The English Geek

Just Because:

the view from my back door yesterday, which I thought was beautiful:

(the peak you can see just behind the large green tree in the center is called Baldy, and I am still working on a blog post about our hike to its top, involving panic and blood and bruises and a fairly persistent rattlesnake)

Answers for Jake: Why Hike

(warning: extremely long post)

A few weeks ago, Kendell and I took the kids on a short Sunday-evening hike. We curved around the south side of Mount Timpanogos into a cool, shady meadow, dotted with a few wildflowers and unexpectedly lush after June's late rains. Timp runs mostly north-south. Its west side---sere, jagged, fierce---is fairly straightforward, a rugged jut of mountain rising from the valley floor. But its east side is something else entirely. Carved from long-melted glaciers, the eastern mass is a series of deep cirques, jumbled next to and upon each other, making their way to the 11,000+-foot summit. That Sunday, though, we were down at the base of the mountain. As we walked along the trail that curves around one of the basins, I spotted a deer. We all admired it, getting closer and closer, walking gingerly along the trail so as not to scare it away. It was nervous, as if it knew something strange was in its vicinity even if it hadn't quite caught our scent yet. Once it did, when we were only fifty or so feet away, it bounded away from us, disappearing up the mountain in great, springing bounds.

Magical as that moment was---the bounding deer in the yellow early-evening glow, the thick green plants and violet wildflowers, the scent of dry dust and damp earth and cool canyon wind---what made it truly memorable was how it seemed to unite the six of us. The current of gentle energy inspired by fresh air and wildlife ran through all of us at once, connecting everyone as surely as if we'd been physically touching. Jake felt it so thoroughly that, after we'd started back down the trail, he turned to me and said "Mom, tell me about some of the hikes your parents took you on when you were a kid." I explained to him that my parents weren't really hikers. In fact, we never went on even one hike.

"Why do you like hiking so much now, if you didn't like it when you were young?" he asked, his face a little bit bewildered at the idea of his tree-hugging mama living in a non-hiking family. I explained that while we didn't hike, my parents still taught me to love nature by taking me out to it. We went on drives in the canyons quite often, and every summer found us at Lake Powell (still one of my favorite places on earth; I think I would chose a vacation there over almost anywhere else, even the beach). But his question kept coming to my mind last Tuesday (the 18th), when Jake, Kendell and I hiked Timp. Just why is it that I love hiking so much?

I think the Timp hike is the perfect hike. It is just long enough. Fifteen miles round trip are just enough to make you feel like you've really hiked that day, but not so long that you have to sleep on the mountain. Plus, the landscape you travel through is absolutely breathtaking. The trail takes you through four distinctly different areas, and each area is itself varied. Piney woods to quakies, marshland to talus, alpine arboretum to high desert garden: it is always changing. The first section, called the Grand Staircase, is a long, narrow valley with a curve at its cliffed top; the trail weaves along the right-hand side of the valley. It's full of trees: pine, aspen, oak. And, everywhere in August, wildflowers. To get on top of that back cliff, you hike a series of switchbacks that has you crossing the same two waterfalls four times each. There aren't bridges over the falls (although there are a couple over long, marshy spots); you just gingerly pick your way across whatever stones are in the shallowest water. The flow is swift and cold, so no moss grows, the stone strangely abrasive, hardly slippery at all.

I've never climbed Timp with Kendell before, because his old hips never would have made it. My previous two ascents were done first with Becky and then with a family friend. Kendell is not a lingering sort of hiker. He doesn't really want to stop and take in the scenery, at least not for more than sixty seconds or so. I really did want to linger once we got to the back cliff, where you can look both down at the valley you've already hiked and then turn to see the next cirque you're approaching. Sixty seconds was hardly long enough. But after some breathing and a little rest, we pushed on.

