarcasm. “Sand Dunes was ‘on the way’?” “Well, not exactly,” I admit. “But it wasn’t so much of a detour. Anyway, we’re missing the point here. You need to find a place to pull over so he can go. We can discuss the Sand Dunes later.” This is as close as my parents have come to seeing us get into an argument, and it is clear they are uncomfortable at this new view of their son-in-law. Daddy is silent and looks away from us. Amma’s brow furrows and her fingers move faster over her knitting. The sunlight that illuminated her earlier is long gone, and she just seems ordinary and tired. The long drive has drained all of us. This time I try to meet Prakaash’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but he can only see the headlights behind us. After a long moment, he slows the car down near a relatively flat area and pulls off onto the rutted shoulder. When the bumping stops, Daddy takes the opportunity to light up a cigarette. Briefly, his face glows orange in the flare of the match. Prakaash jerks over for the match before he can discard it into the dry brush and deposits it safely into the ashtray. In response, Daddy pushes the door open and propels his body heavily out. The long period of sitting in one place has stiffened his muscles. Gravel crunches under his tentative, stumbling steps. I, too, open my door and swivel my legs out. A fresh breeze causes me to shiver suddenly. “Close the door, Mom,” Paapa whines. I shut the door and lean on the warm metal of the hood. From there, I watch my father carefully negotiate the ruts and hillocks underfoot. As he walks away from us, Daddy’s body loses definition in the gathering dark and merges with the general cloudy silhouette of the

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land around him. The earth is stripped of all definition. It is a dense, massive shape embodying a brooding sense of gravity. Everything that isn’t on the edge of that shape submerges within it. It gives up its identity as consisting of and springing from. Instead, it cloaks and blankets and textures. One complex, upthrusting mass makes up the entire lumpy convexity of the earth. The fine edge of that shape is where the substantial meets the evanescent, earth meets ether, dark enters the source of light and dense defies the airy. In the midst of all this, like a lone drunken firefly, the glowing cigarette end bumps and jogs above the uneven sods of grass underfoot. It dims and brightens before it disappears from sight. Above the spot where it disappeared, the sky unrolls in crisp foils of gold and silver into which the thin wisp of cigarette smoke rises and dissipates. In the car, Amma’s lids close upon themselves. Paapa, wrapped in her blankie, thumb in mouth, rests her feet on Amma’s lap. Prakaash has gone behind another mound some distance from my father, hauling Achyu with him. Only the impatient, angry crunching of gravel indicates their route. I move to check that the canvases riding above the car are still firmly in place. To double-check, I tug on the wet ropes from all directions. Then, I too walk into the darkness. The ground is rocky and uneven. My shoes sink into the dry gravel. I feel it shift under my weight. The storm must have passed north of where we are now. Not too far north, because if I close my eyes and inhale deeply, I can still just smell the rain amid the fragrant sage. The evening air carries with it the faintest tinge of coolness. A slight breeze sussurates through the vegetation, threading hesitantly through the pine and brush needles. I could get used to this sound that is like water trickling down mountain streams. Earlier in the day, when we stopped at the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, we got a taste of the forces that had created the very dunes we stood among. From out of nowhere, the wind had whipped up ferociously. The children crouched in my lee as the biting sand blasted around us. Its intensity shocked them both into utter silence. My contacts began to feel like pieces of #2 sandpaper grating against my eyelids. When it subsided, we picked sand out of our ears, neck, and hair, from between our toes, from every possible place.

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But now, along the broad valley floor, as night draws close, the wind is mellow. I find myself waiting for its next soft gust. It isn’t predictable. It isn’t loud. You can hear the chittering insects above it. And in the distance, you can hear the difference between the passing of a truck or a car. Sounds carry over great distances in this area, I’ve noticed. I find myself listening for the sound of warm urine hitting the cool desert floor.

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Into the Rawahs SUEELLEN CAMPBELL A N D J O H N C A L D E R A Z Z O

IT’S A BRIGHT AND CHILLY SUNDAY MORNING in October. Our kitchen table is typically cluttered—laptop computer, a phone bill, little hills of crumpled receipts and notes on paper napkins, stacks of books, a pair of mugs. Marmot and Weasel, our miniature dachshunds, take turns trying to jump into our laps and then onto the table, where they hope for stray crumbs or—Marmot’s unfathomable favorite—balled-up Kleenex. On top of this chaos of plateaus and massifs, canyons and escarpments, we’ve spread a road map of Colorado, and with a purple marking pen we’re tracing the places we’ve been together. Except for certain areas of the eastern plains, we can color over nearly all the paved and all-weather dirt roads. We draw little circles on the seven places where we’ve lived or spent a month or more, and tiny dots on some of our most memorable campsites, places we stayed on our honeymoon, 172

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anniversary destinations. Over territory we’ve really explored on foot or skis, we make a purple smudge. We squiggle in a lot of purple around our current home just northwest of Fort Collins. Spider lines out east through farm grids into the Pawnee National Grasslands, and north toward Wyoming. Smudges around three small home circles. Stronger threads and more smudges southwest into Rocky Mountain National Park and across the irrigated river valley where we now live, cupped between rows of red sandstone ridges that mark the emergence of the Rockies. We draw one thick line curling west along the Cache la Poudre River canyon (as we say around here, “the Pooder”), up Cameron Pass to the Continental Divide, between the high peaks of the Rawah and Never Summer Ranges, then over into North Park, a wide, cold, spare, and windy basin where moose winter among brilliantly colored willows. We trace fine filaments to the sides, marking our ski trails, and one thicker strand running north along the Laramie River road into Wyoming. Finally, we draw a light cluster of dots and a small smudge to mark this summer’s explorations—a pair of campsites along the Laramie River and two tiny trails into the Rawah Wilderness.


Summer solstice. River mist, jungle mist. Mist like the vapor that must rise through the seething Andean gorges of the upper Amazon. Yet here we are, 9,000 feet high, at the very northern end of the Colorado Rockies, looking down into a tumbling spring-melt blizzard of a “creek” we’d noticed only as a thin blue thread on our map. We weren’t expecting this body-shaking waterfall, with its mossy boulders and velvet cliffs, its all-day mist that fractures sunlight into a hundred spinning colors. What a thrill it is to sit on these water-smooth, water-dark rocks on a day suddenly cooled by the river’s damp breath. At home we often walk in the evenings along a lake where cliff swallows swing down over the water to snatch bugs from the air. Here, electric-blue dragonflies are doing the same, clicking and zipping in the rising mist, flashing in the sun, snapping up insects we can’t see. And the insects are in turn sipping microscopic drops of water—water that last night was snow.

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As hungry as the rest, insatiable for this furious beauty, we sit for hours, taking it all in. The air moves lightly against my skin, and all around us leaves take flight. Yellow and gold, green and vermilion, a thousand disks pull free where stem joins branch and spin to the side, through loops and arabesques, up into the bright sky, then down again. Many join the thousands already on the ground, thinning and blackening into earth. Some land on the traces of this week’s snow, crisp little drifts marking the shadows with white. A few brush against our heads and shoulders, thighs and swinging arms, lodge briefly on day pack or hat brim, then fall to the trail. What pulls us to a wondering stop is the countless gleaming aspen leaves strewn over everything else in sight—knee-high sagebrush, smooth granite boulders, tall drying tufts of grasses and wildflowers gone to seed, low strawberry and kinnikinnick leaves turned red—mixed everywhere in a kaleidoscope whirl with the tiny spherical prisms of dew and melted snowflakes. On the soft sprays of fir needles, gold leaves lie flat like coins cast onto a table; among the prickly needles of blue spruce they stand upright like coins flashing between the folded knuckles of a magician. They look like chocolate sovereigns covered in gold foil, confetti cut with a huge hole-punch, Christmas tree ornaments strewn with extravagant fingers. It’s one of those moments that feel like pure presence, and yet it’s layered, too, in space and time, geography and memory. Like the glittering leaves, other moments flash and sparkle and swirl around us and through us. Suddenly, it’s also another September day a few years back, when with our teenage niece Lea we lay still in a grove of tall, white aspens. Bits of sunshine shifted and brightened with every invisible motion of the air, our tiniest flyaway hairs pulled lightly at their roots, and we watched astonished as leaves edged loose from their moorings. They spun and twisted in the sunlight, fluttered like butterflies, dipped lower, rose again, then came to rest on our jeans and sweaters, our hair and folded hands, our cheeks and mouths. Suddenly, it’s also our more recent walk on this trail last June, when we brought the dogs and Lea’s little sister, Joy, for their first camp-out and wilderness hike. All three novices had been nervous as dusk fell, the dogs

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shivering except when they were wrapped in our arms, Joy reluctant to move more than a few feet away from us. When it was time to sleep, we put Marmot and Weasel in their boxes in the car, safe from mosquitoes and coyotes, and, snug in our sleeping bags and tent, told Joy stories about the mountain nights, the sleeping animals all around us, the shining constellations. In the morning, as the pupsters pulled Joy up this trail, yanking her left and right as they explored all the mysterious smells, we found piles of fresh moose droppings and a young moose cow; a hairy woodpecker and clouds of tiny brown twittery birds; sweeps of Calypso orchids and tall spikes of almost-open green gentian. And suddenly, it’s also one anniversary we spent camping out just north of here on a wide slope of sagebrush and aspen, lupine and paintbrush, and hungry mosquitoes, bug repellent forgotten. We sat by our Coleman stove, drinking champagne and poaching salmon and cherry tomatoes, looking north into the tawny space of Wyoming, and remembered the lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “Pied Beauty,” which we had chosen as part of our wedding ceremony: Glory be to God for dappled things . . . For rose-moles all in stipple upon the trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings All things counter, original, spare, strange . . . With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change . . .

On this September day in this one place, everything is layered and in motion. The world shimmers, adazzle, and swirling aspen leaves trace what ties the hidden past to the present, summer to fall, ourselves to our families, each of us to the other and to the mountains near our home.


Autumn equinox. In light rain, we hurriedly pitch the tent among some golden-leafed aspens just off the Laramie River road, cook and gulp down dinner under a dripping tarp, then zip ourselves in against the wetness and the cold. Rain thuds down on the tent fly for an hour or two, stops, thuds again—or has it turned into fat packets of snow? At 8,000 feet, it could easily happen. We’d love that—to wake to a murky, sagging-in tent, crawl

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out of our bags, and slowly zip open the morning onto a world of ice-glazed aspens and willows, a glassy brightness that would make us squint even through sunglasses. When we hike or drive through Colorado, we wander along so many of time’s directions. As we lie in the tent in raw, almost-winter cold in what’s really only the beginning of autumn, we know that the valley we live in on the edge of the plains, just fifty or so wiggly miles down the Poudre Canyon, is still shimmering with midsummer breezes, our five struggling backyard aspens shaking silvergreen, silvergreen, silvergreen. We also know that to wake up here to pure whiteness is to fast-forward to a midwinter afternoon when we might ski in to this same campsite on a crust of hip-deep snow—ski in while a few coal-black moose (or so they seem in all the glare), wreathed in the clouds of their deep breathing, watch us from the willows. On a simpler note, this chilly night marks an occasion of sorts. Before the cold got serious, we’d planned to let Marmot and Weasel spend the night burrowing into the army blankets we’d tossed into the backseat of the car. Now, though, they’re curled up with us for the first time in sleeping bags, and based on the small, happy noises the guys are making, what they seem to have burrowed into are richly scented dreams. We, meanwhile, are lying in the dark, wide awake, as the could-be snow thuds down. Often on our first night of camping, under canvas or under stars, we squirm for a while on the world’s mattress, adjusting ourselves to these huge mountains that are as silent as gravity. It’s a good time to joke around, tell stories, then settle, like our bones, into quiet reflection. Reflection, say, on the hushed community of night: a great horned owl arrowing down from a nearby treetop, migrations of high-flying cranes, migrations of stars. But tonight we’re much more down to earth. “So. Where’s your pupster?” “Smushed against my chest like a water bottle. Mmmmm. And yours?” By morning Marmot has worked himself to the bottom of my bag. He’s a foot-warmer now, sighing only occasionally in his sleep. It’s the only sound on earth. And then suddenly he’s marching up over my calves, my back, my neck. Has he caught the scent to morning light? Heard a coyote slipping

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through the aspens? He pauses on the back of my head, sticks his nose out of the bag. Weasel’s up, too, somehow, and fully caffeinated; they do almost everything together and seem psychic this way. Wet noses poke into our ears, snuffle through our night-crumpled hair. We laugh and laugh, and I drop deeper into my bag, as though I’ll find some leftover sleep in there. Fat chance. Now the guys are hopping and leaping all over the place. We feel like we’re being pelted with beanbags. They snarf and wrestle and tumble like the young brothers they are. Whatever night animals have edged into the campsite have certainly fled. We resign ourselves to the idea that this morning will not be one of those silent, sacred wilderness experiences. But we’re wrong. We’re wrong because of what happens after we emerge from the tent. We find not snow but a softly crunching layer of frost on the bent-over grasses in the campsite. The early sun is already warming our backs and the chestnut coats of the strangely calm, sniffing-around pupsters, and all four of us are uncreaking our bones in our own ways. And then we are drawn to something gleaming in the western sky. High, high up between two closer snow-and-shadow-dappled mountains shines one of the peaks of the Rawah Range. Icy, icy white against a slate-blue sky, it rises out of its own immensity of lower-down dark pine forests and, lower still, swatches of turning aspens—red and gold and orange and a zillion subtleties of green and yellow. It’s one of the most gorgeous things we’ve ever seen. It’s a different world up there above treeline, a kingdom of snow and perpetual cold, the last great Ice Age brought forward 100 centuries to remind us what so much of the continent must have looked like. At the same time, it’s also riveting us—two happy dogs, two happy people—to the here and right now of our Colorado home. Marmot and Weasel root quietly in the shiny grass, and we hold hands and fill our lungs with the beautiful cool air of morning.

