Andrea M. Jones's Blog, page 16

When The Old is New, Yet Again

A frosty morning, from the north-facing office window.

We moved to this property in 2001, and settled into the new house in mid-March, 2003, which means that I’ve been looking at the view from this home for eleven years now.

A few months ago, I did some mental tallying and realized that I’ve now lived in this house longer than I’ve lived in any other dwelling in the span of my life thus far. I’m a little shocked at this, although I’m not sure why. I’m also not sure why it is that I still find myself referring to this as the “new” house.

My best guess is that this linguistic bias is related to the heightened awareness I brought with me when we moved in. I arrived with a writer’s intention—a plan to explore my new home ground in both experience and words. The landscape and the animals and the weather have not stopped obliging my interest over the past decade-plus. The familiar has gained ground on the novel as the years have passed, to be certain, but there are still surprises, still new things to see, still lessons to be learned, still firsts to experience—such as my travel travails in the storm that hit the region on March 7.

It was a perfectly ordinary spring storm—fast-moving and wet. I’d been watching the forecast and knew snow was coming. What was unusual was that I’d decided to keep my afternoon appointment in town in spite of the approaching weather. Snow had not yet started falling when I left home, and I was only gone a couple of hours. By the time I headed back up the hill, though, heavy rain in Cañon City was changing to fat wet flakes a few miles west of town. Although it’s getting older, my little Saturn SL2 is still pretty good in snow and ice, but two-thirds of the way home, it was clear the car would not be able to push uphill through heavy slush sitting atop a thick layer of ice on the pavement. I turned around and headed back to town, arriving almost two hours after I’d left, utterly spent.

This was the first time I haven’t been able to make it home in the thirteen years we’ve lived here, and the experience was a reminder of why I usually throw extra clothes and snowboots into the car when heading out in inclement weather—something I failed to do that day. I hadn’t exactly taken the weather for granted, but I also hadn’t prepared for a worst case scenario. I assumed I’d be home sooner, assumed the warm roads would get slushy but not icy. Back home the next day, a bright sun fast burning the slush off the roads, I remained mired in a funk. I was exasperated at finding myself relearning a lesson I already knew.

As my place-based exploratory project keeps running across the years, however, I realize that it’s too much to expect that everything I still have to learn will be truly new. The place where I live excels at keeping complacency at bay, but what keeps this not-so-new home place feeling “new” has less to do with outright novelty than with tracing the iterations in which a new day or a new season puts a fresh twist on the familiar or offers an altered perspective on the commonplace. As the northern hemisphere prepares to notch another spring on the belt of its vast timeline, I’m reminding myself that recycling—re-cycling—is simply how the world works.

Wind

Determined to not let the wind dictate my activities, I head out for a walk on a February day. The air pouring across the ridge is comparatively mild, by which I mean that I can hear something other than wind roaring in my ears: the rustle of snow and ice grains skittering over hardened snowdrifts.

I try to convince myself that the hissing sounds like a gentle shower of rain. The wind is responsible for the sound, though, and my brain rejects this stab at positive thinking, refusing to accept that it’s hearing anything pleasant.

I’m outside walking in the wind because I’m trying to adopt a more philosophical attitude about this particular aspect of my local environment. This is not an easy undertaking. Wind is weather that works its way into both my indoor and inner life. The house shudders in hard gusts. The moaning and hissing keeps me awake at night. Water swings in the toilet as if we’re on the high seas, which is a little unsettling at this altitude. My sinuses hurt. I get surly. The horses are skittish and crabby, perhaps because their sinuses, which are much bigger than mine, hurt too, or maybe because the incessant roaring of the wind makes it impossible for them to hear anything they would normally be monitoring with their ears.

My feelings on the subject of wind trend strongly toward the negative, but since it is a fact of life up here, my bad attitude seems counterproductive, if not unhealthy. I’ve considered trying to embrace the wind, learning to love it as an integral part of my environment. Genuine fondness would seem to demand finding a way to interact with the wind joyfully, however, and I can’t think of anything I’d do in it or with it that would elicit a sense of fun or admiration. Trees and barbed-wire fences make this unfriendly territory for kites. We’re landlocked in arid country, so wind-driven water sports are out.