The next section is officially named Middle Basin. I think whoever named it has got to be the least-imaginative person alive (or probably he's already dead?) because this cirque is incredible; the drab "Middle Basin" hardly does it justice. It's vaguely serpentine, in a wide sort of way, rimmed in pine-topped cliffs. It starts with meadows, lush this time of year. Birds hop out of the brush and scuttle up the trail, which curves away from the cliff, always ascending but at a forgiving sort of angle. Jacob and I had hoped to see moose in the meadows, like we did when we hiked it three years ago, but they weren't there. Just green, shaded quiet. That is the magic of Middle Basin: how peaceful it is, a circle made of forest, pine, emerald, dusty, brilliant, grass, moss, sea, beryl greens. The cliffs are contrast, and the impossible blue sky; the wide northern talus slope a swathe of burnt umber. The trail winds around rises of stone, seems to almost be going away from the talus, but eventually leads you right across it. The sound of stone on stone on stone on stone on sharp-edged stone: not a grinding or a crushing sound, but a finely-honed clatter that works its way through seeming miles of stone to quiver somewhere deep in your spine. Only the trees and flowers know how deep the stone goes and where soil begins. But it must be somewhere, because even in the scree, there are wildflowers.

We stopped for another sixty-second breath in the middle of the talus slope. The sun had finally, barely risen over the far edges of mountain, and the light sparkled with that blue-white clarity that comes in the morning. I'd been leading so far, wanting to go a little bit faster than Jake was comfortable with. After we'd caught our breath, Jake and Kendell went on ahead, because I wanted to take some pictures. I couldn't resist the light. I couldn't resist the flowers. The flowers! That is one of the answers for Jake: I love hiking because it can take me to a place where flowers simply grow, without help from a greenhouse, without sprinklers or fertilizer or pesticide. The trees, too. Everything growing all on its own, without people's help (despite people, really). It brings me a sense of peace to see the world in its natural state; it makes me feel that humanity might not destroy everything beautiful and wild.

The last part of Middle Basin is my favorite part of the hike. The trail arcs along the eastern side of the cirque and is, to me, a fairy-tale landscape, straight out of a Hans Christian Anderson forest. It is just the way I imagined forests to be when I was a fairy-tale reader:

Long grass and towering trees alike catching the sunlight, the trail a zen curve, and the inescapable flowers. Part of me---the part who believed in fairy tales---thinks there might be fairies living in blossoms, elves under toadstools, talking mice sitting at rock tables, a trail of bread crumbs. I think it is those bits of color, scattered among all the green, that turns the place from simply beautiful to ethereal. I'd like to drop down in the spackled shade and relax in the grass, but every few feet another photo presents itself. I took photo after photo, and then pushed on until something else demanded to be caught on film. Until I stopped taking photos because just being there, in seeming solitude, is enough. Meadows rise above me and fall below me, all full of flowers, and I think that maybe my first metaphor is wrong. Maybe it isn't about fairies and their tales. Maybe it is all God's garden. He is the wisest of all gardners, mixing colors with abandon, bringing light pink to shadowy spaces and ultramarine blue to the green parts of the earth. It feels like solace.

It feels sacred.

Alone on the mountain in the flowery fields, I come upon another answer for Jake: because hiking makes me remember what it felt like to believe in fairies and to be that young and trusting and hopeful. That memory brings me along a path to a more grown-up faith. Mountains to me will always be sacred.

I was almost to the south side of Middle Basin before I caught up to Kendell and Jake. Here there are three long switchbacks, and the basin is steep, and it is all a mass of color. Kendell walked behind Jake, and Jake walked behind me; we talked about what we'd seen so far. I gave him some encouragement, because let's face it: we'd already gone more than four miles, and we still had three to go, and that's a long way for anyone, let alone an 11-year-old. I made sure to encourage him to drink, and to get a granola bar from his pack if he needed it, and gave him a shot block. I told him I was proud of him. Just before we left it, I turned around to look at Middle Basin in the morning light and I realized: maybe the guy who named it that didn't lack imagination. Maybe he knew there isn't a word for how it is.

After Middle Basin is Timpanogos Basin. This high cirque is mostly dry meadow, with a few clumps of trees. My previous Timp hikes had been too late in the season for much color to be left, so that there were flowers here, too, took me completely by surprise. But before I could admire much, I had to take care of business:

Hiking with two boys doesn't allow for much compassion for the plight of a woman hiker, but someone had the wisdom (and grueling task) of building a latrine at 8,000-ish feet. It's a fairly disgusting potty; board walls surround three sides, giving you quite the view while you're doing your thing, but even the view couldn't distract from the fact that no one in her right mind would actually sit upon that toilet. Quite the thigh workout while you're praying no one else comes along needing the facilities. Still, though: more gorgeous solitude. I took a moment to take a few more photos and then to just stand, admiring the view (several hundred yards away from the potty, of course, and definitely downwind), before I started up again.

