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"Tomorrow," my father said to me over lunch. "We'll let the brooks come up today and tomorrow we'll see what we see."
It seemed an eternity away but when the following morning arrived, the earth bathed in bright sunlight and gentle, north wind, my young mind was acutely aware that it had actually come rather fast. That perhaps it had come too fast. I distinctly remember looking at my father's jeans while we dug worms together, somehow understanding that one day too soon mine would be the same size.
It was a difficult sensation to shake, this feeling that time's inevitable passage led full-throttle in one direction, and while I looked out over hill farms overgrown with meadowsweet and red osiers on our drive west across Lowell Mountain, my gaze was drawn to a horizon of Jay Peak. I knew that by the time we reached its foothills this ride would seem no longer than a single blink and that even the excitement surrounding our expedition to a new stream – anticipation that would ordinarily draw out time while I waited impatiently – wasn't sufficient to slow our advance. When we parked along a dirt road still wet in the shade from yesterday's rain, I couldn't entirely remember how we'd gotten there.
In front of us was a great berm of gravel blocking our way, dumped by a crew of men working on an iron bridge a few hundred feet the other side. My father chatted with them, remarking on the steel plate attached to one end of the small span with the names of the Westfield, Vermont selectmen engraved along with the year, 1928. Like most Vermont bridges, this one was rebuilt a year after the November floods of '27, and on this day, 54 years later, was getting a face lift. On the upstream side, lay Snider Brook, cascading down from the spine of the Green Mountain Range, water tinged the color of clayey soil like the bark of the beech trees growing from its banks.
My father and I walked upstream half a mile before we started fishing, putting enough distance between us and the road below to escape the most easily accessed portion of Snider and water that had, in 1981 when plenty of people still fished for brook trout, likely already seen its share of foot traffic during the spring. The woods were full of birdsong. A white throated sparrow called from a boggy seep of dense spruce, blue jays chortled on a hardwood ridge south of us, and a Cooper's or sharp shinned hawk screamed incessantly, his disapproval of our intrusion upon his world coming in peels of shrill shrieks. All around us the woods were bursting with new life, but where lightning had split a maple the summer before the leaves on the half that had suffered more damage were already a light pink, the first ones to preview autumn. In their hypnotic sway, I believed that I could see the midway of county fairs, jack-o'lanterns, a morning of snow, and the silent ascension of winter wood smoke when our thermometer showed barely a nub of mercury.
The fishing was superb. In every hole that should have held a trout we caught at least one, sometimes two or three. We plucked them out of swift riffles, from beneath cut banks where spring high water had eroded lairs under the exposed roots of leaning spruce, and from the downstream side of polished, granite boulders flecked with mica and feldspar. As the light of mid-day, our supply of worms, and the size of the stream all diminished together, we came to a dog-leg bend pool that my father pointed to with the tip of his bamboo rod before handing it to me to fish on my own.
In the woods, you never go under anything you can go over, and you never go over anything you can go around. It was the adage of my namesake, the lifelong outlaw and woodsman, Jake Blodgette, and my father had preached it since I was old enough to accompany him. It was also the furthest thing from my mind as I leapt over a waist-high log, landing awkwardly on the other side in a pile of softball-sized stones. I felt my left knee buckle, gravity yanking me downward with the force of some unseen demon, as eager to pull me underground as I'd been to get to the brook.
"Hop right up," my dad said as I began to cry. Like most fathers of that era, he subscribed to the theory that the best way for people to heal – particularly young boys – was to deny pain.
I pulled myself onto my feet and took a couple of tentative steps.
"Look at this," he said, and as the world came into focus through drying eyes, I saw him pointing to a great hunk of quartz sticking out of the ground. It was more clear than milky, covered in places with dark-green moss and lichen, bare in others where its translucent surface revealed the depths of the stone, the flares of light and prismatic fractures locked inside like entire miniature galaxies.
As soon as I realized I wasn't seriously hurt, I began digging at its sides, clawing away fallen leaves, peeling back damp dirt thick with the hair-like roots of vegetation. I made it down eight inches or so before larger roots halted my excavation then asked my dad if he could help me dig it up and perhaps, if it wasn't too large, carry it out for me. I'd collected rocks as far back as I could remember, and this would have been a fine centerpiece.
My father placed one of his boots against the quartz and shoved hard, and when the stone refused to tremble shook his head.
"It would take a team of oxen to haul this out of here," he said, though I wasn't convinced. I'd seen the earth lay its claim to stones before while chiseling pieces of chert and pink granite out from under our front porch - my winter pastime when that was Vermont's only bare ground - amazed at the grip with which dirt could hang on. He gave it another half-hearted shove and again said, "A team of oxen," but I marked the stone's location, near the log I'd jumped over, beneath a three-finger-thick white birch, believing one day I'd come back alone and, as my father had said before this first trip to Snider, see what I see.
Upstream, above the bend where any trout there would have seen me walking off my injury and spooked, just below where Snider split, one fork coming from the north and another, slightly smaller branch joining from the south, I fished a final pool. It was a deep run flanked by alders and a camel's back boulder dividing the current, and I caught a brook trout almost ten inches long out of it. The largest fish of the day, we would have kept this trout with no questions asked, but just as I removed the hook from its upper jaw I was overcome with a sensation of dread. I peered into the woods across the brook where a dead animal larger than a dog but smaller than a bear lay draped over a rock, its skin stripped of fur, the scent of decay wafting toward me. The trout splashed back into the brook as I raced toward where my dad sat watching.
"There's a dead animal up there in the woods," I whispered. "I think it's a dire wolf."
I knew even as I said it that it was unlikely that one of the animals from my picture book of extinct mammals had reappeared here, more than ten thousand years after it last walked these mountains, but I had no better explanation for what I'd seen.
Instinctively, my father moved his body between me and whatever had frightened his young son and said, "Whatever it is, it can't hurt you. We'll go look together, but you let me go first."
I didn't want to look again, but I liked the idea of waiting alone in the woods while my father investigated even less. Reluctantly, I placed my feet inside the larger tracks from his and eased along behind him. When we reached the place where my trout had escaped we stopped and both looked across the brook into the forest. As far as we could see, which is never terribly far in Northern Vermont woods, there was no sign of death.
"In the scheme of things," my father said, "it wasn't very long ago when our sense of foreboding probably help keep us alive. I'm certain that you saw something here. And I wouldn't want to be a dire wolf going up against you." He patted my back, but I couldn't meet his eyes. I toed at a skunk cabbage plant, bending its large, ribbed leaves toward the brook.
