Good tidings

September, Mueller State Park

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

 Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

 The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.   

– John Muir

January light

At the cabin, shadows are getting long at 4:00 on this January afternoon.  We walk with the dog towards the large flat rock that is a favorite. 

Here we can stand on a broad, red granite slab edged with lichen, and look west towards a distant mountain range that can be seen through a V in the canyon.  We watch the sun scale slowly down into the trees, the glare splayed like sharp spokes of light through the broad branches of Ponderosa. 

I think of Madeleine L’Engle and her star-gazing rock.  There, secrets of the cosmos poke into everyday life, as if the rock were centered under a hole in the rachia, the great solid, perforated dome that formed the primeval sky of Genesis.  Strange truth drips on the rock like rain.

Each year I wonder if I will survive winter, with its frugal light and dust-brown horizon.  I grieve the hibernation of photosynthesis, the absence of green foliage that feathers the landscape and softens harsh corners, green that feeds the world.  I have tried to train myself to the practice of winter, to embrace the bare and the cold, to find beauty in graceful skeletons of aspens and the changeable contours of ice.  It feels like Lent without sweets, or music. 

This January has been better than most.  The several warm days, rare with cordial temperatures, have melted the snow drifts and lure us outside.  Returning from the broad watching-rock, we hike in sneakers rather than boots, without jackets.  Piles of boulders and fallen soldiers of dead trees darken as the day’s light retreats.  Our jagged shadows as we walk eastward are three times our height.  There is a sense we can never live up to them. 

On my left, the grass is illumined in a slice of light.  The waning light catches wheaten stalks, all the way to the base, and highlights every reedy strand.  Grass seeds and panicles glow at the tops of their stalks, each feathery shape picked out clearly like a nimbus or corona.  I turn to look west, and see a field of grasses detailed in their moment of shining, like a delicate blond beard against the rocks.  

What has always been dismissed as “just grass,” a homogeneous green that tickles at knee-level, now becomes a display of diversity.  The grass is not one, but many.  I snap off representative heads of grasses that are curled like the dense tail of a Husky, or sturdy and clutched like grain, or lacy and spread with tiny dill-like seeds. 

Ann Zwinger’s sketches tell us we have seen bluegrass, smooth brome, pine dropseed, and slender wheat-grass.   They have escaped the usual crush of snow.  

 

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner thing happens, the resurge of nature.   - Edna O’Brien

Signs – 3

You thought I was kidding….we spotted this sign in Glenwood Springs, on a trip to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.    Per  previous post, Signs 1, we’d reserved elsewhere.  

Winston Rand might have enjoyed this one.  He posted this funny sign on his blog last year, and this.  As they say in the creative nonfiction world, You can’t make this stuff up.    

Coal Train Blues

Our local utility announced this week that monthly utility bills will increase by 72% in the next 10 years.   An increase of 27% in electricity cost may hit in the next two years, as the city’s existing coal contracts expire.  Coal costs are expected to double in the next few years.   The 72% increase includes water and natural gas rate hikes. 

It’s a tough week to hear this news.  The federal government is proposing a $700 billion solution, as people open their mail to find bills they can’t pay, or watch values in their retirement and college funds tumble.  “We’re in it for the long haul,” people say.  “I don’t look at my statements anymore,” a friend admits.  

I posted a note on my desk that says, BREATHE.   

It’s time for communities to consider which sources of energy make the most sense for them.  Chris sent an article about 4 dairies in Vermont, which are turning crap into cash to produce Cow Power.  Cowpats are converted to biogas, which is burned in a generator that produces electricity for nearly 350 home, and then provides additional revenue opportunity for the dairy farmers.

The Vemont utility hopes to add 6 more dairies by 2010 to take advantage of this remooable energy source.  Those energy dollars stay right in the community.  

And what about southern Colorado?  To me, solar energy makes a huge amount of sense in this part of the world, with 300+ sunny days a year.  And wind energy, for when the sun doesn’t shine.  These aren’t 100% solutions to our community needs, but they could go a long, long way. 

