A Colorado Journal

Dream

As the 20th century flickered and then dimmed into the darkness of history we fled the crumbling cities of the Industrial Age and went to live in the forest of the Rocky Mountains. Soon after, I wrote the first paragraph of what would become our Colorado Journal. I don't know why, but I sat in the car at the gate and the words just fell out of my pen and onto the pad of paper I kept in the car to make notes on for work. The next day I wrote some more. As I wrote, Julie began taking photographs. And we encouraged each other and continued to reflect this beautiful place in our words and pictures. For more than six years we have shared our life in the forest with you. It has been an amazing experience. But the most remarkable part of this adventure has been the number of people who have written to us over the years. For the most part they write to offer hope, not in the outcome of our personal journey through life in the wilderness but, rather, in the greater journey now undertaken by all of the Earth's creatures that crouch in the last remaining wild places and strive, still, against the vast, onrushing herd of humanity and the endless war we have waged on them. It is to them, and the the forest itself, that we dedicate our work.

Locked away in this website, somewhere behind this glowing page on the humming hard drive of the server, are several thousand photographs and more than a thousand journal entries. Today's entry will be the last one.

After much soul searching Julie and I have come to realize that our Colorado Journal has reached it's final chapter. We are proud of the story and honored that you have joined us on this adventure. But all trails end and all stories fade into memory. So it is with this one. The journal archive is closed, locked away forever. I spent many hours over the last year or so gathering my favorite words and pictures into a manuscript. Some time ago, knowing that this day would come, I printed four copies of it. One for me, one for Julie, and one for our child. The fourth one lies somewhere in the dusty catacombs of the Library of Congress Copyright Office. I had once thought that perhaps more copies would be published but I know, now, in my heart, that this is not to be. The world has changed and a new age is upon us. The forest, and all that dwells there, retreats into shadow.

Over the course of time we have come to realize that, to many people in this strange new century we find ourselves in, the place described in our journal is an alien landscape, so different from the cityscape most Americans now live in. To them it may seem romanticized, even contrived. But it is not. It is more real than the concrete of a city sidewalk. More real because it is more than just a place. It is a feeling -- a feeling you can't get in a building or a city or even a park. And you can't really get it here either by reading about it in this journal. You have to go outside and into the world -- up to the mountains and out on the prairie. You must travel a real road to a real place, where the reach of industrial man has not disfigured the face of nature; where you are just one living thing in a confluence of living things. And it is our wish for each of you, that one day soon, and for many more days to come, you will find yourself outside in the world, up in the mountains, or out on the prairie. For the Colorado beyond the city limits is a gift given to us by the creator of all things to bring joy to a weary heart and renewal to our spirits. At least that is what I have found here.

I was born in the East and lived there most of my life. All my family lives there, still. But always I felt lost, there in that tame, rusting place. I was a country man living in the land of cities, a Westerner living in the East. Then, many years ago, now, I came home to Colorado. This is my home, not because I was born here, for I was not, but because I carry it in my heart. But, like so many other Coloradans, I found myself living in the great megacity of the Front Range, working an office job and commuting my days away. And the state of mind that makes this Colorado began to evaporate.

So, there came a time when Julie and I were forced to confront all the reasons we had moved to Colorado and why they remained unfulfilled for two decades. The memory of what our dreams had been rang like a distant bell in the back of our minds, nearly drowned out in the percussion of daily life. We realized that the mountains had become little more than a backdrop on the stage of our suburban world and, if you kept your eyes turned always east and never saw the peaks filling the western sky, you could almost believe you were living in Kansas. Oh sure, we still camped and hiked and skied but we were like tourists in our own state. Our hope, in coming to this place, had been to live in wilderness, not merely visit it occasionally. And we felt our lives slipping away into the limbo of a dream unfulfilled.

Yes, the dream was still there, but we realized that living it would not be as simple as we once had thought, not only because mountain land had become expensive or because my commute to Denver was an inescapable fact of life. The most difficult issues were ones of conscience. By bearing witness to the hyper-growth of our adopted home state and its impact on the environment, the wildlife and the landscape itself, we knew that our dream was not so simple any more. Like the cake that you can not have and eat too, we did not want to diminish the very thing we loved most by becoming a part of the culture that was devouring it. So, for seven long years we searched and researched, looking for mountain land and, also, for a way we could live there in rhythm with the earth and sky.

