Author: Gin Getz

Subtle signs

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

The birds are boisterous in the early morning, silent mid
day in the heat, heat still lingering, a heavy burden remaining from the peak of summer.  The intensity of the seasons in the high
mountains.

Summer is ending.  Longer
shadows even at noon with the sun arcing lower in the southern sky.  Crisp outlines to every object in the
landscape before us.  Signs of
change.  Promise of change.  Subtle and certain.  There is great comfort in knowing what to
expect as the seasons unfold one onto the next.

I am here listening through thin walls of the tent and
realize how separate I am. Connections to nature we created. Threads in our own
minds.  But the longer I am here the more
I understand:  we shall never be a part.  We are but observers, trespassers in the
wild.

The sound of a hummingbird zipping by, way up here on the
Divide, seemingly a world away from where you might expect such a fragile
creature to choose to be, and I think of how displaced we are here when most have
only known these delicate birds hovering around red plastic feeders and it
somehow doesn’t cross our mind they might survive without us to feed them.  Do we forget at times how the world might
manage without us?  We choose to intervene.
And deem ourselves important as we stir
the sugar water.

Am I jaded to the wilds around me as I turn my back and
prepare to leave?  Or can I learn to take
with me in a secret place inside the vastness of the time we have shared
together unlike anyone else?  Such is a
relationship ending.

They tell me I may never find such a beautiful view, as if
that is what matters most, and I consider their ignorance wondering if they
would base the quality their marriage on the most beautiful bride.

What I want beside me when I wake each morning is deeper and
richer than a pretty view.

Leaving the ditch

/ Gin Getz / 3 Comments

An intimate involement.
To a ditch?  Yes! To the
land.  To the wilds.  My family, nature, hard work, solitude,
silence, space.  You see?  It all fits together.  It includes me.  I am a part of her.

Room to breathe and a reason to breathe deep.  Dirty jeans and sweaty shirts and blistered
hands and shoulders and a back so sore in the morning it’s hard to slip socks on.

And I can’t imagine leaving her forever.

I know her like no one else.
Her curves, shallow spots, rocky places, weaknesses and strengths.  Where her wildest flowers bloom, and where
she sheds the silent needles of her dying trees.  Morning rains and evening shadows, how they
spread across and change her. Just a ditch.

No different than a farmer who tends the land, I have seen
her flow with plenty, break loose where she should not, given her an extra push
when I thought I had no more in me, and leaned on my shovel and done nothing
more than watch.

As with all wilds, this is a relationship one sided.  I will tend to her.  She will let me.  She will not stop me.  But she will never care.  Somehow, the nurturing is enough.  I need no more.  I am satisfied to work, to give, to tend to
her and ask for nothing in return.

For look how much she has given me.

A wild strawberry under frosty leaves

/ Gin Getz / 4 Comments

Heavy rains, a comforting wrap about the shoulders of the
mountain.  I walk the ditch tucked under
the wide brim of my hat and the soft canopy of trees with fewer needles than I
remember each year.

It has been a while since I could walk with her alone, in
silence and peace.  Who would guess the
disruption of a puppy would have such an impact?  He’s a different sort.  Still after a year, we don’t fit together
like Alan and I did.  I miss the silent
old dog always by my side companionship.
It will be hard earned, but it will come.

Or perhaps my feeling of separation from the mountain on
which I walk it is more than that.  Now
that I finally know we are leaving.  I
separate myself.  I don’t allow myself to
hold on.  It is not mine.  Then again, it never was.

Without a new land, a new plan, a new place to be connected
with, I am incomplete.

Have I ever been complete?

 

And now August.
Middle of the month already.  I
have trouble keeping track of, keeping up with time this time of year.  I wonder if it matters.  Subtle signs show me where and when.  A change of winds, of season, of
sunlight.  Mid day and the shadows are
already showing.  Longer, sharper,
crisper.

Morning and the first frost settles in and across the open
meadow of the Divide, replacing the weeks’ worth of fog and cloud I became so
accustomed to seeing upon waking, walking through the tall grasses soaking my
pants to above my knees as I lead the horses, two by two, from the comfort of
the highline tucked into the trees to their early morning feeding on the lush
mountain grasses.