What other safe, clean, and creative sources of energy can we find?  Because coal and natural gas are not the long-term answer.  We can’t seem to afford it in the short term, either. 

Wings

At the cabin, it’s finally summer.  Aspens have leafed out, filling the glen with quaking clusters of caterpillar green, a bright shade seen only in montane spring.  My mother follows me as we cross the stream, heading towards the bench set in the rustling aspen grove.  She bends nearly in half as she walks, stopping to examine mysterious new sprigs of bushes and wildflowers.  “A wild rose…” she says.  “And potentilla.  Is that…”  I smile vaguely, because I can’t identify much without a field guide. 

We settle on the bench, which invites us to look up, at pines and aspens that reach tall for the sun on the south-facing slope, along the narrow, flat clearing that adjoins the stream.  Or technically, the crick.  The stream runs seasonally, and seems dry now, though there must be water seeping under the litter of decayed leaves and pine needles, fed by small springs upstream.  Evidence of water surrounds us – green grasses stretching tall, tiny clumps of moss clinging to aspen starts, midges and mysterious insects that nibble at uncovered skin.  This is precious habitat in a semi-arid land of decomposing pink granite.  

 “Are there chiggers?”  my mother asks.  If there are, they’ll find me.  I’m particularly tasty to chiggers. 

 At bedtime in the mountains I’m reading Beyond the Aspen Grove by Colorado naturalist Ann Zwinger.  She tells me about the insects and fauna I’m missing while I sit on the deck and watch clouds, or stare at treetops, rather than look into a microscope and draw what I see.  Zwinger’s book describes years spent exploring her family’s land 40 acres north of Woodland Park, called “Constant Friendship”, after an ancestral home from the 1700s.  The cabin sits at nearly the same altitude as Constant Friendship, perhaps 30 miles away.   

Years ago I attended a Poetry West meeting led by Zwinger, where she handed out blank postcards printed with her plant illustrations.  She led a workshop on “postcard poems,” pieces short enough to be penned on a card.  I scribbled iffy stanzas in my notebook, and quietly stashed the blank cards in my copy of Beyond the Aspen Grove, purchased used from the Aspen Leaf Bookshop run by a friend.  I would read sections of the book, and long for the day when I might observe a mountain land as closely as Zwinger had.  With that book, I could carry a dream in my hands. 

At the end of the meeting, Zwinger signed my copy:  “A sense of place is what ties us to home…Beyond the Aspen Grove is where I’ve found such a place.” 

My family eats lunch on the large deck.  One end of the deck is marked with caution tape while the deck’s precarious steps are moved and rebuilt.  The east deck drops abruptly into space, like a third-storey door opening to nowhere in an Albert Campion novel. 

My mother says, “Is that an eagle?”  A dark raptor with a white cap makes a lazy circuit over the hilltop across from us. Perhaps he is eyeing the burgers and peach cobbler on our plates. I’ve seen eagles here only when my mother visits.  As the eagle heads downstream, I see the lift of his wing structure, shaped like a longhorn steer, as he sails just over the tops pine trees. 

Not long after, I point out a spectacular red-tailed hawk follows a similar circuit, cutting a circle over the aspens and then continuing west.  The hawk’s wingspan seems particularly broad from this close vantage–7 feet? Perhaps it’s a female hawk, which can be a third larger than a male.  The sun straight overhead shines through her feathers, making wings and tail glow a translucent, rusty red as she banks into the light.  She is the color of red granite lit and soaring. Her wings are flat and fringed with black as she flies west. 

Signs 1

   

I like to collect photos of funny signs—this one’s from Susan, who full-times in her RV.  She sees plenty of signs in her rambles.  

I regret being caught without a camera when I saw this sign:  VISITORS MUST HAVE PASS. The letter “P” was missing.

Wish I could locate the print photo of my favorite sign, taken on our first wedding anniversary. The marquee of the Ramada Inn in Glenwood Springs said:    WELCOME SEX CRIMES INVESTIGATORS.   

Luckily, we’d reserved elsewhere. Seen any good signs lately?  

