I Hate This Canyon. But I Love That Other One. Why?

By: | January 9, 2023
Browns Canyon, very close to, but different from, Bighorn Sheep Canyon on U.S. 50.

Two canyons loom large in my life right now, and have for the past year and a half. This is not a metaphor for something, although maybe it could be. One canyon I visit on purpose, for joyful hikes with my baby, my older daughter, and sometimes a friend or two. The other canyon is, shall we say, less full of joy. It is a beautiful canyon, but I am having difficulty seeing it this way. This canyon is a cleft in the mountains that I must transit so I can get from point A to point B.

The first canyon features a winding, narrow road that fills with tricky shadows no matter what time of year I visit. It has a bubbling creek, which provides cool breaks on hot summer hikes and a good 10-degree temperature drop in winter. It is full of fir, spruce, pine, aspen and oaks, and carved with hiking trails from top to bottom. This canyon is probably my favorite place in the city, and I visit as often as I can.

The second canyon features a winding, narrow road that fills with shadows any time of year. It has a rapidly coursing river, the Arkansas, which provides plenty of spots for fishermen and float-tubers to slowly pull off or rejoin traffic, slowing me down either way. It has a good general store halfway through it, which sells tasty fresh sandwiches, but that’s about all I can say in its favor. It is full of pine, rocks, and bighorn sheep, for which it is named, and which I have almost hit on more than one occasion. It is one of my least favorite spots in southern Colorado, and I have to go through it any time I try to go skiing or camping.

I thought about this contrast the other day, while driving through Canyon A so my toddler could sleep in the car. The shadows made it hard to see and I kept flipping my sunglasses down and up. A mountain biker appeared out of nowhere, slowly inching up the road on the icy shoulder. Plenty of Sunday looky-loo drivers went too fast, too slow, or too close to the middle, but I didn’t find this annoying.

A fall morning hike in the good canyon.

I had driven through Canyon B earlier that week, for a short ski day, and it pissed me off all the way to Salida. Then a few hours later, it pissed me off all the way back from Salida. The road was in terrible shape after a snowstorm the night before, which really didn’t help, but it was also the shadows and the other drivers that made me so frustrated.

I feel like I should not have such disparate opinions about two places that are otherwise very much alike. Both are made of granite, both are cleaved by bodies of water that start in the mountains I love, both are actually very pretty, both take me places I feel so lucky to wind up. Why should I feel such animosity for Canyon B?

I think it’s as simple as this: Canyon A represents a destination, while Canyon B represents a journey. When I said that to myself, while driving in Canyon A, I almost gasped. By God, those insipid wooden placards they sell at tourist shops are right. “Life is a journey, not a destination.” I don’t like when pablum makes a point, but I will be mindful of this the next time I go through Canyon B.

I will visit Canyon B again very soon and I decided to make it a promise. Canyon B, I will try not to be mad at you. I will look for your namesake sheep, and I will appreciate the icy Arkansas. I will stop at the Cotopaxi General Store, I will wave at the Lone Pine Recreation Area, and I will try not to resent you. I will try not to yell with relief as soon as I hit Salida. The journey is what counts and I am, as ever, trying to remember that.

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Photo 1: By Bob Wick, BLM/CC-BY-2.0 ; Photo 2: By the author

Roaring Lion Uncaged

By: | January 6, 2023

On the eve of 1942, Winston Churchill was in Ottawa on a Zelenskyy-style rally-the-allies speech in the Canadian parliament before the next “invasion season” of WWII was to arrive, having come straight from doing the same in America (you can watch the speech here, known best by its closing line, ‘some chicken, some neck’). He still had his speaking notes in hand when he met with his next appointment, the photographer Yousuf Karsh.

In Karsh he met a man quite used to commanding in a more subtle way, and the two did not strike up the kind of rapport for which photographers often hope with their subjects. Having grudgingly agreed to stuff his speaking notes in his pocket for the photo shoot, Churchill, leaning on a chair, refused to put down his cigar.

“Forgive me, sir,” said Karsh, and grabbed the lit cigar straight out of the British Prime Minister’s mouth. By the time he snapped the shot, the full fury of the Allied leader at war was on display (see above) and the photo became known as The Roaring Lion.

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The moon, right there

By: | January 4, 2023
The moon and mars above a tall concrete wall

Right there! The moon!

And, right above it, Mars.

Right over my head. Right over your head.

Right over your head, person driving that car! Right over your heads, people who just rode by on the train! Right over your head, person walking your dog! And the dog’s head, too!

And right over my grandparent’s heads and right over the heads of every human to ever walk the earth. And all the other animals, too, the hedgehogs to the dinosaurs. Rising and setting, waxing and waning, right over our heads.

Photo: Helen Fields, Tuesday night

Number the Days

By: | January 2, 2023

It is me again, with my hopeful calendars! I originally wrote this post in January 2020, when the calendar did seem like a place where you could write something on a certain date and there would be a reasonable chance that it would come to pass.

I feel much more timid now, three years on. Over the weekend, I fell into a bit of a funk, where the calendars (so many still!) seemed like one more burden to add to an already weighted year.

