In the Clouds

Trail to James Peak

 Thursday August 23.  I set out from Winter Park this morning to hike to James Peak....a mountain I had seen often when skiing at the resort.  Clouds were hanging low over the mountains but I thought that this was an early morning phenomenon.  With more sun later in the morning, the clouds would life.

 They did not lift.  But the clouds, billowing up, rising over the ridges, careening around this portion of the continental divide, offered glimpses of the deep valleys and gorges on the east side...like flimsy curtains blown by the wind in an open window...just enough to make me realize how immense the scene must be on a clear day.

I kept hiking along the ridge, this divide of the continent into waters flowing east to the Mississippi and waters flowing west to the Gulf of California, until rain began to fall.  A gentle rain...more like a drizzle than a downpour...but, lacking rain gear, I headed back to the trail head at Berthoud Pass/  

The clouds had another effect besides harboring moisture to rain down...they caused me to look more intently on the alpine vegetation growing at my feet...the lichens, mosses, grasses, sedges...their colors, forms, distribution.   I guess when the macro landscape is hidden, our attention focuses on the micro environment, the low plants underneath that would be ignored when confronted with brightly-lit, sun-drenched mountain vistas.  Clouds cause the focus to shift...if one lets them...to things that otherwise would be unseen.

The Farm

Eilif's Tractor

The farm is sold.  End of chapter in family history.  Eilif Miller had bought the farm in the late 50s or early 60s.  A work refuge for him:  planting trees, building ponds, raising barns, mowing vast swaths of meadow, growing garden crops, raising children (the supplementary work force)...the joy (for him) of hard, physical labor.  The farm.  Upstate New York, half hour to Albany, in the Helderberg Mountains, long drives from main homes in New York, Maryland, India, Paraguay

The Porch

I did not spend many days at The Farm, but it was always there in the background.  "Eilif went up to The Farm to get the Christmas trees ready for sale."  "He got the tractor fixed."  "Hazel is doing a lot of canning this harvest...lots of beets."

After five years in the trust since Eilif's death, Peter (the eldest) was able to sell the farm.  To a family who wanted the land for hunting, fishing.  They knew they wanted it when they hiked to the upper pond that Eilif had built (with family help) and saw the thick marsh grasses, the deer tracks where the animals come to drink, the thick forest grown up around it.

The Lower Pond

We made this last trip to gather up some of Charlotte's personal books.  I had a last interaction with Eilif when an attic ladder he had installed fell apart (the steps pulled away from the nails (not screws) that held them in) beneath my weight...and that of a box of books...and I crashed to the ground.  I never did much work at The Farm...Eilif had probably wanted me to do more...so this was his final payback.

Ahhh...not often we have such direct commerce with the ghosts in our lives.  

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Freya and Family

Ingrid, Freya, Charlotte

On our East Coast trip this summer, we spent time with family...the folks who share our DNA, our history.  And other people's DNA, history...that is what we are made of, after all, combinations and recombinations of the past...moving into a future.

Ingrid, Freya

Freya is the most recent addition....well, but not really.  When Jose married Nelci this past spring in the Dominican Republic, we acquired Alejandro, her three year old son.  So families expand by birth, marriage, sometimes just hanging around for a long time...some of the "uncles" and "aunts" I knew as a child were really just good, deep friends of my parents.

Families also get smaller...death, movement away, the end of sending Christmas cards, the dropping off of marriage vows...so there is the constant ebb and flow of family units.  In part the expansion (the children of children of children) spreads us out over distance and time, lessens the bonds, forms other units.

Freya

So as Freya learns to crawl, to walk, to climb steps, to "go away from" as well as "go toward," she will possibly carry the family...this collection of genes, DNA, history...into the unfolding future, one we can not see and one, from whose distance, others would look back and ask, "Hmmm....wonder what they were like."

People Watching

Broadway at Times Square

When we lived in North Bergen, my mother and neighbors would put folding aluminum chairs on the sidewalk in the evening.  These chairs were kept in the hallway of our two story attached brick house..  The hallway led to the apartment upstairs where Mildred (and, before her, the Dumeresks) lived.  When I joined them, I sat on the stoop to Zora's apartment next door...sitting in chairs was for the adults.

