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January 2006 Message from Dan
Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors:
Sunrise on January 1 at Windwalker, my property and cabin
at 8,300 feet along the east side of the Continental Divide
in Colorado, is at 7:21 A.M. Mountain Standard Time. Sunset
is at 4:46 P.M. MST.
Sunrise on Jan. 31 is at 7:09 A.M.; sunset is at 5:18 P.M.
Average January temperatures at Windwalker range between
a high of 35 degrees Fahrenheit to a daytime low of 15 degrees,
but “average” means little in the mountains. Christmas
Day 2005 showed a high in the low 60’s. Two weeks before
that, the temperature at 8 A.M. was at minus-17 degrees.
 All
homes need to be lived in to be maintained properly, especially
a home perched on the lee side of its own private mountain
above 8,300 feet, and during November and the first half of
December of this year I was away from Windwalker long enough
that I returned to find the furnace off – the blower
had failed – and the pipes and fixtures inside the
cabin frozen. This had never happened before. Sewer lines
had frozen during bad spells in previous winters, but never
the deeply buried and well-insulated pipes coming in. Never
had the plumbing inside the cabin at Windwalker frozen or
suffered damage. On December 15th I discovered that new taps
and shower fixtures and valves I’d just put in last
summer had shattered in my absence. When, this week, I finally
got the furnace fixed and the cabin warmed up to the point
I could investigate the water damage – waiting days
until an insurance adjuster could join me to assess the extent
of chaos – I opened the valve in the crawlspace to allow
water to flow into the cabin again so that we could find exactly
where pipes had cracked or burst and . . . nothing. No water
at all. If the pipes had frozen outside – uphill from
the cabin somewhere along the 150 yards or so between the
hilltop cistern and the cabin – well, I might as well
buy my own backhoe and start digging. It would be a long and
expensive 2006.
But Mike from a local well-service company (“local”
meaning 20 miles away) helped me confirm today that the problem
was in a bad float-sensor in the cistern at the top of the
hill, which had allowed the cistern to empty.
So – during my few weeks away from Windwalker, there
had been an unexplained power surge that had tripped all the
breakers (common during summer lightning storms but certainly
not during freezing weather), winds of over 100 miles per
hour, blizzards, temperatures down to –20, failure of
the furnace, freezing and damage to the pipes, and a cistern
failure.
As I write this, the plumbers – I’ve found it
cheaper just to adopt them – will be coming up soon
to start the expensive replacement of pipes, valves, and fixtures
throughout the cabin (especially in those hard to reach places
in the walls and floors.) And this comes at the end of a year
of major expenditures for Windwalker – building a dock,
repairs to the cabin, improvements to the cabin’s plumbing,
repairs to the vertical standpipe and culvert in the largest
pond, repairs to the well’s pump system, and replacements
and repairs to the huge wooden deck.
Why would any place be worth all this continued expense?
 Alpenglow
is one reason. Despite the fact that the winter solstice has
passed, the sun still rises at the latest hour of the year
during January. It also sets much earlier at Windwalker than
its official Jan. 1 setting time of 4:46 P.M. because the
high peaks to the southwest block the sun like a 6,000-foot-high
(higher, that is, than Windwalker’s elevation of 8,300
ft.) wall. Also, the Windwalker cabin is on the leeward (southeastern)
side of its own private little mountain. This is good in protecting
the cabin from the winds – which frequently reach 100
miles per hour so close to where the jet stream roars over
the fangs of the Continental Divide – but it means that
sunset comes even earlier at the cabin itself. To watch the
high peaks inflict their early sunset on the day, one has
to walk around the hill on Windwalker’s long gravel
drive or hike or snowshoe up the hill to the summit.
But there are foothills and even some actual peaks visible
to the east from the cabin – Twin Sisters and Ypsilon
are two serious mountains visible to the northeast –
and these come alive with alpenglow every evening. Alpenglow
occurs when rays of sunlight reflect back off higher peaks
into valleys and lower peaks already in twilight shadow, causing
the summits and sky and hillsides and the air itself to glow
with a pink radiance that is almost beyond the power of words
to describe. The effect is increased when there is fresh snow
on the ground.