As we moved away from the stream to hike back among hardwood trees on its north bank, my dad talked about the importance of trusting our eyes. He asked me if I would believe it if I saw a polar bear stroll across our path, and quietly I said that I would. He laughed and said that he would, too, but that he'd hope it wouldn't see him.
In the early afternoon, the woods were quiet and the breeze was still cool, a scent on it like cut corn in the fall. Again I had the disconcerting sense that time was moving very fast, compounded when we stopped on a ridge covered with pink lady's slipper flowers. As the heads of these large, wild orchids bobbed and swayed, I wasn't sure whether I'd seen them before – in dreams when my mind brought me on occasion to magical places – or knew that like the quartz boulder I would one day see them again. I stared at a flower until I was forced to blink, feeling as though my feet at that precise moment straddled the distance between a young boy and a young man. Further, beyond my small, rubber boots, distant things that may have been and future things yet to come were both as tantalizingly out of reach as the center of the rock we'd left beside the brook.
On our ride home, as Juice Newton sang Queen of Hearts over our scratchy, AM radio, I remember looking at my father while he drove, thinking his feet easily reached the pedals while mine, for the moment, barely touched the floorboards. I looked out my window at the fields on top of Lowell Mountain before I saw anything else.
My dad and I fished Snider at least two dozen more times prior to our last excursion there shortly before I graduated from high school. I don't remember much of note from that trip except that I was consciously walking slowly enough for my dad to easily keep up and that we didn't get many trout. All across Northern Vermont the brook trout fishing had tapered off, dissolving with my boyhood as though its appearance on the map of time served only the purpose of yielding great memories to a boy and his dad. Purpose enough, I believed.
I asked my father a couple of times during my early years in Montana if he and his beloved dog, Outlaw, had made it over to Snider in the spring, and he answered no, that a flood rivaling the one of 1927 had ravaged Vermont in 1996, leaving its brooks straight and wide, obliterating the bends and cover brook trout needed. I didn't doubt it, but when my mother confided in me that there were "special" places my father and I had fished together that he refrained from going to without me it made more sense. During my short visits to Vermont, I realized there were places that I avoided for the same reason.
And then one morning last October, back in Vermont to photograph the fall colors, on a dawn that broke clear after a night of rain, not unlike the one on which my father and I had first fished Snider, I decided it was time to go get that chunk of quartz.
Forty minutes later I parked next to a bulbous, galvanized culvert, the modern, more-efficient, if-not-uglier replacement to the iron bridge of 1928. There was no plaque naming the Westfield selectmen who had served in 1996, and I wondered if somewhere downstream in the tangled wreckage of broken trees and boulders I could find that original plate.
Leaving that search for another time, I hiked upstream under a canopy of colorful leaves, through dense, wine-red stands of hobblebush, around clumps of balsam fir where caribou moss grew ankle deep, and in the shadow of granite glacial erratics larger than pickup trucks. The tops of these boulders provided elevated perches for yellow birch, sinewy roots spiderwebbing down the bare rock, groping for soil below. I parted the pale-yellow, oversized leaves of moose maple, their fuzzy undersides still damp, heard the distant flush of a ruffed grouse, and once stopped to look at a fresh, running deer track, splayed hooves digging through crimson maple leaves.
When, after what seemed an impossibly short time, I stood where Snider Brook divided into nearly-equal parts, I slung off my pack and sat down in a patch of sun and closed my eyes, listening to the rush of water over rock. This time, the only sense of unease I had came in the recognition that any trace of such was as lost to the years behind me as the dire wolf was to this world, and that the millennia between his footfalls here and the decades between mine were both, on a universal scale, immeasurably small.
"Let's see what we see," I said out loud as I started downstream toward where the quartz lay. It was easy to find, jutting from the earth near a white birch larger through than my upper leg, and before I began pulling it from the ground I paused, my hands tracing the exact places where they had long ago. And then I gripped a corner of rock, dug in my heels, and pulled a hundred-pound stone up out of the hole it had laid in since it washed out from under a north-bound glacier.
Not quite a team of oxen, I thought as I smiled and rolled the quartz into my large frame pack, one that had carried plenty of loads of elk meat this heavy over more difficult country in Montana. The downhill walk, one again punctuated by the silence of afternoon woods, passed as swiftly as the years between my visits to Snider seemed to have. When I wedged the stone – lichen side up – under the memorial bench in the Irasburg cemetery with the dates of my dad's life carved on top, I wondered if what had frightened me many years earlier was some innate understanding that the ways of the world lead us all toward where I now rested, my forearms scratched by the sharp edges of clear stone. Maybe my nine-year-old mind created the dire wolf – an animal known to me to be long gone – because it was an easier way to begin understanding our own mortality. I sat on the bench while Canadian clouds blew fast into Vermont, lost in thoughts of changing seasons, ending eras, and the haunting possibility that I'd never see the upper reaches of Snider Brook again. But then, as cold raindrops began landing all around, I knew that I would. At least once more.
One day before my forty-seventh birthday this June, at the height of Vermont's apple blossom (and black fly) season, I started up Snider with my camera and 200mm Nikon macro lens. I wanted to photograph lady's slippers – to capture some of these beautiful flowers that, as my friend and Vermont author, Garret Keizer, so aptly stated, appear as out of place in the North Country woods as a Tahitian dancer. Unlike the piece of quartz, I had only a rough idea of where I'd seen them growing 37 years ago, somewhere on the north side of the stream.
Two hours and three applications of 100% DEET insect repellant later, I was beginning to wonder if, on a year when spring had arrived later than usual, I was too early. I'd found faded, red trillium, Solomon's seal, foam flower, blue and yellow violets, flowering skunk cabbage, and wild strawberries but hadn't located a single orchid. I'd zigzagged back and forth between the edge of the brook and a high, hardwood ridge to the north, covering what felt like several miles. At the base of a knoll where a grove of tall hemlocks provided much-welcomed shade, I leaned against an old tree, its fissured bark green with its own forest of moss, and guzzled twenty ounces of water, tipping the bottle straight up to make sure I got the very last drops.
The lady's slipper at my feet had to have been there when, a few moments before, I nearly set my camera bag on it. A plant that takes ten years before showing the world its first flower couldn't have grown in the span of a few seconds. Still, I looked at it suspiciously and then back over my shoulder, realizing that I was out of earshot of Snider, not entirely sure how far from the brook I'd walked. As I positioned my tripod for a photo, I noticed that there were many more, each, including those in deep shadows, with a wondrous, phosphorescent glow – a hypnotic luminance that drew my gaze from one to another, leading my eyes down a lighted path toward where a twin pair grew side by side.