By now Jake and Kendell were ahead of me again, blessing me with another solitary bit of hiking. I only came across two or three other people in the basin; several squirrels, a few birds, too many butterflies to count. Away from the company of trees, the wildflowers in Timpanogos Basin spread out, as if the entire cirque were a field. (In the above photo, you can see the back of the saddle.) The crags of the saddle and summit come into view; the blue sky opens up. Behind you is another vista: Deer Creek reservoir, the little towns of Heber and Midvale, the grey-green Uintas. The lack of trees in the basin helps you see the structure of the mountain, and the basin's lip seems impossibly steep. As I approached the steep ascent, I again step stopping, to photograph the flowers or just to stand and look at things. I could see Kendell and Jake ahead, begininning the ascent, and then I started to rush to catch up with them. I wanted to come up the saddle together. I even ran for a bit, until I met the base of the rise, and then I just pushed as hard as I could. Kendell managed to make the saddle before I did, but only by two minutes.

About eighty percent of the Timp hike is done on the east side. When you crawl out of Timpanogos Basin---legs quivering, lungs shocked out of their comfort zone---you come over the saddle onto the west face. The view there is amazing; both south and north, you can see for miles and miles. We all sat and rested for a good ten minutes or so, taking in the view and eating a bit, because the last section of the trail---saddle to summit---is brutal. You hike along the face of the mountain; the top on your left and a steep fall on your right, and any sense of a gentle rise is gone. (Here, Kendell (in silhouette) and Jake (the tiny white dot) approach the steepest part of the ascent.) In half of a mile you gain 2500 feet in elevation. And, while there were a few flowers on the face, it is mostly a stony path. Just as you've got your breathing rhythm back, you reach a jutting heel of stone that must be navigated. Almost, along this section, you wish there were ropes. The switchbacks are jagged, short, and steep, set like stairs along what is truly the side of a mountain. At the top of that section, you come through a stone doorway, the valley opens up in your view, but the distance that's still left makes it impossible to enjoy.

Every time I've climbed from the saddle to the summit, I have found myself thinking about Sam and Frodo in The Return of The King, fighting the last bit of path up to Mount Doom. I had that scene in my mind, and Jake turned to me and said, "Mom! This reminds me of Sam and Frodo!" and I could almost manage a little, gasping chuckle. Kendell and Jake both kept starting and stopping, which was killing me---I do better if I can just keep going at a steady pace. Finally I told Jake, who was really doing fine, that I couldn't keep stopping. "Stay as close as you can to me," I told him, "and do not get too close to the edge." And then I went. Up and up and up.

My string of solitude had ended, though, at the top. A handful of obnoxious scouts, a few my-age-ish people, one guy writing in his journal (I can relate, but I didn't bring it on this trip). From trailhead to top, I made it in 3 hours 45 minutes. No solitude, but the view:

The thing I love most is how you can see the very root of the mountains, exactly where they start to rise from the valley floor. There's another answer for Jake: I love hiking because it is the only way you can experience some vistas. Experiencing it with that exhausted-with-good-hard-effort feeling makes it even better.

We ate our lunch---nutella and almond butter sandwiches, grapes, and trail mix---at the summit. We talked about the view, and finalized our decision not to go down the snowfield on our way back (everyone we'd talked to, even the park rangers, had said it was icy, and Kendell didn't want to chance a hip accident). We talked and laughed, and then we were silent, just looking and recuperating and being there.

I was nervous about the descent. The other times I’ve hiked, I’ve gone down the snowfield rather than back down that steep edge. (In the next photo, we're going to go DOWN that trail you see along the ridgeline; the X in the middle-ish section is where the trails converge just before you come up the saddle.) But it turned out to be easier than I expected. Of course, I’m also much slower going down a mountain than I am going up. Kendell and Jake kept stopping to wait for me. When we’d made it off the face off the mountain and were just coming to the end of the first switchback, I looked up at the pile of (new! In August!) snow in the hollow, and there were goats just walking down the mountain. There’s a herd of mountain goats on Timp, and I’m certain it was the entire herd we saw. When I noticed them, they were fairly far away from the trail, but they just kept coming down, until they were literally right on the trail. One guy, coming up, had to sort of stamp his feet at them to get them to give him enough room to continue on up. There were baby goats, with anxious mothers, and two male goats that kept ramming each other’s horns. We stayed on the side of the mountain for at least thirty minutes, just watching the goats. I was a little bit nervous about them trying to charge one of us, but it turned out just fine:

(Forgive the shaky filming...my heart was still pumping hard! And I sound like a complete idiot.)

