Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: The Mule Deer in the back. The merry, merry month of June. Tal. Joan. Lid. Rebecca. The Bacchae. The Iceman Cometh. Tennessee Williams. The Dybbuk. Phaedra. Racine. House of Leaves. Mark Adams. Tip of the Iceberg. Issa. Haiku. Theater. Acting. Building a character study, presenting it in a project. The gospel singing at CBE last night. The Great Sol is so so lit. Trains. Booking a flight to Tel Aviv. Mark in an apartment. In Hafar. Those two Elk along the road last night.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Visitation of the Mule Deer
One brief shining: Those Elk the three one with only one antler come now to eat Dandelions instead this morning it was one Mule Deer inside my fence her buddies looking at her from outside it while my heart admitted mild disappointment wondering when those big Bulls would get here having come four years in a row I enjoy their visit.
A definite shift, a threshold crossing under slow way. I’ve added go anywhere days to my calendar. Yesterday after a solo breakfast at Primo’s I turned onto 285 headed toward Bailey instead of back toward home. Took the first exit and turned left instead of right to Staunton State Park. S. Elk Creek Road. What a beautiful drive. Elk Creek meanders back and forth across the road doing ox bows in a large Meadow just off 285 then crosses to become a fast moving wide Stream creating white Water as it smashes itself against Rocks again and again.
The homes on the first stretch had a similar style. They used the bark board cut at a saw mill when starting to mill a whole tree as siding. They perched on solid slabs of Rocky Mountain basalt (I think) looking down on the action generated by the Stream below. The Valley sides are exposed Rock in many spots. Tall Ponderosa Pine throw shade at the road. The road itself vacillates between asphalt, gravel, and graded rocky Soil. I had to turn around fifteen minutes into my drive because two county road levelers took up the whole of a barely two lane stretch of road.
Elk Creek road is one of my new favorite places up here. That’s the way of the Mountains. You learn the roads you use a lot, the Mountains and Streams, the Valleys, the way homes arrange themselves down in the Valley and up in the Mountains. You begin to imagine that’s the way the Mountains are. But no. Only an exit away a totally different experience exists, one you would never know unless you turned down that road, drove along it for awhile.
That’s true of Blue Creek Road which interests Brook Forest Drive. Maybe four miles toward Evergreen on a road I take several times a week. I turned up Blue Creek Road six months ago. Wow. Open meadows. Large horse farms. Big houses. Each road has its own character, a character defined by the different folds and peaks and Valleys and Streams that Mountains create.
Learning, exploring. Even in my own smallish section of the Rockies. That’s part of the slow way of the crossing.
