No doubt many of you have escaped the city this Labor Day weekend for inspiring vistas, the lull of waves or wind in the pines, the rejuvenating and grounding powers of Nature. If you haven’t (poor Jeanne has only her back yard for solace), or if you just love beautiful writing, you’ll be transported by this lyrical and evocative post on nature and saying goodbye from writer and blogger Charli Mills with two superb flashes to follow. Click on the link for the full post. You won’t be sorry.
And best wishes for a great break from your labors!
There’s a place on earth where cedar wax-wings dip low enough to know air and water amalgamate. High overhead the sky is blue as only sky can be; no jewel can rob its glory. Osprey fish the river and eagles hunt from higher above, sometimes stealing from the osprey. It’s as if this place can boast of paradise, whisper of dreams, vanquish the veil between those who sought shelter then and now. Animals, birds, humans in a circle of life, a beating heart of beauty. And I dared to name her parts.
I was doing my fifth circuit of the small city park when I spotted the woman with the snow-white hair. She was holding a small child up to one of the hardy desert pine trees that punctuate the perimeter. As I power-walked by, the wild-haired little thing gave a cry of delighted wonder. She slapped the bark of the tree and kicked the trunk with her small, ineffectual foot. I left the two of them looking up in wonder through the needled branches.
I was happy to think of the myriad pleasures and lessons from Nature that the child would, like all of us, go on to experience. And I delved into the depths of my own memory to recall the time in my youth when I first confronted Nature as a wondrous, awe-inspiring force.
I was five when my parents piled my four siblings and me into their pink and white, jet-ship of a Dodge and relocated us from Minnesota to Phoenix Arizona. It was July of 1961. Of that trip, I mostly remember being condemned for three endless days to the middle of the back seat between my two brothers and older sister. Yet, my first intimations of the power of Nature date to that first remembered journey: my mother pointing to the sky on a midnight rural highway in North Dakota, calling us to “Look!” as shimmering curtains of emerald and gold rippled across the heavens; my brother Jack at age ten standing dangerously close to the edge of a precipice in the Rockies, below which sheer walls of pine-encrusted rock cascaded down and down and down to a winding thread of river; a sea of buffalo and choreographies of antelope under immense skies, clouds sailing above like voluminous ships.
From the left bottom: Jeanne, Peggy, Patty. From the left top: Danny and Jack. 1961.
Over the next decade and a half, we made the round trip from Arizona to my parents’ home towns in North Dakota three or four times. Eventually it was just my twin and me in the back seat, equipped with Almond Joys and Paydays, Juicy Fruit and Spearmint gum, Planters peanuts and playing cards. Up and back on different routes, passing from Arizona into Utah or New Mexico, on to Colorado, through Nebraska or Wyoming, and then into South Dakota. For three days we journeyed, straight as an arrow over flat eternities of desert; skirting towering rock formations and deep, layered, chromatic terraces; climbing vertiginous, pine-ridged Colorado peaks and plunging precipitously into cool, deep valleys. After the mountains and meadows of South Dakota, the fecund farmland of North Dakota finally welcomed us into her ample arms, her prairies rippling to the horizon like the gentle swells of an infinite sea.
I had a chance to revisit those vast, dramatic landscapes last August, when my North Dakota cousin Tommy invited me along to ride shotgun in a car he’d bought in Arizona and wanted to drive back up north. Tommy is a talented photographer, so I’ll retrace that trip photographically with you here. Note that there are no cute and furry creatures—I dislike anthropomorphizing animals. (Though I admit to taking multiple shots of a pair of mountain goats in the Black Hills the year before on a trip with my sisters.)
The famous red rock formations of Monument Valley in northern Arizona. Many classic westerns, such as John Ford’s Stagecoach, were filmed here.
The photographer and his “horse-powered coach’ outside Moab Utah.
The phenomenal Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
An enchantingly placid and pristine stream in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
The blogger drinking in the beauty and looking like a startled deer in a meadow near the stream.
Darn! They snuck in. Mountain goats near Mount Rushmore.
North Dakota: infinite horizons and the subtle music of wheat waving in the wind.
This short tour of the West and the flash that follows were inspired by this week’s prompt from Carrot Ranch: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about wild spaces. Is it a wilderness or a patch of weeds in a vacant lot that attract songbirds. What is vital to the human psyche about wild spaces? Bonus points for inducing something cute and furry.
The post and flash were also triggered by the ache in my heart for those separated from the beauty of nature. The shells and tiny mouse skull in that very top photo were collected by my son, now serving time in a minimum security prison on a drug-related charge. On trips we took to the coast years ago, he was always the one to find unbroken anemones or sand dollars, buffed and scoured sea glass, even a melon-sized moon snail in Washington that, much to the consternation of the park ranger, he began to dig up before he realized the shell was still occupied. Always an avid naturalist by instinct, his world has shrunk to a stark space devoid of all natural grace except wind, flat land stretching to the horizon, and sunlight. Even the stars at night are drowned in the glare of megawatt lights.
But not for long…
Here’s a flash on nature…
Absolution
He didn’t look back. Not as he walked to the car. Not as we circled back onto the highway. Behind us the towers melted into the horizon.
The road steepened. Pines appeared, grew thick, drank the sunlight. Outside a mountain town we stopped.
Resin and rain keened the air. Wind soughed in the high branches.
I waited while he walked into a clearing. He tilted his head. Palmed the rough bark. Drank the sweet air. When he returned, needles fell from his hair.
“Any place you want to stop?” I said.
“Nah,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I’m fine.”