In 1998 we found that land, this land where we now live, wild land, high on a ridge overlooking the plains. It is a quartersection of a century-old ranch. Land clothed in forest and rock and grass at the very end of a steep, narrow dirt road. And we built a home here, off the grid, and became forest stewards. And it has changed our lives. Some of the changes are subtle, some dramatic. Most of the changes have been positive. Some have seemed, in a very personal way, miraculous.

But our journal is not just a story about two city kids moving to the woods. It is about capturing something less substantial, something ethereal, and wrapping it around you until it is as solid as the granite of the forest floor, as blue as a summer sky, as loud as a lightning strike. It is about taking hold of a dream and holding it out to the harsh light of the world. Like the Tarot's Fool, we have traveled along life's wheel and returned, full circle, to the place where we began; to the world we left behind as children, where sunlight shines on greenest grass, where a gray granite pillow lies upon a meadow's bed, placed there by the hand of God only so you can find it and rest upon the breast of the earth and drift along a river of time in the shape of a cloud.

Few things that are worthwhile come easy. Change can be exhilarating but it also can be hard. By its very nature it is scary because it is unpredictable. And it is scarier, still, when those changes involve your life's dream. Yet, I have come to realize that the only thing scarier than reaching for your dream is letting go of it.

But this is not just about a dream, either. It’s about life. About a few special moments of my life, plucked from the rush of hours and days and held close. Then, inevitably, the phone rings, and I move on to the next moment, and the next -- the less special moments that fill up my life like the broth of a living soup.

I treasure these moments I have been given. They shine in through my eyes and play upon the screen of my heart and then move in my fingers and across the keyboard to be reflected back into the world again. And then, there they are, resting on this page, reflected in your eyes. They are here now, reminding you that life is just moments, moments that come in a flash and then are gone, swept away forever,

yet held fast,

playing on the screen of your heart.

It is early morning, now, here on the last morning of our journal. The forest is flooded with bright sunlight that shines upon the snow cutting out the shapes of trees in blue silhouette. Far below, the prairie is hidden beneath a blanket of cloud that, from this height, looks like round misty hills that move ever so slowly as the sunlight warms it, making it rise like a glacier of fog, flowing up the canyon toward the house until it fills the air all about, momentarily dimming the sun before evaporating into the dry air of a fading winter.

Across the road, in a stand of young ponderosa beyond the meadow, a ring of stones lies under ashen shadow and cold snow drifts waiting for spring and that intoxicating blend of friends and firewood, bourbon and thought, conversation and emotion, that is a campfire. From that place on the very top of the ridge the Great Divide rises in the west like a rampart of ice and granite above the foothills, sharp edges dividing earth and sky, East and West, past and future.

On the hillside to the north of the house, there upon the face of the canyon wall, a hundred small trees lie in silent repose, victims of my saw and my sweat and my blood, holding in their reclining forms the warmth of future winters for this house in the forest. Great old trees stand, still, upon the hillside, orange-barked ponderosa and spiky-limbed fir above blue cedar and ragged juniper, currant and rabbitbrush and mountain mahogany, spared the silent death of the others that were sacrificed so that the wilderness will live on, vibrant, more alive for the death of the others.

I have spent the past eight years following the path of my Forest Stewardship Plan, working on my legacy that will pass, unnoticed, into history but will remain for a hundred years after I die, in the songs of birds and the hunting of hawks, the browsing of deer and the gentle hop, hopping of rabbits. In the time that I have worked to heal the forest I have transformed only a few acres from the dense, overgrown thicket it was into open woodland and little meadows where once-barren ground is now clothed in grass and wildflowers and trees that grow strong and tall. I have seen life return in the form of wild creatures and green hillsides. And I see what I have done and smile. But the smile turns down on the corners because I know I will never have time to finish the task, even if I had a thousand lives to live and spent them all in this pursuit. But I do not. And the one life I have is racing toward death ever faster even as my body dims into old age.