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Blanca Peak CHRISTIE SMITH

L E A V I N G D E N V E R , I C L I M B T H R O U G H slow traffic into the foothills southwest of the city, traveling along Route 285, where impressive mountain homes give way to dusty ranches, and strip malls to general stores. Once past the suburban sprawl, I breathe a sigh of relief at the wide, high-altitude expanse of South Park, and eventually arrive above the central-Colorado town of Buena Vista, with its indeed “beautiful view” of the Collegiate Peaks framing the western side of the Arkansas River Valley. Turning south, I follow the Arkansas to the beginnings of the San Luis Valley. At the deserted hamlet of Villa Grove, I am surprised and pleased to see that Alamosa, at the base of the valley and near my destination, Blanca Peak, is still fifty-five miles away. The vast distances of the American West reassure me. Before me is high desert country—arid foothills with wild rabbits and abandoned 178

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mining towns to the west, and the white, rounded bank of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, resembling the pointed tents of Denver International Airport. I had remembered this as one of the loveliest valleys in Colorado, yet even now I gasp and smile to see how close and large the mountains really are, how impressively their white peaks dominate the plain. Down, down I happily drive into the open, sere valley, leaving behind the skiing crowds, the hiking crowds, the fishing crowds. History lies before me in this valley. When I first came to the West in 1980, I was struck by the history evident along the roadsides in New Mexico and Colorado. Back East, anything old is bulldozed, built over, repainted, and reopened. So even though there has been a less dense human presence in the West, there remains more evidence of it—and its failures—in the shrunken gray abandoned barns and corrals off dirt roads, in the decrepit mining structures built into hillsides, structures now falling to bits, with rusted cables, ore cars, and huge gear wheels sprawled nearby. I am entering land that has seen many travelers and settlers. Prehistoric Clovis, Folsom, and Cody People visited the San Luis Valley to hunt and fish. The Utes claim the longest connection to the valley, having hunted and gathered its bounty since about A.D. 800; around 1300, the Pueblos began traveling up from New Mexico to gather bird feathers and mine turquoise near Manassa and Villa Grove. Just south of the valley, Spanish adventurers explored New Mexico in the late sixteenth century, and Spanish settlers staked out a capital in Santa Fe in 1610. After the city was bloodlessly reconquered in 1694, Don Diego de Vargas and fifty Spanish soldiers came north from Santa Fe, fought with the Native inhabitants near Alamosa, and buried eight soldiers there. French traders passed through in the eighteenth century, and Zebulon Pike himself built a winter fort there in the 1810s before Spanish authorities arrested him for trespassing. In the mid-nineteenth century, after Mexico gained independence from Spain, the Mexican government became concerned about such American incursions into its territory and gave land grants to Hispanic farmers in the San Luis Valley in an attempt to forestall Anglo settlement. The descendants of these Hispanic families live today in towns with Spanish names: Alamosa, San Luis, Antonito, Mesita.

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But the Utes continued to claim this valley as their own, and defended it fiercely up through the mid-nineteenth century against both Hispanic and Anglo settlers. Eventually, of course, the persistent ranchers and farmers, swept along by the wave of post–Civil War relocation, European immigration, and Mormon zeal, not to mention the enticements of free land, better irrigation, and well-financed railroad promotion, pushed the Utes to a reservation well west of the San Luis Valley. Blanca Peak, which lies near the end of the valley, is sacred to the Utes, as well as to the Pueblos and Navajos. The mountain plays a part in the Pueblo origin story, and it is also the easternmost boundary of the Navaho homeland. Navajos have four sacred mountains that demarcate Navajoland—Dinehtah—the place that is theirs, in spirit at least. Miles below the base of Poncha Pass, I can finally see some bumps of white on the southeastern horizon. As I move through the valley, one bump rises higher and higher. As an 1891 promotional book put out by the Rio Grande Railroad accurately declares, “Blanca Peak’s proud summit o’ershadows the plain.” At 14,345 feet in elevation, that summit is covered in snow for much of the year. The snow renders the mountain even more impressive, especially in spring when the valley is green, but in any season, piñon trees and juniper fringe the mountain’s base and set off its vast solitude and the smooth countours that lead to its peak. Most of Colorado’s fourteeners nestle securely in mountain ranges, where their breadth is obscured. Blanca Peak, however, rises almost 7,000 feet above the 7,500-foot-high plain, with the tired, shrunken Sangre de Cristo range slouching behind. I am returning to Blanca Peak to re-experience its force and immensity, to escape my routine in the city. I have come here to clear my mind, to learn who else has found this place significant. I think about the effect of place on people, on myself. I feel moved by places—places other people love, as well as places meaningful in my own life. Somehow, it seems, no matter the spot, someone has felt a bond to it. According to some therapists, in dream analysis, one needn’t analyze one’s own dream: any dream will do to explicate current states of emotion

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and consciousness, to approach meaning and signification. Any dream will do. So, if the pilgrim is serious about the pilgrimage, does it follow that any place will do? And is it crucial that the pilgrim reach his or her goal, whatever that may be? The process of searching, the anticipation, is ultimately more important, since once a goal is attained, the pilgrim must again face the demands of everyday life and the creation of new goals. Then again, perhaps one needn’t be moved at all. Simply going through the motions of pilgrimage gives meaning to the destination, and one’s efforts. On a trip to England ten years ago, I built in two excursions to see villages associated with the poet T. S. Eliot. I made my semi-pilgrimages as overnight trips from London, visiting East Coker, where Eliot’s family lived before emigrating to America, and Little Gidding, the site of a restored seventeenth-century religious community that Eliot found interesting. I’d have gone to Burnt Norton, too, another place anchoring Eliot’s long poem Four Quartets, if I had known it was still an extant Great House, open to visitors for a fee. (And I did not have to cross the Atlantic to see the poem’s Dry Salvages—rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts—since I’d spent some summers on Cape Ann as a child. Still, the challenge of hiring a motorboat and actually climbing onto the rocks appealed to me.) There may not exist two more remote and obscure villages than East Coker and Little Gidding. But I acquired the necessary maps, railway timetables, and bed-and-breakfast addresses and set off. My treks involved two separate trips, since the villages are in opposite directions from London. Because they are so small, they have no overnight accommodations for visitors, but once ensconced in nearby towns, I took buses and then walked to my sacred destinations. Eliot is buried in a small church in East Coker, near an ancient graveyard and thatched cottages. Little Gidding consists of a dainty jewel of a chapel set amid the acres that housed Nicholas Ferrar’s communal sect in the 1630s. They are pretty places, but not unique in England’s green and pleasant land. The effort in getting there, however, added to my sense of accomplishment and pride at my obscure mission. Eliot himself was not exactly sure why Little Gidding in particular was worth a pilgrimage, or a poem. He notes the arbitrariness of the quest:

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If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take From the place you would be likely to come from . . . If you came by day not knowing what you came for, It would be the same . . .

Places are important to us, despite the fact that our bond to them may be arbitrary or inexplicable. We comprehend the world and our experiences in it by connecting to places. I am fascinated with Blanca Peak not only for what it is intrinsically, but also because I have driven by it many times on long car trips to New Mexico. Repeated visits reinforce my connection to certain places, and Blanca Peak is one of them. An immense thing on a wide flat plain, the mountain is visible for a long time through one’s windshield, and then in one’s rearview mirror. I have had time to stare at it and muse on it. Whether it is Blanca Peak beckoning to me, or I to myself, I am happy to make my trek there and see what it has in store for me. Seeing the mountain fills me with a sense of freedom; I hark back to other times I’ve driven by, times when I was “on a mission to be free.” I remember who I was sixteen years ago and the exhilaration I felt driving these roads, discovering Colorado for the first time. Having crossed in from New Mexico in the dark, I slept in my car just north of the town of San Luis and woke to Blanca Peak and the brightness of its Big Sky country. I remember my trips down to New Mexico in subsequent years, looking for Blanca Peak as I slid south into the valley, and again as I poked my way north from San Luis. The deep satisfaction and sense of peace I feel at seeing this landscape draws me back again, calling me from my life in city pent. Still, I don’t impose any mystical layering on my valuing. I honor those green Eliot sites in England and this mountain in south-central Colorado, and feel they have some kind of power, though exactly why isn’t clear. Eliot writes, You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.

People have long found guidance and significance in this place. Native Americans were drawn to Blanca Peak well before I was. And I

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was unaware of their interest until after I had come to love the mountain’s solidity and immensity on my own. On this particular trip to Blanca Peak, I arrive at dusk. It’s a warm November night, and the twilight is long in this high place as I turn off the two-lane highway and head east toward the mountain. All around me is treeless plain. The plain is fenced, but it’s not clear why—to keep the sage and hard grasses in? Soon I see road signs warning of buffalo crossing, but the only animals in sight are ducks floating on an expanse of shallow lakes. It’s odd to see standing water in this desert, but the water table is near the surface here, due to the nature of Rio Grande sand deposits laid down thousands of years ago. I pass an abandoned two-storey house and stop to see it up close. It’s a fairly sturdy structure, made of hundred-year-old wooden planks and plaster. Swallows dart from the rooftop as I approach the house, and when I step through the old doorway, I hear their urgent flutterings as they escape from glassless windows. “I won’t hurt you,” I call to them, but they hurry off to some power lines. I see a pink Blanca Peak framed in the doorways, in the windows, of this old place. The sunset darkens, the mountain becomes redder. I stumble upon part of an old deer skeleton in one room of the house. It startles me; how would a deer get into the house? It probably wouldn’t clamber over the two-foot-high threshold on its own, no matter the weather. Perhaps a mountain lion dragged it there. I feel I am trespassing on a place reclaimed by wild animals. My nerves edgy, I tiptoe from tiny room to tiny room. Back in the car, I continue along the deserted road, loving the solitude, the remoteness, the lack of constraints of this unpeopled land, of this trip. I turn south and drive closer to the mountain now; I’m on its flank. It’s getting quite dark. The last pink highlights of sunset tinge the snow on the mountain’s peak. Decision time: do I go fifteen miles west into Alamosa and sleep in a motel room, or, on this unseasonably warm fall night, do I find a place to sleep out under the stars? I opt for the latter after bumping around on some dirt roads farther up the mountainside. I am now on BLM land, which is public. A rabbit darts in front of the headlights, scampering to safety in the nearby

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rabbitbrush. I pull off the dirt path into . . . more of the same; there are miles and miles of virtually empty land in this valley. Except around the San Luis Lakes, rainwater sinks quickly into the soil, so all that grows are small prickly pear cactus, some rabbitbrush and sage, a few yuccas—odd, scrubby, high-desert plants. I can see for miles to the south, west, and north. The distant lights of Alamosa do not trouble me. I sit in the car, out of the wind, and eat one of the several no-cook meals from the cooler: a hardboiled egg, cheese, a bagel, canned fruit juice. This whole trip ends up costing me gas and some local history books that I later buy in Alamosa: no motels, no restaurants, not even a cappuccino from a little café in town. I roll out two camping pads and two sleeping bags, and get in. The air feels chilly now—it’s probably 40 degrees out—and the wind is blowing. I hear the faint yipping of coyotes far to the south, and wish they’d come closer; I love their sound. The fact of the presence of certain animals and birds means more to me than the creatures themselves. As John McPhee points out about grizzly bears in Alaska, it’s not the bears themselves but the wilderness they represent that thrills him. When I see a bald eagle or a hawk on the way to work in Boulder, it heartens me to know that the rapid development in my county still allows enough wildlife and solitude to support raptors. This is what I like about hearing coyotes yap together in their tightly knit family groups: it means there are enough small creatures in this desert to feed wild canines, and enough acreage for them to survive whatever man-made challenges have come to the valley to stay. The frosty air and slight wind, which has died down since dusk, speak of adventure, of real life, and enhance the glowing warmth that quickly fills my two sleeping bags. The oft-heard phrase “Be here now” comes to mind. I love to live in the present, but with what could be called an unconscious absorption. I have a well-read friend who tells me that this is what French literary theorist Jacques Derrida calls “undifferentiated time.” Edward Abbey also praises this concept as a way of life. When he was a park ranger at the remote Arches National Monument in Utah before it became a busy national park, he reveled in the slow life there, full of what he called the “undivided, seamless days . . . spacious and free as the summers of childhood.” In the same vein, Barry