 The
master bedroom at Windwalker has windows looking southeast
and a northeast wall of glass doors – making for chilly
sleeping in the depths of winter but well worth it for the
view year-round – and sunrise, viewed from beneath the
quilts, can be awe-inspiring.
In the early morning, even before the sun has visibly risen
above the foothills to the east of Windwalker, the sun striking
the high peaks to the west – Long’s Peak, at 14,255
ft. is the tallest – fills the hillsides, valleys, and
sky with alpenglow. Even before the sunlight directly strikes
the summits of Twin Sisters – visible from where one
huddles under a down comforter in bed -- its western slopes
are bathed in pink hues reflected from the sheer face and
high icefields of Long’s Peak, Mt. Meeker, and the other
higher peaks along the Divide. The entire world up at Windwalker
blushes for long moments at each sunset and sunrise.
Star-viewing is rewarding at Windwalker in January if one
is tough enough to stand out on the wind-lashed deck or hillside
long enough to do it. Once, after a reading I gave at the
public library in nearby Estes Park (the village at the entrance
to Rocky Mountain National Park), I met a married couple who
had both taught astronomy on the college level for years and
who had decided to retire to a cabin in a valley nearby specifically
for the fine viewing of the night sky here. It’s true
that the glow of the burgeoning Front Range – the sprawling
metropolis stretching along the foothills from Fort Collins
in the north, down through Denver to Colorado Springs 120
miles south – scatters more light into the sky every
year, but the foothills to the east of Windwalker block much
of that light, allowing for the clarity of night skies that
one rarely finds in the continental U.S. any longer.
Standing outside on any clear winter night, the Milky Way
stretching overhead from mountainous horizon to mountainous
horizon is so bright it seems a solid ceiling. In the winter
of 1996-97, when the Hale-Bopp Comet spent months moving across
the sky, I would hike the hills of Windwalker while throwing
a comet shadow on the snow.
Lying in bed in the master bedroom at Windwalker in January,
one can watch the inverted Big Dipper blazing in the north
above the hillside. From the guest room on the south side
of the cabin, Orion is visible after 9 p.m. I keep binoculars
in different rooms at the cabin, and from the guestroom bed
one can peer into Orion and make out the Great Nebula and
such first-magnitude stars as Rigel and Betelgeuse. Rigel
is 460 light years away but since it’s roughly 14,000
times brighter than our sun, it’s easy to see. Betelgeuse,
a red giant, has a diameter of more than 215 million miles
– greater than the diameter of Earth’s orbit around
our little G-type sun.
There are interesting meteor events at Windwalker every month
of the year, but in January one would have to hike to the
top of the hill and look northwest along the high peaks to
get the best views of the Quadrantrid meteor shower that reaches
its own peak around Jan. 3. It’s not uncommon, lying
in bed while dozing off on a winter night at Windwalker, to
be shocked awake by the blaze of an especially bright meteor
streaking above the pine trees on the shoulder of the hill.
The Perseid meteor showers around August 12th are often the
most dramatic (and almost certainly the warmest to watch while
sitting out on the deck.) I’ve counted up to 200 meteors
per hour from Windwalker’s deck.
People who don’t know Colorado usually imagine us buried
in snow from October through May, but they forget that the
state has about as many days of bright sunshine as St. Petersburg,
Florida. Down in the lowlands – say Denver’s paltry
altitude of 5,280 feet – temperatures in the winter
often hover around 50 degrees with a majority of sunny days.
(And sunlight in Colorado is a different sort of experience,
even as low as 5,280 feet and thus above a mere 30% of the
Earth’s atmosphere. Closer to heaven, at Windwalker’s
altitude of 8,300 feet, sunlight is a powerful presence indeed.)
Blizzards do blow in the mountains and snow does accumulate,
but the long private drive from the Peak-to-Peak highway into
the Windwalker cabin (the cabin is tucked out of sight on
the east side of its own little mountain and surrounded by
national forest on three sides) is free of snow more often
than not, and navigable by my 4-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser
most of the rest of the time. The reason is that most of the
drive lies along a long south-facing slope and the sunlight
burns away much of the snow there most days, even in January.
But in the valley and along the eastern and north-facing
slopes, the snow grows deep. I keep four sets of Vermont-ashe
snowshoes ready for longer strolls. One of the benefits of
winter is the ease of tracking the wildlife around Windwalker.
