wilderness

Leap!

/ Gin Getz / 3 Comments

We sat in the tent, my son and me, as the light withered.  The horses were in the trees for the night,
the little stove hissed, dinner was done, a candle or two were lit in preparation
of the darkness that was swelling.

Everything changes, but some things remain the same.  He will always be my son.  I will always be his mother, and be, give,
create everything I can for him.  I will be
there for him if he needs me, though “there” may have greater physical distance
between us.  And “needing” may not be as often.

We talked, just the two of us, as two adults, two individuals
with big hearts and big dreams, together in one quiet tent in the middle of the
Wilderness.  I gave one last
lecture.  No, there will be more.  He knows.
He’s had them his whole life.  He
knows I speak because I care.  I worry, I
want to give him all I can.

I reminded him of the Cowboy Way.  Rules to live by, each of us, as he heads out
to make his own choices without me near to intervene.  Probably better now.  He knows plenty.  He is ready.
He may not always make the right choices, but he will probably know when
he is wrong, and hopefully do what he can to amend.  He will be hurt from time to time, too.  That is life, but as a mother, that is a hard
one to accept.  We wish for a perfect,
protective bubble.  Yet we know life
doesn’t work that way.

And I reminded him of what matters most to me, for I see
these things matter to him, too.

  1. Live
    life passionately.
  2. Let
    yourself, allow yourself, or make yourself be spontaneous.  Plans are necessary, but sometimes you just
    have to do.
  3. Be
    positive in outlook.  Life IS beautiful
    and amazing, and so are you.
  4. Find
    a purpose in life that is giving, not taking, and do what you can to make the world
    a better place.  Strive to leave
    everything and everyone a little better for having had you there.
  5. Be
    yourself.  There is no one more special.

These are the words of wisdom I send my son off with as he
leaves tomorrow to begin the journey to college. The road trip begins.  The adventure begins.  A new world unfolds.  He is leaving behind the world and home he
has known for more than half his life.

He shows no regrets, sadness, loss or remorse.  Only a calm excitement, which is basically
how he handles life. He’s better at that than me.

I compare his reaction to the negative ones I hear too often
associated with change here.  I am tired
of hearing what it means to the tourists who come here for but a week a year
when humbly my job has required me to listen.
My son, for whom this has been not just a fond memory but a solid and
real home with all the ups and downs that a full rich life are built on, has still
not whined.  And I know he will not.

Tomorrow our life changes.
Just like that.  I don’t know the
answers yet.  Maybe some of them.  Like Forrest going to college.  That’s awesome.  I’m proud of him as a proud parent could ever
be for working as hard as he has to allow himself the opportunities and open
doors he found and created.  His choices.  His life.

As for me, for us, a family, a couple now, moving, changing,
growing, starting something new… I’m ready.
Bring it on.

All the same

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

Can I still see it new, feel it new, when time and again was it the same rain that fell light and cold on my face, and the same tall grasses that soaked my jeans and leather boots?

I reach for my camera then put it away. I have taken the same before. This is not a child forever changing and growing though I have amassed as many photos of the mountain as I did my child in his early years.

How do we know it is time to move on when the land calls us so strongly, the quiet muses tempting and taunting in the song of the late season trickle of the creek and twinkling light of the plump Aspen leaves. If you listen, you’ll know. She is not calling us. Perhaps, only perhaps, she tells us to leave. She too would rather dance alone.

A tingle like nearby lightening when riding over the Divide. Too close, and exposed. Without protection of the trees.

We could run back for shelter. Where it is safer, it is known.

Or hunker down in the saddle and move on.

Even when we don’t know where “on” may be.

Such a wide and wild world. I wouldn’t want it otherwise.

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.

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.