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Lopez notes that wilderness is where we can retreat to “indigenous time” and get away from the linearity that so rules our modern days. I doubt, however, that I’m finding what the indigenous inhabitants found at the base of Blanca Peak. They lived off this land, and had to know its outer and inner life intimately. I have a less detailed knowledge of these wilds. I respond to the emptiness I see in the valley, the simplicity of the tree patterns on the hillside, the lack of abundant vegetation. As a city dweller, I come close to experiencing indigenous time only amid simple rural landscapes, places where I am not easily distracted by lush details and must face the sky, the stark lines of things, the hard earth. As I lie on the ground in the darkness, the Pleiades rise to the east, Orion following soon after. I see some shooting stars and decide to count them—thirteen before I nod off. I think about my friends who might lie awake here, uneasy, their thoughts preoccupied with wandering tramps and mountain lions. I like to think that some few might appreciate this looming dark mountain, its white peaks barely discernible against the night sky. In any case, my solitude does not overly bother me, and I lie here happily, smiling up at the stars. It is quiet except for the occasional airplane droning high above me. I get a kick out of being alone in a remote place, with my little modern snail-self in tow: my car, a cooler with food, warm clothing, books, paper and pen, camera, maps of the area. Many times on this trip, I catch myself smiling. I smile at the beauty of the landscape, at the light, the ruins of settlers, a herd of deer, giant thunderheads lowering, an old adobe building. My favorite landscapes in the West are much like this one: dry, wide-open valleys ringed with mountains. While gazing at the stars, I try to rid myself of the perception that the sky is a big black bowl pierced with pinpricks of light. I make an effort to comprehend the three-dimensionality of space. I try to escape the impression that the stars rise and set, that the Earth is the center of the universe (that I am the center of the universe?). I remind myself that the Earth is turning; it’s the stars that are fixed. I imagine how I would feel if the Earth, like a spaceship, suddenly went to warp speed, into hyperdrive, and above me the stars zoomed and blurred like they do in in science-fiction movies. Then the fact of Earth’s careening through space would feel real.

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But lying here, I feel only stillness. I’m on the spine of the continent; the land and I are pushing upward toward space, and on both sides, the continent falls away to the ocean. When I walk on a beach, I have a similar sense of the continent. I know then that I’m at the edge of the North American landmass. The continental shelf is jutting out toward the deep oceanic troughs and ridges. The oceanic, an idea dreamed up by Freud, is in fact what compels me back to the high plains and mountains, what calls some people to return to the ocean itself. It’s a feeling of immanence, of something large and great that cannot be fathomed by the rational self. After moving from the East, with its ocean, I worried that I would miss the boundless moods of the sea, but I soon found that the high plains and mountains evoke the same feeling even more powerfully. When turn-of-the-twentieth-century novelist Mary Hallock Foote saw South Park and its vast expanse on her first trip to Leadville, Colorado, in 1879, she wrote, “It is a glorious sweep of rolling hills. . . . It seems a playground for Centaurs—so vast, so brilliant, so free and utterly unspoiled.” Despite roads and settlements, these high plains and the mountains that border them are still otherworldly. The western landscape has in fact taken me over, soul and body. I discovered this some years ago when I went back East for a visit. When I’m there watching television and I see the inevitable images of the West in car commercials, I feel a sudden tug at my heart and dull pain in my sternum. I feel a momentary sense of panic, and a fear grabs me that somehow I’m not living in the West anymore. “It’s okay,” I tell myself. “You’re only visiting the East; soon you’ll go back home.” For me, the pull of the western landscape calls to mind Shakespeare’s Juliet lamenting, “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.” Even as I see it in real life, I want to hold it closer. A fear still haunts me that due to family ties or career choices, I might, rationally or foolishly, decide to leave the West and doom myself to feeling trapped again. This night at Blanca Peak, I dream that I suddenly hear male laughter nearby, that I sit up to find several oafish modern-day cowboy types around a nearby campfire. I wonder how I could have missed them when I drove out into this open country to camp. The men talk and joke with each other with a careless camaraderie that nevertheless sounds threatening to me, an unarmed woman out alone in a sleeping bag in

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the middle of nowhere. But I wake up, sit up, and hear nothing around me, see no fire, and am surprised at the vividness of the noise from the dream. In the morning, the view from ground level is of blue sky, golden sun, and shining white Blanca Peak come alive in the light, framed by the low scrub around me. The clarity of light at this altitude lends me preternatural sight. I see a depth in the shadows of nearby bushes and distant trees on the mountain’s flank. The outlines of gray sage clumps, pointy green yuccas, and the rocky, rounded groundswells at the mountain’s base, the dark, high valleys not yet lit by the sun, impress themselves on my dull city senses. There is a depth in these distances, a shimmering, translucent solidity to the air between bush and hill, foreground and background, whether they are fifty feet or five miles away. I hear a few birds peeping in these early hours, but otherwise the silence holds. I am glad for the solitude. I am not comfortable camping near other people, mostly due to their noise. I want my nature to sound natural; I feel intruded upon if I have to hear people’s chatter or children whooping. When I am subjected to music blaring in the wilds, or the irregular whining of ATVs, I become indignant and think about joining a land-use organization. Later in the day, I wind around the large and nicely planned campgrounds at the Great Sand Dunes, and although I like the views, I could only ever stay there if the campground were at something like 5 percent capacity. If I wanted lots of neighbors where I camped, I would camp in my own backyard. A bit of high-flown poetry from the 1891 Rio Grande Railroad promotional book San Luis Valley echoes my yearning for peace: Here silence reigns, And naught there is to mock The far-off murmur of the mountain rill, As if a voice in solemn accents breathed O’er the wide expanse and lone park “Be still!”

Before eating my cold breakfast in the sun, I shake off the heavy frost that has formed on the sleeping bags. It flakes off in thick bands.

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The temperature must have dipped below freezing. I feel lucky that the weather has cooperated for my sleepover—there could as easily have been a blizzard in mid-November on these high plains as my star-studded, crisp fall night. I take the morning to explore the San Luis Valley’s south end, keeping the mountain always in sight. I see voles, deer, antelope, hawks, and even a cheerful but apparently homeless man walking with his dog along the BLM road. The thought that he probably camped out not far from me makes me uneasy, but I refuse to let it affect my willingness to camp here again. Camping alone entails some risks, but neither my startling dreams of cowboy campfires nor the possibility of unwelcome strangers deters me. I promise myself that I’ll come back soon with more time, that I’ll hike on Blanca Peak and see more of the terrain and geology. My plan for this trip was simply to enjoy the mountain’s size and feel its grace. I drive in a large semi-circle around the base of the mountain, passing old adobe villages with empty storefronts and low, cozy houses; the Rio Grande looking shallow and insignificant; and a railroad junkyard with the mountain for a splendid backdrop. A short stop in Alamosa, and I need to head north again. Too soon, it’s time to return from my pilgrimage. A big old billboard on the highway explains, in its way, why I crave this place: “Jones Construction—All Phases of Earth Moving.” Nailed above it is a smaller sign: “N.Y.C. 2000 mi / Chicago, IL 1000 mi.” Unless I’m far from the crowds, I can’t experience the oceanic, and here I’m blessedly far away. Books and movies portray people who go to places exotic enough to inspire living fully in the present, people who then come back and apply this habit to their regular lives. I use these short sojourns to clear my mind, to renew my dull senses. I want to keep the sense of space and quiet in my mind’s eye when I’m back in busier places—commuting, working, planning, too often on autopilot. Savoring things as they are is key. Here in the San Luis Valley I savor solitude, the bare landscape, and off to my right, huge Blanca Peak, sitting massive and patient as I point myself back to urban life.

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Lumpy Ridge: Buson in the Rockies AMY ENGLAND

H A R U N O M I Z U , T H E W A T E R S O F S P R I N G , is a commonly used indicator of season in Japanese haiku, understood to mean the season’s swollen streams and rivers rather than the rain that swells them. In the haiku of eighteenth-century poet and painter Yosa Buson, the waters of spring are slow, warm, and silent, wetting violets and reeds, muddied by the crossing of clumsy, weak-ankled feet. Haru no mizu yama naki kuni wo nagare keri

The waters of spring flowing to their end in a mountainless country

Yama naki kuni is the land or country without mountains; the particle wo follows the receiver of action. Nagare is from the verb nagaru, flow; Sawa and Shiffert translate this line, nagare keri, as “flows so smoothly!” 189

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The best way to see mountains is with intimate knowledge of their absence. As a child, I was taught that mountains were beautiful, although growing up in Illinois, in an especially flat part of that already flat state, I had little opportunity to evaluate this dictum. There was a trip through the Rockies when I was fourteen, most of which I spent sleeping in the back of the van, trying not to disturb an all-consuming sunburn; there were a few glimpses of wrinkled geography from airplanes. After college, I lived for a short while in Tokyo, taking the odd day trip into higher country. I remember, on one of these excursions, as the scenery got interesting, leaning out the train window like a setter hanging its tongue out the window of the family car. The people around me eyed me oddly. They were used to looking at such scenery, and I was sorry for them. That land, which is determined to lie down as flat as possible, should be compelled to act this way, and so many things compressed with it—latitude, seasons, time on all levels. Now, in Colorado, driving from the mountainless country of Denver into the Rockies allows me the constant restaging of that surprise. This essay is a description of the mountains lacking in Buson’s poem—which is how I have, somewhat arbitrarily, decided to cast the mountains of Lumpy Ridge, just east of Rocky Mountain National Park. The same force that pushed up the Rockies bowed down the bedrock under Denver to create the Denver Basin, which spent successive geological periods collecting whatever happened to blow by. The basin is now filled with the Denver Formation, a Paleocene to Upper Cretaceous layering of sandstone, mudstone, claystone, and conglomerate. Atop this lie Holocene deposits of eolian silt and sand and loess. As you drive northwest from Denver, the wind-blown deposits thin and end. The Denver Formation surfaces, followed by various Cretaceous beds of sandstone and marine shale, left over from the large inland sea that covered much of what is now the American West. The beds, covered with only a thin layer of soil and gravel, were exposed 28 million years ago when the mountains uplifted that extra mile and the streams started running with renewed vigor, scooping out the Colorado Piedmont. You pass along the High Plains until the underlayers of rock begin to raise their tilted edges up out of the earth, revealing themselves in

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reverse sequence from the order in which they were laid down—the Dakota Hogback of white limestone, full of dinosaur fossils, and the red beds of sandstone. Of course, as land rises, erosion increases, so that by the time you reach the Rockies themselves, the layers, which once would have arched over the mountains, are long worn through, exposing the oldest remnants of Precambrian granite, schist, and gneiss. One billion, four hundred million years ago, when life really was much simpler, this future granite welled up as igneous intrusions into the surrounding rock. The large crystals in some of this granite were formed far below the surface, where higher pressure and temperatures allowed them to cool, and grow, slowly. What this means, then, is that as you move higher into the mountains, you have the impression of going back in time. Beneath the hogback’s limestone, layers upon layers of red sandstone mark the passage of Permian and Pennsylvanian time. This sandstone was deposited by the runoff of streams flowing down the granite sides of the ancestral Rockies and wearing them flat—flat as Illinois is now. I like putting that image and Buson’s haiku together, thinking of the water moving from mountains to plains not only through space, but through time as well. The red sandstone is famous for the fantastical, almost alien, landforms its erosion leaves behind in places like Red Rocks Park or Boulder’s Flatirons. I once walked through the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, comparing those blades of rock to what I saw in the pages of a geology book. An hour and a half later, as I walked out the gate of cliffs, I experienced that flash of synthesis between reading and experience that we all hope to be granted. I looked back over my shoulder and finally saw it: the sandy floor of water—or the beach, the ground— standing on end. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”—Dylan Thomas’s metaphor covers both the organic and inorganic—“the force that drives the water through the rocks.” If I had a religion, I think I would be a pantheist; the idea of creation creating itself, of form continuously flowering out of its own dissolution, appeals to me. I remember sitting in the cafeteria of the Art Institute of Chicago, reading from Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art: “Whereas an image implies the representation of an object, and a sign