I’m unlikely to learn to regard a windy day as my lucky one, so my compromise has been to work on staying open to the aesthetics of some of the wind’s handiwork (see Drift Season), along with this current project of cultivating equanimity by way of selective attention. I try to ignore the wind when it’s really ripping. I force myself to go outside for reasons beyond the necessary daily chores on some run-of-the-mill windy days, when the wind is merely pushy, not aggressive enough to make me stagger. My theory is that such voluntary ventures will rob the wind it of its capacity for making me feel trapped indoors.

My surroundings regularly suggest this kind of mental self-improvement project, but in this case my spirit has yet to be expanded by the effort. Mostly, I just feel windburned.

Back inside, clicking idly at the computer, I go looking for a word that captures the affective tenor of wind. Chinook, foehn, Sirocco, mistral, Sharqi…none quite conveys the vague agitation, the unease, the restiveness that comes from sharing days and nights and days with this unshakeable presence, familiar yet primordial, ordinary and ungraspable.

Minding the Details

Blue grama grass in flower.

Several times over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had people, in talking to me about my writing, compliment me on my eye for detail. I’m sincerely flattered, and am grateful that this aspect of my efforts has been rewarded with the notice of readers. Almost inevitably, though, I wish I could offer some context. A propensity for accumulating details is, in my case, less a matter of keenness of eye than it is an artifact of the writing process—but making this point never seems to fit into a casual conversation.

The interplay of attention and writing is a cultivated skill, a competency I’ve been consciously working on for a long time. The desire to write leads me to actively seek out things that I might write about. Dovetailing with this habit of noticing is that the stimuli of seeing, say, an animal’s track in fresh snow or hearing the cry of a bird on the wing, is followed by a conditioned response in which my brain tries to come up with a catchy way of describing the event. Details and writing run in a feedback loop. I mind the details because I write. I write because I wish to capture the details.

If you’ve ever spent any time around books that offer advice to aspiring writers, you’ll be familiar with the exercise in which the would-be author is coached to go out into the world and eavesdrop: to record the conversation at the neighboring table at the coffee house, to jot down the quirky exchange overheard in the line at the grocery store. Those conversational snippets are useful for fiction writers, yielding, for example, raw material for realistic dialogue. The apprentice writer practices paying attention and in the process adds to a store of fine details that can potentially used one day.

Because my preferred genre is natural history, I go outside to do my eavesdropping. I snoop under rocks and at the entries of animal burrows. I listen in on the ravens’ conversations. I am a shameless looky-loo ogling the fatigued, panting, and evidently uninterested doe as she weaves back and forth under the bottom strand of the fence, trying to gain a bigger lead on the pursuing buck, who must thread his antlers under the line each time he passes under.

The point of nonfiction is to portray reality. Providing details helps flesh out that portrayal.

But the accumulation of details creates a quirky distortion. What gets written down—and subsequently buffed and polished to what I hope will be a nice reader-friendly glow—is what’s noteworthy and relevant. Some material is edited out because it’s boring or redundant or distracting, no matter how “real” it might be. And there’s only so much room for background, for the particulars of related ideas, or for the complexities of an interesting but tangential nuance.

All this creates a tiny fiction beating at the heart of my nonfiction: proximity. The assembly of details and observations relevant to a given topic are all summoned to the space of a few pages, even though the accumulation of those fine points in thought and experience may have taken days or weeks or months—even years, sometimes.

In writing about the landscapes around me, I’m catching myself in the act of noticing. What doesn’t get written—thank the deity or force of good fortune of your choice—is all the drivel that goes on in the minutes and hours in between, when I’m occupied with other activities, when I’m too distracted to look around, when I see once again things I’ve seen—and made note of—before.