I spent at least an hour photographing these orchids, one growing near a maple seedling, another against a backdrop of ferns, still more sprouting from the litter of fallen hemlock needles, vibrant color on a floor of browns. While half the black flies in Northern Vermont feasted on the back of my neck and the sun crept higher on a day not far from the longest of the year, I thought about how my visits to Snider Brook had served as place-markers in my life and how, in a way, they'd come full circle. For a time, as I moved between flowers, sure each was prettier than the last, I felt a little of the same wonder I had as a child who believed he'd stumbled into a place from his dreams. I felt that the distance between man and boy, at least in this spot, was once again remarkably small.
It's the damnedest thing. When I left the lady's slippers and hiked to the brook, crossing a pair of ridges I'd inadvertently placed between us, I realized that there was a particular photo I hadn't taken. I wanted a shot at the close focus limit of my lens, filling the entire frame with the throat of one of the orchids. Well, what's a few more fly bites and twenty minutes worth of retracing my steps, I thought? Easily enough done. I soaked my baseball hat in the cold water of Snider, slapped it back on my head dripping wet, and headed north.
In half an hour, I knew I'd walked further than the flowers. I cut back at a slight angle, searching for the tops of the hemlock through holes in the forest. When I heard the brook, I stopped and, after another small adjustment, walked north again.
I grid searched for two hours, eventually arriving on the dirt road where I'd parked without seeing a single lady's slipper or finding the grove of hemlock. It didn't seem possible that I could walk to the exact place where I'd seen a single stone when I was a child but couldn't find a group of trees half an acre in diameter that I'd visited just a few hours ago.
It was clouding over when I struck out one more time along the route that I'd taken in the morning. Here and there I found my boot prints, and once where a moose had put its large hoof over the top of one. In places where I couldn't see tracks, there were often landmarks I recalled – a shattered boulder covered in ferns, the twisting trunk of a maple that snaked between a pair of larger yellow birch, and a dry seep where brilliant, fallen leaves coated every stone. I walked until the land tipped abruptly upward, surging toward the top of the Green Mountains and then, sitting on a piece of quartz that truly would require at least a team of oxen to budge, I reviewed the photos I'd taken earlier, relieved to see that they were indeed there on my camera.
I have a good memory and am good in the woods, but I don't have any explanation for why I couldn't find those flowers again. I don't believe that they vanished into thin air any more than I believe that a dead dire wolf presented itself to me nearby when I was nine. And yet, I'd seen both and had also seen them disappear.
"Trust your eyes," I heard my father saying as I climbed into my car, shoving the driver's seat back a bit.
Moments later, as Snider fell out of sight over a ridge behind me, and with the uneasy feeling that I was putting more distance than that between me and the brook, I caught myself singing to the Sherbrooke, Quebec radio station that had, when I crested a height of land, tuned back in.
"Midnight. And I'm a-waiting on the twelve-oh-five."
*Some of these photos are available now under my New Releases section, where you can also view other new spring pictures*]]>
I take a step, supported for a moment by my snowshoe, then drop a foot into deep powder. I was here less than eight months ago but today, inching my way across this snowscape so tightly gripped by winter, I wonder if the wildflowers I remember seeing blossomed in some pleasant dream. I have been following the tracks from a pair of backcountry skiers, but they veer off toward a corniced ridge above me, leaving only this unbroken expanse of snow ahead where it's easy to imagine that the land I traverse looks precisely as it did five thousand years ago.
I pause to catch my breath where a ragged stand of wind-battered white bark pine cluster across my path, linking slender arms and bowing toward the east like parishioners kneeling before the omnipotent gods of weather. I thrust one of my trekking poles down through the snow, searching for the frozen ground below to support myself on, but it plunges easily to its handle without resistance. I've got almost sixty pounds of camping and photography gear in my pack and can feel every ounce of it in my quads as my legs splay apart in a snowshoe stance I'm not accustomed to or comfortable with. As late afternoon becomes early evening, the mountains on the northern horizon, below whose peaks I'll spend the night, don't seem any closer than they did half an hour ago. It's a tough way to get a picture I think as I lean into the slope and plow ahead.
It may be difficult photography, but this certainly constitutes social distancing. It's been less than a century and a half since the first human beings laid eyes on this basin during winter. For ten thousand years before that, while nomadic hunters ventured into these mountains at the height of summer to hunt big horn sheep, no one came during the season of snow. And with good reason. I haven't seen so much as a squirrel track, heard the throaty call of a high-soaring raven, or gotten the impression that a single living thing resides within three miles of me. I suppose that somewhere in one of these clumps of trees there's a band of chickadees, and perhaps a pine martin has shuffled through within the past month, but if I had to subsist on what lives here, even with the world's most modern weapons at my disposal, I'd be dead inside two weeks.
I climb fifty yards and then pause again, my lungs working hard for air. I'm approaching 10,000 feet above sea level, and I can tell there isn't as much oxygen here. Resting, I look up at the sky where clouds blend with wispy tendrils of snow blown from deep drifts, wraiths dancing into the heavens to celebrate the coming of night. The forecast calls for clear skies, but here in the mountains that's always a coin toss. Right now, I'll settle for the wind dying down. It whips along from behind me, turning the hood of my sweatshirt, damp with breath and sweat, to concrete.
Onward and upward. The theme of my time in the Rocky Mountains, though my pace isn't what it was 20 years ago. A step at a time I tell myself, marking progress by passing a dead tree, a patch of blueish, sculpted snow in a miniature bowl, and a hulking boulder whose south-facing side stands bare, the only sign that eventually spring may find this land. It will I know, as surely as these mountain clouds begin turning pink and my shadow grows, but it's difficult to fully understand that it will occur in this lifetime, a mere couple of months from now.
Twilight. The pink glow above imparts similar color to the snow below, and for a few brief moments the world stands in pastel hues of salmon and blue. And then, in what is the best proof yet that winter is not interminable, I find that I'm at my camping site, tall peaks protecting me on three sides, dim memories of a summer pond here as abstract as the notion that all land may once have been buried beneath a globe-encircling sea.
I use a small, plastic shovel to clear away the snow inside the tree well of a massive white bark pine, digging down a few feet to the bare ground where the husks of squirrel-emptied cones lie deep over frozen earth. My tent is roughly the same shape – and size – of a giant silk moth's cocoon, and by the time I get it set up and inflate my narrow bed pad my hands are growing numb. I tear open packet after packet of handwarmers, shaking heat into them, dropping a pair into a small bag that holds my camera, cramming the rest into my sleeping bag, which I crawl into wearing a heavy coat and insulated pants. I set the alarm on my phone for 2:50am, choke down a cold protein bar, drink a few ounces of water, and close my eyes.
