Two nights ago, I wended my way through the just-dark countryside, having completed the mission of gathering over 20 gallons of springwater (local, straight from underneath a tree root) for the week ahead. As I drove slowly back through an area heavily populated with Amish families, I took my time, slowing down and dimming my lights for horse-drawn buggies full of waving hands and bearded smiles, enjoying the woodsmoke wafting through my cracked windows, woodsmoke from homes where only the warm light from oil lanterns poked orange holes in the deep blue fabric of night, a woodsmoke from hardwoods- one I hadn't smelled in a long time, one steeped in nostalgia from earlier eras of this same life. Nowadays, in my mountain home far off in the Inland Northwest, the woodsmoke smell is of conifers- Ponderosa Pine, Larch, Douglas Fir.
But for this season, I'm not there, I'm in my hometown instead, devoting time to family and to friendships measured in decades.
Here, things are much much faster and louder than back home. There's less space- a clutter of homes and roads and tin warehouses and shopping centers. And, as becomes so apparently obvious the more you go away and come back, a marked and obvious degeneration of humans that agitates me at times, frightens me at others, and then breaks my heart. But it isn't just here, it seems to be anywhere with a sizeable population, and such a stark contrast when you spend most of your year in a faraway place with an average of 3 people per square mile.
Alas! Here we are, and complaining is hardly ever helpful or good for the spirit, so!
How about we wind back the clock to earlier this season, before we left home, as Autumn's silver and gold began to settle over the Okanogan Highlands...
Sometime around the end of October, the trees began to grow sleepy. Some, like the western Larch and Aspen, turned to gold and as the golden forest crept up the mountain, the first silvery dustings of snow gently made their way down, until gold was united with silver, and we found ourselves part of a bejeweled and glistening wonderscape.
And the language of light whispered its poetry over the land and into our grins all those Autumn days ablaze.
While leaves fell and that rarity, the Western Larch, blurring the line between conifer and deciduous, brushed golden strokes through the otherwise evergreen forests...
we were busying away... repairing fences trampled over by cattle (the joys of open range territory), burying apples [3 feet deep!] for wintertime experiments, tossing wildflower seed balls around (prayers they take hold and sprout come Spring)...
and as Eric worked clearing brush and dead trees, I decided to build our first raised bed, challenging myself to use no hardware and spend no money while doing so! I did put some chicken wire (that we already had) inside on Eric's advice to help keep burrowing critters out, but the rest was made using a hatchet and a handsaw. I enjoy this kind of thing, and I like the primitive look best anyway. It's a hugelkultur bed, so lots of sticks and logs as the first layer under there, and composted goat manure a gift from a friend whose farm I helped on this year. It's quite medieval looking isn't it?
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| Chicken wire covering the bottom and sides |
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| Then filled with sticks and logs, hugelkultur style |
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| Next I added a fluffy carbon layer using dried grass we had cut weeks prior |
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| Finished with goat manure and used coffee grounds |
.::*::.
One early November morning I filled a thermos with coffee and took out to delight in this flaxen gold landscape before the snows arrived the following night. My path took me through thick forests, lonely gravel roads and ghost towns, alongside rivers with magpies darting through the woodsmoked air, passing only a handful of vehicles the whole day. It felt as though I lived inside a painting- one done of egg tempera like Andrew Wyeth, Pieter Brueghel, and the medieval masters knew and used. This land is more than a place, it's a feeling, a visual and spiritual feast for the seeker of real nourishment, a medium through which I can more easily sense God- always calling me into a state of reverence, awe, and solace.
The first snowfall meant it was finally safe to burn the big brush pile we'd amassed over the summer of clearing trails, downed trees, and fallen limbs. So with the temperatures plummeting into the teens, we wrapped ourselves snug enough and went to set fire to it all. I loved working on and witnessing the land in her new coat of white, in this oldest of seasons before the cycle resets.
Then later in the evening, our fire turned into a little community event with friends gathered 'round!
And it was a joy to be out on this wild land, with mountains towering over us, stars aplenty overhead and howls echoing out from the nearby forests, with a roaring fire keeping us warm and the wood-bright light making honeyed lantern-like figures of us all in the moon-blue and bone-white landscape.
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| Photo by my friend Kerri |
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| Photo also by Kerri |
.::*::.
So, in mid-November, when we should've been hunkering down and settling into slower days and our own forms of hibernation, instead we were crossing those mountain passes with packed suitcases and making our way east, via the south and the west.
We waved good-bye to the Okanogan Highlands, in her twinkling new white adornment...
And greeted Idaho, then Montana...
Then down into Utah where the sun could be felt stronger coming through the vehicle windows. We followed the Mormon Trail and stopped to stretch our legs at Butch Cassidy's childhood home...
And then down into Arizona's red rock desert, where we lived for a short time many years ago, and here we spent some extra time just enjoying the solar charge on our skin and each other. Letting the light in.
And here is the secret spot we climbed up to one afternoon, which we aptly named Smith Mound, though I can't tell you why.
.::*::.
Now we find ourselves back east, where we're from, where the not-evergreened forests sing with oaken and hickoried voices, and the Sycamore, not the Birch nor Aspen, writes white lines through the dreary winter woods. Yet it's familiar here too, and sometimes when I'm out walking, the earthen smells roll up from the ground into my nostrils and I'm nearly knocked over by a sudden cyclone of nostalgia, as though I had just walked right through ghosts of a former life. It's strange to revisit one's original home and for it to feel both totally familiar, and at the same time not at all. A disorienting and curious thing indeed.
For now, this wick of words has been burnt to the wax. I leave you with the final draught from my mug: some films I've enjoyed lately, and a wish and a blessing that we manage to view the world through numinous eyes this season and beyond, no matter where or how we find ourselves.
Films:
Alone in the Wilderness (to watch the whole thing, you have to purchase the DVD)