Drift Season

There’s a certain irony in the fact that winter, when I’m inclined to spend more time inside, may be the season when I’m most likely to be hyperaware of the weather. Presumably this is because snow affects our access more than does summer weather—although road closures in 2013 due to fires and flash flooding point toward the foolishness of making such blanket generalizations. It is nevertheless true that the synergy of snow and winter wind pose special challenges. Some years—and this is shaping up to be one of them—we end up shoveling or plowing the same snow multiple times as the wind re-arranges it again and again over weeks and even months.

Parallel mini-drifts on Cap Rock Ridge in April, 2013.

As with many other aspects of life up on this high ridge in central Colorado, drifting snow gives me things to see and ponder. For example: snow quantity is not the sole variable that creates a drift worth noticing. This isn’t to say that having lots of snow on the ground is irrelevant—quantities of snow make for drifts that are not only deep but also broad. With six inches on the ground, we’ll often have enough room to skirt around a drift on the driveway with one of the cars if we need to. With twelve inches, we’re digging and plowing before we go anywhere. But smaller amounts of snow leave open the possibility that nuances of form that would be hidden in white-on-white with deep accumulations will be revealed as patterns of contrast and color in the wind’s aftermath. Working with just a few inches of snow, a strong north wind worked our area over with a daylong windstorm last spring. Where it crossed Cap Rock Ridge, the snow settled out into narrow drifts behind anchors as small as rocks, shrubs, and individual grass clumps. From here, white streaks laid over the tan grass made it look as if the slope had been methodically stroked by a gigantic comb.

And while it’s easy to finger snow and wind as the ringleaders in drifting events, they have collaborators. Contour is the most influential, of course—the ridges and edges and plants that channel and shape the flow of air across the land, dictating where it’s apt to accelerate and scrub the ground clean, and either slow down or vault over a high point, in both instances dropping its load. But contour has a spatial factor, and wind direction relative to landscape features means everything in the context of drifting snow. More often than not, the strongest winds blow out of the northwest or north this time of year. Under those circumstances, we know where drifts are likely to form, and we plan accordingly. Banks of snow that we deliberately plowed to what is normally the downwind side of the driveway, however, might create a perfect road-blocking heap when the wind swings around to blow out of the south.

Last week, three days of an atypical southwest wind created an impressive demonstration of another variable: temperature. Beyond the barn, ground blizzards slithered over a straightaway of driveway gravel. The days were clear and mild, and the sun created enough warmth to melt the snow as it passed over the dark ground, leaving an inch-thick, hundred-yard rink of transparent pebbled ice.

Drift cross-section showing dust strata.

Last week’s wind event culminated with a shift to a more westerly flow and an overnight blow that thumped at the walls of the house, shrieking in the eaves and rattling the dryer vent. The wind carried a plume of grit off the road into the horse pasture, tinting the scant snow cover pink. Near the barn, the gale scoured the snow off a section of the riding arena, exposing the sand. When I plowed the drift that accumulated downwind of there, the cross section of the bank revealed alternating layers of white and tan, a chronicle of gusts.

That there are such weather-related novelties to encounter in this, our thirteenth winter in this place, is a reminder of how much remains to be seen, whether I’m looking out the window, venturing out into an inevitable tempest, or wandering around in the calm that just as inevitably follows.

Late Harvest

The garden is under snow—and after several crispy dry winters during our sustained drought, I’m not sorry about this fact. The snow isn’t deep, but there’s enough of it to cover the planting beds and protect them from the winter wind. With our coldest months of the year coming, I’m hoping the snow will linger, that however crusty and grainy and dirty it becomes, the blanket will hold until spring, when it can melt and treat the beds with an inaugural soaking.

