These bottomlands and mesas of the Rockies now under assault by humans for recreation, lifestyle and homes were once a quite different ecology in a vastly different human economy. Standing on a mesa, now either an abandoned hayfield or one hayed for reasons other than profit from the hay, one can look up, first at the oaks, sage and mountain mahoganies of the fringes, further up to where aspens and cottonwoods transition into the spruces and fir that grow on up to the tree line. One can look downward through the oaks, sage and mountain mahoganies towards the wetlands and creek bottoms there are willows, chokecherry, serviceberry crowding next to the hayfields there. There were then, as now, seedeaters, berry eaters, squirrels, birds, a whole food chain from the herbivores on up to the predators and scavengers. Of course it’s more a food triangle with a base of herbivores, for each level up wastes some 90% of the food value of the level below. But it was different then; it was their economy.

Standing in what was once an economically sensible hayfield I simply interpolate what once was from what I see above to what I see below. I doubt it’s wrong. I close my eyes and see an oak savannah smattered with junipers, aspens and spruce; at my feet are holly grapes, thimble berries, boletus and grasses that I can’t identify. I open my eyes and see smooth brome and orchard grasses imported from elsewhere by my local co-op, alfalfa deeply rooted but old and stalky, mule’s ear, thistle and dandelion. I know these things for I have plowed these fields and drilled these seeds and fought these weeds. We call it agriculture, cultivation of the land.

The first night of Passover and JP and I are resting on our couch, my back leaning against his center, his legs apart. Ruby is asleep in our bed. A whiteness emanates from beneath the mountains. The sky is a fresh coat of paint, and the distributed light bulges from beneath the ridgline’s cleft. The source of the light: a celebration from the other side, a rocket ship at lift-off, a nuclear explosion, a stream of fallen angels returning home? No, it must be the moon. We sit for twenty, thirty minutes, waiting for the answer, and she comes, this lunar gift, an orb pushing its way through the peaks, reaching for the constellations, a newborn’s head thrusting through its mother’s vagina, fertile life making itself known. “How could we ever explain this?” my husband asks aloud. Within minutes, the full moon has found its own freedom in the sky, and as we watch it glide along, we feel the Earth move, we feel ourselves move, the speed real now, we are a spinning ball in the ether, and the moon humbles us, reminds us of  our place. The man in the moon, he soon presents his face. “A sign,” my husband tells me, “that we should believe in ourselves.” Our human visage smiling back at us from the Heavens.

“I have been at a writer’s block,” I confess. “I don’t like anything I am writing lately. It feels like the same thing over and over. But this,” I realize out loud, “this is what I have been searching for.” A way to inspire beyond the confines of the synthetic. It is all here before me, has been for months now (years really); here is a way to maintain hope in perfection and beauty and goodness in the universe. But how can a city girl do Nature justice? She is a foreigner to me. A friend who recently stayed with us questioned me: “Why are the mountains here different colors? Why do rivers and streams always form steps with the rocks? What kind of bird is this?” “I don’t know,” I replied many times, embarrassed and defensive: I can only see the abstract, the veiled connections. But is this true – or does it always have to be true? Can my untrained eyes and brain learn how to notice the nuances, investigate the trees, the creatures, the stones, the water? Can I be reborn a scientist? Or, perhaps what I am truly asking is: Can I be reborn a child?

For about eleven years we lived in the log house on Casady Creek, across the road and up in the trees from Floyd’s place, which back then was just simply Jim Pratt’s hunting cabin. It was the first piece of property that I had ever owned, and I took some delight in knowing the chain of title: Woodrow Wilson to William Casady, homesteader, to John Anderson, to myself. Simple enough, and I didn’t see any need at all to inquire about title insurance.

The first transaction, Woodrow Wilson to William Casady had especial appeal; oh maybe partly because Woodrow Wilson has appeal, maybe partly because Casady is spelled with only one “s”, and certainly partly because of the homesteader image. This man came walking up Woody Creek and decided to stake out his homestead, not a mining claim, at this particular and precise spot, staking out 59 acres in all. Why here? And why not here, because it is a beautiful location; there is the creek coming down through wonderfully large spruces, a spring coming out of the side hill, pretty good sun during the winters. I grew interested in this man William Casady and why he had stopped at this place, and what his life had been about while here.

