So, you might ask, why Superior Wolf Moon? Well, I’m in the Superior Wolf world now and plan to stay in it until I have a new first draft. I conceived this story idea back in 1999, have picked it up and put it down several times. Now though I’ve got traction, I’m having fun and I’m finally going to finish it, probably around this time next year, maybe a bit sooner. Every one’s a little different. Superior Wolf Moon is a device to remind me of that commitment every day for the the duration of this moon cycle.
The sun is on its way down, sinking behind Black Mountain. I don’t often write in the evenings anymore because I’m usually downstairs in the house. Tonight I came up after a sweatshirt. It gets cool reliably around 7 pm or so.
It also gets quieter here in the evening. The motorcyclists have made it to wherever they were headed. The cars loaded with camping gear have found a spot for the night. The Denver tourists headed to Upper Maxwell Falls trailhead have returned to the city. No bicyclists. No one walking their dog. A few people are still arriving home from work, probably having driven from downtown Denver.
This has been a hard week. Jon’s most recent encounter with the courts got at least part of the divorce mess sorted out. Kate drove home from Jackson Hole. The last of the painting project is almost wrapped up. Kate and I went to the grocery store today, a task that proves physically difficult with our mutual arthritic thises and thatses. The days have been warmer than I prefer, though definitely more tolerable than Denver proper.
A possible arc upward does seem hidden in the detritus. Jon has more predictability now in his life. The long work of staining and painting has all but ended which means no more extra cars and people around during the day. BJ’s injury is healing, headed toward what her surgeon believes will be a good recovery. He says she should be playing again in a couple of months.
Lugnasa lies just ahead, two days. That means the peak heat of the summer has begun to wane. The nights will get cooler, the days shorter. Welcome changes. Summer is my least favorite season and was so even during our intensive gardening days in Andover. I don’t like the heat, even the more modest heat that we get here. The vegetables and fruits and bees needed it, we welcomed its results, but not its presence. I’ll be glad to move into August, even more so September.
Kate got back last night, a long drive, 9 hours, from Jackson Hole to Shadow Mountain. Good to have her back. Home is better when both of us are here.
Masked with the staining begun, 7/19
The painters may finish today, they’re very close. This project has taken three weeks so far. The cabinets are done, most of the other interior work, too, including Kate’s splash of bright green above the cabinets, changing the character of the kitchen yet again.
It was hot here yesterday, though pallid in comparison to Denver. We remain less humid than the plains and the nights are cooler. Minnesota has had a siege of weather related storms and heat, not over yet.
Beginning of school a year ago
The grandkids were up last night. Gabe reprised his week ago trick of attaching a dog bone to a long line of twine and “fishing” for dogs off the deck. This time though he used a stick. The bone worked better. Ruth had a sore throat, but was in good spirits. It was a calm, normal evening, the goal toward which all this divorce mess aims. It was good to see.
Today is another court related hearing, an important one, for Jon. We’re all going in to see what the disposition will be. He goes back to work next week and is planning, for now, to commute from here into Aurora which is on the eastern edge of Denver. A long drive in rush hour.
Swirling. The world, or at least the part of it connected to me and mine, has taken flight, gone up in the air like dust devils. BJ had surgery on her shoulder in the late afternoon yesterday in Jackson Hole. Kate said she liked the surgeon, which is roughly the same as saying he’s a rock star. The Hitching Post, a motel next to the hospital, has rooms for $45 a night if a family member is in the hospital. She’s staying there.
Jon is rushing to finish remodeling a bathroom, put on a deck and doing other fix-it chores at the Pontiac house. He has to be out of there before Jen and the kids return on Monday evening. A restraining order makes it so. The heat-and, ironically for this arid state, the humidity-have been high. It was 99 there yesterday when he and I ate lunch at the wonderful dining table he built.
Though, for those of you in the Gopher State who read this, I know it’s been pretty bad there, too. Both places remind me of Singapore in April when Kate and I visited Mary. We managed to hike across the Singapore Botanical Gardens on a day when the temperature was within one degree of an all time record and the humidity created a watery, heated bubble around us as we walked. Can anyone say carbon tax?