The hillside is sprinkled with tiny gems hiding beneath frosty
leaves.  Wild strawberries.  I watch every step, often end up crawling on
hands and knees to harvest a handful.

Sweet treats.  How
easy to overlook when we’re too focused forward to look at the ground before
us.  Changing ground.  Changing lives.  Reaping the harvest while it blooms.  What a pity if I had missed this.

Evening rain

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Evening settles into a downpour.  Deep and grey and heavy.  Rain and hail, loud on the thin walls of the
tent.  We are in here, dry, protected by
no more than thin canvas.  More than
enough.

Lightening touches down above tree line across canyon.  Our horses are out there with their heads
down, ignoring the massive blasts of thunder that heave onto the walls of the Divide,
rumble and roll around the peaks like water shaken in a glass jar, round and
round it seems while we sit cradled in the center, in the shelter of the tent.  Yes, the tent I did not want to bring because
it somehow seemed decadent to have anything more than a tarp to crawl
under.  Me, who likes it simple.  Sleeping under a tree this month would have
left us wet and cold.  We’re here to
work.  A good night sleep is not a bad
idea.  I conceded.  I confess the boys were right again.

So here we are under a canvas roof with a small woodstove
hissing against the seeping sides of the stovepipe, water pouring off outside
walls filling buckets half full with sweet clean cold bounty free from the
generous sky.  Allowing me one less trip
to the creek with sloshing buckets in each hand.

I sit by the open tent door and look out at the horses through
the shroud of heavy misty rain.  They
remain seemingly unaffected.  This has
happened to them before.  Seems like
every night for the past few weeks.  And
when we lead them into the shelter of trees at night and offer them a simple
handful of treats and a gentle touch, I smell deeply the musk of dampness on
their steaming coats that appear already to be thickening with the first hints
of winter fur.

Thunder begins on the other side of the tent now, the other
side of the Divide. Rain lightens and sky attempts to brighten, a brief flight
of sunlight through a weak spot in thin clouds.
And then the sun will drop down beyond the Pyramid, the high point on
the mountain we know is there but cannot see.
Blind faith.  Like knowing we’ll
see the sun and be warmed and dried when morning comes.

Now our vision is limited to the valley and the foothills of
the mountain across from us, a familiar face hidden behind a veil of heavy
clouds, hardly demure, but strong and powerful.
Comforting in her solid feel. There, a mother and baby moose cross
between our horses and the trail that leads up and away into the clouded
shrouded horizon.  The little fellow
scampering with gangly legs only partially in control, playfully ahead of
mother, who nervously runs to keep up, ahead, protect, do what a good mother
should do.

They are unconcerned with our horses who out there now remind
me what a giant step closer to wild they are than me.

Me, safe and warm and sealed off from the elements by
nothing more than a tent.  Which too
often, is enough to separate.  And I feel
the growing rift when what I want is connection.  How we fool ourselves to believe we too are a
part.  For only a never lasting moment.

Simple words after a storm

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Oh for peace of place

I seek around me

And all the while

Forgetting to look within

 

Calm and quiet after stormy skies

Have spent their fiery passion

Leaving moist grass in the dramatic evening sky

And let me be still to listen

Ditch camp

/ Gin Getz / 8 Comments

A weekend returned and resting from ditch camp. Perhaps resting is not the right word. Moving cows (bringing the girls to a boy), cleaning cabins, clothes and selves, restocking and repacking. I’m slack on finding time to catch up with correspondence and writing. And when I finally do sit down to write, the words and stories overwhelm and I don’t know where to begin. There seems to be so much. Summers, rich and full. As they must be. Fast and furious and fleeting in the high country.

I must begin with the practical. An explanation of ditch camp for those of you who have no idea what I’m referring to. For those who know, please excuse the redundancy. I’ll share something new with you next time.