I didn’t even have to point out to Jake that mountain goats are something I love about hiking. Not mountain goats themselves, of course, but the chance of coming upon wildlife. When Jake and I hiked last time, we saw five big moose, nearly right on the trail, and that time we stopped to just watch them, too. It’s not anything like seeing an animal in the zoo. Watching them forage, and run, and interact in the place where they just live is incredible. "Seeing those goats," Jake told me once we started going again, "makes up for how tired I am." That’s always how it is: you pay with exhaustion, but you receive something you couldn’t get any other way.

We had one other notable experience as we went down. Jake, who’d been strong for most of the entire hike, and brimming with endurance on that long saddle-to-summit section, hit the wall with about two miles to go. He was not happy. He didn’t want to keep going. Finally, after trying to encourage him, we stopped to sit on the root of a tree, and I talked to him about how even when things are hard, he has to keep going. Hiking is just like life in that way, and the similarity helps make life’s difficulties themselves a little bit easier to bear. It’s a sort of practice run. Keep hiking even though you’re tired, or keep running despite the blisters, or walking even though your knees ache, or whatever: it helps you build a physical stamina that translates into a spiritual one. I don’t know if he understood what I was saying, but maybe one day, when he’s struggling with something in his life, he’ll remember that moment in the tree roots, and it will help him keep going.

What I have learned from hiking this mountain before is that the hike changes something in you. It's hard to describe; the mountain becomes something other than the landscape of the place you live. Hike it, and you begin to have a sort of relationship with it. Even when you're down in the valley, the connection remains; no matter the weather, I look at Timp from my window, at the route we take to the top, and I wish I were up there. That Tuesday, at the top, I wasn't wishing. I'd brought myself there, a couple of people I love with me. I could almost say it was the best hike I've had, except for I think about the other times I've hiked it and I know it's not about better, but different. It was every single reason I love to hike, spread around the seven-ish hours of hiking.

I Need a Scarecrow

Our cat, Emily, is a birdcat. Whenever she sees the chance, she snaps a bird. And eats it. I try to remind myself that this is her cat nature and not something that should bother me. Even though, in general, it does bother me.

Serves me right, I suppose; the being bothered is a sort of karmic irony. Because now that I really, really need her to catch a bird, she won't because she's too old (she turned 15 this spring). Lest you think I am into bird death, you should know that it's not just any random robin I would like her to eat, but a specific one. Namely, the one that keeps flying into our garage in order to eat Emily's cat food.

Seriously---what sort of robin dares to eat a cat's food? Especially when said cat is lying right there in her padded box next to the cat food. The cat food being eaten by a robin. Robin used to be Emily's favorite meal, and I'd imagine that this one, having gorged daily on Emily's second favorite meal (cat food!) would be a fairly tasty treat. If you were a cat, that is.

But no. She does raise her head when the robin makes its visit. She glares at it a bit. But she doesn't make her bird-hunting miaowgrowlmiaow. She just puts her head back under her armpit. Maybe Emily isn't too old; maybe she's just depressed. Isn't not finding pleasure in activities you used to love a major sign? And sleeping too much? Do they make Prozac for cats? Because I'm seriously tired of this bird. The fact that I want it to be devoured by a cat illustrates my cat-food-bird exhaustion.

So, alas, Emily's birding days are over, and somehow the robin knows it. It swoops in, dines on Iams, and swoops back out. Dive bombing everything in the garage on its way out. Do all robins simultaneously swallow and poop? Or just the ones that eat cat food? And I'll tell you what: the cat food is wrecking serious damage on the bird's intestinal tract. Bird poop should not look like that.

So whenever one of us sees the bird in the garage, we start yelling and waving our arms, stomping our feet and screeching. I wonder what the neighbors think? Even Kaleb knows to scare the crazy, cat-food-eating bird out of the garage. But it is impervious to any fear. Cats? Nah. Humans making obnoxious noises? Well, weird enough to flutter away for a few minutes, but nowhere near scary enough to actually, you know, not come back.

Does anyone know if they make scarecrows for robins? Scarerobins? At this point I'm willing to try anything.

I Loved That Tree

This morning we woke up to 10" of snow.

Ten inches!!!!!!!!!!!!

