nature writing

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.

Graduation

/ Gin Getz / 12 Comments

Sand between my toes. Not what I have felt in years, living in a land of snow and wool socks, jagged rocks, boggy pasture and cowboy boots.

I have painted my toenails for first time in over twenty years, borrowing “city clothes” from my mother, sandals straight off her feet to be here. It is special.

Sand pours through my fingers, back onto the beach, limitless possibilities of patterns in the sand, forever changed by wind and water and my footprints which will last only until the tide returns.

I think of sand filtering through the confines of an hourglass, slowly shifting, piling, only to be turned again as we watch the next section fill. This is how we tell time.

Changing times.

Times of growth. Always growing. Nothing remains the same. Only now we take the time to acknowledge and celebrate.

Graduation. My son’s achievement of completing high school. In his class of one, he is here to share with others who have achieved similar. The balance of education and life.

It’s been up to him. Alone. I don’t teach him. He has learned to learn himself. His mind has not only grown with knowledge, but with the self-discipline and skills of directing, focusing, motivating and empowering himself. He has learned at eighteen what I seen some still don’t know.

And he understands the power and passion of work.

Where will his dreams lead him from here?

A new beginning.

As my greatest dream to date is being fulfilled.

Only to have more dreams, new dreams, variations on a theme, or beginning to sing a new song.

I love you, Forrest Nile Getz.

This happens every year

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

The river continues to rise. A café au lait rush of roaring melting snow ripping down the canyon. The mighty Rio Grande contained by the steep bluff of rocks cut from years of this spring ritual. The island we hop onto in summer is submerged. The plank used to cross the gentle expanse in fall has been washed downstream. I look for its unnatural straight edges and rectangular shape of wood floating somewhere out there in the huge expanse of the Reservoir, two miles downriver. What was large enough to carry my weight across the river will appear as no more than a needle in the haystack out there in the vast still waters of the lake, waters waiting their turn to rush and rip again when they reach the other side and resume the river’s course.

And until we build a bridge or the waters subside, suddenly I find myself trapped here on this side, surrounded by tourists and traffic and in-laws on one side, and the raging river on the other. It’s not that these things are all unpleasant, some are surprisingly wonderful, but I feel myself as a caged beast unable to roam free. The wilds of winter and my room to roam are suddenly taken away. I learn to adjust. It’s not all bad. But I am no longer alone, no longer in touch with the mountain, and a part of me is lost.

This happens every year.

Roaring, rushing, raging. The sound penetrates the windows of the Little Cabin, old windows, old glass, seemingly seeping with time, distorting the view with lines of weeping age from single pane glass probably eighty years old.

The waters will calm. The snow in the high country above tree line is lesser each day, now no more than patches, stripes, pieces of the whole remaining, holding tight, losing ground. Work in the high country calls us, my escape to wilder worlds as my home becomes too tame in summer.

My home. Funny I should still call it such. And so it will be until I find another place to pour my heart into the land, and mix my blood with the rush of another raging river.

Almost summer

/ Gin Getz / 3 Comments

Some days we wait, other days we run to catch up. I forgot what it feels like to sit back and wait for the world to catch me. Or is it only in moments of foolish pride that I feel that could possibly be the case?

Summer. The calendar says it’s still a week away, but I say it’s here now. The ranch is filled with laugher of children, and if there is one sound that fills me with joy after the sounds I’m used to of the mountain’s silence, children’s laugher is it. Many children. Last I heard, there were sixty or so. The pup thinks they are all here for him, and revels the attention as he fetches his football tossed by many an eager child unwinding in the soft light of late afternoon.

And in the middle of the laughter and ball playing and sunny city smiles letting loose in the high mountain air, we’re banging away as usual – never the sorts to sit back and soak and take the summer off, but more comfortable with our role of building, providing, creating the place and space.

And tired as I am some days when a bath and bed seem so attractive yet still out of reach, I look around at these smiles, and the ensuing smiles of my own boys, and I’ll stick with Forrest’s expression: sleep is overrated.

Oh, and for Karen and those waiting news on Forrest’s mare, well, we’re still waiting. Now into her seventh day of “waxing” when I’ve never seen a mare take more than two. But waiting is a wonderful thing in this case, as it brings me alone and silent, with the pup at my side, staring up at Pole Mountain illuminated under the cold deep glow of the setting moon in the otherwise darkness of the frosty morning.

The comfort of clouds

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

Intimacy is lost in the noise of chatter drowning out the rushing brown waters I hear only now in the wee hours as I step outside to soak in the chill of early morning silence. Mid day and everywhere I look there are people, signs of people, lights, motors, movement. I am used to being alone. The vast rift between alone and lonely. I am lonelier around people.