Signs 2 

Signs 3

Got Sol?

I’ve been fascinated with solar power since I was a girl, when my mother attended classes to calculate what it would take to install photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roof of our middle-class, suburban home.  At that time, there was no option for grid inter-tie.  The decision to go solar meant batteries for electrical storage, and full disconnection from the power grid.  My mother decided the costs and hassles of maintaining the system weren’t feasible.   

Times have changed.  Passage of Amendment 37 in Colorado required local utilities to provide grid-tie options, so that people could install PV panels to produce solar electricity during the day, and draw from the electrical grid at night.  No batteries, no mess.  Just good, clean power.  And no need to install 100% of a building’s electrical demand – a partial solution would work, too.   

I’ve followed the solar industry for about 15 years as an outsider.  Not much a technological type, I’ve simply thought that solar made a lot of sense for where I lived.  In 2006 I attended  the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) national conference in Denver.  Plenaries focused on several aspects of climate change, including a moving presentation by Dr. Jim Hanson of NASA.  This was probably my “come to Jesus” moment for renewables.  Hanson said we had 9 years to make significant changes in order to offset serious and catastrophic effects due to global warming.  I staggered out of Hanson’s lecture, wondering how I was going to prepare my young boys for what might be coming.  If Hanson was right, this might be the dominant issue of their generation. 

 Chuck Kutscher, of NREL, chaired the Solar 2006 ASES conference, and edited a report compiled from the plenaries, called Tackling Climate Change.  This free report has had 500,000 hits since publication, and represents a serious, balanced, solution-charged approach.  It’s possible, if we are aggressive with renewable and conservation solutions, to fill the gap between our current trajectory (what Hanson calls BAU, Business As Usual), and what would be required to lower carbon emissions.   It will be hard work, expensive.  But much less expensive if we act now, rather than wait. 

 On July 7, 2006, I decided the time had come to do our part by installing solar panels, to offset our need for electricity from our city’s coal-burning plant.  We could not install a 100% solution due to roof configuration, but we did what we could.   Last month (April), we were billed for only 107 kilowatt hours of electricity.  BSP (Before Solar Panels), we averaged 400-500 kwh a month on our bills. 

 The new EIRP plan by our local utility studies and predicts energy demand for our community over the next decade and more.  When the first version was released, several people noticed hints about the need to build a new coal-burning power plant.  Community response was small but powerful.  Climate change data was rolling in, and people were understanding that emissions from coal plants were a huge part of the problem. Architect Ed Mazria cites that 80% of global warming is caused by coal-burning plants.   The new EIRP is under revision, but now renewables will have a bigger part of the future energy mix for our community.

 Our family cut our home’s need for coal-burned electricity nearly in half, a teeny investment against building a new coal-burning plant.   Solar panels are expensive, and out of the reach of many families.  The solar industry is working hard to cut costs for solar energy, and bring new technology to the market, to make solar power available to more and more people. 

 We often see long trains carrying coal to the city power plant.  I ask my kids, “What’s on that train?”  Coal.  (hear the bored voices)  “What’s it used for?”  Making our electricity.   My son now says, “Making way LESS of our electricity.” 

May the Bird of Happiness…

When I was a kid, my brother and I competed in the sport of cut-down:  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.  May the bird of happiness crap on your shoulder. 

In January, we returned to the mountain cabin to discover a bird had moved in.  Evidence suggested a small bird, what a neighbor calls an “LBJ,” a little brown jobber. The bird enjoyed several perches throughout the house, on nearly every piece of furniture except the kitchen table, and particularly the sham on my husband’s pillow.   

That afternoon, we heard a happy chirp coming from the master bedroom upstairs.  We crept quietly up the steps and peeked in the door, to see an LBJ sitting on the old pink armchair, singing in a patch of warm sun coming through the window.   

The bird was not afraid of us.  When the children sneaked too close, the bird simply disappeared by a convenient escape, to chirp merrily in another room–from a bedpost in the boys’ bedroom (nicknamed the Bunkhouse), from a kitchen chair downstairs, from rafters in the downstairs den.   