It started snowing yesterday. When I got home from work our flowering plum tree, which had just blossomed on Monday, had limbs so coated with snow they were almost touching the ground. So I went out and got off as much of the snow as I could. I did it again last night before I went to bed. But apparently my wimpy human efforts were for naught, compared to mother nature's might.

The odd thing: last week, when I was out running, I ran past someone else's flowering plum, which already had its blossoms, and I had the strongest thought: as soon as mine blossoms, I should take some pictures of it. I love the way it looks when it blooms, the bright- (but not hot-) pink flowers with their tiny maroon stamens against the finally-blue of the spring sky.

I should have followed that prompting. Because when we woke up this morning, it looked like this:

 

An alternate view. There was very little snow underneath the tree, the blossoms were already so thick:

What you can't see in the photo is that almost all of the major branches are cracked or broken. While Kendell was shoveling, I went into the back so I could take a picture of the snow piled on the table, a ruler nearly buried in the snow, and I saw my lilac bush. In another month or so, it would have looked like this:

 

But this morning it looked like this:

 

It was so burdened by snow that it was pulled out of the ground. My lilac bush! I'm sad. Is it crazy that I nearly cried? I mean...I know it's only a plant. I can replace it (although it took me forever to find that kind of lilac, with the edges of the blossoms lined in white). If the tree is too damaged and we have to cut it down, we can get a new one. But I loved that tree, that bush. So many memories hang on their images. The tree, for me, is synonymous with Haley's birthday, since it always blooms that week, so it's not just a tree but a metaphor for my daughter: feminine, colorful, delicate; full of contrasts and details. And the lilac bush...I've taken spring pictures in front of it for so many years. I will miss it!

This afternoon, now that the snow has started melting, the flowering plum looks like this:

You can really see one of the broken branches on the right side, and on the top (before the storm, it was round and full, not lopsided and haggard). But it also looks better than I thought it would. I guess we'll trim off the broken branches and see what happens. I hope it can recuperate. 

Autumn Wonderland

After many blustery threatenings yesterday (and a great long run punctuated with random snowflakes), we woke up to a thin sheet of snow. Kaleb immediately wanted to go outside to build a snowman, so he and Nathan bundled up and gave it a shot. Not enough snow for a snowman, but enough for a few good snowballs before breakfast.

It's early for the first snowfall, which is making me hopeful we'll have another snowy winter like last year. Still, it was strange to wake up to white again, especially with the outside still looking like fall and even, in some little garden pockets, summer. 

 

I Went to the Woods.

I didn’t go to girls camp when I was a teenager. (Girls camp is something we do in the LDS church each summer with our 12-17 year-old girls as an activity to build faith, connections, and skills, as well as just for fun!) Of course, I didn’t go to church much, either, but whatever occasional fellowship efforts were made in my direction definitely did not include an invitation to rough it in the woods with the other girls for five days. It’s hard to camp in steel-toed lace-up boots and a black suede jacket, anyway.

But since I’ve been working in the Young Women organization, I’ve hoped I could go to camp. I was absolutely certain I would go, in fact, until Kendell’s surgery came up. Then, I just had to think "I’ll wait to see how it goes." But all along hoping (and yes, even praying) that I would get to go. In a miraculous lining-up-of-the-stars kind of event, everything turned out so I could go for a couple of days. Kendell’s ilieus and the troubles he’s been having with his IT bands meant he was in the rehab unit until Saturday; my mom and my mother-in-law agreed to help with the boys; I was able to find someone to take my Friday shift at the library. Thursday and Friday at girls camp were mine!

I went mostly because I wanted to have some good mother/daughter bonding time with Haley. That didn’t really happen, though. I think she had mixed feelings about me being there. She’s always been independent, not one go get homesick or to miss me. So she didn’t really need me there, and I think it felt a little bit like my arrival took away some of her independent time. I tried to be patient with her annoyance, to remember what it felt like to be 13 and annoyed by your mother; I tried very hard, in fact, to not mother her at all, but to let her do her own thing. Occasionally her "own thing" meant hanging out with me, but usually she was with her friends. So honestly, my going to girls camp ended up being more about me than it was about her and me.