I no longer feel the mountain and long for the tender touch of falling snow which is the mountain as she allows herself to be, gives herself to me. I am lost in the walls of my own home, no longer mine as we move out once again. And yet somehow I feel lighter without the encumbrance of clinging, claiming. I am moving on, transforming, and that feels as good to say as it does to accept as I look around my world once again in boxes and shrug off the confusion, too busy still to focus on the future. Probably a good thing, as I am rather uncertain where that will lead.

A heavy grey sky hangs over our greening valley this morning, closing us in with the mountain. It does not burden but frees, providing a sense of place and space, completion, connection, a still peace.  For just a moment, I am allowed to slow down and do no more than breathe.

A contradiction to the pressures of the day.  And the day begins now.

Morning moose

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

Early morning as the sky begins to lighten. I’ve been looking out regularly (and throughout the night) at my son’s mare due to foal today. A young female moose steals my attention now. She is lying in a patch of yet unopened iris out on pasture not far from the gate. The same pasture the moose have claimed for the past two weeks, and probably the same moose I’ve been cussing for grazing heartily on our already too limited pasture.

There, now, she is resting so close to my unconcerned herd. The horses, once so quick to spook and snort at the sight or smell, have become conditioned to their regular presence and mill about at ease. I watch her through the binoculars and the sky brightens and my vision improves. For the first time, I find such beauty in these otherwise awkward animals. She is a soft charcoal grey, I imagine touching her neck, stroking soft and silky, with the wavy hairs along her back like the mane of a horse, and her long nose, almost regal. I see a different side to her this morning, a shared familiarity, as she lies there. The female side. I’ve never seen their beauty, but nor have I shared this intimacy of a peaceful morning rest.

She’s up now, trotting off to meet up with the two young bulls she’s spent the spring with that must be lower down the pasture beyond my view, told by the direction of the horses heads, all turned in unison in that direction. The horses do not turn to watch her rise and leave. My attention returns to the expecting mare.

And letting go

/ Gin Getz / 6 Comments

And then it
is over

Winter
tucked away so neatly for the season

Not unlike
the box of shiny ornaments in the attic from the Christmas tree

The white
peaks surround, a reminder like left over wrapping papers and ribbons

Scattered still
in the corners of the room.

Somehow we
sense she is finally through

What we have
known

The givens,
assumptions, the safety of knowing

Is suddenly
gone

The bottom
dropped out from under

Searching for
solid ground

When we were
so used to walking on feet of snow

We are left
empty

Surprised to
find ourselves suddenly without

The habit of
heavy boots and zipped up parkas

As I head
out in morning to feed the horses

Who too are
finally letting go of their winter coats.

We leave
behind the wilds of winter

Easing into
summer so civilized with folks living for cocktail hour

And we may
never see it again.

Inside looking out

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

The world returns to white. 

The view out my window is soft and heavy and wet and white.  I slip on my boots and down jacket and head out to feed the horses.  The boots I thought were retired for the season, now brimming with snow, deep snow, dampening my jeans because the boots aren’t high enough snow.

Ten. That’s how many Mays I’ve been here.  Ten. And I’d never seen snow like this in May.  “Back in the day,” my husband tells me. And even then, he says, snow like this was a crazy thing.   You just never know.  The mountain is mightier than we are.  The best we can do is work with what we she gives us.  She gives us plenty.  And this spring, that’s plenty of snow.

It’s crazy, alright. The robins are perched on the fence post looking down at the white ground and wondering what went wrong.  The chickens hide under the shelter of their coop and can’t figure out what cruel joke was played on them this year, just when they started laying regularly again.  And Norman, dear Norman, the new guy – his training continues in spite of the snow.  Perhaps he’ll learn to pull a sleigh before he has to pull a slip and plow.

Ten Mays.  I came and said I’d stay a while.  Now it’s been a while.  Some days, it feels like too long.  We were ready to leave long ago.  A friend wrote yesterday, “How do you like your new mountain and your new ranch?”  He can’t believe I am still here.  I can’t either.

Ten Mays and still it is not mine.  I knew it never would be. Not because of the elements, the elevation, not even the snow.  Those things are in way mine.  I know them, feel them, am with them intimately. Those things we can work with. It’s something more.  Deeper.  A connection.  Was it severed, or did it never grow? 

A land that is both a mirage and memory for most.