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The Best Dam Year-End List

By: | December 30, 2022

The end of the year is a time for lists. Our Ten Favorite Books, Twelve Movies We Loved, Twenty-Seven TikToks that Perfectly Captured the National Mood in 2022. We’re a society obsessed with rankings — with the quantification of media, the comparison of culture, the litanization of everything. We writers are the worst of the bunch. Year-end lists are our most valuable currencies: Our book’s placement on any Top Ten is proof that our work was remembered beyond the moment of its publication, that somebody, anybody, thought we mattered.

Anyway. Over the last twelve months I read some books, saw some movies, watched some shows. Mostly, though, I spent 2022 sloshing around beaver ponds. So, without further ado, here are Ten Beaver Dams I Absolutely Adored in 2022.

10.

Check out this retaining wall! Usually beavers dam at narrow stream pinch-points, where minimal labor can produce maximal results, but here they built a low, long bulwark across the floodplain. Tough work, but worth it.

9.

Hard to beat the view up Cottonwood Creek.
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Walking Into the New Year

By: | December 28, 2022

I wrote this on January 1, 2018. A lot had happened already, and more has happened since. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was writing about but I see now more clearly that it’s about living with the memories of what’s happened. So I’ll repeat my wish of walking, memories and all, into the new year with courage and faith and joy.

Well now then.  Here we are.  The first day of another year.  What to do about that?

January 1 is a day for looking forward.  Kids mostly look forward, I think.  But any adult knows you make sense of any given situation only by looking back, by remembering.  Memory allows the comparison between then and now by which we more thoroughly understand the now.  The fact that memory is also a complete crapshoot just makes life more interesting.  Where was I going with this?  Ok, I remember now.

I’ve lived in Baltimore since 1980, longer than I’ve lived any other place.  Most people from where I grew up move a lot: I remember a guy telling me the average stay in my home town was now 2.5 years. I remember thinking that 2.5 years doesn’t give you much chance at maintaining a community.  I’m digressing again, please forgive me.

Back to Baltimore.  I’ve lived here long enough that places, buildings, streets, sidewalks, aren’t just themselves any more, they’re colored by, or they resonate with, what happened there in the past.  The street corner where I fell off the curb and cut the hell out of my knee and my husband took me to the crowded ER where I didn’t make the triage and when I finally got into an examining room, flat on my back looking up at an examining light, and the doctor said to my extremely-curious husband, “Sir, your head is between the light and her knee,” that street corner is a little scary and mostly funny.

We used to go to Florence, Italy a lot; this is not a digression.  Florence has for centuries used tourist money to preserve its Renaissance self in a non-Disney way, that is, the Florentines still live, work, and shop in those massive stone buildings.  Lorenzo di Medici is a real person who seemed not to have died all that long ago, your grandfather might have known him.  The fruit piled up in front of the fruit stores is the near-relative of the fruit on trays in paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio.  The past is right there.  It didn’t go away.  It’s just made the present more complex.

None of this is news to anybody.  Our brains evolved to make connections between this and that, so when you see this, you remember that.  And when the memories-in-stone pile on top of each other for centuries, you get Florence.  Why am I having such trouble sticking to the subject here?

Because it’s painful, I guess.  Who wants to remember pain?  Nobody, except that the buildings and street corners and sidewalks remember it for you.  I’m driving along, turn the corner, and ooops, there’s my husband so interested in the anatomy of my cut knee that he’s in the doctor’s way.  My husband died two years ago, so at that street corner now I smile and don’t smile.

The older you get, the more dearly-beloved dead people you collect: for me, the most recent is my husband and the deepest is my son.

Now I can get back to this day, the first day of the new year.  It presents a problem: how can I look forward, how can any of us look forward, with half the concrete in Baltimore remembering pain?  I’ve taught myself a trick:  wash out the pain, replace it with the people themselves, my son walking down the night sidewalk, walking into a streetlamp’s light, through the dark in between, and into the next light, on his way home.

I’m pretty sure this is how most people face the new year, especially if the old year was kind of crappy.  Everyone’s had deaths, disappointments, sicknesses, fears, the whole list; and all of them are connected with a room, a car, a porch.  So people cut out the bad, remember the good, let the good memories become present reality, let the street corners and sidewalks carry the reality into the new year, and then they just walk right into it.

I’m still not entirely sure what I’m saying here.  I am sure, however, that I wish all of us, every one, a splendid new year.

My Year in Books

By: | December 23, 2022

Say what you will about 2022, but for me, it’s been a great year of reading. By that I mean, I’ve read a lot of really good books. 

I keep my yearly book list only for myself, and I try not to get competitive about racking up numbers. The reading itself is the point. That said, I do have a few little rules about my list: I only count books that I read for pleasure (not work), and they don’t count unless I give them an attentive read cover to cover. 

As I write this on December 18, I have read 49 books and am halfway through number 50. Most of these have been fiction. I’ve also read three books of poetry, five memoirs, two works of narrative non-fiction and a couple of thought-provoking, but hard to classify books (The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, and When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut.) 

Looking over my list, some favorites rise to the top.

Favorite book of the year: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This novel is an insightful exploration of a friendship between two creatives, and it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read about friendship and creative process. The story is deeply layered and resonant.

Close second: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. At 626 pages, it was the longest book I read this year, but I didn’t want it to end. It’s a captivating story about the power of narratives, told over a timescale that spans centuries. Doerr does an incredible job of threading disparate stories into a unified narrative.

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