On a regular January day, walking just a mile or so around
the cabin, one will find tracks of mice, voles, rabbits, Albert’s
squirrels, fox, coyote, weasels, beaver, and – on occasion
– mountain lions. Because the winters are warming in
the Rockies as most other places, it’s now not uncommon
to find bearpaw prints even in the winter when the large animals
should be hibernating.
Occasionally, following such tracks along the edge of the
pine forest or down along the frozen ponds and valley stream
will show an entire drama of life and death that has played
out just hours or minutes earlier – rabbit tracks suddenly
lengthening as the rabbit began to run, then coyote tracks
– also far apart since the coyote is also running –
then an explosion of disturbed snow sometimes painted crimson,
with only a bit of bone or rabbit fur left behind.
Last spring – and the snow does remain in the valleys
into May – I found the hair and part of the spine of
an entire coyote along the snowed-over jeep track running
the length of the valley. A mountain lion and then smaller
predators had taken all the rest – flesh, muscles, bone,
skull – leaving only the hair and bits of vertebrae.
 It’s
easy to think that life is sleeping during the long nights
and howling arctic winds of winter up at Windwalker, but any
real acquaintance with the place soon shows you the truth
of the matter. Under the snow, life proceeds at a furious
rate. During winter thaws – the warm chinook winds can
melt three feet of snow in a day up here – and then
again in spring, one finds countless eskers, coiled and convoluted
lines of soil that look like gopher burrows but are really
solid strands of dirt moved by the thousands of burrowing
creatures making their way under the snow,moving the dirt
from in front of them to behind them, not burrowing under
the ground.
Some plants, such as kinnikinnik, remain green all winter
under the snow. The subnivean light levels are able to penetrate
the snow on sufficient wavelengths to allow for a little photosynthesis.
Some seeds germinate under six feet and more of snow while
certain buried sedges even put out new leaves in January.
And everywhere at Windwalker there are startling microclimates
– on a south-facing slope, in the lee of a small boulder,
you might find spring beauties putting out their white petals
in the middle of January.
January is an amorous month in the mountains. Beavers breed
in their lodges made of sticks and mud. Hiking past the beaver
ponds, one can see the heat from their bodies rising in ripples
from the six-foot-high heaps that are their lodges. Coyotes
breed from January to March. Their young are born in about
sixty days and venture from the dens about three weeks later.
Black bear cubs are often born in January, while their mothers
are dormant in their deep dens. Great horned owls do their
courting during this coldest and darkest of months. Rosy finches
flock by the hundreds.
 Even
grasshoppers can be found along the dry, south-facing slopes.
Well designed by evolution to be early Martian colonists,
the grasshoppers have elevated levels of glycol in their system
in January – a natural antifreeze – and seem to
grow drunk on it. They provide food for the foxes, coyote,
and owls.
Gray jays and mountain chickadees will eat from your hand
when you stop to pull food from your pack while snowshoeing
or cross-country skiing.. (Be glad the Clark’s nutcrackers
from the other three seasons aren’t always around in
January. Those birds will throw you down on the ground and
go through your pockets for food.) Hiking west and higher
to the Divide, or east up Twin Sisters, you’ll probably
step on ptarmigans before you see them; the plump birds change
from a speckled gray in the summer – almost indistinguishable
from rocks – to pure white in the winter.
#
One reason I’m writing about Windwalker today is that
I’m considering putting it in a book I’m thinking
about writing – a strange little mainstream novel which
might bear the title Titus.
 I
rarely use my own surroundings as a setting for my stories
or novels; I’m more comfortable writing about Romania
or the arctic or another planet altogether. But if I do include
Windwalker in Titus, the place itself will be a character
– one of only three.
In Seamus Heaney’s essay “On W.B. Yeats and Thoor
Ballylee,” the poet writes about the earlier poet’s
identification with his tower home called Ballylee, a Norman
keep in the Barony of Kiltartan dating from the 13th or 14th
Century, descending from the great line of the de Burgos and
registered in The Book of Connaught at the end of
the 16th Century. Yeats bought the place for 35 pounds from
“a government body called, with an unromantic grimness,
the Congested Districts Board.”
Yeats purchased the tower in 1916 and didn’t move in
with his wife (George!) until 1919, and even then just used
Ballylee as a sort of summer house between 1919 and 1928.