Timberline Painters finished staining the garage, shed, and two decks yesterday. One garage door is green, the other will follow. Interior painting starts on Monday. The dogs, who have to be inside while the painters are in the yard will be happy when this is done. Yesterday, while Gertie and I were in the loft, unbeknownst to me, the painters sealed off the door out of the loft with 3M plastic. The mammoth bone handle knife gifted to me by Tom Crane came in handy as I sliced through the plastic. Felt like I was being born again as I stooped through the small hole with Gertie behind me.
In Colorado, so far, it has been the summers of our discontent, the winters have been fine.
Imagine if you were African-American looking back at American history. First, enslavement and its horrors. Then, the Civil War. At last, free at last. But wait. Reconstruction torpedoed by Andrew Johnson, Jim Crow laws speed through the country, returning and enforcing segregation. Lynching and the Klan. The rise of the Klan in the 1920’s, then the Great Depression, falling, as these catastrophes do, harder on the poor, many African-American. The wars, in which African-American soldiers could die, but not lead. A shining moment, the time of Martin Luther King. Selma. Washington. Birmingham. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Affirmative Action. Their gutting over the last few years. The steady pop, pop, pop of police shootings. Death and maiming.
How would you view our common culture? Would you feel safe? As I went about my Friday, whenever I saw an African-American in downtown Denver, I wondered what they were feeling in the aftermath of Falcon Heights, Minnesota and Dallas. There was a young African-American girl lying in a chalk outline of a human body, a protester in Minnesota. Her sign said, Will I be next? How do we unravel this knotted skein in the tapestry of our nation’s history?
Fixing climate change, a very difficult challenge, only makes sense if the world we save is one we all want for our home. If you want peace, work for justice. True that.
Ever since the great iconoclasm, my voice has been muted. Not sure why. Topics don’t seem to occur to me. I’ve never had a theme, a particular ax, though felling and limbing the occasional political issue shows up once in awhile. Philosophical, quasi-theological pondering. That, too. Lots of did this, did that. The online continuation of a journal keeping way I’ve had for decades. Art. Yes, but not as much as I want.
Maybe there was a more intimate link between the images and the vitality of this blog than I realized. Apres le mitigation the whole copyright issue, the fate of images in an age of digital reproduction, will occupy some of my time.
Work on both Superior Wolf and Jennie’s Dead have been ongoing, though not yet much writing. Reimagining Faith occupies a lot of my free thinking time, wondering about mountains, about urbanization, about clouds that curve and mound above Mt. Evan’s, our weather maker. No Latin yet. Not until I can have regular time up here in the loft. Not yet.
Could be that underneath all this lies a reshuffling of priorities or a confirmation of old ones. It’s not yet a year since my prostate surgery and a friend of mine said it took her a year to feel right again. This year has felt in some ways like my first year here, a year when I can take in the mountain spring, the running creeks, the willows and their blaze of yellow green that lights up the creek beds, the mule deer and elk following the greening of the mountain meadows.
My 40 year fondness for Minnesota has also begun to reemerge, not in a nostalgic, wish I was still there way, but as a place I know well, a place to which I did become native, a place which shaped me with its lakes, the Mississippi, Lake Superior, wolves and moose and ravens and loons. Where Kate and I became as close as we could with the land we held temporarily as our own. Friends. Art. Theatre. Music. Family. Perhaps a bit like the old country, an emigre’s memories which help shape life in the new land. An anchor, a source of known stability amidst a whirl of difference. The West. Mountains. Family life.
So. There was something in there anyhow. Now, back to fire mitigation.