They would sit for a few hours each evening...chat about the day's events but also say "hello" or not say "hello,"  sometimes just nod a greeting...to people passing by.  They'd be going to the corner store or maybe for a late walk in the park.  And after they passed by, well, there was time for a comment about them...some piece of news...some remark "She's not looking so good."  or "I heard his sister is sick."  Not any backbiting...they were not gossips.  Just collectors and disseminators of  news and observations.

Broadway in North Bergen

The street we lived on, Broadway, did not resemble the Broadway across the river in Manhattan. No room for folding chairs there. Yet that same pleasure is found in the City, as Manhattan was always referred to, as if we ourselves did not live in a city (but then we did not, we lived in a "town.")  This past fall, I was chased off a stoop around the corner from Park Avenue by a maid...so access to this pleasure is not universally granted.

In either place or, for that matter, any place, there is delight in just observing people, watching their movements, identifying characteristics that are different or the same, perhaps pointing out the color or drape of clothing...in a sense, defining ourselves by what we see or do not see in others. Or by where we sit.

Art again

The interaction of art and people is, for me, more interesting than the art in and of itself.  Objects hanging on walls can be emotionally moving...as in this Greek carving of a "maenad," a graceful dancer in worship of Dionysus...god of wine and madness.

But it is the juxtaposition of the viewer with the object that is more dynamic, more lively to me.  The manner in which the observer becomes observed...their reactions becoming part of the art itself.

Cameras, of course, have added to this interaction.  Take a picture of a picture while someone is taking a picture of you taking the picture.  So you can "own" the picture, the art, the artist?  So you can show others that you have seen this particular masterwork, this particular scene?  

So it all could become a bit confusing...if one thought about it enough.  Luckily there is little danger in such thinking since the museums in New York are just flooded with people this time of year, putting a check on the checklist of "things to do"....at least during the day.  .

But then there are refreshinly those folks who have had, well, enough.  And whose posture is less than heroic or even interested.  Waiting for a girlfriend who is still on the 4th floor, overlooking the atrium, taking photos of French impressionists.

So what is art but that which is in the eye of the beholder?

Streets of New York

I have spent many happy days wandering the streets of Manhattan.  Now I was back again for a few days.  Staying in midtown.  51st between 2nd and 3rd Ave...a central location.  Always an astonishing and stimulating place...lots of energy, lots of color, lots of sensory stimulation (good kinds, bad kinds). 

But I had never realized how much my experience was shaped by an 1811 vision of the city by a commission set up by Gov. Clinton (he, also, who began work on the Erie Canal).  When the country was just two decades old and the city had a population of just 100,000.  But more were pouring in.  So he set up a commission with powers of "eminent domain" to design a city that would stretch north of what would be 14th street to Washington Heights.  And it would be "rational"...streets east to west, avenues north to south, streets 60 feet wide, avenues 100 feet wide.  Two thousand blocks in all.  To provide workspace and housing for a projected population of 1,000,000. 

So land was bought, hills were leveled, streets pushed underground, and the blocks marched almost inevitably north.  The rational plan, of course, eventually ran into opposition...it is, after all, New York...and by 1853 a plan was developed for Central Park and, along the way, other small parks and squares were created, mainly at the behest of speculators.  Still the basic plan remained.  It is one of the signature characteristics of the city...I think unique to major world cities which have often been left to grow "organically" as spurts of population increase occur. 




The Museum of the City of New York (103rd and 5th) had an insightful exhibit devoted to this Great Grid.  And funny that as much as I had used the grid all my life as this basic urban landscape, I took it to be something "natural"...like some folks think of Central Park as "natural."  But I had never linked it to someone's "vision" for a city...certainly not to a commission that existed 200 years ago. 

And funny how unconscious we can be of the shapes that shape our lives and how a vision from so long ago can order our daily comings and goings, our sense of place, and that very place itself. 

Werge

So that is who I was...when we all wrote "Good luck in the future" in each other's yearbooks, not having much of an idea of how we would deal with life nor how life would deal with us.

We had our reunion this June, 50 years after we graduated. Of the 100 kids we could find, about 50 or 60 attended. We had had a few earlier reunions so had kept in touch to some extent...still the years do show. And the different roads we travelled down...or did the roads take us? The classmate now living in senior housing, the one with a manse in Florida, the one with 18 grandchildren, the ones with none, the ones who have struggled with drugs or cancer, the ones for whom life has been easy, the marriages and divorces, the lost loves....all in one room for a few hours.