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signifies an object, form signifies only itself.” I closed the book, then went out onto Michigan Avenue and saw everything, everything—the lake filling its bed, the streetlamps raising their lights, natural and manufactured objects alike—as the drive to continuously achieve form. And when the iron poles rust and collapse, when the lakebed fills to the top with the raw materials for Holocene shale, that will be an expression of the same force. Focillon’s vision silences the wearying argument between form and content. On Lumpy Ridge, bare aspens, pines and hemlocks, dry bracken, and kinnikinnick alternately hide and reveal the permutations of weathering granite: a dome losing its layers; monoliths parting and separating along a vertical fault; a knob atop the ridge, phallic or spherical; rounded folds like elephant hide; a network of cracks. Clustered spires, needles, pyramids, knuckles. The complex, curving line of Lumpy Ridge should be translatable to music. Round boulders spill continuously down its sides. A Chinese landscape: washes of ink suggesting the reaches of cliffs half visible in the thick weather, perhaps a little green paint to show pine trees growing from their impossible clawed holds on the vertical slopes. A few people, each a few dashed brush strokes, to show the scale of the thing. Perhaps the archetypal place of scenic beauty in China is Huangshan, a huge granite outcrop that rises to dozens of baroque and strange ends, embellished with the odd grotesque boulder, each with its own fantastic name—Immortal Pointing the Way, Magpie on a Plum Tree, Goddess Embroidering, Squirrel Skipping to Celestial Capital, Pig-headed Monk Eating a Watermelon. Granite may be hard, but eventually time—a few geologic ages’ worth—will wear it down. The stone of Lumpy Ridge has been even more forcefully eroded, smoothed by glaciers, like deer hide scraped to velvet. Granite weathers this way, rounds along its faults and cracks, receives the sculpting rush of water and ice in its deepening runnels. The Japanese term for landscape lines up the characters for water, mountain, picture. Weather, water, and rock drive their wheels against each other, but since rock is moving so much more slowly, the actions of the other two are like sandblasters on a nearly static surface. In the end, all that rounding down creates something organic in the weathered shapes— the dome like an elephant’s back, the line of an elbow or hip in a

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boulder’s side—and so evokes something like tenderness. And out of tenderness people give names to the rocks, and soften them further. Gaining in elevation is equivalent to going north; so many feet up equals so many miles toward Canada. By the time you reach the heights of Rocky Mountain National Park, you’re in the climatic counterpart of Alaska—lichen and tundra flowers underfoot, ground cover made delicate by altitude. In spring, moving to higher ground means retreating toward winter, cold and wind intensifying, green becoming sparse, snow beginning to fall. The weather on the drive out of Denver is foggy, the views even more like Chinese paintings than usual. As we cross the line from red rock into crags of gneiss, knobs of granite, slatey ridges of mica-laden schist, we abruptly re-enter winter. The fog precipitates onto the dead grasses, the pine trees, coating each blade and needle with frost. It looks fake, like tacky Christmas flocking. Then the mountains lift us, abruptly again, out of the fog, which remains visible as a solid bed of white behind us. Driving into Estes Park on Highway 36, you can see Lumpy Ridge to the north of town. It is a small, distinct geological entity, quite different from the sharp horns of the Rockies just to the west (as you can easily see on a topo map, which shows the lines of elevation suddenly frenzied and thick), and this bounded smallness makes it seem even more like a painting—one the observer can enter. From far away the ridge looks gray, sometimes lichen green. But close up, the newly broken surfaces of rock are pink and dark red, crystals ranging from tiny flecks to the size of quarters: mica- and hornblende-speckled granites, pegmatites of huge feldspar and quartz crystals. Larger crystals weather more quickly, and the ground is sandy with escaped granules—a slightly ruddy sand, flavored with iron. The bark of the ponderosa pines, too, has a red cast. Red, red-brown, graygreen, dark green, gray black—such a modest palette. Even so, with all that red, this place can flame out as if the sun were setting on it, even when the sun is not visible. Lumpy Ridge is human in scale, and like a Chinese painting, the landscape usually contains some element to remind you of that scale. The town is often visible from the trail, which is dotted with people;

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the ridge is not high enough to be inundated with snow, so it’s frequented even in winter. Raptors love it, as do rock climbers—all those crevices. Unlike many scenic areas in the mountains, the natural features of Lumpy Ridge have been thoroughly named (albeit not as fantastically as Huangshan), mostly according to its climbs—Sundance Needle, Bowels of the Owls, Batman Rock. Where Huangshan has its “Immortal Sunning His Boot,” Lumpy Ridge has a boulder shaped like a boot (worn through with a hole), said to have been discarded by Paul Bunyan. Buson belonged to the bunjin, or literati, movement, a group of men who expressed their objection to Japan’s isolation by affecting the Chinese manner. The Chinese painters they copied were bureaucrats who had retired in disgust, rich enough to rusticate without worrying about earning a living, which the later Japanese painters were not; as a result, the lifestyle did not completely translate. Buson was a busy man in a metropolitan place, successful at his painting—one of those people who fit so well into society that they make that society seem itself responsible for their grace, a middle-class artisan form of sprezzatura. However, since Buson’s painting did earn him a living, his poetry did not have to, and he attained the ideal of the Chinese amateur in one area of his life at least. His version of chinoiserie found its way into his poetry in a variety of ways: in the deliberate use of Chinese characters—which, like the topographic lines over Lumpy Ridge, blacken and thicken the text—as opposed to the more flowing lines of the Japanese syllabic alphabet. And he evoked China through the images he chose— China as ink painting. Perhaps by then, China was hardly a real place to Buson and his friends, but it would have functioned all the better as a screen for the imagination, a specific name to give to distance. Asagiri ya e ni kaku yume no hitodori

Morning mist: drawn into a dream of a picture, people passing

It isn’t morning, however, by the time we get to Lumpy Ridge. It never is. Since it inevitably storms on the ridge in the afternoon, the short two-mile hike to Gem Lake has defeated us several times. The last time, we were defeated not by the weather but by the many offshoot

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trails used by the rock climbers. After following three of these paths to the sheer face of the rock and using up most of the day’s time and energy in the process, we gave up in self-disgust. We passed a dry hollow of pine needles and lay down there, falling into a serenely refreshing sleep. It was like being held in a relaxed, impersonal hand, scented and cool and silent. I will always be grateful to the clouds that afternoon for refraining from pouring down on us. In 1927, Chiura Obata, a Japanese artist well versed in the methods of sumi-e and Japanese woodblock prints, and possessed of a compelling interest in Western art, made his first visit to Yosemite. Thus began decades of effort on his part to use the vocabulary of Asian painting and printmaking to describe that uniquely American landscape, in pictures that occasionally approached the spareness of haiku. Evening Moon: two large trees, one small one, setting their verticals against the curved line of domed granite, behind them the sky peculiar to Japanese prints, colored with pigments ground from lapis and malachite and graduating from dark to pale with perfect smoothness. When hiking on Lumpy Ridge, I experience conflicting desires. On the one hand, I want to put a name to every patch of lichen, every protuberance of stone, and it frustrates me that I cannot even correlate the names of the rock faces on the map with the ones right in front of me. Twin Owls, in its tall, central position, is obvious, lined with fine vertical ridges; the hump to the left of it must be First Rock, the one to the right, Gollum’s Arch. But I very quickly lose my way. The names are not based, after all, on the appearance of the ridgeline, but on where the good climbs are, and that isn’t obvious from here. I feel as if I should know the names of things because the landscape seems so familiar. A layer rests over it, the aura it has absorbed through Obata’s prints and watercolors of Yosemite, an aura reaching all the way back to Chinese landscape painting and the thirty-two peaks of Huangshan. But naming something is a way of having power over it, and we come to these places to be reminded of what it means not to have power. Comparisons are part of the same loss, and I have not used a single simile here without a significant feeling of remorse. We, meaning the West, did not always view natural landscapes appreciatively. Such scenes were wastelands; nature was the work of the

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Devil. The rough and uninhabited regions might have had their uses, if you were a monk in search of some deserted place to fast or converse with God, but they were useful because they were desolate, not because they were uplifting. It took a long time, not to mention all fourteen books of Wordsworth’s Prelude, to develop the idea that the wilderness was an antidote to human activity, that nature was as pure as we were corrupt. We may grasp that beauty has been conferred upon mountains by acculturation—that we can be taught that mountains are beautiful— but there is no substitute for raw firsthand experience. The first time I went camping in the high country, a friend took me to Kibbie Lake in Yosemite National Park. Across the lake from the trail is a long, cascading fall of rounded granite, edged with green. My first thought, as I collapsed onto the ground, was, “I smell very bad,” but the second was, “There is no I.” I was lifted by looking out of myself, left on the shore of the lake without the ability to formulate sentences. But this was not the result of effort. It felt more like tripping and falling down. In fact, on the days when I can see the Rockies off in the distance, when the smog hasn’t obliterated them, art’s intrusions are terribly annoying. It’s as if I can’t simply look; I see paintings and photographs and souvenir postcards, rather than what’s there. Art teaches us to see and then wears out that sight completely. But Obata’s version of Yosemite still renews vision through the surprise, the delight, of drawing those two entities—that scenery, which I have walked through, and that style of painting, which I associate with the greatest possible distance—into a single thing. The Japanese poet Basho had his hermit’s hut, his monkish habits, his journeys into wilder places. Buson, conscious of coming after Basho and inheriting his position in the world of poetry, could only occasionally leave his busy life and imitate Basho’s travels with more modest ones of his own. But he tried, when he could, to follow Basho’s example, to return to an earlier set of conditions and choices. Basho’s own travels were in imitation of an earlier example still, that of Saigyo, a twelfth-century poet and priest. And we also try, when we come up here, to enter into an earlier set of conditions, a greater dependence on the chance events of weather and what we carry with us. Basho traveled

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to see what people in history had seen; he went “from shrine to shrine through the backcountry . . . through time as well as space.” What Buson couldn’t do in his life, he could in his art. His illustrations of Basho’s travel diary to the northern mountains, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, were a high point of his artistic production. We travel to mountains to go back in time. When human beings came to this continent, shedding Clovis points like breadcrumbs, the glaciers were in power, and life was lived according to their strictures. As the glaciers receded, their cold-weather ecosystems retreated to the north, and to the mountaintops. From Lumpy Ridge, the Rocky Mountains proper are very close at hand; they open off to the west, taking up, on this late March day, a shining, bitter white quarter of the horizon. We are visiting an earlier incarnation of nature, accessible only through time now that we have won the war against the elements so successfully. Nature the uncontrollable. After warning you of lightning and avalanches and the dangers of snowfields, a sign at the Gem Lake Trailhead leaves you with the bracing warning, THE MOUNTAINS DON’T CARE. This is what I expect of nature: a reminder of the Great Indifferent, the world going as it goes, without regard for me. After making these short sojourns, I have the pleasure of imagining the mountains empty, or at least empty of my presence. Art, I think, is similar. It’s like painting the floor of a room: you ultimately paint yourself out the door. You have created a scene that now has no need of you, nothing to do with you. Freud described his young grandson playing at making a reel and string alternately disappear and reappear, gone and here, fort and da. If fort-da was a way of practicing the mother’s departure, this is a way of playing with your own departure, practicing death. You paint or write your way out of the picture. By the time we reach Gem Lake, it is snowing heavily, hard little pellets of snow, collecting like ball bearings on the gray slush of the path, on the odd black rock (resembling stacks of pancakes) that walls the canyon here. Gem Lake, at this time of year and in this weather, is a small, dark reflectionless water, sullenly clutching its trove of Holocene insect carapaces and pine pollen grains. We keep hearing water running. Sometimes it really is water, and sometimes it’s the snow

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landing—strange that those individual specks should make such a liquid noise. And there are many painterly scenes to be taken in as we head down again: the close walls of the canyons dark gray, the farther walls pale, the pines in the foreground a black you could fall into, the rock rising to disappear in snow. There is the bed of fog we had driven through, off to the east. Almost an ink painting, almost no color left. But the grounding discomfort of snow melting down my neck keeps art at bay. This granite was for a time the roots of the ancestral Rockies, but “root” is a misleading metaphor. Mountains do not tower like trees, anchored by a root system merely as deep as the tree is tall. Like icebergs, they float on far larger foundations of heavier stone, and the earth’s crust thickens below them. I took a photograph on that walk that later surprised me: a bare tree against the snow, the rock walls above it, a picture of weather stroking away the stone. Surprising because the blank field of snow could have been clouds, the slush along the bottom, the clouds’ edge, a picture of land weighing less than the sky. “The force that drives the water through the rocks.” As if the mountains wanted to rise, as if they wanted to fall. As if the world wanted to be the world. Kogarashi ya Iwa ni sakeyuku Mizu no koe

Freezing wind goes tearing through the rocks, voice of water

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Belmar Park: Where the Sidewalk Ends A N I TA H A R K E S S

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends. —Shel Silverstein

I A M D R E A M I N G that my childhood home is full of murderers. I know that my entire family is dead, beyond my help or anyone else’s, but the killers have not seen me. I crouch behind my mother’s armchair in the darkened living room and then maneuver toward the door. If I can get a head start, I might be able to run past the dead end at the south end of Carr Street, a block away. I know that if I can make it into the wild place of weeds and darkness and soft, gray-brown dirt beyond the end of the asphalt, I will be safe. 199