The 2013 edition of the garden was not what I would call a rousing success, although aspects of it get points for duration: I harvested three tomatoes on Christmas Eve, plucking them from the scraggly plant we’d moved into the greenhouse back in October. I finally dug my carrots on November 19, some of them odd-shaped lunkers with little roots sticking out the side, evidence of the neighbors they’d consumed whole when I fell behind in my thinning. The last of the potatoes came out of the ground the following week, in time for Thanksgiving. The soil was lumpy and cold but not yet frozen: lucky for me, but entirely on a par with the rest of 2013, which can only be described as a wild ride.

What once was a trio was one…then none.

Coming off a horribly dry 2012, January was parched, with less than an inch of snow. A scattering of storms from February through April brought a little precipitation, although not enough to reliably cover the powder-dry ground and certainly not enough to relieve the drought. Over the course of a few nights, a rodent ate the three ball cactus I’d transplanted next to the house years ago, flicking the spines off them one by one and then eating the flesh down to the root. In the piñon-juniper forests south of here, roughly a third of the trees were dead or dying. Ponderosas in our neighborhood were following suit, and the pasture looked like we were trying to grow dust—and succeeding. Dry summers had stunted the grass, and open winters, with no snow cover to protect the roots from sun, wind, and browsing, left nothing but brittle stubs that shattered when I walked across them.

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Wraparound

I’m not a morning person. Never have been.

Cloud bank south of Pikes Peak.

I like to sleep, for one thing, and, as is the case with some other aspects of my life as time goes on, I don’t do it as well as I used to. I dislike getting up in the dark. Part of my objection is to the abrupt blaze of harsh electric lighting: getting smacked in the retinas is not my idea of the best way to ease into a new day. In any event, when other people rhapsodize about the tranquility of the morning and the beauty of sunrise, my pat response is that I appreciate those things all the more because of the relative rarity with which they appear in my life.

To avoid getting up in the dark this time of year, however, would require indulging in torpor with a rigor that I haven’t been able to muster since I was a teenager. I might not like it, but workaday prudence dictates that I get up in darkness. And there are, admittedly, days when the sunrise rewards me for adhering to an adult schedule.

Pink light over, and on, the mountain.

A few mornings back, we had one of those days. A scrim of cloud threw a net across the sky, woven just tight enough to capture the sun’s first rays. The seam where sky meets earth was wrapped full-around with a luster of rose and lavender, anchored by a heavier bank of clouds south of Pikes Peak that glowed like embers from a vast celestial campfire. Snow lingering on the mountain from the arctic front a couple of weeks ago reflected a distinctly un-snowy hue. In the west, a moon one day past full was suspended like a pearl against a backdrop of shell-pink.

Moonset beginning in the west.

We don’t always get wraparound displays like this, but I welcome them, especially this time of year. In its winter dormancy, the landscape is rendered in sepia tones, or black and white. The world seems pensive, preoccupied. Then: a showy sunrise, a vivid sunset. I appreciate the colors fanned across the sky like swatches presented by an over-enthusiastic painter. In a season when wind and cold air counsel the biding of time, a harboring of resources, these fleeting extravagances of color urge alertness, at least a couple of times a day. There’s much to be said for hunkering down, and where I live this is the season for it. The skies that bookend these clipped winter days, though, remind me not to withdraw so comfortably into the warm cocoon of indoor reflection I miss the show.

Out and About

Although it hasn’t happened in a while, there have been times since settling in at our place in central Colorado when I think back over the past week and realize that I haven’t left the property in six or seven or, occasionally, ten days. My record, I believe, is twelve days: a period approaching two weeks in which I managed to avoid getting into the car to go farther than the mailbox a few miles away.

Since I am a confirmed homebody, this realization is cause for bemusement rather than dismay. I’ve designed my life to revolve around being home, after all: I work from home and so don’t need to commute in order to contribute to the household income. We moved here in part because the landscape allows us to do the things we enjoy: hikes depart from the doorstep and a short stroll down to the pasture allows me to catch my horse to go for a ride. The view from our house rivals that of many mountain resorts, so we can recharge our mental batteries out on the deck, partaking of local scenic resources.

