Summer Woolly Mammoth Moon
Smoky the Bear’s fat index finger points at Very High on all the fire danger forest signs we drive by. In Evergreen the fire station there says Extremely High. The Spring Creek Fire is at 103,000 acres burned and 35% containment. The 416 is at 54,000 and 45% containment. The Weston Pass Fire has closed 285 at Fairplay and is at 12,000 acres with 17% containment.
There’s a lot of low level anxiety here, knowing all it would take is a careless camper, a lightning strike, an automobile accident to put us in danger, too. The big fires are in the southern and southwestern parts of the state where some areas have passed beyond extreme drought conditions, so the fuel load is tinder dry.
We are left not with trust, then, but only hope. Hope that fire will not burn down our houses and upset our lives. Once Kate and I decided that if it burns, it burns and we move on, my anxiety level decreased. We chose to live here, chose to build our Colorado life in an area vulnerable to fire.
Choices, like our psyches, are never only this or only that. We moved here to be closer to the grandkids, yet to have our own life in the mountains, too. That is, we chose to move from the relatively safe from fire Andover (though the occasional derecho, tornado and hail storms were destructive.) to the wildlife/urban interface of the Rocky Mountains. It’s desirability is captured by its adjectives, we are where the wildlife live, yet urban amenities are also close. We have the beauty of the Rockies, the mule deer bucks and does that visit our yard, the elk that bugle in the fall, the mountain lions that cough in the night, black bears and all manner of other creatures. Yet, we also have the existential danger, especially high in early and mid-summer, of fire. Not an either/or, but a both/and.
Life, too, though not a choice we made (but to continue our life is a choice), puts us in an even more dire dilemma. We were thrown by circumstance into the life/reality interface, knowing that the wildfire of our death grows increasingly less contained as we age. At some point it will engulf us, burn out the wild mind that has carried us from birth. I’m ok with that, too. Not that I have a choice.
Oh. Sometimes the sweetness of life becomes palpable. More and more of late. Not drowned out by the drumbeat of illness, family struggle, heat it underscores that life, our lives, are moveable feasts. The meaning of life itself lies in this realization, not in achievement or wealth or knowledge or belongings. Why? Because no thing in life carries permanence, not joy, not hate, not anger, not even love. All is transitory, the matter of a moment, then it will change.
Took Gabe to see Avengers: The Infinity War. We both liked it a lot. At various times I have the aesthetics of a 10 year old, a 12 year old and a long time museum docent. Not sure why, but I’m enthralled by comic book storylines and computer graphics. Vermeer, too. Caravaggio. Tolstoy. Wolverine. Harry Potter. Wabi-sabi. Sci-fi in books and on television. Guess parts of me just never grew up.
Trump. So, George Will wrote a column in the Washington Post urging members of his former party, the GOP, to vote against it in the upcoming election. Somebody has to check the “Vesuvius of mendacities.” Great metaphor. Even better idea. Of course, he believes that a Democratic congress will be as pusillanimous as the current GOP one, but it will not buckle toward the president, but away from him. He’s not become a liberal, hardly, just a pragmatic conservative who finds Trump abhorrent from a different place on the political prism.
Gabe and Ruth have been here since Thursday night while Jon worked on his house. Somehow we’ve finally sorted out a way of being together that seems ok for everybody. Hallelujah and hosanna. Kate has calmed, I’m not sure how, but she has. Wonderful to see. Gabe’s more attentive, more fluid in his speech, if not more fluent. Ruth cooks, sews, goes to the planetarium, talks about matters both important and funny. We interact, but on our terms, all of us. A family of introverts (though Ruth sees herself as an extreme extrovert) takes a while to find an equilibrium. Especially post-divorce.
According to my weather system we’ve had 1.5 inches of rain this month. That’s 6.8% of our annual precipitation total of 22 inches. (Conifer does better than the state, precip wise, 22 inches on average with 105 inches on average falling as snow.) And most of it came over the last three days. Pinecam.com is abuzz with hosannas. Things were not looking so good when the four of us left for Durango. Now? Much better.
Writing, at least for me, is sufficiently compelling that I’ve continued to write over the years without success in publishing. That’s working without regard to the results. And, I found quite a while ago that that was enough for me. The writing is, itself, sufficient reward.
Of course, one of the things I forgot to mention about my brief, successful excursion into small engine repair is this. Now I can mow the fuel. That clogged carburetor had given me a pass for a week or so until I decided to tackle it myself. Mowing the fuel is much different from mowing a yard. The purpose has little to do with aesthetics or neighbor pleasing. The fines, as the fire experts call them, are grasses and flowers that, when dry, serve as a fuse so that ground fires can travel from place to place.
Over the course of the evening I discussed quantum physics in relation to time, the placing of a second hive box at the Herman’s, travel to Peru, working as a marketing consultant, “In business, as a consultant, you’re always justifying your existence,” and watched Rabbi Jamie’s yarmulke float to the bottom of the dunk tank.
The weather was perfect. 75 degrees, dry and blue sky sunny. It was a good event for both of us. Folks came up to Kate and said they were glad she was going to be on the board. Two other recent shoulder surgery folks attended, their effected arms still attached to their body with slings. Kate has been consistent with her rehab. The pain relief alone has been enough to make it a successful procedure, but now she’s regaining range of motion, too.
One thing it took moving to the mountains to learn: I’m allergic to lodgepole pine pollen. I could have done without revealing this part of myself. It’s a couple of weeks of fine yellow grime on table tops, windows, cars, window sills, all for sex and we’re forced to participate. Well, my body fights back. Ah, choo!
In climate change news the 416 fire outside Durango has claimed part of the itinerary for the Tom, Mark, Paul and me trip. We were going to ride on the Durango/Silverton Narrow Gauge railroad. Nope. Closed through the time we’ll be there due to fire risk. We may hit Four Corners and Mesa Verde and the hot springs instead. The area is full of interesting bits.
Went to a talk at Beth Evergreen last night on linguistics. Elizabeth Moore, an administrative assistant on our staff, is a very smart woman. She majored in linguistics and offered a crash course. A lot I didn’t know. She gave a quick overview of a very complicated discipline, explaining its fundamental disciplines like phonology, pragmatics, syntactics, morphology and its more esoteric branches like neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, graphetics and philology.