Ditch camp is about the three of us living in a little thin wall tent with a wood stove, a welcome upgrade from five years ago when we began camped out under a tarp. It is about being tired and sore and dirty at the end of the day, earning our rest, our silence, our sleep. It is about sitting wordlessly together with a simple meal of Hamburger Helper, listening. To each other. To the steam of the coffee on the fire. The sound of the creek. Birds. The horses contented exhales as they graze on the endless pasture of the Divide. The wind through the trees baring their soul as the needles fall and soften the ground below with a silvery brown blanket.

Ditch camp is about days spent with hand tools and horse power. A team of three. One family, close, together, comfortable in the wild world. And horses and dog and wildlife. Shovels and picks, drags and slips. Rebuilding low banks. Cleaning out debris and sediment washed in during the spring run. Repairing damage and improving flow. And my favorite part. Clearing and felling trees with the old crosscut saw, one pair taking turns as the third person stands guard with ax in hand, watching the waving of the top of the tree to tell us it is ready to fall. The forced and powerful rhythm of the back and forth metal on wood, torsos to and fro, vigorous breathing in and out, sawdust and shavings gathering in reward at the base of the tree as the cut gets deeper and deeper.

And on the most practical level, ditch camp is about maintaining a transcontinental ditch deep in the Weminuche Wilderness for a private company that owns the water rights. An old ditch built long ago bringing water from a creek that flows to the west of the Divide over a mile to the east. Pretty simple. They don’t know we see it as the romantic adventure it is, and remain grateful for the hard work we do.

As for the rest, and there is so much more to share with you, I must wait for another day.

Time to get back to work.

Cowgirl up

/ Gin Getz / 15 Comments

You’d have thought it was Friday the 13th, but it
was only Wednesday.  I hate to be
superstitious.  I know it’s
illogical.  I prefer reason.  But once again, bad things come in threes.  I’m sure it’s just coincidence.  Right?

How many times have I heard from backpackers we pass
horseback on the trail (usually those going uphill with a heavy load upon their
back as I “just sit” on my horse) that riding is SO much easier.  Spoken by someone who’s not spent enough time
in the saddle, I say.  Working with
horses, it’s not a matter of if you’ll
get hurt, but when, how bad, and how many times.  I’ve heard of plenty of hikers getting tired
and sore. Yet I think of all the horse people I know who have broken collar
bones or pelvises, smashed toes, sprained wrists, lost fingers, and even
died.  I don’t hear these things
happening very often to backpackers.

Please don’t tell me it’s easy. Because right now, as I’m
nursing bruises to both body and ego, I’m thinking it feels pretty darned hard.

Stop that belly achin’, you tell me. And you are right.

So it all comes down to this.  Cowgirl up. No matter how tough things get,
hang on.  Don’t let go of that rope.

Here’s my example, my Wednesday the Thirteenth.  We’re packing into ditch camp.  I’m on my Arabian who up until last fall was
a stallion and was (still is) the father of most of my herd.  Not always an “easy” choice for a mountain
mount, but for those of us who choose them, we sure do learn to ride. Or at least, to hold on.

He’s in the lead.  We’re
coming out of the woods into the open, right on the flats of the Continental
Divide, way up there, way out there.  And
something spooks him.  I don’t know
what.  All I heard was a branch snap, and
it probably wasn’t much more, but you know how horses are.  So he bolts.

Well, I’ve not trained this guy to neck rein.  We still direct rein, which means to issue a
STOP command, I need one hand to let up and one hand to pull, thus turning the
head to the side, bringing the horse to a calm stop.  That’s the theory.  It’s technical horse talk, don’t worry about
trying to really get it if you’re not into horses.  But the bottom line is this.  It works.
If you can do it.  Of course at
this particular moment, I couldn’t.  I
had one hand holding the reins even, so all I could do was pull straight back,
which produces the “race horse response” by which the horse pushes into the bit
and goes faster.  And the other hand,
well, it was holding tight to the lead rope of my pack horse.

So, off we go over the Divide at a full out gallop, me on
this fancy little Arabian who’s spooked from a broken branch, and my loaded
down pack horse, running along even beside me.

We manage to stop. Somehow.
I don’t know how.  All I know is
there I was catching my breath, letting out the adrenaline, and noting that I
still had a firm hold of the lead rope and my pack horse was still there beside
me.  I call that a good move.