Silence. It's the most pervasive trait of winter wilderness, more so even than cold, though it is certainly that here, too. I watch my breath ascend toward the small vent in my tent's ceiling, rising like the fingers of wind-blown snow I saw earlier. I close my eyes, imagining the paintbrush and asters that I saw the last time I was here, following the flight of a checkerspot butterfly as it tries to decide which blossom to land on next, staring after it until it is a dark speck in an ocean of color.
My alarm's chime a few hours later signals that it's time to do what I least feel like: relinquish my small warmth for the chill of the night. I sit up slowly, pulling my sleeping bag around me, fumbling through my pack for my Jet Boil stove that will, in under two minutes, boil the water I'm going to make instant coffee with. I hear the hiss of gas, the pop of the ignitor, and feel the warmth of flame. When my headlamp shows bubbles churning in the water, I drop in a handful of coffee, its aroma taking me back to my grandparents' house when I was a boy and would get up early to talk with my grandfather before the rest of our family rose. I sip it slowly, cooled with a pinch of snow, feeling its heat course through my body, lending sufficient ambition to fight into my boots and crawl outside.
At high elevation on a clear night, there are so many stars visible that the sky has three-dimensional depth. It's dizzying to look at sometimes, a thick, pile carpet pulsing and shimmering, vibrating with light billions of years old. I fumble with my snowshoes, their plastic straps protesting against manipulation, ratchet them onto my boots, and, after slinging my pack onto my shoulders, trudge thirty yards into an opening which, in July, will be open water. Again I use my shovel, digging down this time to ice as dark as the deepest folds of the sky, where I set the legs of my tripod. I attach my camera to my equatorial mount, align it with Polaris, begin its tracking rotation - its imperceptible movement following the rise of the sky - and start taking three-minute, portrait-oriented exposures. Facing east, I work north to south, overlapping the images by nearly 50%, watching the core of our Milky Way galaxy pull itself up from behind a horizon of rocky peaks. An hour passes quickly, and before any hint of dawn shows, I retake the same series of images, this time with my motorized equatorial mount turned off, allowing my camera to focus sharply on everything in the foreground. During editing, I'll blend the two sets of photos together, the first with a sharp sky and slightly-blurred foreground, the second with acuity reversed.
By the time my shutter opens for the final time, my feet are cold and my hands have been begun to shake. I disassemble my mount, packing it and my camera securely inside my pack, work my tripod's legs back into their contracted positions, and plow back to my tent where I make a second cup of coffee, its warmth at least as welcome as the first.
I consider packing my tent and beginning the trek out now, still more than an hour before the sun will rise, but my sleeping bag is more inviting. I unzip it, drape it over me like a silky shawl, and look up at the sliver of sky I can see through the tent's vent. It's ironic I think that the closest things down here to what I see up there are buried deep beneath me. Down below the pine cones, under Montana's thin layer of soil, further inside than the obsidian shards left by hunters thousands of years ago, deep down below the roots of these tall mountains where the genetic material of this planet bubbles much as it did a few billion years ago. It seems that there must be some cosmic connection between the stars and the inner Earth, between the near and the very distant, between all seasons at all times. I'm thinking about it as the checkerspot comes into view over a patch of showy asters.
"Where did you come from?" I hear myself say out loud, smiling as I drift into sleep at the realization that I can no more control my voice than I can my wonder.
** You can see the photograph I took, Winter's Glow, here, and also its summer counterpart, taken from the same place in August, Celestial Rainbow.]]>
Perhaps my thoughts turn here because I'm heading to Yellowstone National Park to photograph bison, an animal that, for all intents and purposes, has disappeared from its native range. Or, maybe the snowed-over cat tracks that I saw in the alley by my truck before dawn stirred memories of my childhood pet, Lynx, who disappeared about this time of year almost forty years ago, the same recognition of a slightly longer day igniting his urge to wander. Whatever their origin, these thoughts of the lost are unsettling, and disperse minimally when a gust of wind catches me off guard on top of Bozeman Pass, shivering my pickup toward I-90's passing lane, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. As I crab into the wind and let off the accelerator, allowing gravity to roll me along between mountains still in night and a prairie hinting of day, they return full force.
Nelson Powers was a bull of a man, crashing through life like the proverbial china shop. He lived at the tail end of Northern Vermont's reign of "characters," unique personalities as varied as the March weather, whose collective whole made the Northeast Kingdom, where I grew up, a paradox of wild and fragile.
Nelson had no qualms about walking into downtown Newport's traffic, with all the regard for oncoming cars of an Essex County bull moose, to flag down someone he recognized – or thought he recognized – to see if they had an extra five-dollar bill on them. He might call my father who, before he began writing full-time, worked for a social outreach organization charged with helping people like Nelson secure, and more rarely hold, employment, in the middle of the night to ask him if he'd heard a new song by the Doobie Brothers. Or, on less frequent occasions, might spend a few nights in the county jail for slapping his father, a perpetually-tired and frail-looking man, around the house.
"Can you tell me why you did it?" the local judge would ask, accepting Nelson's answer of, "No, but I'm sorry," as equally valid statements, then trying to weigh the pained expression of the son against the bruised face of the father to come up with a fair sentence.
Each summer my dad would bring Nelson to our Irasburg home a few times to stack wood, and I'd sometimes help, mindful to work toward the other end of the pile, where I was less likely to be struck by flying pieces of white ash, yellow birch, and rock maple, hurled end over end by the hulking man in cut-off jean shorts and canvas sneakers synched to huge, sockless feet. We talked while we worked, or more accurately Nelson talked and I listened, soaking up details of his exploits, none more likely to have occurred than any of the Greek myths my dad read to me, none remotely appropriate to share with a twelve-year-old boy. Sometimes in the middle of a tale, usually involving a "lady friend," he'd pause and say, "Hey, hey, hey. Go get me a glass of that lemonade." I'd do it as quickly as I could, eager to hear the story play out, but as often as not, after rivulets of liquid had poured from both corners of Nelson's mouth as he drank, he'd switch gears to music or late-night TV. If I asked about the previous conversation, he'd shake his head and narrow his eyes, signs of agitation building toward anger, as though whatever he'd been talking about was locked behind doors he could never quite open up again.
We've had a largely open winter here in Montana this year, and after two tough ones I'm ready for a reprieve. The Yellowstone River Valley, between Livingston and the entrance to the park in Gardiner, is mostly bare. The deer and elk that I saw here last year, driven down from higher elevations by deep snow and record cold, don't line the highway this morning, allowing me at least ten miles an hour faster progress.