I remember when I turned 30, thinking that Tim Leary had been wrong after all, at least about that turning 30 thing. I looked in the mirror and decided it didn't bother me, my turning 30, that is. I didn't feel any different, really. Not really. And when I turned 40 I wasn't all that upset. I looked in the mirror to see if any gray hairs had appeared. Now that I am 50 I see that there are a few. My body is not as strong as it once was and it has acquired a few persistent aches. But it is tough with the annealing of hard work and thin mountain air, as is my spirit. When I was younger I had no path to follow and my feet wandered along the road aimlessly, guided by desire and need, rebellion and conformity, duty, ego, mind. And now that I am older I look back and see my life as so much wasted time. But there is a thread of purpose amid the debris. There is a wife who shared her heart with me and a child we made together. They have made my life worthwhile and filled me with love and tenderness and meaning and pride. In the end, we found our way through the crash of Industrial America and into the Rocky Mountains. And today I can look out and see myself reflected, at last, in the mirror of the living forest.

Melting snow runs in small rivers along the muddy shoulder of the lane and cascades in sparkling waterfalls from the eaves of the house. The sun climbs higher and glows on meadow and hill and sharp cliff and forest. White quartz boulders glow in the shadows like weathered bone. The ground underfoot warms and mud dries on leather boot tops and even the cold, steel gray granite begins to thaw into softer rock forms that vibrate with the sunlight from the highest peak to the deepest canyon, carving with highlight and shadow the wandering tracks in soft, ochre mud that tell of a cougar's flight westward, following the hoofbeat dirge of the buffalo into the electriclight, antibiotic world ahead.

Above the trees, and behind them like a stage backdrop, is a dark spring sky, that perfect slate color, filled with fury and energy. Wind flows down the canyon, bringing treesound in that melancholy way. The tide of clouds washes over the sun and the world dims to muted shades. A restful feeling fills the air. On the breeze is the smell of distant snow.
To the west the valley of Cloud Creek rests quietly in the hollow of God’s palm, shining with sage and mahogany and sharp yucca leaves. But the landscape is dimming, fading swiftly; shining river rock and blood red clay, raw beauty flowing beneath ancient cottonwood boughs, the green of a Vanished Age turning to the gray of urban oblivion.

Out in the vast world, beyond the forest edge, there are endless oceans shimmering in a million shades of green and blue, deserts of vast stone ledges and sparkling sand, prairies rippling with the tide of the wind across tall grass and supple hills, hardwood forests filled with orange leaves falling on soft mossy floors. And there are cities and highways and skyscrapers and landfills and factories and coal mines and an endless herd of humans. Yet only one place runs through all of these, from dry hoodoo to urban corridor to cold tundra. The great escarpment of the Rocky Mountains reaches across a continent dividing America in half and separating the flatlands from the high country. But, more than that, it divides the artificial world of man from the perfection of nature. Here in this thin air and wild beauty you can walk on lichen-dappled rock high on the Great Divide and hike the floor of a redrock canyon there to find your soul waiting for you, at the end of the trail, murmuring along a mountain stream, wavering in a forest shadow, shining on an alpine lake.

Here you can clearly see with your heart and spirit that natural things are sacred and should be treated with reverence. You can see, also, that in the world of the Great Plastic Electric Empire we have exchanged our place in creation for a place we have made for ourselves. Upon the altar of Industry we have raped the body of nature and let loose her blood to flow into the engines of our steelmachine world.

But, when standing on a mountaintop it is not hard to see that this is not our land, at all.

The forest and the elk and the eagle and the rock belong only to God and to themselves,

not to us.

There are mornings when I awake from a place high in the sky and know that I can fly. My body knows, too. It remembers that it is as light as a dream and can sail above the crush of man and his concrete-formed world. But the feeling fades. My airy form falls earthward and struggles in the mud of mind and reason, knowing that the things of my spirit's ken are found only in an endless sky above a blue-gold hillside of sage and grass; in cold granite boulders adrift on a sea of wildflowers; rendered gently in the supple form of a deer against a sharp, dark thicket; borne up in the magical union of wind and wing and a piercing gaze from amber eyes; felt in the press of hard winter air on fragile flesh or the prick of pine needles on ginger toes; sparkling like starlight on new-fallen snow and moving on a slate-gray river edged in ice and stone.