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Since earliest memory, this dream has come back to me again and again. My mother has suggested that I somehow knew, at age three or before, that the Lakewood Police Department would one day locate its main station on the north side of that field of weeds—which, I now know, is officially called Belmar Park. I disagree. My dream only shows that, at the dawn of my memory and ever since, I was tuned in to the spirit of Belmar Park, the same spirit that prompted the City of Lakewood to build its Municipal Center there, police station and all. This same spirit, which called upon May Bonfils Stanton, an heiress to the Denver Post newspaper fortune, to build a private mansion and estate there seventy years ago, today calls countless Coloradoans to walk the paved concrete trails that snake across it. Belmar Park is steeped in the spirit of sanctuary. Those who walk there, or bicycle, or simply sit staring into man-made Kountze Lake, seek to lose track of the stressful, workaday world, immersing themselves in the park’s calm and security. When I was very young, the dead end marked the edge of civilization. It was exactly as far as my parents could see without leaving the house, and since it also kept most cars from driving down our street, my parents were comfortable letting me wander to the dead end and back. It was perfectly okay for me to walk by myself as far as the sign at the end of the sidewalk that declared “NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES,” but no farther. My brother, two years older, was allowed to venture past the sign and disappear into the expanse of knee-high grass and black-eyed Susans. He returned with stories of a magical place: one with hills, trails, and the most perfect lake in the world for skipping rocks. By the advanced age of five, when I was finally allowed to go beyond the sign myself, to wade through the weeds and lay eyes upon the fabled lake, I had already come to think of the park as an extension of my own backyard, only more safe, more secure. I was free to walk alone through the high weeds and over a soft-soiled hill. I was delivered completely from our concrete and lawn-grass suburb. I knew that the local shopping mall, Villa Italia, sat jut across roaring Wadsworth Boulevard from the eastern edge of the park, and that the north border was Alameda Avenue, one of the thickest and fastest thoroughfares in Lakewood. I knew that the south side was bounded by housing developments like my own Carr Street to the west, where cookie-cutter townhouses lined

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one side, and two-story houses repeated just three designs up and down the other. But here, from the park, I could see none of this. All I saw was rolling hills, yellow grasses, and weed-flowers of every color—black-eyed Susans with yellow petals, dandelions, pale purple ground cover, and tiny white blooms I never bothered to identify—not to mention a mud puddle of a lake where ducks and geese occasionally swooped in to wet their feet. I thought of skipping rocks, but I did not know how. Besides, rocks were difficult to find in this place of mud, water and “weeds” that looked like flowers to me. To the south of the mud puddle, another little lake had mutated into a swamp. It bred mosquitoes and cattails, which, respectively, I hated and loved. The rare footpaths were just lines of stamped dirt. I ignored them all. The few tall trees, dried and gnarled and leafless in Colorado’s prairie climate, had twisted barks in which I could see patterns, faces, and pictures of the fairies who surely lived inside. I came here as often as I could because here there were no rules, no worries, and best of all, no people. This was a dandelion of a place: it was not pretty in the traditional, polished sense, but neither was it tame. So it was left solely for a grubby child like me to claim as my own. I quickly realized that I was not the only one who found sanctuary in the park, but as long as it was a relative secret, I was willing to share. I particularly remember the spring when I was five years old. My father lost his job. Dad had loved working as an auditor for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, traveling around the country, visiting reservations and sorting out the messes that the Bureau had made of each tribe’s finances. Dad, friendly sometimes to the point of being obnoxious, loved meeting new and different people and solving problems with them. He told us that the auditors were the only Bureau representatives that the tribespeople were happy to see. But the Bureau decided, as Dad explained to me, that it didn’t want its messes cleaned up anymore. Dad’s department was shut down, and he was forced to take a much lowerpaying job in the private sector, with no travel. My mother went to work nearly full-time, leaving my brother and me with baby-sitters. There were big changes all around, but I don’t remember any hardship or anxieties or scrimping and saving.

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What I do remember is this: an image of my father, slightly overweight at thirty-nine, in his cotton-blend dress shirt, tie, pure polyester dress pants (the year was 1979) and the shiny black leather shoes that I still liked to try on. He is poised at the top of our driveway, straddling the ancient women’s Schwinn bicycle that my mother had bought for herself at a garage sale. Dad’s leather attaché case—inherited from his father, the other Thomas Harkess, C.P.A.—is tied onto the bike’s rear basket with clothesline. Dad wears a big, boyish grin as he flips up the kickstand and rolls down the driveway, past the dead end, and off into the rising sun. His new job was in the Irongate Building, an office complex so named because it stood on the very spot where a huge iron gate had once, long ago, guarded the entry to a marvelous and very private mansion. The Irongate Building sat on the far eastern edge of Belmar Park, directly opposite my dead end. Although he could have driven his car there in less time, Dad bicycled over the trampled dirt paths through the center of Belmar Park twice a day. And all I remember is how young and happy he looked as he did it. By the time I had finished the first grade, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had reinstated its accounting department and rehired the auditors. Dad wistfully retired the Schwinn to the garden shed and returned to his old way of life. He was his old self again, more gruff, busier, more obnoxious, and less available. I was sad to see my boyish, bicycling dad go. But then again, the park was all mine once more. I slowly learned that my desire to own this place was neither unique nor new. At Belmar Elementary School, my teachers thought it important to tell us about our local history— especially how the school, like a great many things in our neighborhood, had come by the name “Belmar.” In the 1930s, a very rich lady named May Bonfils Stanton had a nasty fight with her sister, Helen Bonfils, over their inheritances from their father, a co-founder of the Denver Post newspaper empire. Helen got the newspaper. May and her architect husband, Charles Edwin Stanton, built a haven away from the rest of the world, an estate protected by Russian olive hedges and a forbidding, ornate iron front gate. It became their hiding place for more than thirty years.

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Inside the high hedges was a world out of time. There was a 250-acre pasture filled with grazing deer, a 50-acre man-made lake ringed with boathouses and edged with shrines to May’s beloved Catholic saints, and 10 acres of lily ponds and formal gardens, in the center of which sat the legendary Belmar Mansion. The name was a combination of May’s mother’s name, Belle, and the original version of her own name, Mary. The twenty-room mansion was a replica of the Petit Trianon, the country palace where Marie Antoinette retreated whenever dealing with her breadless countrymen became too stressful. During the Great Depression, May Bonfils Stanton spent more than $1 million to create her own palace retreat. For nearly forty years, only she, her husband, and their servants were allowed to set eyes on the grand estate. Even when she died in 1962 and her deep Catholic faith led her to will the glorious place to the Archdiocese of Denver, May stipulated that the estate should never be put to its obvious use as a museum. Her husband explained their shared belief that a home is a private place, and once it has outlived that use, it should be destroyed. And so it was. In the fall of 1970, the Archdiocese opened the Belmar Mansion for public viewing. Then, after hundreds of people had walked in awe through its marble halls, the palace was demolished. The day my second-grade teacher told us the tale of the Belmar Mansion, complete with slide-show images of the house and fountains and the boats flitting about on a gigantic lake, I took a new route home from school. My brother had told me that Belmar Avenue, which started just across Garrison Street from Belmar Elementary, led straight into Belmar Park, where, I already knew, the Belmar Museum had sat on the southeast corner, displaying farm equipment and everyday items from the early days of Colorado’s history. May’s made-up name was everywhere. As I walked past the unfamiliar hedges, the houses built by a different architect than the one who had designed the homes on my street, as I passed the swing sets and the horse corrals on Belmar Street, my mind already began to soften into Belmar Park mode. My pace slowed, and the wind pushed gently against my back. I thought less in words and more in images. When my hair escaped my windbreaker hood and started to tickle my nose, the wind drifted to brush it away. It was my

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friend now, doing whatever I wanted it to do. I walked the unfamiliar street with my new friend until I was deposited in my playground, Belmar Park. But it was a part of the park I had not seen before. I had avoided a full exploration, liking the idea that I didn’t know exactly how the park started or ended, or what, precisely, it contained. By the Belmar Street entrance, I found a set of three pull-up bars at varying heights. A small sign, some of its words weathered away, explained that they were part of an exercise circuit set up at intervals around the park. I tested the bars, hung by my knees from the lowest one until my head began to throb, and then I picked up my book satchel and set out again. For once, I followed a dusty trail—over the first great hill, beyond the mud-puddle lake, and past the swamp, where I stopped to pick a cattail—heading toward the north edge of the park, where Alameda Avenue roared and moaned in the distance. An object began to appear, centered along the north horizon, standing alone in the blowing grass. It was about six feet tall and two feet wide, with a rounded top and a dull gray color that absorbed the afternoon sun. Reaching it, I found that it was an obelisk made of stones slapped together with light gray mortar. When I looked at it from the north side, facing what was once May’s vast artificial lake and now was my dwindling mud puddle, I saw a little shelf carved out of the stone— an empty space, an obvious absence. A statue of a saint must have sat here once, protecting this spot on the lake. I had found one of May’s shrines. For the rest of my second-grade year, and in the years that followed, I walked home down Belmar Street as often as I walked the winding route that my mother had originally taught me. I visited my pull-up bars often, swinging away in secret. But I avoided the shrine as much as possible. Its emptiness, its obvious longing for the lost saint, saddened me. And then one day, my bars were gone. The weeds on some of the hills were gone, too, leaving only scars of naked gray-brown soil scoured by the wind. From the top of the hill by the mud-puddle lake, I could see yellow giants parked in the high grass: a backhoe and a bulldozer. As I crossed over the dead end onto Carr Street, I turned and saw that the “NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES” sign had been joined by one that said,

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“Caution! Construction Area! Keep Out!” Worried, I ran home, but I obeyed the sign and avoided the park. My real backyard, with its sandbox and swing set and single hill covered with mown grass, would have to suffice. After three lonely weeks, the invasion was finally explained by Mrs. Shaw, my corpulent teacher in Belmar Elementary’s Gifted-and-Talented program (quickly renamed “Directed Studies” to avoid upsetting the parents whose children were neither). “We’re developing Belmar Park!” gushed Mrs. Shaw, whose smile always looked pasted on. My father said that she was a member of Lakewood’s city council. “We’re putting in pathways and lighting and bridges. We’re planting trees.” She smiled her disturbing smile down at the class. “We’re opening Belmar Park up so that everyone can enjoy it.” I didn’t like this idea one bit. The thought of everyone enjoying my park was so unfair. I wanted it to stay dirty and weedy and “vacant” and “inaccessible.” I was used to my own gigantic Belmar universe just as it was, and had no interest in “development.” Belmar Park’s serenity was born of its dandelion quality. Trails and bridges and trees, and especially more people, would destroy it. I was wrong. When, at last, the “Caution! Construction Area!” sign came down and I ventured into the park again, the serene feeling was still there. The “NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES” sign was gone, but about ten feet into the park, a new sign announced “Park Rules” and displayed a map of the area. The sidewalk no longer ended where Carr Street did. Instead, as it entered the park, it smoothly morphed into a wide concrete path and continued to maze its way through the hills and weeds. Lampposts stood beside all of the trails, extinguishing all mystery, even at night. Trees had been planted, as Mrs. Shaw had promised, but they were a ridiculous ski-tourist’s stereotype of Colorado trees—aspens and pines that did not belong on this prairie land. A sprinkler system, installed to keep them alive, sprayed merrily over the grass and weed-flowers, which still flourished knee-high all over the park and had now turned from yellow-brown to green. Dark wood gazebos, as silly as the trees, had sprung up here and there, and a covered bridge, built from the same wood and in the same style, stretched across an eastern section of the lake.

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But the lake was the marvelous part. The bulldozers and backhoes had scooped out Kountze Lake again, so that it covered the greater part of the park’s center. Filled with water, it now gleamed in the sun. In the late afternoon, the sun cast its own image over the surface in a golden streak. The few ducks that had patronized the old mud-puddle lake had now brought all of their friends and relations to enjoy the restored Kountze Lake. An enormous flock of Canada geese—a species I had never seen before—had settled in as well. As I had feared, people came in flocks, too, helping their children feed the birds, walking dogs of all sizes, sauntering along with their spouses of fifty years, or zipping by on yuppie racing bikes. Even my mother, whom I had never known to set foot in the park, had taken to walking its concrete trails. My private dandelion paradise had become the most fashionable spot in Lakewood. And yet, it was still a sanctuary. My mind still softened as I crossed the park’s borders. The air still felt different somehow—thinner, freer. I felt more at home here than in my own backyard, with its mown lawn and swing set. Although the maps now told me with certainty where the boundaries of the park were and exactly what lay within them, I couldn’t see any of those borders unless I was standing at one. The park still seemed to go on forever, existing on a separate plane from my own tangled life. And aside from the vastness and the rolling hills that obscured the view, there was an otherworldly feeling here— safety, belonging, home?—that I could not fully describe. It simply was, and always was, no matter what developers had done to the land. But the Lakewood City Council had further plans for Belmar Park. Its greatest achievement, and its greatest blow to my private world, was the building of the new Lakewood Municipal Center. “It will be beautiful,” Mrs. Shaw enthused to our class. “I’ve seen the plans. It will be a totally modern facility, with the police department, the mayor’s office, and all the civic departments together in one building. And at this exciting time, I’ve decided to run for mayor. Tell your parents to vote for me. You’re all young enough that you’ll still be in Belmar Elementary’s Directed Studies when the Municipal Center opens. If I’m elected, I’ll take you all there for a tour.”