I seek something fuller and richer and deeper than that.  Hands immersed in warm soil, toes buried in sand.  Seeds scattered, roots spreading.   A connection.  A place to live and die and toil.  I’m not looking for a place to get away but to remain. 

It seems so simple.  Basic.  A good place to start.  Funny it should take me so long to find. 

And so, where will my mornings find me, with what view out my window in the lightening sky as I sit here and write you?

Ah, the view before me. White and muted behind the veil of falling snow.  I have been glad to be here, am gladder still to leave.

I’m not big on retrospect, too often filled with sadness or anger.  Let it go.  I’ve seen too many hold onto a lifetime of resentment, hurting themselves most of all.  A bitter pill swallowed every day.

I’d rather take my chances, spit it out, and see what lies ahead.  Or right now, for that matter, because now is a wonderful time too.  A time of change.

Change. To where? Where am I going?  What will I be doing? What adventures are we creating?

For now, our hands are full, tied.  Tied to mops and window cleaners, to reins and driving lines, hammers, saws and moving boxes. 

And that’s just the beginning. But I guess that’s enough for now.

Beginning with the birds

/ Gin Getz / 7 Comments

Starting with the birds. 

The sky is alive. A speckled sky, fluttering with activity, motion, wings and song, as the snow continues to fall. Birds everywhere.  Black dots in leafless trees. Brewers blackbirds, nuthatch, starling, common crows, mountain blue birds, stellar jays, finches, juncos and grosbeaks. 

The shrill call of the redwing blackbird lends a staccato refrain to the gentle background melody of the robin.  Such beauty in their simple tune.

The ground moves, and upon second glace, down there with the doves, we see the cowbirds scratching at last year’s seeds, melting out a tiny patch of snow about them, leaving a tell tale circle of dark, wet ground when they fly away all together, all at once, only to settle back down almost where they started from.

During breakfast, while the snow falls in white feathered flakes, the long black bird I can only figure might be a cormorant or ibis (anyone know?) cuts across the view in a perpendicular line along the storm  softened horizon.

And then a raven on the fence post looking down. I follow his gaze to the ground.  Beneath a blue spruce we planted there years ago, now well established, a healthy young tree much taller than me.  There in the wake of the boughs, a ruffled mass of brown and spots.  I slip on my boots to inspect. The injured grouse flies off, the raven trailing, leaving a trace of blood and feathers behind.

At times I wish to intervene with nature. 

And then the weather.

A little bit of everything.  I have felt rain.  Seen our fair share of spring snow.  And then in one sunny day, the ground melts out, dries and promises us a productive spring.  The grass is greening in the moisture. When we can see it, beneath the regular coverings of white.

It’s up for grabs.  And we grab it all. A longing to see everything, feel touch taste smell each softening change of the season, experience the intimacy we have known and shared at a time when the mountain opens, beckons and still no one stays.  A bittersweet acceptance, knowing it will not last.  On one hand, such excitement.  On the other, a combination of fear and grasping for the past.  The latter is the weaker hand.  The past does not draw me like the future does.  Can we work to make a better past? Yet how many try? We can work for a better tomorrow. 

Remember the quote by Hunter S. Thompson:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a ride!’”

Seems not a popular view as I look around lives and towns and a country of safe and easy and holding on tight to memories and positions and safe choices.  But I like it.  I think I want to slide into home base.  Only quietly.  So I can hear the birds along the way.

I begin by listening.  In the darkness of the early morning before I look up and out, and remain safe and warm in my own little world, my home.

Still, even there and then, the robin’s song, the spring song, penetrates.  I am warmer still by their refrain.

Spring mornings are all about birds. A dramatic change from the silence of winter, when the only sound of birds is the slow scratching panic of the jays on frigid mornings as they await their handout, or the slow steady pulsing beat of one of the two ravens that share the cover of our trees all winter long.  Like the sound of air through the lungs of a running horse.

Now the morning cacophony as I step out under the sheltered deck to check on the horses before feeding time. 

These birds. Congregating here and now.  Regrouping perhaps, resting, enjoying their free meal after their long journey north.  Some will continue onward.  We won’t see them again until fall, if fall finds me still here. The rest will dissipate as the tourists congregate.

Many will head for the hills, for the shelter of higher ground and fewer people, dogs and roaring motors.  We will see them up at the ditch.  A fine place to meet again.

And then I will be gone.  And the birds will fare fine on their own.  And I will be out there feeding a new flock, in a new home, in a new land.

And so, about us. 

Though I guess I’ve taken up enough of your time for one sitting.

I’ll save the rest for next time.