Casady had cleared the trees on the easterly side of his eponymous creek and cut a few little lateral ditches from the creek into his clearing. To me the slope is too steep for irrigating anything but sod, yet Casady irrigated up potatoes on this slope. I can only imagine that it took a lot of hours of the day to do so without causing serious erosion. Some old timers told me that Woody Creek “red,” the soil in the valley, was highly regarded as potting soil and further, that Casady’s potatoes were held in similar high regard. Red Rowland told me his memory of walking from town as an adolescent, carrying his deer rifle and an empty sack. On the way to Casady’s he would shoot a buck and trade it for Casady’s potatoes; Red described this as a two day trip, spending the one night with Casady.

Stan Natal showed me the stump of a fireplace in one of his fields, up against the north bank, about a mile upstream from his place. He said that Bill Casady had lived there for many years and had moved on up to the homestead because of the “population pressure,” needing a little more solitude.

In front of our log house were some old railings and a few boards, greatly weathered. There was no doubt that the rails were once Casady’s corral, and the boards remnants of his cabin. He had chosen a site right next to the biggest spruce on the whole 59 acres. I reconstructed the corral and threw the boards away.

I had a dream the other morning. The vivid ones do seem to come in the morning. My mother, who is alive, came to me as a ghost. She, a declared atheist in life, told me that there is no death when you die, that your spirit remains. She told me how happy she was (this woman who is almost always sullen and despondent, yet quietly wise), and how good it felt on the other side. She was only still frustrated that she had to remain in Colorado (as she is in life, and yearns daily for Manhattan, where they do have an apartment that they occupy only four months of the year) because she needed to be near my father (who loves Colorado and, although a native New Yorker, would be happy if he never had to return). I recall thinking within the dream that she could let herself be free: why would a spirit need to hover in one place? But now I realize that she was waiting for my father, that she could only give into her spirit fully once he joined her.

I cannot recall who it was that told me of William Casady’s death, but I know that there is no stone or any other marker of a grave on the homestead, for I looked at length and in vain. Bill, this person told me, had become old and ill, and found life no longer to his liking. Bill, this person said, bought a jug of Dago red, some sticks of dynamite, and a long, long fuse. Bill, I was told, put the dynamite under his bunk, lit the fuse, and lay back to enjoy his last drink.

For days afterwards, even today, I don’t like that she came to me as a ghost. I wrote a play several years ago where I represented her as a ghost who tortured her daughter, or was it a representation of my grandmother torturing my mother? My mother was hardly ever present – more so these days though than when we were younger, mostly when she is around her only grandchild Ruby. She disappears in books and self-loathing – the same places I go to when I am scared, overwhelmed, lonely.

We lived there for ten summers and one winter.

I don’t want to go to those places anymore. I want to go to the falling stream up the hill – freeing itself from the snow, retracing its rhythm, discovering new byways. I want to go to the parabolic mountain ahead of me, sliced on the left, camel- peaked on the right – asymmetrically symmetric, never at odds with itself. I want to go to the icicles that beard the towering red rocks behind us in winter, sun-shaved in the summer. They are the elders who will survive me.

My neighbor Stan’s grandfather homesteaded his place up here in Woody Creek. Stan was my guide and mentor into my second career at age forty. Stan’s spread was 280 acres, mine more like 450, and we both grew hay and raised cattle. Stan declared that we weren’t “ranchers,” those were those people down in Texas or Oklahoma that had spreads of thousands of acres and herds of many hundreds or even thousands. Stan had seventy head and I one hundred thirty. Stan said we were “farmers,” for a great deal of the year we were planting, irrigating, or harvesting hay for the winter-feeding of the cattle. So, whether asked or not, I state my second career as farming.

Posted in chapters | No Comments