I’m not plagued by a sense that my existence is constrained or limited, and my homebound interludes aren’t evidence of scrappy self-sufficiency. Although there are occasions when I’d like to go out but am hampered by weather conditions or car trouble or work obligations, my extended runs of staying around home are a matter of choice. If we run out of milk on a day I’m disinclined to motivate to town, I can usually ask my hubby to pick some up on his way home.

In this context, my schedule last month—November, 2013—was a near-frenzy of coming and going. Instead of staying put, I made three separate road trips in the space of ten days, traveling first to Durango, then Denver, then back up north to Boulder five days later. Because of the distances and the timing of the events involved, each of these was an overnight jaunt (two nights in the case of Boulder, where the extension of a day allowed us to visit with friends).

The time and miles were demanding, particularly given winter weather on some of the legs. I also had work deadlines to fit in between journeys. But the most stressful factor was the event at the  center of each trip: giving a bookstore reading to promote my new book.

Being a homebody and working from home have knit themselves neatly together in a number of ways, including the fact that I’ve spent no small amount of time over the past decade-plus looking around my home place and then writing about what I’ve observed. “Home” has provided both a subject to write about and the conditions in which to write.

Writing is, as a verb, an inherently solitary act. “Writing” is also a noun, however, and the product we refer to using the word is social at its core. Human beings write things down in order to communicate, to establish connections, and to share information with other human beings. Unless it’s something like a journal entry intended to be an exercise in stop motion thinking, a piece of writing doesn’t fulfill its potential unless there’s at least one reader who, somewhere, someday, reads it.

In theory, I’m entirely comfortable with the social component of the written word. I have, in fact, done all the things I was supposed to do in order to provide my little collection of words with the means of fulfilling its destiny in the communal realm. But I somehow hadn’t anticipated that I might someday find myself in the same room with groups of people (small groups, fortunately), who had read or were thinking about reading my book. Giving readings—and organizing my days to allow for the travel involved—is a sign of good fortune in the life of a still-aspiring writer, but this activity represents a new category of work—work that can’t be done at home, in solitude.

Having traveled those miles over Colorado’s highways, having met some readers and visited with friends and made a few new ones, I returned home to more deadlines and out-of-town family arriving for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Last week, the first week of December, an arctic front settled over Colorado. I was out from under obligations and the house was stocked with leftovers. I built a fire in the fireplace and hunkered down. I could only manage three days before I had to go to town, but those days sure did feel right.

Drawing the Blinds

The seasons’ slow cycling brings changes in the weather and the angle of the sun, along with shifts in the routines of daily life. On this high ridge in central Colorado, as in many other parts of the northern hemisphere, late fall brings the chance of snow (along with shoveling) and fires in the fireplace (along with hauling firewood). Since we don’t have large stands of deciduous trees delivering their autumnal yield of fallen leaves, there’s not much raking to be done, making fall more of a spectator sport: we watch the shifting hues of the grasses as they redden or turn tawny or bronze on the hillsides. Groves of aspen flare yellow from their nooks in north-facing drainages, and the dark green puddles of scrub oak on the hillsides turn russet and then quickly fade to brown.

But there are changes inside, too, and not just the earlier switching on of lights or the aforementioned fires in the fireplace. Since we built our house to take advantage of southern exposures for passive solar gain, there are seasonal patterns to operating the cellular blinds on the windows. This time of year, I’m diligent about making a round in the evening to close them all. The next morning, the process is reversed, albeit in a more fragmented fashion, since I open them as the sun hits the respective walls: eastern windows first, southern windows a bit later, west-facing last. On days that are cloudy or snowy, I leave the blinds closed save for those on a couple of windows where I’m likely to pause and look out as I’m passing by.

In summer, the pattern reverses, more or less. Blinds on the west and south get closed during the day to keep the sun from blaring in and overheating the house. At night, they’re all reeled fully up so we can throw open the windows and usher in the cool air of mountain nights.