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I had to admit, the offer was tempting. If Mrs. Shaw’s defeat in the mayoral race could have prevented the construction of an office building over a mass of my beloved black-eyed Susans, I would have done my nine-year-old best to campaign against her. But I knew that the Lakewood Municipal Center was going up anyway. Still, even if I had wanted her bribe, there would have been no point in telling my parents to vote for Mrs. Shaw. My mother would make her decision without discussion, dutifully go to the polls, and vote however she chose. My father had already formed his opinion and voiced it daily: “A teacher and a mayor at the same time—if she tries to do both, she won’t be any good at either one. And that Municipal Center! I’ve seen the design. The walls and roof are made entirely of glass. Do you know how expensive it will be to heat that monstrosity? And all this money is coming right out of my pockets!” In 1983, in spite of my father, Linda Shaw became the first woman mayor of Lakewood. The Glass Monstrosity did indeed rise up. I studied it from the outside as an enormous bite was taken out of Belmar Park to make way for its parking garage. Then the building itself was erected even farther into the park, with a regal little fountain bubbling in front of the park-side doors. Mrs. Shaw, basking in her fame, called us out of our regular classes for a special Directed Studies meeting when a national educators’ magazine came to photograph the teacher/mayor with her youngest, and therefore cutest, students. She came to school every day swathed in a conservatively dark polyester business suit, and in case any important city business came up, she kept a cordless telephone in her classroom closet. When I was in the fifth grade, she kept her promise and arranged a field trip to visit her crowning achievement. “The front of the building faces the park,” Mrs. Shaw announced during our tour. “The entire Municipal Center is designed to instill a feeling of tranquility in the workers inside, so that people will enjoy being here and will do their work better. You see? All of the carpeting, the wall treatments, and even these floral prints on my office walls are in shades of gray and lavender. Psychologists have found that these are the most calming colors. The roof and outer walls are mainly windows, so the workers can enjoy soothing natural light even on cloudy days. And, of course, the

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majority of our offices—like mine here—look out onto our comforting, beautiful Belmar Park.” Our park? I still did not feel ready to share, but I could understand the city council’s sentiment. Like May Bonfils Stanton, and like me, the Lakewood City Council members had found a place where they could feel completely safe. They, too, wanted the place for themselves. Reluctantly, I accepted the council’s willingness to share. In the meantime, my brother and I had developed an addiction to the smooth ride of a bicycle over the park’s concrete trails. The new face of Belmar Park had a different effect on my mother. The rolling trails and night lights now meant that all sorts of people could come to the park at all hours of the day. And people, she knew, were the greatest danger to little girls. We made fun of her, of course. Belmar Park was still Belmar Park, the place beyond the dead end, that dreamscape where nothing negative could possibly intrude from the real world. My brother joked that she was afraid I’d be grabbed by a “killer bag lady.” Still, I was not yet a teenager. The word of a mother was law. “Mom says I have to stick with you,” I announced as I walked into the garage and flipped up the kickstand on my bike. My brother was already poised at the top of the driveway. “Sure,” he grumbled, “if you can catch me!” With that, he flew down the driveway and toward the dead end, pumping the pedals as fast as he could. I picked up my bike, turned it toward the park, and hopped on. The wind blew my pigtails back as I shot up and over the first hill. My brother disappeared over the next hill. I flew over the bridge, hearing the “thockthockthockthockthockthock” of wheels over footboards as I whizzed through the dizzying designs of sunlight thrown by the roof slats. Off the bridge, I sped around a curve, barely noticing as I passed the Glass Monstrosity and May’s saintless stone chapel. I saw my brother rolling around the next bend, and my front tire rolling off the concrete trail, as I took the curve too quickly. I steered sharply back but wedged my front tire against the concrete edge. My bike stopped. I flew, swanlike, over my handlebars and onto the gravel-strewn concrete. My brother disappeared in the distance as I started to cry. I had scraped the skin off the side of my chin, my right knee, and my right hand.

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Immediately, three mothers and one grandpa, out in the park for a day with their families, gathered around me. “Oh, that must have hurt,” one mother cooed. “Here, dust yourself off. You’re all right,” the grandpa assured me. “Are you all right? Do you live far?” another mother worried. “I’m okay,” I said, and suddenly I was. I thanked them, brushed the gravel out of the palm of my hand, and walked my bike home. As I limped past her on my way to the bathroom, Mom didn’t even look up from her Woman’s Day. No one asked why I was spraying myself with clear Mercurochrome and digging through the medicine cabinet for extra-large Band-Aids. As I carefully lowered myself down the basement stairs and into the den, my brother was calmly watching The Spy Who Loved Me on TV with my dad. No one had asked why he’d come home without me. No one noticed the bandage on my knee or the lack of skin on my chin. I would have to go back to the park for comfort. I went back often. Through my sixth-grade year, I practiced my daily bike ride as a form of meditation, though I didn’t see it as such then. I rode alone, as fast as I could go while keeping control, letting the wind blow my long hair behind me like a flag. I rode because I was twelve years old. Cliques were forming at school, with the apparent purpose of excluding me. Lumps were forming on my body and I wasn’t sure I liked them. Blood had started to flow once a month. I knew I didn’t like that. And everyone was asking what I wanted to be when I grew up. My brother was a full foot taller than I was. My mother had no interest in denying him anything, and no interest in listening to me. My father, even when he wasn’t off on a business trip, was distant. But when I rode, I was ageless. I was no part of any world but my own. On my bike, I was safe in the spirit of the weeds and the saints and the history of the place. The following year, when I was in seventh grade, my father was laid off again. This time, however, there were no jobs in the Irongate Building, and no daily bike rides to comfort him. He took a lower-level government job instead, and hated every minute of it. After about a year of this, Dad suffered his first heart attack. Ten months later, on February 5, 1989, he had his second, the one that killed him. His three brothers and their wives flew in from all over the country. As my Uncle Hal

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helped plan his younger brother’s funeral, he poured himself a glass of water and carefully swallowed a pill to control his high blood pressure. I wondered how he could keep from screaming. When the funeral details had been set, Aunt Rebeca, a great lover of walks, suggested that my mother show them the marvelous park she’d been talking about. Night had fallen. The lampposts bathed the park in cold, artificial light. The February air was icy, although there was no snow. Stars shone above, cold and perfect and brighter than I had ever seen them. My mother and uncles and aunts avoided their grief by talking about everyday things. I lagged along behind them, basking in a fifteen-year-old’s insular sorrow. No one knew what to say to me. In Belmar Park, I didn’t care. I could simply be, in a place separate from formalities and ceremonies and plans. Ice crystals drifted through the lampposts’ light, and I imagined this place frozen in time, with rimed brown grasses still knee-high, cattails dead and headless in the frozen swamp, and May Bonfils Stanton’s little shrine calling out for its saint. Without my father, the house was less of a home. Even my bedroom was no place for solace: my brother could rattle the door at midnight, or walk in any time to take something he wanted, or punish me for something I’d touched. My mother said nothing. If I stepped into his room, though—or if I argued with him about something, or got in the way, or was visible when he was unhappy or bored—I could be hit, kicked, twisted, or jabbed in the neck with his take on the Vulcan neck pinch. My mother simply went about her business. When Dad had been with us, plopped in his usual place on the couch, I could at least scream when I was frightened. Then he would come stomping up the basement stairs, tell my brother to stop doing whatever had caused me to make that annoying noise, and stomp back down again. But without Dad, there was no one to defend me. My frustration was boiling. Late each night, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, my brother rattled my door. He woke me up at 6:00 A.M. by setting his clock-radio alarm as loud as it would go, then drifting off again, oblivious, while it blared through the wall we shared. One morning, after he drove off without me again in the car that my parents had bought him on the promise that he’d take me to school and back, I walked into his

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room, yanked the clock radio out of its outlet, and set it out with the weekly trash. That afternoon, the garbage was gone when my mother dropped me off after school. My brother had driven himself home, again, without me. I had called my mother, again, and she had silently picked me up and driven me home before going back to work. My brother was waiting for me in the kitchen. “Where’s my alarm clock?” “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “I want my alarm clock!” He grabbed my arm hard enough to leave purple fingerprints and reeled me in. “Give back my alarm clock!” His steel-toed motorcycle boots, the fashion statement of his high school years, bit into my shins. “It’s my clock!” he shouted, raking out bits of my hair. I shrieked, knowing that no one who could hear me would care, and twisted away from him, losing more of my hair. Running away, I tripped over the footstool but landed upright. Fumbling with the locks to open the front door, I tore out across the lawn onto the asphalt of Carr Street. I ran faster than I ever had, knowing that if I could make it into the dark, weedy, wild place beyond the end of the asphalt, I would be safe. I stopped only after I had run up the concrete trail and past May’s saintless shrine. I realized, to my amazement, that no one had followed me into Belmar Park. I was alone. And safe. And suddenly very cold. March is the season of snowstorms in Colorado, and one was just beginning. The pine trees were flocked with frost, and the high grasses stood sparkling, frozen. Large, cottony snowflakes were floating down all around me. I realized that I had no coat; I had run out the front door in only a sweatshirt, jeans, and laceless canvas sneakers. I was safe from everything but the cold. As I passed the Glass Monstrosity, the thought of the police station in its basement crossed my mind but flitted away. Why would they help me? This was how little sisters were treated. I walked on, stepping off the path before I got to the gazebo bridge, and waded straight on through the rimy weeds until I stood at the edge of Wadsworth Boulevard. On the other side was Villa Italia Mall. I had no money for shopping or eating or even using a pay phone, but it was a public place and

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it was heated. I paced up and down both floors of the mall, forcing myself to window shop and trying not to cry. Finally, I went to a pay phone and placed a collect call. I hung up when my brother answered. I wandered the mall again, I called again. Still no luck. Three hours and several phone calls later, my mother finally answered. “I’m stuck at the mall, and it’s too cold to walk home,” I said simply. “Can you come get me?” “Fine. Be in front of Wards. You’d better be there waiting for me.” She slammed down the phone. I went outside and stood on the sidewalk in the snow. Ten minutes later, my mother’s car rolled up. “What were you thinking,” my mother snapped as I pulled the door open and jumped in, “going shopping without your coat?” I knew she didn’t want an answer. At home, I found that she had bought a new clock radio for my brother. He refused to use it. “I want my alarm clock,” he sulked, seventeen years old. I avoided being home as much as possible, but my brother would not give up his quest to beat his precious clock out of me. My mother went to the store to buy more clocks to comfort him. Later that week, I called my best friend, Julie. It was evening, when her parents, Ron and Carla, were home. They came to take me away, and I was allowed to stay in their basement for three days. Then they brought me back: they were convinced that I was a troubled teen, but not that my story was true. I was quieter after that, and valued my sleep less. Still, two years later, when the start of summer break bored my brother, I ran from the house again with bruising fingerprints on my arm. Carla and Ron believed me this time. They kept me for a full week and returned me only after arranging a meeting with a church counselor, whom my mother ignored while pouting at me. And then another with Social Services, who said they could do nothing, as they only had time to bother with abandoned children and life-threatening cases. They did not expect me to be killed. Besides, I would be eighteen in six months and no longer their problem. For three more years, I grew quieter still, and involved myself in every outside activity I could find. When my brother, now twenty-one,

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solved an argument by swinging me into a door by my hair, I ran from the house yet again. But this time, as I jumped into my own car and drove away, I realized that I was twenty years old. I had my own car and my own source of income. I never had to go back. Dealing with my brother and mother was much simpler when I lived somewhere else: whenever tempers started to flare, I could jump in my car and go home. Gradually, a cold but calm semblance of a family relationship developed. I could visit on the proper occasions— holidays, birthdays, and the occasional weekend—and be polite for a while. And then, thankfully, I could go home alone. I spent most of my time away from my family and, sadly, away from Belmar Park. When I was twenty-three, eight years after my flight through the snowstorm, Belmar Park reunited me with one of my rescuers. At the end of a Sunday-morning visit to my mother, I decided to visit the park as well. I walked past the gazebo, down one long hill and up another, across the bridge, and past the Glass Monstrosity and May’s empty shrine. As I neared the bend in the trail where I had fallen off of my bike, I saw another walker coming toward me. I met her eyes, smiled, and was about to mouth a silent “Hi,” when I realized that I knew her. She was Carla, Julie’s mother, who had taken me in twice during those terrifying years. She was walking quickly, her wire-framed glasses slightly fogged, her cheeks stained with tears. “Hi, Carla!” I called, still wearing my customary pedestrian smile. “Um, are you all right?” She smiled back, but sniffled as she came to a stop. “I’m all right. Well, I’ve been better. Anita, I haven’t seen you in years— how are you doing?” I was doing quite well, and I mentioned my apartment in Littleton, my college courses, my secretarial job, but it was obvious that Carla was the one who needed to talk. “Have you had lunch yet?” she asked. We walked to a townhouse, set in the mass of townhouses on the Carr Street edge of the park. Carla told me her story as she heated up a rotisserie chicken and dished out potato salad. I knew that she and Julie’s dad had divorced while Julie, one year younger than I, was still in high school. After three years of living in a Green Mountain condominium with Julie, she had begun dating a gruff Vietnam veteran named