I came away with several precious things from girls camp. (I'm fairly certain this won't be my last blog entry about camp.) One was friendships. The women I was already friends with feel like closer friends now, and women who I just knew from church before feel like real friends now. Another thing was a closer connection with the young women. I often feel very inadequate in my calling with the young women because I am so lacking in that ability to immediately connect with people. I am sort of a closed-up-tight kind of person, until I know someone, but that quality also makes it much harder to get to know someone. I felt like, at camp, I was able to open up a little bit and connect to these girls, to laugh and talk and joke with them. And finally, girls camp gave me a little inner peace that I have desperately needed.

Because here’s the thing: I have been so anxious about Kendell coming home from the hospital. Whenever he is sick, all of my resentments start to surface. The old resentments about how he takes care of me (or doesn’t, really) when I am sick. Those resentments make me grumpy and annoyed while I am taking care of him, so I do it out of a sense of obligation instead of love. And I didn’t want to approach his homecoming with that attitude. I don’t want to lose my temper, or argue with him, or have that bitter litany—why should I, when you don’t?—repeating itself in my head. I want to just be able to help him, not because of something he has done for me but because he is a person who needs help. But I have not been at all sure that I could do it like that.

Somewhere, though, at camp, I felt my anxieties settle. It could just be that I love being outside in the mountains. They are sacred places to me. Sacred and magical. The way things happen without people’s interference is part of their draw for me—trees that came from nuts or pods or bolls, not a pot from the nursery; wildflowers that sprung up without potting soil or fertilizer. Despite the rain, the mud, and the constantly-cold hands, I am perfectly content in the mountains. But it could have been other things, too. Maybe it was hiking through the damp piney woods, filling my lungs with fresh air. Maybe it was sitting in the cabin with the other women, talking and crying over our heartaches. It could have been the few moments I sat all by myself on a mountain slope, in a sort of room made of two fallen stones that happened to land at a 45-degree angle from each other, writing in my journal and listening to the wind in the trees. Or even, just before I left late Friday night, standing by the pond and admiring the casually-imperfect fleur-de-lis made by the silhouette of the trees on top of the mountain. I’m not sure of the exact moment, and maybe it was the total of everything. But even though I am exhausted, I am peaceful. My anxiety over taking care of Kendell has melted away, replaced with a surety that I can take care of him well and for the right reasons. It’s not what I expected from girls camp. But I am grateful indeed to have it.

Nature Walk

A faint memory from my childhood: I think I'm just five, in kindergarten, and my mom is helping me with my homework, which is to go on a walk and gather some things from nature to bring to school. We're walking down the cracked sidewalk, next to the ditch that used to run along the street (long-since covered), Becky with us in her stroller. In my paper bag I have a pine cone, a seed pod from a sycamore tree, a handful of yellow buttercups, and a clump of fresh mint. I am certain what I am bringing is perfect and will make my teacher happy, because my collection makes me happy.

It's a tiny memory, really. Vague on the details---was it spring or fall?---and random in a pleasant, normal-day way. It popped into my head this morning while I was exercising. I always start by walking a lap around the trail near my home, before I start to run. The trail is just over a mile, an amoeba-shaped circle that meanders around soccer fields. Well-spaced trees (perfect for fartleks), planted only about five years ago, line it, and there are remnants of family gardens from the houses that used to be there, before the city bought the land and turned it into green space. As I walked, I started noticing little details, collecting them in the brown bag of my mind: the way the new leaves on the red maples hung, wrinkled and purple, from their slender stems; or how what I thought was a flock of robins in a almost-blooming snowball bush, each sitting perfectly still with a worm dangling from their beaks, was really the not-quite-green-yet leaves. A fat pink worm shaped into a question mark; the argument of seagulls on the north field; the way the dandelion fuzz was the first thing to catch the light once it finally made it over the mountains.

I think that memory came back to me this morning because I felt, walking in the still, cold air, like I did at age five: captivated, amazed, awed by the beauty of this world. I thought about something I read last night (from a book of essays called Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch), about the impulse to praise things: "Praise is an impulse to more life, a form of blessing, a way of cherishing a world that shines out with radiant particularity." Today I felt like praising my little world's radiant particularity, like noticing and remembering and cherishing the little details.

Spring

I found these in my flower beds yesterday when I went outside for the paper:

Snow crocus! I planted these bulbs when I was pregnant with Haley and they've been my spring harbinger ever since. Usually, by the middle of February, I've got fifty or so little blooms in three clumps. But since we've had such a winter, these two little surprises are the first to bloom. I'm not sure how they got
here---they're all by themselves. I'm just happy to see their purple faces, because it means---even though it's supposed to snow again today---that spring is coming.

