Tag: Garden Valley

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Endless Autumn

I was reared in the deserts of southern Arizona and the fall of the year was like most of the year. Dry and dusty. And it could be hot, too. So when I heard people gasp and praise the colors of New England or the vast aspen groves of the Wasatch chain, it did little to stir my innards. I looked at photos and yes, the reds and oranges, yellows and golds, russets all were pretty but little did I understand how those colors in real life could rivet your eyes to the serrated edges of leaves, the black of ash tree branches hiding behind the bright gold of the leaves, the shimmer of the blood red aspen leaves ringing high New Mexican meadows.

Garden Valley, Idaho Photo Courtesy of Ken Rodgers

And yes, I did live in New Mexico and there I became aware of the acres and acres of aspen that grew in the cold spots of the Sacramento Mountains. Some years the autumn reds and golds blazed, and some years not. Some Septembers the rains came in phalanxes of black and gray and tormented the leaf peepers from the desert climes of Texas and the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Those years the leaves immediately went from green to a wan yellow pocked with dark spots and quickly to dull black. A wet mess that instead of drifting in a brisk breeze like flags on top of an alpine bed and breakfast, fell splat in damp blankets that pasted the ground beneath the trees.

I’ve lived almost all of my life in the west and I’ve seen the best the west has to offer in terms of fall color, so when people say that Ruidoso or Taos or Heber City or Squaw Valley rival the colors of New England I am here to tell you that generally speaking, those folks are hyping real estate or some other reason to get you to come to their country. The hills of Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire are without a doubt one of the most outstanding places to be when the maples show their flashy—yes, I think I can say—their brazen petticoats of autumn. When I say outstanding, I mean in the world, the planet, the universe as we know it from our tiny point of view.

Aspen, Wood River Valley, Idaho Photo Courtesy of Ken Rodgers

But…but, there is often a but…this year, 2013 in the western United States, from my vantage point, has to be one of the most amazing years for color that I’ve ever seen…maybe the most amazing, and this includes the autumns of New England.

Betty and I were in Garden Valley, Idaho, for the initial turn of the aspen, and then in the Wood River Valley, and the Stanley Basin of Idaho. And the colors rose up off the leaves and glared at me as if I was being inspected by the trees and I must say, it made me feel small, made me feel wanting, and that feeling was followed by an exhilaration that was mindful of balloons rising in the fall of the year over Albuquerque.

By way of a caveat, I will say that one of the things that made the 2013 colors of autumn in Idaho so outstanding was the contrast between the blaze of tints and the harsh sage brush and cheat grass land surrounding the rivers and creeks and seeps that snake down the mountains, hills and valleys of Idaho. And it wasn’t just aspen and cottonwoods and maples and ash trees that seemed to glow in the brisk, sunny light, it was the riparian willows turned to red and gold as they defined where water runs in this arid land.

Salmon River Country, Stanley Basin, Idaho Photo Courtesy of Ken Rodgers

But of course, the colors of autumn are ephemeral and leave us too soon, and leave us, too, with the sad knowledge that winter lurks in the near future.

But as Idaho’s autumn tints began to dim, Betty and I went south and found the colors just starting to show in Nevada, like huge surprises, the cottonwoods on the Truckee River as it meandered off the Sierra Nevada into the sinkholes of Central Nevada, and up and up over the top at Donner and down into the Sacramento River Valley, the colors less aggressive, still with a benign green that promised an autumn to arrive real soon, in the week, the weeks coming…and just for a moment I hoped for an endless autumn.

Donner Lake, Sierra Nevada, California Photo Courtesy of Ken Rodgers

But there are no endless autumns. Autumn to me parallels the period of my life that I now inhabit. An autumn where the colors are so vibrant they leave me searching for the meaning of beauty, where the days are brisk and drive energy into tired bones. And the sadness that comes as you understand that what is to come will be more like the rubbed-raw blast of winter.

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The Ungovernable

“We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.” …Eleanor Roosevelt

Somewhere in one of my texts for a university political science class, I read that the first rule of political science is: The world is ungovernable. And one of the few ways humanity can overcome this ungovernability is to encounter some kind of genuine outside threat that will force us—a family, a community, a nation, a species—to cooperate.

Bull Elk, © Ken Rodgers 2012

You may find the association unusual but I thought of this “rule” last Friday evening as Betty and I and some other folks stood outside in the cool night in Garden Valley, Idaho, and listened to elk bugle. We were staying, along with communications and internet guru Stephanie Worrell, with friends Ken McKay and Elaine Ambrose the night before Elaine’s fifth annual Write by the River retreat.

Not only were competing males, or bulls, bugling across the meadows—the distinctive sound caught in the nooks and headers of the pine-covered ridges—but we also heard chirps, mews, squeals, whines, barks and bleats. The language of an elk herd. One bull, the male who seemed to be closest to the herd, sounded like he possessed the best bugle with the most music and oooomph at the end, and I speculate that he was the leader of the harem and also the herd.

With a flashlight, you could barely see a few of the elk, mostly an outline of their large-deer bodies and the beam of the flashlight reflected in their eyes. We guessed there were sixty or seventy out there.

All the bugling and chirps and mews were a serenade that rose into the night. A serenade by an elk symphony with different and individuated voices singing at us. Something about the music touched me. I don’t know what it was. A similar feeling as when I perch on a mountain top and see the Milky Way strung out over me like an artistic morph of a time lapse photo of LA freeways. Or the music from the singing of a thousand toads and frogs awakened by the late summer rains that wash the dust from a desert sky. Or the liquid gold notes from competing meadowlarks as their mating cries skip along the tops of sagebrush at dawn. A feeling that clutches me in the gut and squeezes out an emotion so primitive it’s hard for me to articulate…an emotion born of eons of familiarity between the molecules that now inhabit me and make me the twin, the cousin, the relative of all the things that ever were and will become.

Later, we heard the crash and crack of antlers as the bull elk battled over who would govern the harem of cows and as a reward, and a duty, breed the females and perpetuate the line. And that was part of the symphony, too, the conflict within a species to make sure the top bull passes on the best traits to ensure the survival of the species. A chaotic mix of cooperation, begetting, and battle carried across the breezeless nighttime meadows of the Idaho mountains.

It also occurred to me as I stood there and listened to elk music that even in the face of the chaos of breeding, the music was something that anyone could hear for miles…any friend, any enemy. Besides the goofy preening and posturing that I knew the males were doing as they bugled, they still managed to stay focused on what dangers might be around—men, cougars, bear, wolves, coyotes, all which live in the general vicinity. And just as important as breeding and begetting is survival in the moment, for both the elk and us, and for that matter everything else that lives on Earth.

Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Kevin Martini-Fuller

All this takes me back to the poli-sci business of being ungovernable that begins this blog. The thing that keeps these elk together and working as a herd is the fact that something might eat them or their young. They have their conflicts, but the need to keep the herd together and protected is crowned over all other behavior.

And that makes me wonder about us, in this country, right now, and all the rancor and division that comes with, I suppose, democracy in action. But it seems to me that the bile only gets worse, and from both sides; epithets like “liar,” “idiot,” and other names for those who don’t agree with what we want and think. I wonder if we might end up eating ourselves, metaphorically speaking, instead of being eaten (Read: destroyed) by outside enemies. To quote the cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It seems to me we need to see our problems as something bigger, something approaching a national survival crisis, so we can come together once again and be “governable.” Like the elk herd that performed for us in Garden Valley, Idaho.