By 1928, Yeats’s health had begun to fail, so he quit
returning to the drafty keep even in the summer. But, as Heaney
explains – “The tower had now entered so deeply
into the prophetic strains of his voice that it could be invoked
without being inhabited. He no longer needed to live in it
since he had attained a state in which he lived by
it.”
Heaney continues –
“To call it a summer home, then, is really slightly
off the mark, since it is obvious that the tower’s first
function was not domestic. Here he was in the place of writing.
It was one of his singing schools, one of the soul’s
monuments of its own magnificence. His other addresses were
necessary shelters, but Ballylee was a sacramental site, an
outward sign of an inner grace. The posture of the building
corresponded to the posture he would attain. The stone in
all its obstinancy and stillness, the plumb bulk and resistant
profile of the keep, the dream form and the brute fact simultaneously
impressed on mind and senses, all this transmission of sensation
and symbolic aura made the actual building stones into touchstones
for the work he would aspire to. And that work would have
to be a holding action in the face of old age, death and the
disintegrating civilization which he, ‘Heart smitten
with emotion’, perceived in its decline.”
Yeats’s perception that he was observing the disintegration
of civilization, the actual end of his world, was not in error.
As Seamus Heaney reminds us, the Easter Rising in Dublin had
occurred just a few months before Yeats’s negotiations
for Ballylee with the Congested Districts Board in 1916. That
same summer of 1916, the Battle of the Somme – which
many people, myself included, consider the end of the relatively
innocent old world before this modern Age of Blood –
was fought. In 1917, the Russian Revolution broke out. From
1919 onward, Ireland was being consumed in more blood as its
war of independence raged everywhere.
In 1928, his last year at Ballylee, Yeats published his volume
of poems entitled The Tower and had conceived its
sequel, The Winding Stair, which would follow in
1933. Seamus Heaney writes – “In the title poem
of The Tower volume, Thoor Ballylee is a podium from
which the spirit’s voice is resolutely projected.”
Rilke had written in 1922 in his third sonnet to Orpheus
that singing is being. That is, poetic song is reality –
creates reality – much in the way that we now know that
the Aborigines believe they sing the world into being as they
go.
In this way, some writers reflect their surroundings by writing
about them, while others sing them into being, creating
a place that may have existed only geographically or historically
before the poet’s eye or the novelist’s pen sing
them into deeper being. I think of this frequently when –
during one of my many driving trips across the nation –
I stop in Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri. The next
time I go to London, I want to visit 221B Baker Street, although
I know that whatever physical things I find there will be
only pale reflections of the deeper fictional reality that
was sung into being for that address.
When civilization, as you value and remember it, is unraveling,
and when you feel that both your own body and the world you
were born into is coming apart at an equal pace, a high place
– a sort of tower – is not a bad position from
which to be an honest witness for such disintegration. My
possible-novel’s character Titus may be just such a
man who has seen enough, learned enough, lost enough, felt
enough, been honest witness enough, to send him seeking out
a high place to view the final twilight-alpenglow days of
a waning world.
This is Yeats’s peroration in the title poem of The
Tower –
Now shall
I make my soul,
Compelling it to
study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of
body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil
come –
The death of friends,
or death
Of every brilliant
eye
That made a catch
in the breath –
Seem but the clouds
of the sky
When the horizon
fades;
Or a bird’s
sleeping cry
Among the deepening
shades.
One of the deepest sadnesses in this passage bears on the
death – in reality of person passing or in failed relationships
as real and painful as physical death – “of every
brilliant eye that made a catch in the breath.”
But in a later Yeats’ poem, “The Man and the
Echo,” we are made to understand that the much-vaunted
isolation of the poet in his tower – or upon his hill
– is helpless against what Heaney calls “the unaccommodated
cry of suffering nature.”
But hush,
for I have lost the theme,
Its joy or night
seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk
or owl has struck,
Dropping out of
sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit
is crying out,
And its cry distracts
my thought.
And now I have to go to see if the plumbers have come so
that walls can be torn out, floors ripped up, pipes and valves
replaced, and Windwalker made habitable for the remaining
days and long, clear, cold nights of January.
A Happy and Thoughtful New Year to you all.
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