Winter visitors sometimes snicker when I start the evening round of closing. “What, are you afraid the neighbors will see in?” they ask, giggling. The joke is that the nearest house with a line of sight to any of our windows is more than a mile away.

For me, privacy doesn’t really enter into the equation. In my mind, the window blinds are part of the climate control system for the house. They’re a tool in keeping it warmer in winter and cooler in summer. The daily rounds of raising and lowering are tiny steps toward improved energy efficiency.

That’s the practical aspect. There’s a philosophical component of this chore, too. We tend to draw a clear line between indoors and out, and we call those lines walls. Windows introduce a degree of fuzziness, providing apertures that usher something of the outdoors in (and, on the note of privacy, can also provide a peep show of the events going on inside). Regardless of what’s on my schedule for the day, the small ritual of opening and closing the blinds draws my attention outside for a few minutes a few times a day. I might be preoccupied with a work project or scurrying to get ready to run errands in town, but those interludes of tugging on or releasing the cords on the blinds draw my focus, if only briefly, away from my to-do list and the interior chatter that my brain is inclined toward. I enjoy the sense that I’m responding to the conditions of my environment, appreciate this element of interaction between the house and its setting. Even when commitments or an inclination to hunker down keep me indoors, I’m glad for the excuse to peek outside and be reminded of where, exactly, I live.

Wild, Urban

I can’t take credit for the view, but I will own up to shamelessly taking advantage of it. When we built our house here in central Colorado, we designed it so that our offices—the rooms in which we are most apt to spend daylight hours—occupy the top floor. The two rooms of this aerie afford a 360-degree view from their windows.

Cap Rock Ridge and the Sangre de Cristo
mountains, spring 2013.

When I’m working at my computer, oriented toward the south, I can look over the screen and see all the way down to the Wet Mountain Valley, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range serrating the horizon. In the middle distance, a formation called Cap Rock Ridge clips off the vista of the Sangres with a rocky butte, then stretches its undulating profile all across the western perspective. Continuing around to the north, the landscape tumbles around in a complicated array of grass and rock outcrops and piñon scrub, with several more rock-capped buttes accenting the seam between land and sky. The squat cone of Pikes Peak fills the east-facing window of my husband’s office.

All of which is to say that the “wild” part of being between urban and wild is pretty easy to account for. At first glance, the “urban” aspect sounds delusional, since the nearest town of any size is thirty miles away, invisible in the wrinkles of the landscape, and I can count on one hand the houses within a one-mile radius.

When you boil down the definition of “urban,” though, the thing most fundamentally characteristic of a city is the presence of people—people and the infrastructure associated with them. In the context of the stories that assemble here, then, I am the representative of the urban: me, the house my husband and I live in, the barn we built for our horses, the scattered homes of neighbors, the roads and vehicles we use to access this place, the lines draped along the electric service poles, my computer and the other technologies that link me to the intellectual web of the wider world, including words collected in hard-copy forms. Because I live in a place where the land is such a powerful force—and given that an interest in natural history inclines me to submit to its attractions—it seems worthwhile to acknowledge up front the fruits of human ingenuity that enable my existence here.

There are costs, too, of course. In a place that is more wild than urban, living a lifestyle reliant on modern conveniences inflicts environmental and social burdens, some of which are different in type and degree than those inflicted on the world by someone who lives in town. That’s part of the story to be told here, but only part. Mostly, this blog is a chronicle about my experiences of living in this particular place: stories about the land, the animals, the weather, the plants. It’s intended as a collection point for observations about the events—sometimes large but mostly small—that tug at my attention when I look out the window or take a walk outside.

That I can live in a remote area and still participate in the intricacies of modern human society is no small thing. That I can look up from working at my desk to see a golden eagle coursing along the ridge top on a thermal of mountain air, its feathers flexing and separating at its wingtips, is a source of considerable gratitude on my part. Just as I can’t take credit for the views, I can’t take credit for the technologies and inventiveness that support my lifestyle. Endeavoring to write about the former by way of the latter is a small gesture toward honoring both.