nature writing

My side of the mountain

/ Gin Getz / 1 Comment

Lost and found
I lose myself in my big back yard
Consumed by her presence
I’ve become almost comfortable
Such stances dull the senses
Noted as I languidly lie back on her still warm hillside
And breathe for but a moment between bursts of vigor
Bouts of anger and so much still to do before I leave.

Soul food
She has fed me from her flesh of rock and soil
Nurtured me with her cutting wild wind
Filled my belly with raging storm and thundering tempest
When the earth and sky merge together as one
And quenched my seemingly insatiable thirst for wide and white and wild
Then let loose her uncontrolled wrath of waters in spring
When no one else would stand by her side
As if she were no more than a shallow sunny summer face.

She showed me her subtle still side
Her dark side
Deep side
I dove in
Where the sun dips behind her mid afternoon silhouette and her skin turns frigid in a flash
And the world is a blinding white and black and blue
Or the brown grey cold wet simple season of spring
That no one cares to see
Her seemingly ugly side
A raw face before the fanciful adornment of warmth and leaves and light.

Now she is stripped bare
As tourists turn their backs for a warmer ease
The elk for lower ground
Foliage for their resting place on the leeward side of bunch grass
Surrendered for the season in tired tangled and torn tan mounds
Or deep in the woods beneath the silent silver trees awaiting their blanket of snow
And the geese begin to congregate on the delta flats
Their final farewell sounded by loud squawking that carries up the side of the freezing mountain
Two miles or more as I stand on the front porch and hold my breath to listen.

Forever Home

/ Gin Getz / 4 Comments

Part one.

Our intention was to be here forever. We were building what was to be our forever home.

When I married Bob, I thought I was also marrying the mountain. The two were close to one.

I have since learned there is a connection between man and land, but the two are not inseparable. It is a connection created only in the minds of those seeking something solid to hold. A meaning and importance, connection and definition.

But the land does not define us. We only use the land to describe ourselves, find meaning in a more universal sense, one that others can comprehend and characterize. A false and temporary explanation of self. The exterior as a mode of classifying the interior. As a shell that does no more than contain and protect that which lives within.

We are both learning to re-write these labels, and learn who and what we truly are, not based on the walls we built and the mountains we climb.

How do we, then, define ourselves? Somehow we feel lost without the label.

But I am not the mountain.

I am not my husband, not my son, not my dog or horses or job.

I am me.

Of course that’s too ambiguous.

How do I define me except in relation to all these things?

And how when these things are all changing?

Will I remain the same?

Do we ever?

For now I don’t know who or what I am.

And now I recal the words of Cyndee sharing the image of the horse running free, when all four feet are in flight, above the earth, ungrounded, unbound, exhilarated…

Learning to live

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

It’s not what I was expecting
Is it ever?
Or are we best learning to live without expectation, allowing each day to unfold as it may, and remain in the present? Can we really survive as such without memories of the past and plans for the future?
I think not.

It’s all about balance.
We are products of our past, and crops for our futures. Is that really so bad? And can’t we accept that and still enjoy the present? What kind of a fool feels today is all that matters?
What matters? The air, the mountain, the river cutting through hard rock? Elements, harsh and mild, wild and calm. My husband, my son, my dog and cats, horses, birds in the back yard, the hawk hunting in the willows out on pasture. The feel of wind chapping my cheeks and rain tapping my hat and snow falling soft on my sweaty face as I tip my head upward and taste the simple sweet essence of changing seasons.
All of it.

That’s what I want.
Not just today. Certainly not just yesterday. And not only tomorrow. The whole enchilada. Life. Rich and full, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, birth and death and every day I am allowed to live in between the two.

Touch me
Soft and wet and warm
The fullness of life like
Water rushing over pale flesh
At times too deep to breath
I find myself in the middle of
A river I cannot stand in
Flowing too fast for a foothold

Tearing away

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments


Do not shed tears. Hold them back. Contain them for now. And then I will let them burst unbound. Soon. Then they will be for joy. They will fall upon a new land, enrich and nourish parched soils, merge with a new river, and flow with a freedom I have not felt in years. An exultation. A release. A flood of emotions pouring forth with a saline surge held back for too long. As a child, uninhibited, lost in passion and release from a comfort she does not fully understand, only trusts that this is how it meant to be.

