Comparisons, Emptiness

I’ve been back from Colorado for a week. Upon my return, while doing simple things like grocery shopping and dog walking, I became uncomfortably aware of an incredible cacophony assaulting my eyes and ears. It was, of course, no more than the noise and motion of a city surrounding me once again. I had rather expected the silence where we went to be deafening, but instead it just made more room for the sounds of birds and wind and water.

But before we get to the rest, I was meaning to give you a comparison, ask you all if you thought my quilt was a good representation of aspens. I was up in the heights among them again so I took a picture. If you haven’t been around aspens, they grow in groves at very high elevation (7000+ feet, I think). These particular ones were sunning themselves across the road from my cabin near the Continental Divide. I like aspens no matter the weather – they seem very graceful to me – but I did miss hearing the sound of the wind fluttering the leaves.

Again, it seems, my idea of peace will be tied up in an aspen grove, in the mountains, near running water. That very sort of quiet and happy memory, of sun and wind and water, is what prompted me to create my small quilt in the first place. It’s a good memory to have sewn.

High altitudes slow you down. They remove the distractions of cell phone and internet, for we had no signal, no cable where we were for a few days. Altitude also requires that you move rather slower than usual. Not an altitude for jogging if you usually live at sea level. At 10,000 feet, if you’re a flat-lander, you might very well run out of air before you finish an entire sentence.

I wish my camera had a better light sensor, because I’m always amazed at the colors I see in the forests and desert. I never feel as if I capture how the colors look to my eye, although I want to bring them home and find fabric that reminds me of them. The wash of reds and oranges and browns in a scrubby bush that grows along a river. The rust and deep green and silver of evergreen forests. The sudden inner pink sparkle of a rock split in half. The striations of limestone and sandstone where it has been cut away for a road. The gold and orange of dried flowers waiting for spring.

In large or empty places like northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, often cameras fail to capture the sense of where you are. You are left instead with occasional geese and bighorn sheep and moose–and good luck convincing them to be photogenic!  But at least they are subjects that will agree to fit entirely within your viewfinder, when the mountains to your right steadfastly refuse to captured in their entirety.

After my train trip through the Midwest, I mentioned my love of not only seeing the place I’m going TO, but also the places that are between me and there. The long road and I have always had a bond. I have seen an obscene number of the highways of this country. I have seen many small byways as well. I do not love them all, but I’m happy to visit most of them at least once.

I’d still prefer a train ride.

It’s hard, coming back to life, to maintain a sense of where I was, and how my shoulders decided not to live up there near my ears for a while, amid the busy day-to-day of everything. I envied the three who owned the cabins in which we stayed for their lack of distraction. I wondered if I could do that. It’s peaceful, yes. Would it become too remote without benefit of all my wires?  Would I become bored?  Does the constant sound of the wind over the mountains drive you crazy after a while?  I have no real idea what it would be like, so it’s all romantic notions, since my life is so far removed from there.

But it’s definitely nice to visit sometimes.

Monarch Season in Austin

There were a dozen fluttering on this bush all around me. Gorgeous!

(mostly) Wordless Wednesday

California and other stories

So what I was doing three weeks ago before things in my life got sidelined, derailed and permanently altered was trying to relax. Ironically enough. I was on vacation in California, seeing what there was to be seen and visiting my brother. Although I’ve been to 42 out of the 50 US states now, I’d mostly missed CA except for one trip to San Diego, but I was too young to really remember it. It turns out that California has a fair amount of spectacular in it, kinda like this:

If that’s not your cup of tea, perhaps you’ll like the quiet coastal lighthouse wreathed in fog just down the road.

I mean really, who wouldn’t like this sort of coastline? Even though I grew up near Texas beaches, there’s no comparison with this. The truth is that many Texas beaches are rather smelly, sad and dirty affairs due to all the offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t look like this. Or smell like this. Have I mentioned the gigantic and pungent eucalyptus trees near the coast? And the pine trees? It seemed like no matter where we went, it smelled like awesome.

Anyway, we went all over the place from San Francisco to Felton to Santa Cruz to Monterey to Big Sur and back up to Nevada City and Truckee and Lake Tahoe. We encountered quite a bit of wildfire in our travels, first the Lockheed Fire and then the Yuba Fire. I spent half the week with ash falling on me and smoke in the air. This, for example, was what I saw north of Big Sur near Carmel-by-the-Sea (cough cough hack hack).

Big Sur is beautiful and dramatic and slightly nerve-wracking, but overall much of that stretch of Highway 1 is quite peaceful, and there’s more farmland along the coast than I expected. A lot of beautiful vegetables that really made me want to cook quite desperately. When we got to Jeremy’s cabin in the Sierra Nevada, I cooked quite a bit, just to relax, because by that time we knew Audrey was really sick and we were upset at being so far away. In the end, I left my brother food for a week I cooked so much. The news also made me quite weepy about all animals, like this snoring/barking sea lion. They are really more like watery dog-like beings.

So did I mention Lake Tahoe is spectacular? My brother sat out and contemplated it one afternoon.

We did also spend time in San Francisco proper wandering all over the place from the Mission District up through the Castro then up Market to downtown, and up to the wharf and stuff. We treated ourself to Greens restaurant one night for some fine vegetarian cooking, which was quite easily the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life. When down in the Castro, after having some extraordinary coffee at Philz we sort of stumbled upon ImagiKnit, whereupon I purchased six skeins of Pima Fresca yarn (bulky pima cotton) from Queensland Collection in chambray. I wasn’t planning on that, but it was sooo pretty, and on sale … and as you can see, by that point I was weak. You see, ImagiKnit separates plant and animal fibers, and also labels stuff very clearly instead of just stuffing it all in. Usually I end up with itchy, red hands from picking things up to see what they are, and it was so enjoyable to go to a yarn shop without having an allergic reaction from handling wool.

It was great to see my brother, who I’m very close to, and neat to see his job. He does utility pole inspections in various guises, part of making sure the electric infrastructure in parts of California is operational, that they’ve cleared stuff out to avoid more fires, that nothing’s going to fall down and kill people or leave them without power. It’s neat. If sometimes dangerous for the enormous ants, unruly ranch animals, cantakerous rural folks, occasional cliff hiking and of course, the Very Large Splinters. Like this one.

I also got to see my nearly-three-year-old cousin, and her mom my first cousin, and her husband, and they are all very lovely and exuberant people who live in a lovely seaside community that most of us would give our left arms to live in. We just haven’t figured out places like this exist, and that you can really live there. They fed us, and sheltered us, and I’m afraid we were very upset and poor guests one night, so we’ll have to make up for that later.

So that, in a nutshell, was my vacation, which went awry halfway through, but was still quite memorable for both Jeff and I.  I’m sure it will pop up in future art/craft projects. And now I leave you with one last classically-Californian-sunset-but-seriously-it-can’t-really-be-that-pretty picture. Because really, it is that pretty.