Across the river, beyond the Absaroka Mountains, the sun is feeling for the horizon, the sky rushing through shades of metallic grey, tinged along the edges of darker clouds with pale pink. By the time I reach Emigrant fifteen minutes later, all signs of night have slithered over the Gallatin Divide on the opposite end of the celestial dome, banished for two full minutes longer today than yesterday.
At the mouth of Yankee Jim Canyon, where the Yellowstone is pinched between high walls of igneous rock, I spot a pair of trumpeter swans, tucked out of the current in a backwater. The sun is almost to them, their feathers glowing a soft, bluish-white, the color of snow cornices above them in the Absaroka. It would make a pretty picture, but, weighing the likelihood of getting close enough against the much greater possibility of spooking them, I continue driving south, reminding myself that all things I see in the wild are worthwhile whether or not I photograph them.
In Gardiner, a quiet town this time of year compared to its summer self when thousands of park visitors pass through each day, a young bull elk has flopped down in the yard of a motel. It surveys the town with regal expression, another decent photo that again I opt not to pursue. I've got bison on my mind, and still the disconcerting thoughts of the disappeared.
Nelson lived with his parents in a small house whose side yard ended in alders along the edge of one of Vermont's northernmost brooks. Fed by Canadian spring water, it tumbled out of the foothills along the Quebec border and had, for the past ten thousand years or so, been home to brook trout. My dad and I were never sure whether it was simply this stream's proximity to Nelson's home that drew him to fishing or whether in that pastime, while immersed in the wild, he'd found a prescription for natural therapy – a measure of relief from a world whose fringes he danced with but whose inner workings never allowed him much solace. Whatever the origin of his love affair with angling, he pursued it with a passion that bordered on the obsessive, something both my father and I could fully relate to.
The three of us went fishing together on an early-July day in 1985 when summer had secured its hold on the Northeast Kingdom, dairy farmers racing to get their second cuts of hay in before evening thunderstorms, black flies filling the woods in a voracious search for blood, the cold waters of the trout streams I grew up on dropping lower.
Brook trout aren't a sophisticated fish. Their haunts, free from ice for less than half the year, aren't overflowing with food, dictating that when opportunity for a meal presents itself it can't be ignored.
"You can do almost everything wrong as long as they don't see you," my dad used to say,"but if they catch so much as a glimpse of your shadow the jig's up."
It was gospel truth, one of the few hard and fast rules of brook fishing, an edict we followed by crawling on our hands and knees nearly as much as walking upright. We would sneak, sometimes on our bellies, up to within a few feet of a promising-looking pool, then carefully lower a worm from the end of our long fly rods, rigged with monofilament, into the water. Thousands of times, on dozens of brooks, we were successful.
Nelson approached fishing with the same wrecking ball blitz and disregard for the norm that he employed against the rest of the world. In shorts and sneakers, he slipped and splashed down the middle of the stream, using a stunted spinning rod to whip his bait out in front of him, sometimes mere inches ahead of his feet. He seemed impervious to the discomforts of biting flies, wet clothes, and the scrape of dead spruce limbs which, where he was forced out of the brook by log jams, he crashed through in splintering shows of brute force.
At the end of our two-hour fish, Nelson Powers, who had defied every ounce of wisdom that my father and I had come by over our considerable time in the woods, had at least as many brook trout in his creel as we did. As we walked up a gravel road toward my dad's car a mile away, I watched tiger swallowtail and white admiral butterflies dip across our path while water and mud sprayed from Nelson's sneakers and he talked about wanting to see Chicago, a lawn mowing job he was considering accepting, and how the sun, even when it vanished behind clouds, was "still right up there in the sky."
Where the road hooked around cedar trees ringing a stagnant bog, we interrupted a blue heron's search for frogs. It flapped up over our heads and for a moment Nelson stopped talking, followed it with his eyes, and then spun toward my dad and said, "What do you think of Jesus Christ?"
"I think he had a lot of good ideas and would have liked seeing that heron," my dad said.
It's slow going inside Yellowstone National Park, creeping along a narrow road shouldered by the Gardiner River, then crossing that flow on a high bridge where I head due south into the deep shade of mature fir whose limbs shield the highway from sun, ensuring winter-long snowpack. On the horizon of the Blacktail Plateau, I spot the first groups of bison, cows and calves in small herds standing dark against a background of blowing snow. The bulls I seek will be further inside the park, another testament to an easy winter, so I keep driving.
There are more bison on the flats by Tower Junction, and the smell of sulfur channels down the Yellowstone River cut, wafting strong into my truck. Climbing away from the Yellowstone toward Lamar Valley, I notice the depth of roadside snow increasing. Here, in one of the coldest places in Wyoming, winters are always hard.
At the downstream end of the valley, before the land opens into seven miles of high, rolling sage, I pull over, strap on snowshoes, and set my sights on a spear-shaped opening on a ridge a couple of miles off the road. A favorite feeding place for lone bull bison, it is crisscrossed with tracks, evidence that I'm headed in the right direction.
It's still near enough the end of a successful elk season – many miles with heavy packs behind me - so that the weight of my Nikon with its attached 500mm telephoto is comfortable. I've got it riding tight to my back in a form-fitting, padded case, a solid tripod ratcheted to the outside. Somewhere overhead a pair of ravens croak, but apart from their throaty calls there is no other sound, save the crunch of snow under my shoes.
There were once 30 million bison in North America. We took care of that in short order I think, as my progress slows up a steep, finger ridge. The juggernaut of westward expansion reduced them to a single herd remaining right here in this park, the eradication of the Plains Indians, who relied on them for food, clothing, and shelter, in lockstep with their demise.
Under a dead white bark pine, a victim of modern climate change, I think about the ten years I spent working with Crow Indians on their reservation coal mine and the sobering words of Harold Male Bear regarding the bison.
"Imagine what would happen if tomorrow morning nothing that requires electricity – nothing from a cell phone, to a television, to a house light, to any type of electric motor, including car engines – ever worked again. That's how it was to us when we lost the buffalo."
Leo Good Luck explained that the current Crow Reservation, like many others in Montana, is a fraction of its original size, whittled down through varies "treaties," none of which benefited its residents. The road I drove earlier in the day, where I saw the pair of swans, more than 200 miles from where Leo and I had talked, was once part of the Crow world. Probably more recently than when this dead white bark burst from its parent's cone as a seedling.
Before I continue my upward trek, I reflect on some of the saddest stories from my time working with the Crow. The Little Light family whose car broke down on a remote stretch of road one winter night and whose bodies weren't found until the spring thaw. Men who were struck by vehicles on Interstate 90 that never stopped. Children whose dreams – whatever they might have been – morphed into steady drug use to cope with a world devoid of hope.
It's segregation under the guise of sovereignty, I think. Saying you can have your own nation, where you can make your own rules, until you misappropriate some federal funds and we come put you in jail.