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Tom, whom Julie detested. Carla blamed Tom’s excessive machismo, his rudeness to women—including herself—and his bigotry toward all people and things from anywhere in Asia on the horrors he had seen in the war. Julie and I were of the opinion that Tom had been a horrible person before he ever went to war. Vietnam had simply amplified him. Julie had occasionally tried to convince her mother that she could do better. Carla responded by letting Tom move in with her after Julie had moved out. Then, at last, Tom had thrown a fit big enough to scare even softhearted Carla away. She had locked herself inside the bedroom, cowering, while Tom rampaged through the rest of her condo, throwing pictures and overturning furniture. After he finally stormed out and drove away, she packed a bag, left a message giving Tom one month to find his own apartment, and took off for Belmar Park, her favorite walking place. Her ex-husband, Julie’s dad, was letting her stay in his townhouse on the edge of the park while he was away on vacation. She was grateful for the safe place to stay, but even more grateful to be near the park, where friends appeared as magically as troubles evaporated. Over the years, living in other parts of the Denver area, I gradually forgot about Belmar Park and the feelings it inspired. I did not visit it again until the summer of 2001, when my work as an office temp brought me to the City of Lakewood’s Department of Economic Development. The city government, having outgrown the Glass Monstrosity, had recently opened the Civic Center North, a shiny, modern brick box that took a bite out of the wildness in the park’s southeast corner. This was where I would be working. They had also put in a large shopping center populated with such stores as Old Navy, Cub Foods, and Ross “Dress for Less”; a new library; the Lakewood Cultural Center, with its theater and art galleries; and a plaza of concrete and brick to unite the buildings and wipe out the last patches of wild grasses and flowers. I became aware again of Belmar Park’s immense size when I realized, looking at this expanse of concrete and brick where knee-high grass had been, that most of the park was still untouched and wild. June, the department secretary for Community Planning and Development, who shared a suite with me, told me how disappointed she had been when the North Building opened three months before. She

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had been moved from her former office in the Glass Monstrosity. “I had a window facing out onto the park,” she said wistfully. “Almost everyone did. I could look right out and see the sun sparkling on the lake. Summertime, wintertime, there was this line of sunlight spreading across the water. It was just so beautiful.” When I asked June how to transfer a stack of purchase orders to the finance department, her face lit up. “It’s in the main building. We can just walk it over. I’ll come along and show you.” We set off across the plaza to the Glass Monstrosity. When our errand was finished, she led me out a door that left us far from our office, looking out on Belmar Park. “Why are we going this way?” I asked, blinking in the dazzling sun. “We’re just taking a little break,” said June. “Let’s take the long way back and enjoy the lake. Isn’t it gorgeous?” It was. The July sun was not too hot, but it sparkled prettily on the lake. The greenish-yellow grasses swayed in a gentle breeze, and the aspen trees shook their leaves. We stayed for a moment, absorbing the sunlight, then walked all the way back to Civic Center North. One frantic Friday, when most of my work was finally done, I stared blankly at my clear desk for a moment, and then I remembered June. “June?” I called, peeking around the front of my cubicle. “Can you cover my phones? We have fifteen minutes left, and I really need a walk.” June smiled knowingly and nodded. I trotted down the stairs, out the door, and off across the brickwork plaza. Stepping off the brick, I walked over mown grass to the other side of the Glass Monstrosity, then strode into knee-high weeds that ruffled the hem of my officecasual dress. I was home again. Belmar Park, I saw, had continued to change. I was disturbed to see the back side of the acclaimed new library. The jagged brick building bit obviously into the park’s gentle, rolling wildness. Around the sharp edges of walls and corners was a swath of the greatest insult: mown grass. I turned away and walked deeper into the park to forget. A few couples strolled by, and some dog walkers. I came upon a sign at the edge of the lake: “Feeding is Foul!” it cried. “Please enjoy our waterfowl, but DO NOT FEED THEM! . . . Feeding them only encourages overcrowding

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and disease.” As if to illustrate, a mass of geese milled around the base of the sign. A few yards away, I saw that May Bonfils Stanton’s shrine was no longer empty. Some modern supplicant had glued a six-inch plastic Madonna and Child into the scooped-out shelf. Someone else, I suppose, had seated next to her a brown plastic baby doll with a Kewpie-like smile. Other sorts of shrines had appeared, too. Closer to the lake, a life-sized bronze statue of a Canada goose spread its wings to the blue summer sky. A circle of bricks surrounded it, most of them engraved with dedications: “In Loving Memory of,” “In Honor of,” “A Gift From.” Some were blank, still for sale. As I turned back toward the office and began my circle around the park, I focused on a memorial that had previously escaped my attention. At the park’s edge, directly across from Civic Center North, a bronze bas-relief wall stuck out of the ground. “Colorado’s Fallen Firefighters,” it declared. “Honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice while protecting the property and lives of the people of Colorado.” Property and lives? I thought. Shouldn’t lives come first? The carvings in the wall showed a small clutch of firemen (and no firewomen) dressed in full protective uniforms, standing around one fallen fireman who was stretched out like a rag doll. One of his comrades stooped to hold an oxygen mask to his face. As I walked on, some quaint park benches of wood and iron appeared here and there along the concrete path. All had little bronze plaques affixed to their backrests: “In Loving Memory of.” More memorials. Our park is becoming a cemetery, I caught myself thinking, then I wondered, Isn’t that appropriate? A place of rest, a place of sanctuary. But this place should be set aside for the living, not the dead. All the same, the inscription on one park bench called out to me: “In memory of Albina C. Glebsch, who found solace in this park.” I knew exactly how she felt.

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About the Contributors

Fred Baca is a sixteenth-generation descendant of one of the original Spanish families of New Mexico. He was born and raised in Colorado and attended Colorado College and the University of Colorado at Boulder, studying English. His novel Agua has been accepted for publication by Arte Publico Press. He received a Colorado Council on the Arts fellowship for a short story, “Elves.” Alexander Blackburn has published Suddenly a Mortal Splendor (Dallas: Baskerville, 1995) and The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979). For his unpublished novel The Lamp Beside the Golden Door, he won the 2003 International PeaceWriting Award. John Calderazzo teaches creative writing at Colorado State University and is the author of Writing From Scratch (Chicago: Rowan & Littlefield, 217

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1990) and 101 Questions About Volcanoes (Tucson: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, 1994), the first in a series of nature books for children. His most recent book is Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives. SueEllen Campbell teaches literature at Colorado State University. She has written The Enemy Opposite: The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis, Bringing the Mountain Home (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), and most recently Even Mountains Vanish: Searching for Solace in an Age of Extinction (University of Utah Press, forthcoming). Alexander Drummond was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and has climbed, hiked, skied, camped in, and otherwise explored both his native turf and much of the American West, as well as Northern Europe. He holds a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Colorado and an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. For twenty years, he served as publications director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. His book, Enos Mills: Citizen of Nature, was reissued by University Press of Colorado in 2002. He now spends his time hiking, skiing, camping, writing essays and poetry, and freelance editing. He lives in a 100-year-old log house with woodstoves and solar power in the mountains west of Boulder. Amy England’s most recent book of poems, The Flute Ship Castricum, was released by Tupelo Press (Dorset, Vermont) in April 2001. Her work has appeared in Volt, Fence, McSweeney’s, Ohio Review, Indiana Press, Colorado Review, and Best American Poetry 2000, among other publications. In October 2000, the Edge Gallery in Denver presented a collaborative exhibit, “The Hall of Gifts,” by England and artist Karen Andrews. She also edits Transparent Tiger Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks. Reyes García received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1988. He teaches writing, as well as Western European philosophy, indigenous worldviews, religions of the world, environmental ethics, philosophy of history and culture, and Southwest Studies, at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He has published critical reviews, personal essays, and poems in a variety of academic and literary journals. During the summer, he lives on a family ranch in

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the San Luis Valley. He has two daughters, Lana Kiana and Tania Paloma. Merrill Gilfillan is a writer of essays, poems, and short fiction whose Magpie Rising: Sketches From the Great Plains (Pruett/Vintage, 1988) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. His most recent collection of poems, The Seasons (Adventures in Poetry), was published by Zephyr Press (Tucson) in 2002. Sworn Before Cranes (New York: Orion Books, 1994) won the Ohio Book Award. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. Anita Harkess lived next to Belmar Park from the day she was brought home from the hospital until she moved out on her own at the age of twenty. She holds a degree in English writing from the University of Colorado at Denver. Previous publications include stories, essays, and poems in Lakewood High School’s award-winning literary magazine Harbinger, a poem in CU-Denver’s literary magazine The Edge, and columns and reviews in CU-Denver’s Denver Free Press. She now lives in Aurora, Colorado. Mark Irwin is the author of several poetry collections, including the most recent, White City (BOA Editions, 2000). He has received a “Discovery”/The Nation award, two Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Colorado Recognition Award. Kristen Iversen teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1999), recipient of the 2000 Colorado Book Award for Biography, and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, forthcoming from Prentice-Hall. She is currently at work on a historical novel based on “Baby Doe” Tabor and her two daughters, Lily and Silver Dollar, and on a work of creative nonfiction, Full Body Burden, about growing up in the shadow of Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. Kate Krautkramer lives with her family in Yampa, Colorado. Her stories and essays have appeared in The High Plains Literary Review, The Seattle Review, and the North American Review. “Walking in Yampa” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

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James Lough lives in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, teaches writing and literature at the Colorado School of Mines, and writes book reviews for The Denver Post. He has published fiction, poetry, and essays in various literary journals. He has received an Academy of American Poets award for fiction, a Frank Waters fiction prize, and the Order of Omega Outstanding Teacher’s Award. Thomas J. Noel suspects that his love of dark, mysterious places is due to his conception in the Moffat Tunnel. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Colorado, The City & the Saloon: A Liquid History of Denver (University of Press of Colorado, 1996), is now a book. Broadening and deepening his research, Noel has also published Colorado: A Liquid History & Tavern Guide to the Highest State (New York: Longitude Books, 1999). He teaches Denver, Colorado, and American West history at CU-Denver, and is the author/co-author of twenty-five books and a weekly “Dr. Colorado” column in the Saturday Rocky Mountain News. Sangeeta Reddy was born in Hyderabad, India, in 1955. She was educated in India and the United States and holds degrees in art and English literature. A painter since 1985 (she is represented by galleries in New Delhi, Chennai, and Denver), and former adjunct faculty member at Arapahoe Community College, she has only recently come to writing. Her short story “Ambu” was published in Many Mountains Moving. The excerpt in this anthology is from her first novel. Currently, she is juggling her time between writing her second novel and working on her art in Littleton, Colorado. Reg Saner’s essays and poems have appeared in more than 140 literary magazines, including The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Field, New York Quarterly, The American Literary Review, The Georgia Review, Ironwood, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, and The American Voice, and in more than three dozen anthologies, including Best American Essays. His Climbing Into the Roots (New York: HarperCollins, 1976) won the Academy of American Poetry’s first Walt Whitman Award. So This Is the Map (New York: Random House, 1981) was selected by Derek Walcott for the National Poetry Series, and his collection Red Letters won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize. Saner’s

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backpacking, backcountry skiing, and canyoneering have furnished materials for his The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), nominated for the John Burroughs Medal in nature writing. Among his honors is a State of Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Wallace Stegner Award conferred by the Center of the American West. Saner’s latest book, Reaching Kent Seel: Ruin’s Echo & the Anasazi (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), is a meditative response to ancient Pueblo terrain, dwellings, and culture. Christie Smith, raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been living in the West since 1980. She has a B.A. in English from Tufts University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Denver. Her master’s thesis is on Willa Cather, her dissertation on western illustrator and novelist Mary Hallock Foote. She also works on Colorado history projects and teaches composition at Denver area colleges, including Front Range Community College, Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Colorado at Denver. She lives in Longmont with several cats, and during her wanderings, enjoys the many hot springs around Colorado and New Mexico. Nick Sutcliffe is a writer for the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. After moving to the United States from England in 1985, he attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he studied English and education. He has written short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Along with teaching students at the high-school and college-freshman levels, Nick has worked in nonprofit development and marketing. He currently lives in Gold Hill, Colorado, with his wife and two children. Jane Wodening’s First Presence was published in 2000 by Baksun Books (Boulder). She has also published five chapbooks. In 2001, her work was included in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, published by the University of California Press (Berkeley), and The Libraries of Thought and Imagination, published by Pocketbooks, Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2002.