“…I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” Joan Didion, California Notes, NYRB, 5/26/2016
Front, May 6th
Becoming native to a place implies the opposite of what Joan Didion recalls in this fine article taken from notes she made in 1976 while attending the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. The becoming process implies not being easy where you are, not knowing the place names as real, not knowing the common trees and snakes.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is not a real place to me. Neither is Four Corners nor Durango nor the summit of Mt. Evans, only 14 miles away. The owls that hoot at night, the small mammals that live here on Shadow Mountain. No. The oak savannah and the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Familiar. Easy. The Big Woods. Yes. Lake Superior. Yes. The sycamores of the Wabash. Yes. Fields defined by mile square gravel roads. Pork tenderloin sandwiches. Long, flat stretches of land. Lots of small towns and the memories of speed traps. Yes.
A local photographed yesterday near here. from pinecam.com by serendipity888
With the fire mitigation this property here on Shadow Mountain is becoming known. It has three, maybe four very fine lodgepole pines, tall and thick. A slight downward slope toward the north. Snow, lots of snow.* Rocky ground, ground cover and scrubby grass.
Denver. Slowly coming into focus. The front range, at least its portion pierced by Highway 285, too. The west is still blurry, its aridity, mountains, deep scars in the earth, sparse population. The midwest clear, will always be clear.
Becoming native to a place is the ur spiritual work of a reimagined faith. First, we must be here. Where we are.
*”Snowfall for the season on Conifer Mountain now stands at 224 inches (132% of average).” weathergeek, pinecam.com
Kate and I went to the Aspen Peak Winery in Bailey last night for seafood paella and Spanish music. I love local events and this one had a good combination of homemade ambiance and terrific food.
On the drive to Bailey, about 20 minutes under normal circumstances, we experienced rush hour on Highway 285. The event was at 6 pm and Bailey is west of us in Park County. Rush hour is rush hour, even in the mountains, and I would not want to make this commute every day, especially after a big snow storm.
Saw a pick-up with a funny, but biting bumper sticker: Save an elk, shoot a land developer. Sort of the flip-side to a 1970’s bumper sticker that has remained in my memory: Sierra Club, kiss my axe. That was in Ely, Minnesota during the debate over the creation of the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.
Kate’s had a good, but long week organizing the kitchen. She’s ready to get back to sewing. Golden Solar is coming to finish the critter guards on our micro-inverters today. Tai Chi later this morning. Probably chainsaw work later today. The weekend.
You wanna find Stock Show weather? Go to Minnesota this weekend. Friend Tom Crane sent me a link to the Updraft blog of MPRNews. “Thought you might want to know what you’re missing,” he said.
Paul Huttner, the meteorologist for the Updraft blog, repeated a Minnesota weather nostrum often used at times like these: “The only thing between Minnesota and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence.”
In Minnesota, not often, but often enough, you realized the weather could kill you. No winds necessary. This will be one of this times.
Colorado, at least for us so far, doesn’t produce weather like this. If you go higher in altitude, then yes, you can find extreme winter cold, but even at 8,800 feet nothing like this. Can’t say I miss that bitter cold. though looking out the window from a warm house, over a snowy frozen landscape has its charms.
Lonnie and Stefan came to Shadow Mountain yesterday. We had a nice visit, showed them around the homestead and had a deli lunch Kate gathered at King Sooper. In correspondence with Stefan later I gave a voice to a recent recognition about friends:
“I’ve been thinking about making new friends out here. At first, it was a high level need. I jumped into a sheepshead group, tried to connect with the Sierra Club and a group called Friends of the Mt. Evans Wilderness. Then I realized that the friends I made in Minnesota like you and Lonnie have a depth, a history that I will never replicate here. Not enough time.
So, a high priority for me is to maintain face-to-face contact with as many of you as I can. The Woolly retreat is one way and I hope to make it back for the Nicollet Island Inn dinner in December. That way, combined with trips like yours and Lonnie’s, I can stay in relationship with those I love in Minnesota.
I’ll make new friends here, too, eventually, but these will be third phase friends. They can’t share the second phase time I spent with all of you in Minnesota.”
This might sound dismal. But it simply recognizes the truth of the friendships I found in political work with the Sierra Club, among the docent corps at the MIA and in the Woolly Mammoths. These are not to be left behind, but nurtured still. The times of being with many of these friends was episodic even while in Minnesota. So the duration between face-to-face moments may increase, but it also may not.