I start walking again, wondering if I know the first thing about loss or disappearances.
My dad and I took a circuitous route home after we dropped Nelson off following our morning of fishing. "Riding the roads," we called it, the ubiquitous, rural-America pastime of putting on miles. We talked about Nelson's approach to fishing, my father recalling a story from his youth about watching a moose cross a stream in Quebec while fishing with his own father. Their Abnaki guide told him to cast right in as soon as the moose reached the far bank, and when my grandfather suggested the trout had probably spooked said that the fish aren't frightened of moose. A hefty catch on the first cast was proof enough for my dad, and he reasoned that Vermont's brook trout likely viewed Nelson more similarly to a moose than an otter.
As we cruised slowly along the web of gravel roads in Brownington, the town where I was born and spent my first four years, we both noticed that more pasture had been lost to first-generation woods. In one meadow, its piles of glacial stone, stacked five feet high by Depression-era farmers clearing space for grazing, were barely visible through tall meadowsweet, woody-stemmed asters, and flowering black-eyed Susan. Further along, another field already sported osiers and alders, a sign that no dairy cows had trod that land for five years.
"It's all changing," my dad said as we summitted a height of land overlooking Lake Memphremagog's South Bay. "I'm afraid that the world we're headed for won't have room in it for people like Nelson much longer."
"What do you think will happen to them?" I asked.
"They'll disappear," my dad said. "Drift away into history. In your lifetime, I doubt many people will remember the time when they existed. They'll go the way of the eastern catamount, the sap bucket, and the small, family farm."
Later that evening we played baseball together on the common in the center of Irasburg, my dad pitching balls to me until it was too dark to find all the ones I'd hit. I was thirteen years old, and he was throwing faster to me, the balls I connected with traveling further. The infield was laid out to Little League specs, the pitching rubber 45 feet from home plate, so I'd moved 15 behind it, closer to the chicken-wire backstop, to approximate the distance from the mound in Babe Ruth, the league I'd graduated to that summer. More than once, as chimney swifts, nighthawks, and then bats tested the air overhead, I understood that I'd never again stand at home plate on that field.
The bison I've come to Yellowstone to photograph is grazing his way toward the top of a small knoll, brushing snow from buried grass with his prodigious head. He swings it back and forth, clearing the ground below, and has about as much interest in me as he would the game of baseball. He is capable of running almost 40 miles an hour, a fact I'm mindful of when I set up my camera a safe distance away, but this morning all he wants is an extended breakfast. In fact, he's so intent on eating that I find any type of shot is impossible. He refuses to so much as glance in my direction. Well, I'll do what I do a great deal of the time when I'm shooting wildlife. I'll wait.
As clouds and sun dance above and a pair of five-minute snow flurries coat my hat, I stand behind my camera, patiently watching the bison's advance toward the top of the hill he's working his way up. My thoughts are a mix of change and loss, the images they produce in my mind a collage of dilapidated Vermont barns and flinty arrowheads I've found in Montana, the soundtrack to them snippets of conversations with my grandparents. I see the size of the Northeast Kingdom's brook trout radically drop from necessitating that they curl in the bottom of my dad's wicker fishing basket to something not much larger than a big minnow. I see twenty-year-old maple trees and their crimson leaves in autumn standing where my friends and I once stacked hay bales, the only clover growing there now relegated to the center of a tractor road cut through this new forest. I see sprawling subdivisions hungrily devouring the land all around Bozeman, Montana.
As the bison finally comes into position, training an eye blue with the reflection of snow and sky on me, I take a single photograph and see Nelson Powers pedaling the 10-speed bike someone gave him shortly after our fishing excursion, going for all he's worth up Route 14 in Irasburg, racing a thunderstorm dropping over Lowell Mountain. He can't outrun it any more than I could this bull bison.
Nelson disappeared two years after our fishing trip. He left his bicycle and also the epilepsy medicine he needed each day at home, clues my father was certain pointed to an unintentional departure. It was an opinion he and his parents shared, but not one that gained any traction elsewhere in Northern Vermont. The local police were tired of his panhandling, quick to accept a rumor that he'd finally made a break for Chicago. For days, while my dad entreated law enforcement to organize a comprehensive search, and we walked the banks of brooks near Nelson's home calling his name, there was no sign of him. No midnight collect calls, no word that he'd almost been run over crossing the street in some village, no evidence he'd purchased a bus ticket from the local station. I remember how small his mother looked one morning when my dad and I stopped by to tell her that we had no news beyond what we had a few days earlier. She was standing by a plain, metal kitchen sink, her knuckles particularly pronounced as she knitted her fingers together and squeezed.
"How can no one care?" I asked my dad as we retraced some of our route from the morning we fished with Nelson, driving along the edge of Brownington on our way home from his parents' house. He raised a hand from the steering wheel, started to point at a collapsed barn, then drew in his breath and shook his head.
The extra light I sensed a day earlier in Montana is evident again as I drive north out of the park in the early afternoon. Whether we always see it or not, I guess the sun is up there doing its thing. I can see it now, off my left shoulder, shining brightly enough to melt a bit of snow plowed out of a fishing access along the Yellowstone, a tiny drip of water seeking the big river. I pull in and stare out over the water at the Absaroka Mountains and then, wanting some fresh air, roll down my window and swing my passenger door open.
A DJ from a local radio station announces that a three-week search for Salina Not Afraid, a 16-year-old Crow girl missing since the early morning hours of New Year's Day, when she walked away from a group of adults at an I-90 rest area, has come to an end. Her body has been discovered in the prairie a little over a mile away and it appears that she succumbed to exposure.
It took longer to find Nelson. It was late summer when two young boys discovered his remains lying in a brook scarcely larger than the trickle of snowmelt by my bumper. Perhaps he'd had a seizure, perhaps he'd fallen and struck his head, and while there wasn't enough water to hold a trout there was enough, when he landed face down, to drown him.
Unlike any efforts to find Nelson, the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Montana State Police, and the local sheriff's departments were all active in the search for Salina. They've had too much practice I think as I shut off the stereo and continue staring blankly out the windshield. Too much experience searching for people who vanish on these reservations.
I'm not startled by much, but when an enormous raven lands in the middle of my passenger seat, I jump. I've got an open bag of Lay's potato chips there, and this obviously isn't his first go-round with that type of snack. He turns his head sideways, watching me with one dark eye while he thrusts his thick beak into the bag and brings out a chip. As it crunches, half going down his gullet and half shattering across the fabric, I remember Irvin Afraid of Bear telling me that a more accurate translation for the name of his tribe would be Raven, not Crow.