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Index

Abbey, Edward, 184 Abe’s General Store, 42 Abiquiu, New Mexico, 76 Adi Da, 156 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 121 Aeschylus, 126 Africa, 45, 58 Agamemnon, 126 Alamosa, Colorado, 179, 183, 188 Alva, Oklahoma, 115 “America, the Beautiful,” 118 Andover, Massachusetts, 114 Antonito, Colorado, 74, 76, 130, 131, 134, 177 Arapaho Glacier, 91 Arapaho Nation, 105, 106, 143, 145 Arches National Monument (Utah), 184

Arkansas River, 178 Art Institute of Chicago, 191 Aspen Institute, 117 Australia, 74 Badito, Colorado, 42 Basho, 196–197 Bates, Katherine Lee, 118 Bear Mountain, 149–151, 153 Beaver Creek Road, 116 Belmar Mansion, 203 Belmar Museum, 203 Belmar Park, 200–201, 202, 208, 211, 213, 214 Black Hills, South Dakota, 62 Black Lake, 6 Blanca Peak, 130, 158, 178, 180

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Blue River, 96 Blue River Valley, 96 Bohm, David, 127 Bonfils, Helen, 202 Bonfils, Mary Stanton, 202, 203, 208, 210, 213, 216 Borodin, Alexander, 134 Boulder, Colorado, 102, 103, 108, 111, 138–143, 148, 149, 184 Brainard Lake, 104 Briggsdale, Colorado, 60 Bruno, Giordano, 157 Bryant, William Jennings, 26 Buchanan Pass, 3 Buddha, x, 73, 155 Buena Vista, Colorado, 23, 178 Burnt Norton, England, 181 Buson, Yosa, 155, 189, 191, 194 Cache le Poudre River, 173 Cambodia, 80 Cameron Pass, 173 Camp Audobon, 104 Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 181 Carrasco, Davíd, 72 Carson, Kit, 41 Central City, Colorado, 20 Chama River, 76, 79, 80 Chavez Town, Colorado, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43 Cheyenne Nation, 143, 145 Chicago, Illinois, 28 Chihuahua, Mexico, 21 Clark’s Fork, 91 Clear Creek, 95 Clovis People, 179 Cody People, 179 Cold War of Kitty Pentecost, The, 119 Collegiate Peaks, 91 Colorado, The, 118 Colorado Fish and Game Department, 67 Colorado Highway 69, 42 Colorado Historical Society, 43 Colorado Piedmont, 190 Colorado Plateau, 118 Colorado River, 87, 96 Colorado South of the Border, 41

Colorado Springs, Colorado, 118, 122, 191 Conejos County, Colorado, 73 Conejos River, 69, 76, 77, 81, 84, 130, 136 Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de, 33 Cortéz, Ezekial, 78, 80, 81 Cortéz, Hernán, 78 Crazy Horse, 103 Cripple Creek, Colorado, 118 Crow Creek, Colorado, 60 Cumbres, Colorado, 70, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81 Cumbres Pass, 74, 77 Curtis, Edward, 60 Cushman, Robert, 114 Dakota Hogback, 191 “Dance of the Maidens,” 134 Daniels, Bebe, 29 Davis, Bill, 116 Decision Rock, 92, 93, 97 Devon, England, 88 Denver, Colorado, 19, 21, 24, 28, 41, 42, 91, 103, 108, 134, 142 Denver Basin, 190 Denver Formation, 190 Denver International Airport, 179 Denver Post, 67, 202 Denver Public Library, 43 Denver Republican, 25 Derrida, Jacques, 184 Diego de Vargas, Don, 179 Dillard, Annie, viii Dipping Lakes, 79–80 Divine Madness Running Sect, 140 Doe, Harvey, 20, 30 Dreamer, Geno, 62 Dry Salvages, Massachusetts, 181 DuBouchet, André, 135 Duffy, James, III, 10 Durham, North Carolina, 114 Eagle Rock Road, 46, 48, 50 East Coker, England, 181 Eckankar, 140 “Eighth Duino Elegy,” 137 Einstein, Albert, 127

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Eldorado Springs, Colorado, 148 El Guique, New Mexico, 81 Eliot, T. S., 181–182 El Rio Bravo Del Norte. See Rio Grande El Rio de los Conejos. See Conejos River El Rito, New Mexico, 70, 76 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, x Empedocles, 69 Evans, John, 116 Evans Davis, Margaret, 116, 117 Evergreen, Colorado, 116 Exe River, 88 Faris, Jeanette, 42 Faris, John, 42 Farisita, Colorado, 42, 43 Ferrar, Nicholas, 181 Flat Top Mountains, 53 Focillon, Henri, 191 Folsom People, 179 Fonda, Henry, 115 Foote, Mary Hallock, 186 Fort Collins, Colorado, 91, 173 Fort Garland, Colorado, 158 Fosseco, 41 Four Quartets, 181 Freud, Sigmund, 186, 197 Gallegos, Maclovio, 78 García, Augustino, 37, 38, 40, 43 García, Castellar, 72, 73, 79–80 García, Celestino, 76 García, Colorado, 41 García, José Amarante, 72, 76 García, José Eduardo, 75, 77, 78 García, José Victor, 72 García, Lana, 82, 86 García, Margaret, 76 García, Réyes, 130, 135 García, Tania, 82, 86 García, Teodora Espinosa de, 73 García, Teresa, 77 García Lake, 74, 79 Garden of the Gods, 191 Gardner, Colorado, 37, 40 Gardner, Herbert, 40 Gem Lake, 194, 197 Georgetown University, 77

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Glacier Gorge, 2, 7, 12, 13, 16 Glebsch, Albina, 216 Goethe, Wolfgang Von, 132 Golden, Colorado, 95 Gold Lake Valley, 103 Golgotha, 35 Gómez Durán y Chavez, Don Pedro, 38 Gonzales, Reyes, 76 Gore Canyon, 87, 91, 95, 98 Gore Range, 98 Gore Rapid, 92, 100 Grapes of Wrath, The, 115 Great Sand Dunes National Monument, 122, 159, 169, 187 Greenhorn Inn, 41 Greenridge Mountain, Colorado, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 57 Green River, 89 Half Mountain, 10 Hamlet, 29 Haystack Mountain, 144–145 Hermanos (Brothers of Light). See Penitentes Highway 36, 193 Hogan, Linda, 82 Hollywood, California, 111 Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, Chicago, 26 Huerfano River, 37, 38, 39, 42 Heurfano Valley, 42 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 175 Idaho Springs, Colorado, 116 Illinois River, 90 India, 164, 165 Indian Peaks, 106 Interstate 25, 42 In the Spirit of the Earth, 72 Intimate Nature, The Bond Between Women and Animals, 82 Irwin, Mark, 81 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 111 Jesus, x, 32–33, 34 Jung, Carl, 126, 127 Kauai, Hawaii, 81 Kiowa Nation, 62

226

I N D E X

Kirshbaum’s Rapids (Gore River), 94, 95, 99, 100 Korean War, 117 Kountze Lake, 206 Kremmling, Colorado, 87, 91 Ku’ato Nation, 62 Kumar, Hemant, 162 Lake Texcoco, 72 Lakewood (Colorado) City Council, 206, 208 Lakewood Department of Community Planning and Development, 214 Lakewood Department of Economic Development, 214 Lakewood Municipal Center, 207 Lakota Nation, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109–110, 111, 112 Laramie, Wyoming, 108 Laramie River, 173 Lazarillo de Tormes, 126 Leadville, Colorado, 19, 22, 186 Leadville Annunciation Church, 24, 26 Lee Hill, 110 Leopold, Aldo, viii Life of Forms in Art, 191 Little Gidding (England), 181 London, 23 Long’s Peak, 3, 10, 17 Lopez, Barry, 85, 184–185 Loretto Academy (Santa Fe), 76 Los Angeles, California, 103, 111 Lugh, vii Lumpy Ridge, 192, 193–194 Machebeuf, Bishop Joseph P., 24 Machine in the Garden, The, 120 Maddox, William J., Jr., 80 Magnussen, Ruth, 3 Manassa, Colorado, 179 Mancos, Colorado, 81 Mandan Nation, 62 Mangeshkar, Lata, 168 Martin, Calvin, 72 Martínez, Amorina, 81–82 Martínez, Armando, 81–82 Martínez, Clara, 81 Martínez, Lorenzo, 81

Martínez, William, 81 Marx, Leo, 120, 121 Matchless Mine, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30 McFee, John, 184 Melagres, Don Facundo, 42 Mesita, Colorado, 41, 179 Metzger, Deena, 82 Mexican Hat, Utah, 111 Mexico, 71 Mexico City, 72 Mills Lake, 3, 13 Missoula, Montana, 91 Moby Dick, 121 Monument Valley, Arizona, 121 Morrison Creek, 46 Mount Blanca. See Blanca Peak Mount Evans, 116 Mount Massive, 23 Mount McHenry, 9 Mount San Antonio, 130 Narcissus, 156–157 National Center for Atmospheric Research, 149–150 Navajo Nation, 180 Nederland, Colorado, 108, 111 Never Summer Range, 173 New Haven, Connecticut, 114, 126 New River, 89 Niwot, Chief, 105, 106, 143 Nixon, Richard, 80 North Park, 173 Obata, Chiura, 195 Oberlin, Kansas, 115 Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, 161 Onate, Juan de, 33 Oxford, England, 117 Pacific Ocean, 90 Pawnee Buttes, 59 Pawnee Creek, 59 Peltier, Leonard, 110 Penitentes (Brothers of Light), 32, 33, 38 39 Pennsylvania Marine Shale, 98 Peterson, Brenda, 82

I N D E X

Phippsburg, Colorado, 48 Picard, Max, 132 “Pied Beauty,” 175 Pike, Zebulon, 118 Pikes Peak, 118 Pine Ridge (massacre), 110 Polovtsian Dances, The, 134 Poncha Pass, 180 Prelude, The, 116, 196 Pueblo Nation, 179, 180 Pyrite Rapids (Gore River), 94 Rawah Wilderness, 173, 177 Red Cloud, 103 Red Rocks Park, 191 Richmond, Virginia, 126 Rilke, Maria Ranier, 135, 137 Rio Grande, 69, 130, 176 Rio Grande Railroad, 180, 187 Robinson, Edward G., 29 Rocky Mountain National Park, 173, 190, 193 Rocky Mountain Rescue, 11 Romero, Flora, 81 Routt County, Colorado, 46 Russell, William Green, 42 Sahara Desert, 2–3 Saigyo, 196 Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Leadville, Colorado, 30 Salmon River, 90 San Acacio, Colorado, 41 Sand County, viii San Diego, California, 77 San Francisco, Colorado, 41 Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 32, 39, 122, 130, 159, 179, 180 San Juan de los Caballeros, New Mexico, 76 San Juan Mountains, 69 San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, 76, 130 San Luis, Colorado, 31, 36, 78, 81, 163, 168, 170 San Luis Lakes, 184 San Luis Valley, 40, 71, 122, 130, 178, 179, 180, 188 San Pablo, Colorado, 41 Santa Barbara, California, 118

227

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 36, 38, 72, 76, 179 Sargent, John, 76 Sargent, Ludgarda, 76 Sartre, Jean Paul, 151 Scarberry, Susan, 81 Schweitzer, Albert, 117 Seattle, Washington, 89, 90 Shaw, Linda, 205, 206, 207 Silver Dollar, 29 Silverstein, Shel, 199 Sisters of Loretto Cathedral, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 36 Sitting Bull, 103 Skyomish River, 97 Sonnets to Orpheus, 135 South Park, 178 Spain, 71 Stanton, Charles Edwin, 202 Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 45 Suddenly a Mortal Splendor (novel), 122 Tabor, Augusta, 22, 25 Tabor, Elizabeth McCourt (Baby Doe), 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30 Tabor, Horace, 21, 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 30 Tabor, Silver, 19, 21, 26, 27–28 Taos, New Mexico, 130, 158, 167 Taylor, Ralph C., 41 Tenochitlan, 72 Teotihuacán, 72 Tewa Pueblo, 76 Thatchtop Mountain, 9 Thomas, Dylan, 191 Thoreau, Henry David, viii, 131 Tinker Creek, viii Tokyo, 190 Toynbee, Arnold, 23 Trungpa, Chögyam, 70, 74 Tunnel Falls (Gore River), 94, 98, 99 Ulaterri, Juan de, 33 Universal Studios, 111 University of Colorado at Boulder, 72, 80 U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 201 U.S. Bureau of Land Management, 183

228

I N D E X

U.S. Highway 85, 41 Ute Nation, 179, 180 Valmont Butte, 153 Vietnam, 75, 77, 80, 122, 124 Villa Grove, Colorado, 178, 179 Walden, 121 Walden Pond, viii Walsenburg, Colorado, 40, 42 Ward, Colorado, 102–103, 104, 108, 110 Waters, Frank, 118, 128 Weld County, Colorado, 59

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” 146 Whitman, Walt, 146 Windsor Hotel, Denver, Colorado, 30 Wolf Creek, 76, 82 Wooten, Uncle Dick, 41 Wordsworth, William, 116, 196 World War II, 41 Yale University, 115, 117 Yampa, Colorado, 45, 46, 48, 50, 57 Yampa River, 47 Yosemite National Park, 195, 196