Even the ones who did not come because they did not want to remember or their remembrances were painful or they had passed on, they were there. For we are our shared memories...and they are present in those stories of the past that we share.




Like sitting around the high school yearbook room...deciding upon a name for it (we went with "Prelude"...this year's yearbook has the same name...a shared memory except now the memory has become a tradition)...or discussing layout..Sue, me (always known as "werge"....did anyone know I had a first name?), Iris, Carol, and Leslie. This being together, laughing, for others playing sports or playing hooked,....ties we shared and share.




But we go back much further. We spent much time at the reunion identifying ourselves in our 1958 grammar school photo...we got about 80 percent. And our memories extended back not only to us, but to our brothers, sisters, cousins, moms, dads. And how many outside of older members of our families remember my Mom, my Dad? What a deep, quiet joy to be with these neighborhood friends who know me in the context of my childhood, my early youth.






But the past is only a prelude, no? On Sunday after the reunion and then a reunion party, we met in North Bergen for brunch, then took the ferry over to Manhattan to catch some part of the Gay Pride parade. Gail, Sheila, Sue, and Werge. Still living life forward...as far as it will go.



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Location:North Bergen, NJ

Kids

So why do we spend a week with kids, sharing songs, activities, time, ideas, experiences...I guess because they nurture our souls.


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At our Quaker gathering in northern New Mexico, Gretchen Baker-Smith said during a morning sing (she being the one with the big hand made song book) that we all nurture one another...that is true for me.

And what is nurtured in part is that part of our souls that still carries a child within. I realized that most fully the morning I spent with the toddlers and infants. Micah had woken from his nap but still wanted to be held. So I went into the nap room, picked him up, and sat down in the rocking chair to sooth him. Micah has this loving way of clinging to one's neck and shoulders...something so basically mammalian about that form of embrace. We rocked. I sang a little song I remember my father singing to me in Norwegian when he put my brother and I to bed. And,then, giving into the mood, the heat in the room, we both fell asleep. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? Don't know how much time passed. Doesn't matter.

We woke at the same time. Drowsy, we joined the kids, Wally and Lilly, playing in the other room. And, then, I really woke up, felt some new, good energy and Micah looked around with new eyes. It was just that we both needed a good nap. And how would I have known if Micah hadn't lulled me to sleep in the rocker.

That's why we hang out with kids...at least on one morning of the Quaker gathering.




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Location:Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu New Mexico

High Park Fire

Whole forests dead from pine beetle...a winter without snow...high winds...3% humidity...hot temperatures...lightning.


The fire came within four miles of our town...but, with federal, state, local firefighters was kept confined to the foothills to the north and west and to those small mountain communities and more isolated homes built in the woods to enjoy the benefits of living surrounded by nature




Planes and helicopters fly overhead, dipping into Horsetooth Reservoir to suck up water and into federal stockpiles of chemical fire retardants. To this date about 60,000 acres have burnt. As the fire moves away from homes and structures, it will be left to burn. Perhaps all summer or until snow begins to fall again. If it does this winter.

What surprises me is how normal life is in town...except for the smoke chocked air in town when the wind blows in our direction.




Horses graze in the park. People picnic or perhaps drive up to see the flames and then drive back to eat a burger for lunch. But I guess that is what our species is so good at, adapting to new conditions and, if one is not directly affected, to carry on with life as it is or appears to be.

The long-range impacts will be substantial for the town. Water quality will be greatly affected and our local brewery industry, relying upon fresh, clear water, will be impacted as denuded hills wash soil and debris into the Poudre. Tourists don't like smoke. And the environment will be degraded though, at the same time, the fire provides an opportunity for regrowth from the earlier devastation of pine beetle infestation. That, however, will take decades.

I write this on a train traveling over the broad mouth of the Delaware River, traveling between Washington and New York. So much water. This is a country of regions...so different, so hard to comprehend.

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Location:Fort Collins

Landscape

As the sun goes down, evening spreads slowly across the valley. The mesas to the east still catch rays. They sit above the closer ridge lines and quietly blaze, showing their sandstone layers...those millions of years of seafloor sediments and volcanic ash deposits...in dramatic light. Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Ghost Ranch

A Hike

We went for a hike on Monday, to climb Pedernal, the mountain in the photo...the flat topped peak just above the purple cactus flowers.