As this raven continues to eat, I notice the two federal Fish and Wildlife aluminum bands above his feet, mementos of his trusting nature and our need to leave our mark on even creatures of the sky. When he's had his fill, leaving a tattered bag and a handful of crumbs for me to clean up, he hops out onto the ground and climbs the low pile of snow near where I've parked. With afternoon sun split by my shadow, he poses for a photograph. And then he takes wing, soaring over the Yellowstone, where I imagine Nelson would have enjoyed fishing, somersaulting in the air – because he can and enjoys it – disappearing in the tree line of the Absaroka, land Salina Not Afraid's ancestors once called home. For almost as long as Vermont has been home to brook trout.
** Photographer's Note**I have seen everything that my dad predicted would happen to Northern Vermont come to pass. Hundreds of family farms have become thousands of acres of woodland, and few people remember the eccentric men and women who were once fixtures along the streets of Orleans County. They've disappeared like candles in the windows of hill farms, flaming into incandescent light when electricity arrived after World War Two, burning out to darkness with the elimination of an entire way of life. My dad said that even the Northeast Kingdom couldn't hide from the 21st Century, and he was right.]]>
That said, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of my photos from 2019, reliving the times when, at the end of the day, I had something that I wanted to share with the world.
January, 2019
I love the night sky and the soft glow of billions (literally) of stars. I love thinking about the size of this universe, contemplations that bring equal parts awe and a wonderful sense of connectedness and importance. Here we are, in this beautiful sea of galaxies, during moments that will never repeat. What will we do with our gifts of time?
This image, Three Clear Nights, shows the stars in the Northern Hemisphere seemingly spinning around the night sky, circling the polar axis of Earth. In reality, it's our home that's spinning, whirling through the solar system, giving the illusion that the stars circle us. I captured this photograph by driving an iron bar into the ground, bolting a ball head to it, and clamping my camera securely enough to that so that I could, for three consecutive nights and battery changes, record the sky. I used a down coat wrapped around my camera, hand warmers attached to the lens with Ace bandages to prevent frost from forming on the glass, and, by taking 40-second exposures with only a tenth of a second pause between each, stacked more than 2000 individual pictures into a final scene of smooth star trails.
In First Winter, a pronghorn antelope fawn surveys a snowy, Yellowstone National Park during a frigid morning of frost and snow that it blends with as seamlessly as the falling flakes. Two steps one way or the other and this yearling would be lost in heavy sage brush, but for an instant it froze in front of me, washing away on a still morning when it and the world aligned to show cold and hope, evident in the calm eyes of this young animal, at the same time.
February, 2019
Spend enough time in good enough country, and I promise you will see things worthwhile. For Frost Bows, I'd hiked a snowy path to Montana's Lava Lake, high in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. I nearly turned around two or three different times, plowing through drifts up over my knees, but I'm glad I stuck with it. As the sun fell behind rocky peaks, its rays shining through crystals of frost hanging in the below-zero air, arcs of sun dogs appeared cradling the frozen lake. I shot a fast, three-row panorama at 70mm, taking 24 photos that, when stitched together, showed one of the most beautiful moments I've seen in the winter wilderness. I tell people that our world, particularly off the beaten path, still holds wonders well worth seeing.
I didn't think that this coyote, cruising a frozen land of buried grass, would stop far enough away from me to get a photo. I sat motionless, training a 500mm telephoto on him, waiting for him to realize that the lump on the snow ahead was human, one of his few mortal enemies. On he came at the mile-eating trot he's capable of holding far longer than any long-distance runner, until, when he was just 20 feet away, I whistled. He gave me a puzzled look, his face filling my frame, and then, more annoyed than afraid, swerved around me without breaking stride. Song Dog was immortalized with the press of a shutter release.
March, 2019
The cruelest of months for all living in the North Country, March should be spring but it never is. It does bring signs of changing seasons, but only the optimist spots them.
The core of our Milky Way galaxy rises above the horizon in our northern hemisphere during the very early morning hours of early March. For Cold Night On The Yellowstone, I woke at 3am and spent an hour and a half along the river when it was eleven below zero. I was rewarded with a scene of lovely mist, pulsing stars, and an arcing, galactic panorama – a sliver of the group of stars and planets where we make our home.
Sometimes I do plan my shots. Knowing that the March full moon would crest the horizon while there was still plenty of light in the sky, I set up more than a mile away from this beautiful, Central Montana homestead, waiting for our moon to rise above its roof. Using my 500mm Nikon f4, I captured this black and white image in a single photograph. I don't often shoot black and white, but the stark beauty of an abandoned home contrasted against the well-lit moon spoke to me in shades of monochrome. Super Moon is the result.
April, 2019
I spent four mornings on the Yellowstone River waiting for the sunrise I wanted for An Arch And An Oxbow, listening to the quiet rush of water, the occasional redwing, and twice a group of coyotes serenading the dawn. On the day I took this panorama, I was interrupted three times by small flocks of geese, their raucous celebration of our changing seasons adding warmth to the cold air.
The evening I captured Sphinx Mountain Rainbow, I was cruising the backroads of Southwest Montana without any particular destination in mind. As the sun began to sink below the Gravely Mountain Range, a spring rainstorm gave way to the beginnings of an enormous rainbow, shooting into the sky above Sphinx Mountain. This Madison Mountain Range landmark is one of my favorite peaks, and I was fortunate to catch it here standing beneath this color for a few moments.
May, 2019
The western tanager is one of Montana's most colorful birds. It's parrot-like, tropical appearance is definitely incongruous with the Rocky Mountains where it spends its summers. It arrives from Central America in small flocks each May, often spending time in cities and villages before retreating to the woods to raise its brood. The males have brilliant orange heads, the result of their diet of berries and insects far to the south. This one played hide and seek with me in a flowering plum tree for a long time before I took the photo, Peek-A-Boo.
Across the United States, in my hometown of Irasburg, Vermont, the ruby throated hummingbird, arrives in time each spring to greet blooming apple trees. Here, in the light of late afternoon, a male guards choice blossoms, his tropical feathers and intense eyes giving a reptilian appearance, proudly proclaiming, "I have dinosaur DNA." Apple Of My Eye shows a spring-green background, a gorgeous ruby throated hummingbird, and colorful apple blossoms.
June, 2019
On the longest day of the year, Pine Creek Lake, high in the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness, was still almost entirely covered with ice. I'd hiked through fields of blooming glacier lilies, spring beauties, and twice crossed a creek bank-full of snowmelt, only to find a scene more fitting of December than the summer solstice. As evening slowly faded and storm clouds gathered in the east, I decided a photo nearly devoid of color best showed this alpine environment. Thin Ice is lovely proof that nature won't be rushed and contains beauty at all times. By remaining open to what we find rather than what we expect, we sometimes discover wonderful surprises.