The finish carpentry for this log cabin is eccentric—the original owner ran out of energy or funds or expertise—and there are holes in corners, gaps between wall and ceiling, mismatched boards, strange configurations of space and storage.  Plenty of fix-up budget will be spent on finish trim. The cabin may have been built from a barn kit; it seems better adapted to horse stalls than bedrooms. 

My youngest boy loves the closets in our bedroom. Abracadabra, he can enter my closet, squeeze behind shelves set in the eaves, and exit through the other closet.  But the bird could slip from an east room upstairs to a west room downstairs  There are more gaps than we realized.  After allowing a single photograph, the wren would reappear to another room and continue singing.  Eventually the LBJ was shooed out a window missing a screen. 

We successfully evicted the Bird of Happiness. 

Not an hour later, we heard chirping upstairs.  This time my oldest boy was prepared.  He consulted his bird book from Grandma, and announced we had a house wren.  Wrens tend to nest in boxes.  This wren selected a heated, 2000 square foot box, and could move freely from outside to in.   

I enjoyed hearing the birdsong in the house, which I did not confess to my husband, who held a contrary view.  The sound of a cheerful song animated the cabin, gave it a heart, like the tick of a deep-toned clock.  Spring sound echoed through the home in a bitterly cold season—surely this was a good omen. Despite LBJ’s significant contribution to janitorial duties, I secretly wished the bird could stay.  We covered couches, tables, chairs with newsprint when we left, hoping he wouldn’t invite a mate, or a house party, before we could return to seal the points of entry. 

In February, my husband slithered through the narrow attic space to tack screening over vents and penetrations.  We didn’t see the wren that day, but learned he now preferred sturdy posts on the upstairs balcony under the skylights, and spent afternoons on the open door to the Bunkhouse.  In March, we found the wren had gone after a brief stay on the Shrader wood stove.  My boys muttered about the Bird of Crappiness as we cleaned the mess.   

Last weekend, there was no evidence of the wren.  I walked outside with the dog after 7:00 a.m., hearing many species of birds fill the glen with song as April sun paints the tips of rocks and pine trees.  I’d like to think the wren found a new home without much trouble, that he had not been trapped in the cabin.   

I’d like to think only one of my brother’s predictions will come true, and that this will not be followed by a plague of fleas.

Pearl of great price

Last year, in early June, we visited Pearl Lake near Steamboat Springs.  We stayed in a cabin on a small ranch, where the boys could feed ravenous baby lambs with bottles, or watch a bedraggled, grumpy peacock strut in his stall near the horse paddock.

 A storm moved in the afternoon we arrived, bringing microburst winds through the canyon, toppling old growth Ponderosa pines (just missing the cabin roof), and dumping nearly a foot of wet, fluffy snow.  I sat by the crackling fireplace, reading scrapbooks about the ranch and local history.  One told the story of Minnie Pearl Hartt, PEO member and “prizewinning fisherwoman,” who donated part of the family’s sheep-ranching spread to the Colorado State Park system, including the lake that had been named after her.  A smaller pond had been reserved for Minnie to fish, nicknamed “Mini Pearl Lake”. 

The next morning, the snow had stopped, and we drove to Pearl Lake.  Heavy snow dragged the tops of laden aspen trees to the ground, and coated pines with globes of white.  We were alone in the park as we walked the path to the lake, through a tunnel formed by bent aspens, like walking through an arch of swords at a royal wedding.   

The forest was still, except for chunks of soft snow plopping through branches.  Quick-melting snow dropped from treetops, and limbs would shift upwards with a crack as they were liberated from the weight.  The rapid melt sounded like artillery.  We grabbed trunks of bowed aspens lining the path, and shook off some snow, just to hear the swish of leafy branches snapping back to full height.       

Fog and cloud had settled low, obscuring the mountains ringing the lake.   But when we returned the next morning–snow melted, weather warm enough for shirtsleeves, forest floor nearly dry–all the trees stood tall and green.  Skies clear, sun shining, we saw Pearl’s legacy.   

 

 

Pearl Lake