Is this what they call blind faith?

Perhaps I am learning to believe.

Last night the rain turned to silence and our world turned to white.

Such a familiar state. For nearly half my days living here have been in snow. I am more comfortable with the cold white world than I am with the few warm weeks that pass in the blur of summer.

I hear the old rooster crowing in strong defiance. He too is too familiar. He knows what winter brings. What he doesn’t know is this. He’ll be relieved of this burden soon and allowed to pass the last of his days two thousand feet lower in elevation in an aviary owned by a neighbor of a friend. Rooster retirement. I never said I was not a sucker.

End of color

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment

And then it is over
The gaudy display
The song and dance
The brilliant appealing attractive spectacle

After weeks of the gradual climb to climax
Suddenly it comes to an end
Blown away
Stripped in one windy afternoon
The gradual crescendo
Followed by the Grande Finale
Now the audience claps and clears the theatre

Her inner core is left exposed
And therein lies her greatest beauty
Raw and unrefined
Real and without fanfare and comforts and attractions ready made
And for the first time in ten years I won’t remain
At the one time I belong

I long for wild
My wild winters
What has allowed me through the rest
Will I find this calling somewhere else
Or will I lose that part of me
Silenced in the din
Of traffic, talk and schedules
Based not on the rise and fall of sunlight
But on the numeric display on your modern phones

It won’t be long
It’s who I am
How I define myself
My wild side is dominant
Now dormant
Unable to awaken
But I do not let tears flow unless they may nourish and join the river and rain
Perhaps another river
And a rain storm building above another range

The wind is silent now
I do not hear the mountain
I do not hear myself
Instead I hear the wild call somewhere farther
Somewhere else
And I shiver to think of joining her there soon

A poem behind a rain streaked window

/ Gin Getz / 1 Comment

Rain on the window sill like anxious fingers drumming on the top of a table
The unsteady pulse of traffic below
Kicking up puddles that flash florescent in passing low beams above the slick ink black pavement covered by two days of rain
And above the colored flashing chaotic lights of town
The mountains calmly stand serene
An instant space of silence
Secrets hidden behind veils
Layers unfolding
As skirts on such a grand Victorian lady
Ashen coating softens the deeper you dive in
Irresistibly drawn
Back into the seemingly endless sea of jagged peaks
Back towards the richest of treasures
Sparkling a faint silvery gold
Diamonds in coal
There before me
Changing views as the heavy clouds
Languidly rolling about her hips
Unveil new secrets just long enough for me to question
To draw me in
Back there
And all that is or was the foreground suddenly disappears
My breath calms and gaze widens and I am there
Somewhere between the sea and sky
In the layers of grey fading like a childhood memory
A blurred vision I saw once in the back seat of the station wagon
As the motor hummed and my family loudly carried on
A faded photo with colors washed out over time to a pale patina of light and dark
There before me the view which lifts me over the lights and noise and now a siren I think I heard
Now so far below me
As I somehow progress deeper and higher into the infinite wilds
A place with expanding boundaries
Is anything anywhere left untouched
That I may be the pioneer I dream of

Unadorned

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment


Your peaks were painted with snow yesterday. And for just a moment I stopped my work, stood outside and looked at your white laced mountain tops, and felt the same stirring I have felt each year, a yearning for the excitement of anticipation of the season. Primal and uncontrollable, yet still soft and deep enough no one ever really knows.

For how many years have I worked on our little piece of land here on your big broad mountain side and looked over my shoulder awaiting your leaves to put out your final fiery display and then blow off, taking with them the last of the summer tourists, leaving you here with me, unadorned, as we remain and near the stark white season, that which settles in and consumes, quiet and calms, allowing me to hear my breath in your winter winds.

And yet this winter will find me on a different hillside, a different mountain to cradle my fears and passions. A winter, hushed and sleepy and snowy, awaits me but in a new land, new places to explore, touch and tease me, unfold before me like lacy golden wings, delicately covered with frost in first light of an early winter morning.