Next incident goes like this.  I’m leading Norman the New Guy across the
creek for his first day of ditch work.
Everything is new for him.  New
harness.  New environment.  New creek.
New experience.  I have to hop
across these three rocks to make it from one side to the other of this
creek.  The rocks are slick and my rubber
work boots don’t have great traction but with enough forward motion, it usually
works.  Usually.  Well, on this particular day, I’m leading a
horse who is not as sure as I am about crossing the creek.  So he stops to think about it.  Fine.
Only he does that at the same time I’m playing leap frog on those
rocks.  The lead rope I’m holding onto
jerks back as I try to leap forward and the ensuing physical response leaves me
flat on my rump in that cold water creek.
But… I still had a hold of that lead rope.

After a bit of anger and finding ways to blame my husband
for my own mishap (maybe he was scheming to get me to spend the day working in
those shorty shorts playing lady logger instead of donned in my usual baggy
levi jeans which spent the day hanging from the tent to dry), I’m back to work,
in the ditch with horse and shorty shorts.
I’m figuring maybe this would be a good time to work on suppleness and
responsiveness with my horse.  Right
there in the ditch.  Well it doesn’t work
as I planned, and the horse spooks, jumps my way, knocks me over, and the next
thing  know I have a draft horse
scrambling over me while I’m down in the dumps in that ditch.  I’m seeing long legs and mighty big feet all
around and don’t quite know which way is up.

When it’s all over, I realize he managed to avoid stepping
on me.  Fifteen hundred pound on my
hundred fifteen pounds would not have been a good combination.  I love that big boy even more.

And the best part of it?

There I was in the bottom of the ditch, my shorty shorts
covered in mud, my thighs battered and bruised, and my front end dragged over
my hind end.  But I still had a hold of
that horse’s rope.

Anyway, the moral to the story is probably something to do with
holding on, no matter what.  I can’t say
it’s something I thought about much at the time.  Any of the times.  But it’s something you got to do.

And about that part on bad luck coming in threes?  Well, I still don’t want to believe that.  But nor am I in the mood to try my luck.  For now, my body is bruised and my confidence
shot.  I think I’ll walk for a while.

At least until tomorrow when I got more work horseback
coming up.

And hope I have some better luck.

On death

/ Gin Getz / 4 Comments

We turn one corner closer to home as the horse trailer rattles down the dirt road behind us, pulled by the same truck we’ve been driving since we first made a family. Dust kicks up a wake as the view of our little piece of the mountain spreads wide open before us.

We ride along in our own silence. What can we talk about that would distract us from this changing view? We are not supposed to comment. It’s all been said before. We should be used to it by now. Perhaps we should not notice. But we do.

What are we supposed to feel? Nothing? Never. I turn my head and see the dying from another point of view.

Death descends on the mountain. Some days we think it’s just the light. We sit at the kitchen table and look through the wavy old glass panes and think maybe it isn’t so. Perhaps we’re just looking for what we know will be. Browning trees, starting at ridge line, sinking down draws, wrapping around the mountain from the beetle killed back side into our view. The green fades. An amber glow of evening light halos the trees even mid day. The beetles are taking our side of the mountain.

It’s a natural cycle, I read. Does that make it all right to see our hillsides dying? And all we can do is sit and watch the hillsides fade.

There is no one to blame but the beetles, and they feel no remorse. I feel so much.

Death, oh death, descending the mountain like a heavy brown veil taking the green needles away in the wind, a blanket under foot as our trails become lined with what was once vibrant life.

I shed tears like needles, and they fall just as plentiful, just as silent, with no one there to hear.

It’s natural, they tell me. So is my anger. And so are my tears now blending with the summer rain and soaking into the opening hillside of dying trees.

Dreaming

/ Gin Getz / 6 Comments

Within a stone’s toss from our Little Cabin is the outhouse, a close and convenient distance from the front door of a cabin without indoor plumbing. On the east side of that outhouse, like a small wooden box perched on the bluff over the river with a view as spectacular as any you could dream up, is a bluebird house. Before we moved back down to this cabin for the season, renting out the house we built and called home once again to a series of grateful tourists, the bluebirds moved in. They were disturbed when that outhouse began receiving regular use, but determined to stay put.