The forest surrounds me, a vast, bottomless silence, but not empty. Listen, do you hear it? A woodpecker beats a hollow rhythm somewhere in the deep wood. Rain chatters on dry leaves. A wild river calls thunder from the narrows beneath ragged shoulders of granite. I hear the voice of a wild America speaking in a language as old as the Earth itself -- as new as a fawn's first breath. It is a soft recitation of an ancient verse heard, now, in fewer and fewer places, drowned out, ever more often, by the grinding beat of the gas-powered-gun-toting-jet-propelled-hip-hop howl of humanity.

But here in the forest, in the silence, you can hear something else,

an inhaling of breath,

a pause in the struggle, filled with waiting,

waiting for the next moment,

and the next.

The forest is like a dear friend
that will hold you in warm arms,
but does not love you.

It is the loneliest place on Earth,
filled with a thousand beating hearts.

I stood and looked out into the hidden heart of the forest.
But I saw only trees and rocks and blue sky,
snow glittering on the distant canyon floor,
the faded half of a waning moon
riding on a ragged wall of clouds
resting there on the backs
of the high mountains,
far away to the west,
so far away.

A legion of stout pines stood guard, keeping their secrets,
there where brave creatures fight for survival in the wind and the dark,
there on the savage mountainside,
there in the dark shadows,
where the Mind of Man can not see.

For a man can walk a thousand miles through wilderness
and never know the forest's heart.
He can seek it every day of his life and, in the end,
recline in ignorance, knowing only that,
as the light of his final sunrise dims and dies,
he has seen nothing and traveled nowhere.

The heart of the forest can not be caught or captured or seized.
It can not be won like a prize or studied like a book or conquered like a rival.
It can only be felt.

These past many days I have been a prisoner,
held captive by my mind,
trapped in the loop of my own thoughts.
It is a terrible thing to be enslaved by thoughts.
For thoughts are just the sound of you talking to yourself.
There are no more empty words than those that echo inside the human skull,
nothing going in, nothing coming out,
just a fantasy of rationalizations and suppositions, conjecture, worry and fear.
None of these things are real.

The true nature of reality can be found, not in your thoughts,
but in your heart and your gut and your God-given senses,
the hush of snow falling at night,
the touch of a lover's hand,
a child singing softly at play,
wind sighing, sun shining,
breath, muscle, blood.
These things are real.
Your mind did not think them up.

This is the secret the great pines guard
and the mourning dove heralds.

Reality is not contained in words,
including these words you are reading right now.

It lies out there,

beyond your thoughts,

in the hidden heart of the forest.

The outside world streams into the room from the television set,
carried on the electromagnetic pulse of the Great Plastic Electric Empire,
reflecting the pace of the world it mirrors,
as it flickers on the walls, the floor, the mind,
illuminating nothing.

In a dark corner the wood stove rests, cold and silent,
like a dear companion lulled to sleep, waiting.
Outside, the wind flows through trees and murmurs in eaves,
soft, sibilant, whispering.

The TV winks off and we sit in the silence.
Soon boot heels echo on hard redwood planking, bleached blue-gray by the night.
Cool spring air wraps around a soft warm breeze,
moving through trees and down the hillside,
calling.

The full moon descends to rest on a rock,
there where deep shadows gather,
there where winter pools in the bones of the earth,
melting.

"See how the lichen glows."

"Look! how the stars shine."

"There is an owl!"

"A coyote's howl!"

"And a little rabbit there by that tree."

"How small his ears are."

"How silent he creeps on the curve of the hill."

"How quiet the night is."

"How soft the ground."

"Now, look how the moon has gone down!"

"There's rain falling on the ridge over there."

"And it's really quite chilly, or so I just noticed."

"Yes, it has grown quite late. Here take my hand."

"Where has the time gone, my love?"

"There through the trees, dear,
and down the hillside."

I remember a dream I once had.
I was young, and the world called to me.
And, in my dream, I answered.
I went out into the world. And I lived the life I dreamed.

I remember a dream I once lived.
I was young, and the world called to me.
I heard rivers and oceans and mountains and vast, wild places.
And I went out into the world like a child following an unwounded heart.

ricandjulie@stellers-park.com