We came up to cut down some trees, logpoles infected with pine beetle. The beetles moved into this area some years before, killing huge swaths of trees. Better to take the trees down than to wait for them to fall....better to clear out the underbrush and slash than have them feed a forest fire. Bob uses a new chainsaw, a present from one of his sons, to see how well it works. Better for us to come up to the cabin, get in a day's of work, move around in the forest, collect brush, than to lift dumbbells in the gym in town. We add a few pieces of firewood to the rows he has built up over the past months.
Afterwards we sit on the porch, talk, drink beer. I take small breaks from the conversation to examine the plants that at 9,500 feet have established themselves in the silver plume granite that forms the bedrock of these plant, animal and human communities. A friend, Patrick, has gotten me interested in the way that these "natural" configurations provide inspiration for planting on my rock gardens at home. I am most impressed by the lichen and grasses which begin the initial breakdown of these boulders into small packets of soil.
But then looking up from these small packets of life, I see the tall shafts of Long's Peak some 5,000 feet above us...turning color as the daylight shifts. It's all a question of scale, I guess, the forming of tiny botanical life forms on the boulders, the uplifting of 1.2 billion year old granite from miles under the earth, the cabin in the woods providing families with shelter and a "home."
But we get a sense of these scales of time and elements from the perspective of our own brief existence. for me, these tree cutting days, this examination of plants and mountain peaks, this sitting on the porch are reflections of my membership in the human community, in a web of friendships and relations of which Bob provides the access point. There is a kind of wholeness in such days...linkages to rock, plants, trees, and other people...all part of a web of life, our lives.