About 20 of us went, mainly junior high students, some adults, alas only two maps and one person who knew the trail. So it turned out to be something of an adventure rather than a typical hike. The one person who knew the trail and had a map went ahead with a small group, the other map holder went back early with a group of young friends, our middle group lost its way below the final rock wall...but after all that is what an adventure is.




An adventure being an event that raises unexpected obstacles that must be overcome..as opposed to an event, a long if leisurely hike, that goes according to plan. In this case, it was a question of realizing our group had become lost...after searching in thick brush for 40 minutes for the final leg of the trail...and then taking out our lunches and dwindling water, resting and heading back down the four miles back to the cars.

Reminding us that life is an adventure, always turning up the unexpected, always asking us to make adjustments, be flexible, and not assuming that we are with someone who knows what he or she is doing.

Location:1709,Abiquiu,United States

Fort Collins Music Extravaganza or FoCoMx

One of life's pleasures is music. In human evolution, I believe that music...or at least rhythm...preceded the development of modern language, estimated to have been around 70,000 years ago. The beating of sticks in unison around a fire, the repeating of vocalizations to babies, the rhythmic pounding of roots and plants for cooking...all would have lent themselves to a kind of protomusic, long before homo sapiens learned to say things like "Hey Dad, I need the keys to the car."

FoCoMx is a music festival in Fort Collins, this year with over 300 Colorado bands performing in venues all over town, even out to La Porte, fit into a two day period. So you can move from one bar or book store or restaurant or brewery or coffee shop and catch bands you've never heard before or older favorites whom you have heard before. Like Widow's Bane, pictured above and below, a tremendously eclectic ensemble, complete with belly dancer, that performed at the Aggie, a music venue in a converted movie theatre.




But then down the street, you can run into Lara Jai, singing blues in the poster splayed back room of the vinyl record store.



And next store, the metal band, Away for Nothing, in a cocktail bar, surrounded by a crowd of enthralled groupies.



Or Chad Price, a country and western band, performing at the redone Astoria, now a more upscale tapas bar.






In short, a weekend of sound that reminds us of the diversity of music that makes this community and this world go round, round, round.

Red mountain

Am experimenting with blogging from my iPad. So I am not sure this will work.





- But last week I explored some additional trails at this geologically complex complex "county open space





Some of the trails go through eroded canyons...and the Cheyenne Rim goes up along the northern edge of the Denver Basin, a syncline that dips to 13,000 feet under the city of Denver. Makes one realize the extent to which the Front Range is just wash out from the erosion of the Rocky Mountains, now so much lower than they once were.





Just astonishing to be surrounded by so much living, moving rock...forming the structure of our daily lives

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Location:Larimer County

Lookouts

On the road to Westcliff

One of the joys of road trips in Colorado is the limitless opportunity to take in long vistas, to see landscapes unfolding, mountain ranges rising above and falling behind the car windows, to turn a corner and go "wow" even after living here for the past 15 years.  Such views cause the soul to sing. 

Which is why folks try to situate themselves to "own" a particular scene.  So houses of all kinds try to fit themselves to ridges where they can see out and, for those with money and egos, can in turn be seen.  For the person on a road trip, these places then become a kind of housescape rather than landscape.  One's attention is drawn to the construction...sometimes quite eccentric.

Redwing

 

 

 

Bishop's Castle outside of Rye in the Wet Mountains

 So one's attention gets drawn both to the man made forms and to the land forms.  When I got to Cripple Creek on this particular trip the first thing I did in getting into my hotel room was to look out the window.  I saw the town below, the ridge lines beyond, and then in the distance the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.  And, then, in that mountain range I recognized the pass, Hayden Pass, that low point on the horizon, on other side of which is the Oak House where I had been staying a few days before. 

Cripple Creek and Hayden Pass in the far distance

Something about an outlook, a scene laid before you, gives space for reflecting upon your place in the world and the universe.  Which is why perhaps (besides the economic and the prestige factors) we have buildings that reach toward the sky.  I ended this road trip in Denver, going to get apartment keys from my son Tom who had just moved from DC to join a law firm downtown.  I felt a bit chagrined at being in my road clothes (fairly dirty from a week in the mountains), but I went up to his office. 

36th floor 1801 California Street

His view seemed like a fitting end to a road trip whose itinerary included so many long and vast look outs.