The couple remained, the eggs have hatched, tiny squeaking chirps amuse us as we sit silently on the throne on the other side of the old weathered wood wall, and from our table in the cabin we watch the proud parents busy throughout the day catching bugs to feed their growing brood.

Determination.
The power of a dream.
And the emptiness to be without.

Even before he was born, it never occurred to me Forrest would not receive a full tuition scholarship. I know that sounds crazy. Much of what I do and believe does. But I’ve not only believed it, I’ve worked towards it for the past eighteen years. I saw no reason why it could not be. And took a lot of steps along the way to make it happen. And then so did Forrest. And ultimately, he made it happen. He’s learning to dream, and seeing how dreaming is the first step to creating.

Now I find myself uncertain of my dreams. They are distant and vague. The clear images which have guided me into these often crazy situations throughout my life currently are too murky to steer me clearly. I’ve been beaten down after the past eight years of plans torched in spite of my efforts. I’m not sure if I blame bad luck, bad relations, or bad choices. Probably a combination of all three. And still I have to realize that success or failure, both are mine.
Now I falter. My resolve is weakened. I question myself. It is one thing to be a dreamer, I remind Forrest, but I have and will always strive to be one who works towards and makes my dreams into reality.

A doer, he says, not just a talker.
Yes, I say. But I don’t want to just be empty words. I want to be actions. Living proof.

How do I get myself to dream again when right now it seems my days are consumed putting out fires as they arise? Moving out, moving in, moving far away, guests arriving, horse training, college paperwork, business, ditch work, completing the subdivision… Even the simple things like finding a place to take a shower after a day of hard work. I tackle the list in order of priority. Dreaming is not at the top of the list, and the list is in a cycle of growth. Wind stirs the fire.

The additional energy needed to build, and rebuild, has been minimal. I’m trying to catch up with the fires, jump the line and run free and clear.

But I’m done being burned and consumed. My priorities are no longer this business, my guests (yes, my calling in life of providing a clean and comfortable short term get-away for a bunch of every changing tourist is complete – I can check that one off my list). It’s time to close one book and begin a new one. Scary, exciting, wild and uncertain.

The wind picks up. It’s bringing rain clouds this time. A storm blows in. The embers sizzle and thin trails of smoke wisp up as the rain pours down.

In the midst of the storm over the Rio, I feel my dreams stirring like dormant seeds in a parched land. Soak, expand, and allow the dreams to swell. Something is taking shape.

Return

/ Gin Getz / 4 Comments


We return.

Greeted by the soft light of the amber evening sun, long shadows, the smell of horses and clean air, and the close rush of the Rio, now a foot lower on the bank than it was five days earlier as we were preparing to depart.

Home. Simple and pure. A little one room log cabin, now flanked by a storage shed and a simple deck of scrap wood connecting the two. There, where I stand in the morning sun and wash my dishes in two well worn steel tubs of water heated on the old cook stove.

We settle in, lighting the Coleman lantern and that old stove and feel very happy to be home.  Home in all its simplicity. Home for now.

Away from the fancy Four Star hotel and restaurant fare served on real plates with cloth napkins with smiling faces who were used to strangers coming and going when I carried on with a sense of permanence, ever changing but understood by hotel staff.

Here, home, back where I can clear my mind with the sound of the river pulsing through the open door, the thin old panes of glass on closed windows. I stir the pot simmering on the stove, stuff in another chunk of wood, and stare out into the disappearing view. Close by, Gunnar runs in circles in his favorite patch of long, wet grass. His home. For a moment, he is wild, and I let him be.

We step out for our evening ritual of brushing teeth under the stars, a fine necessity when one is without indoor plumbing, and the smell of wood smoke lingers like a heavy incent, frankincense in the church at Christmas when I was a child.

My temple, I think now, as I stare up into the ever expanding array of stars, and the Milky Way sweeps liberally across and down to the south east in a cloud of open promises.