There’s a hiking trail I enjoy. It starts a couple of blocks from my house and winds along behind several conjoined cemeteries for about a mile and a half. Lately there have been mountain lion warnings up at the head of the trail but the only wildlife I’ve seen since those signs went up are wheeling raptors.
Today I set out late enough that I came back home along the front of the cemetery. It’s not that I’m afraid of meeting a mountain lion on the trail. It’s just that I’d prefer not to meet one after dark. The light was failing, but I was able to get a few photos to show the stark beauty of the high desert terrain I’ve grown to love since moving out west.
Storm clouds gathering over a grassy hill
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I love the yellow grass out here. I grew up in Kentucky where everything is green. The only time I saw grasses like these when I was growing up were in neighborhoods where folks planted the typical American lawn – always a grass foreign to the area and not well suited for unassisted survival, even in Kentucky where green grass abounds - and then left it to die.
This yellowy grass often reminds me of the hauntingly beautiful painting “Christina’s World,” by Andrew Wyeth. The painting depicts a woman sprawled in the midst of a huge yellow field of grass with a farmhouse, small on the horizon. I was first introduced to this painting as a stimulant for creative writing in a fifth grade class. It wasn’t until this year that I learned that Christina is not sprawled on the grass to admire the wild beauty of her farm. Nor has she thrown herself down in despair over a departed lover or dying child or any other of the many scenarios of grief my classmates devised in response to the painting.
Christina Olson was paralyzed from the waist down and Wyeth was painting the way she harvested the vegetables from her garden: by dragging her body through the grass, useless legs trailing behind her. I love the painting more now that I know.
Scrabbly rocks
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Parts of the hill are covered with this scree. It’s pretty common all around this area. I have to be careful climbing hills because I end up looking like a cartoon character navigating a spill in a marble factory if I don’t watch my step. The land is so different here from where I grew up. The soil is different. The air is different. It’s hard, sometimes, to imagine I’m in the same country because the terrain and plants are all so different.
When I encounter a tree I recognize from back east it’s like seeing an old friend again after many years absence. “I know you!” I exclaim at the black locust tree on campus. “I’ve known you all my life!” Long after recovering from the general culture shock of moving from east to west I still surprise myself when nostalgia for the familiar wells in me.
Scrubby trees
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I don’t know the trees here, I’m ashamed to say. I’ve lived here a decade now and I haven’t learned the names of the plants. After a decade of life in Kentucky, I knew the name of every tree and plant I could find in walking distance from my house. I love plants – they are my friends. I feel like I dishonor my new friends because I haven’t bothered to learn their names yet.
Oh, except for the Piñon Pine. If I get close enough to see the doubled needles, I recognize my new friend. I showed a classmate once, as we were walking past a Piñon on campus. She was singularly unimpressed, both with the fascinating doubled needles and with the fact that I’d gone to the trouble to learn about the tree. “The trees on campus aren’t there to examine and enjoy,” her jaded attitude seemed to say. “They’re just . . . there. For no other reason than because trees are supposed to be there. And we are supposed to walk right past them without a second thought.”
Snowing in the mountains
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I would have interpreted the distant storm clouds as rain but since they’re over the mountains, they’re probably dropping snow. I grew up in a land of rain and thundershowers and tornadoes. Here the rain is usually gentle but the snow can be wild. I have seen lightning in a snow storm out here – something I never saw back east, though I’m sure it must happen from time to time. There is something soft and muffled and cottony about thunder and lightning in the snow. It loses the snarling threat I’m used to associating with lightning, especially after the time I was struck by it, and becomes woolly-pawed, almost comforting. I well imagine I’m in just as much danger of being struck dead by lightning in a snow storm as in a rain storm but it seems tamed somehow, tamed and furry like a tiger-striped kitten.
One dark cloud hovers
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That one small, dark cloud. Like Winnie-the-Pooh hovering over the honey tree. Like the cloud of despair and failure that dogged Charlie Brown.
And the mountains coated with a texture of snow while I wandered the valley in a light denim dress and sweater. The wonders of altitude, of mountains so young that I look to these foothills and call them mountains. Where I grew up, these would be mountains: the Appalachians are so ancient, they have been ground down to foothills. For that matter, the valley I’m standing in is just 800 feet shy of being a mile above sea level. I grew up a mere hectometre and a half above sea level; this valley is a world above my homeland.
The day comes to a close
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And there is the sunset and my cue to leave the trail. Do mountain lions hunt at night? Would they hunt me? I hope they’re well fed and wandering the earth themselves, heading off to wilder parts. If I should encounter one on the trail, I hope at least that the light is good enough to bring you a photo.