Sunny Snow

I took this a couple of weeks ago, during one of those brief, strange snowfalls that happen with hardly any clouds in the sky. Maybe it's not even snow, but simply little pieces of coldness falling.

Do you see the buds on my tree?

Blog Action Day

I've got approximately 25 minutes left of today, and I just discovered that it is blog action day, and while those scant 25 minutes mean I probably won't get anyone else to write about this topic---the environment---I'm still going to write about it anyway, because it is something I think about every day of my life. First, this quote, which comes from this amazingly distressful article from Granta magazine:

"For fifteen years now, some small percentage of the world's scientists and diplomats and activists has inhabited one of those strange dreams where the dreamer desperately needs to warn someone about something bad and imminent; but somehow, no matter how hard he shouts, the other person in the dream---standing smiling, perhaps, with his back to an oncoming train---can't hear him. This group, this small percentage, knows that the world is about to change more profoundly than at any time in the history of human civilization. And yet, so far, all they have achieved is to add another line to the long list of human problems---people think about "global warming" in the way they think about "violence on television" or "growing trade deficits,," as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all. Enlightened governments make smallish noises and negotiate smallish treaties; enlightened people look down on American for its blind piggishness. Hardly anyone, however, has fear in their guts.

Why? Because, I think, we are fatally confused about time and space. Though we know that our culture has placed our own lives on a demonic fast-forward, we imagine that the earth must work on some other timescale. The long slow accretion of epochs---the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene---lulls us into imagining that the world is big and that we are small. This humility is attractive, but also historic and no longer useful. In the world as we have made it, the opposite is true. Each of us is big enough, for example, to produce our own cloud of carbon dioxide. As a result, we---our cars and our industry---have managed to raise the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide, which had been stable at 275 parts per million throughout human civilization, to about 380 parts per million, a figure that is climbing by one and a half parts per million each year. This increase began with the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, and it has been accelerating ever since. The consequence, if we take a median from several respectable scientific projections, is that the world's temperature will rise by five degrees Fahrenheit over the next hundred years, to make it hotter than it has been for 400 million years. At some level, these are the only facts worth knowing about our earth." Bill McKibben

I'm not certain exactly when I read that---at least four years ago---and it has haunted me ever since. Maybe it's the image of that bad dream you can't wake up from. The realization that global warming is not just a political issue like class size or health insurance. Or the startling facts. Or the fact that it did stir a swirl of fear in my gut, one that has yet to settle down. I do what I can---plant trees, drive the least amount possible, use energy efficient light bulbs and appliances. I'm always after my family to turn the lights off; I keep the heat down in winter and the a.c. up in the summer. I recycle as much as I can. But I do continue to fear. I look at how the world has changed in just my small area, with just my small experiences---the drought that won't go away, for example; the dwindling of the lakes, the rashes of wildfires in summer. The blazing, blazing summer heat. But, like McKibben says in his article, what makes me the most fearful is how people refuse to look at the truth and then change.

Someone I am close to tells me often that he doesn't "believe" in global warming---as if it were a matter of faith, not science. I try not to argue with him anymore over this topic, because I don't know how to convince him. He has an argument for everything I offer up as evidence. At the end of these "discussions" I am left with this thought: say that everything science is telling us about global warming is wrong. Say that all efforts to reduce greenhouse gases don't change anything. SO WHAT? The trying won't hurt you. You won't develop a brain tumor or suddenly become an atheist just because you tried to change how you treat the world.

You know I love this earth. I love the mountains and the trees and the desert, love everything that is  untouched by humanity. I wish I had a voice loud enough to counteract that all-too-human refusal to change. In the face of environmental issues, I feel very small. The problem is, no one person can change things. Just as we have grown too large for the idea that we are too small to affect the world---we did this damage together---we must somehow incorporate the idea that everyone has to change.

I've written about ten different paragraphs about this topic, then erased and started over. How do I say what I really mean? I'm not sure, other than to encourage you, whoever you are, whatever you believe in, to start right now. Turn of the lights. Walk instead of drive. Teach your kids one positive thing they can do for the environment. Encourage someone else. Even though it is overwhelming and the odds seem impossible. At least---let's try. (And now my 25 minutes are up, so I'm going to post this even though I've not yet come close to saying what I want to say.)