But will I find wilds? Will I ever be embraced by the wilds that have surrounded me here for half the year? The solitude and silence have become me. I have identified myself more with the mountain than the people who come and go, and from both I step away. I will find them again, that which matters most, the wild places and spaces, elsewhere. Some of us belong somewhere just a little more wild. Or is it that perhaps we don’t fit in the other places.

Rain at night

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment


Rain. Its primordial rhythm on the metal roof calls me, lures me seductively like an enigmatic wood nymph out into the ink black night. Akin to the murky depths of the ocean, the moon and stars are shrouded behind this heavy cloak. Darkness is complete. I stand in the doorway and look out as if with closed eyes.

Suddenly a close strike of lightening, the ranch illuminated before me instantly, seemingly unnaturally as if under glaring spot lights of a semi truck and I can see it all for just a second, the dirt drive, the cabins, the grove of aspen trees and old manure spreader we set there as an odd sort of decoration. Then the blackness returns and seems cavernous.

The dog and I step out into the abyss. Now the rain taps on my hard brim hat and I break the blackness with a beam from my flashlight. The drops of cold rain illuminated like a million diamonds falling from the sky. They feel close to ice, close to snow. A soft sign that summer fades as the tired aspen, leaves paling as their annual brilliant grande finale is about to begin.

We follow the flashlight’s beam to the barn and open the gates to allow the mare and foal a warm dry shelter for the night. They are there waiting, bright yellow eyes captured by the flashlight. I return to the cabin and release a contented sigh, kicking off the muddy boots and hanging the damp slicker by the door. They will be dry by morning when I slip into them again.

Beyond the surface

/ Gin Getz / 6 Comments

Beyond the surface
Dragonflies, big and blue and about the size of hummingbirds
But mute, mysterious, and yet somehow, more real.
There are no red plastic feeders here
Wild and silent and shimmering in the otherwise flat grey light of dawn
Leaving big ripples on the still forest pool
Perfect circles expanding
A bull’s-eye.
It is different here
New and as such, slightly odd.

We are camping beside a large pond with cattails taller than the camper on our truck and lily pads the size of dinner plates skirting the edges. Earlier this morning the largest bull moose I ever saw splashed in through these lilies and swam to the other side, his huge and heavy rack held above the black silk surface in the haze of first light like a burdensome and looming ship crossing a medieval mote.

At our camp site is trash, always an unwelcome site. Local trash. Tell tale signs of broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, shotgun shells and business cards from a shop in the nearest town about a half hour down the mountain. Little pride in their beautiful land. I’ve never understood that. Does it form from a sense of helplessness or ignorance? In any case, I call it a bad sign.

I am looking for signs. Signs that tell me “this is the place.” Home. I’m not finding it and it’s somewhat scary since I am committed to make this move and soon, yet have not figure where this move will take me. And depressing because I keep hoping to find it clear and simple, “Eureka!” there it is, and am disappointed each day as I sit in the back seat of the pickup and look out the side window at the landscape rushing by, hoping something there will call me, tell me I belong here. But I hear nothing beside the rush of the motor and the blaring music of my son and the regular outbursts of silly humor of the three of us telling jokes and stories in our funny and familiar way.

I lose faith in myself and wish I had faith in higher powers. But higher powers haven’t got me where I am. Hard work and a strong sense of daring have. I have no blind faith. My eyes are wide open. I know that will upset some to read. The same few who might admire my life and keep praying to live where and how I have lived. I would like to believe prayers will get you as far as grit but haven’t seen this first hand.

Funny though that I still keep praying, asking for a sign, asking to be put where I belong and do what I can to best serve this beautiful world.

And the truck rumbles on, and another day passes as fast as the view outside the side window, and in a blur I remember the answer but it’s not as clear and comforting as I wish it were.

Make it happen. There is no red carpet laid out for the journey of life. Weave it as you go along. And weave it yourself. All the velvety red ribbon is already inside you. It’s not the place; it is you. All you need to do is get to work and weave the path yourself. Believe in yourself. I’ve heard those words before.

There’s more to it than that. I’m listening for the answers. But I’m learning to listen within.

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.