Looking Into The Future was the result of pure luck and patience. I'd spent two hours lying near a small mud puddle in the Gallatin Mountains, taking macro shots of insects. There were several kinds of butterflies, many bee flies, ants, and a lone dragonfly. As my back cramped and my eyes blurred from looking through my lens, this caterpillar appeared, slowly crawled across the scene, but stopped to examine a silvery blue. They stared at each other for a brief second, both approximately the same distance from my camera, caught here as present and future.
July, 2019
It was a tough, sloppy, seven-mile climb to Elbow Lake in the rugged Absaroka Beartooth Mountains. I had visions of this alpine country at sunset, glorious peaks reflected in crimson-tinted water, but by evening, when summer storms persisted, knew I was out of luck. I was soaked to the bone, had knocked loose a crown from one of my teeth when I slipped and smacked my cheek on a boulder, and was more than a little concerned about the fresh grizzly bear tracks I'd seen along the trail. I'd been turned back from a waterfalls above the lake by unstable snowfields, and, resigned to another day without a good photo, was packing up for the long walk out when the sky at the lakeshore cleared partially. I took a thirty-second exposure of the next squall descending, sheets of rain dropping down to kiss the Earth. Examining the photo, I decided it looked more like the gathering of souls than falling waterdrops. Souls Of The Absaroka was born.
On the day I captured Calm Before The Storm, I'd forgotten mosquito repellant and had been eaten alive. Swarms of the biting insects rose from this damp, alpine ground with each footstep, happy to rid me of my blood by biting me everywhere from between my fingers to my eyebrows. I'd hiked thirteen hard miles when I stopped to shoot a three-panel panorama of this impending storm, ominous clouds contrasted against a field of wildflowers. Within minutes, I found myself caught in the most violent thunderstorm I've ever experienced, lightning striking several times a minute all around for more than an hour. As the electrical storm subsided, the torrential rains gave way to grape-sized hail that pelted me until it lay six inches deep on the ground.
August, 2019
In the middle of August, a hailstorm devastated Montana's Big Lake Waterfowl Refuge. Chunks of ice larger than baseballs, propelled by 70mph winds, killed thousands of birds. With a heavy heart, I journeyed to what's always been one of my favorite sites, ready to chronicle the harsh side of Nature. Yes, death abounded, but I was more struck by how much life I found. All among the battered sweet clover along the lake, there was a multitude of insect life on a scale I could hardly imagine. Spiders and locusts, dragonflies and butterflies, mosquitos and gnats literally filled the air. The whir of their wings came from every direction, and, rather than focus on dead waterfowl, I found myself taking macro photos of this celebration of life's tenacity. Mirror Image shows a pair of northern blue butterflies on either side of wheat grass, their soft shades of blue glowing with light from within.
On the final day of August, again in Bear Basin in the Spanish Peaks of Southwest Montana, the day faded over a small beaver pond. Here in the alpine country, where frost touches the land 12 months out of the year, the nearby meadow where I'd photographed wildflowers before the storm a month earlier was brown and dry, but along this pond blossoms still graced the land. At the onset of fall, only a couple of weeks before heavy, autumnal snows blanketed this scene, a warm day came to a close with the reflection of lavender clouds and craggy peaks in a tiny body of water. As I often do, I stopped several times while taking this photo to simply look around and enjoy where I was. Late Summer Reflections is one of my favorites from 2019.
September, 2019
Like a giant forest in a magical kingdom, this is the scene along the banks of Hyalite Creek in Montana's Gallatin Mountains. While water runs smooth in the background of this long exposure and curls of green moss stand in the foreground, a variety of mushrooms grabs center stage. I shot this photo with my Nikon 200mm macro, setting up about 10 feet away, stopping down to f22 to increase my depth of field, always shallow with a quality macro lens. A one-second exposure in the deep shade of these fall woods helped produce a dreamy sense of some fairytale world, hence the name Once Upon A Time.
Young maple trees show off their fall colors in this wide-angle panorama taken in Northern Vermont during the last week of September. Fall Ferns is a combination of six photos taken at 24mm, panning across green ferns and crimson leaves. By shooting low to the ground with a lens capable of remarkable depth of field, even at close focus, the resulting photo combines color, depth, and detail in a way that almost does credit to the real scene.
Ocotober, 2019
If there's a prettier place than Vermont's Northeast Kingdom during the first week of October, I've not seen it. In a display of unrivaled color, hardwood trees prepare for many leafless months by turning shades of peach, crimson, gold and orange. Growing up surrounded by this seasonal beauty, I took a certain degree of it for granted, always struck when I return now by what a remarkable phenomenon these changing leaves are. Here, in Autumn at Pageant Cove, the shore of Crystal Lake stands in fall splendor while a cold rain clears before dark.
At 4:1 macro, raindrops stand like huge, crystal domes on a fallen aspen leaf. Depth of field was less than 2mm during this shoot, requiring a focus rail and image stacking to produce this photograph all focused properly front to back. I love taking these in-depth looks at Nature, revealing her hidden beauties, often being surprised myself by what the enlarged world around us looks like. I was able to capture this image, Rain Catcher, using a reverse lens technique, screwing a medium-wide-angle prime onto my 200mm macro in reverse. It comes with dramatic loss of light gathering, miniscule depth of field, but extreme magnification.
November, 2019
In Montana, the world slides back into winter during November. Heavy mountain snows fall, temperatures drop to below zero, and everything in Nature grinds to a halt. For the next five months, the Earth lives in suspended animation, waiting patiently for the spring thaw. As the days grow shorter and shorter, the sun finds the land from lower angles, producing some beautiful lighting along mountain streams. In Upstream In November, Montana's Pine Creek cuts through a wintry scene of patchy light, snow and ice.
One of my favorite mountain ranges to photograph in Southwest Montana is the Crazies. At the edge of the plains, they often stand beneath dramatic cloud formations, rising from the prairie into billowing curtains of frozen rain. On this morning, I caught a train passing along below them during sunrise, approaching a willow I've photographed many times during different seasons. East Bound is an example of just happening on the right scene. The vibrant color of the train's engines is the perfect addition to this November picture of dry grass, snow, and pastel clouds above tall mountains.
December, 2019
Sometimes I'll have an idea of the photo I want to capture in my head when I set out. More often than not it doesn't materialize, though I sometimes come away with something entirely different. Ice Blue is an example of finding precisely what I hoped for, a scene of mineral-rich ice hanging over a swift creek flowing through winter. It's another wide-angle panorama, shot at 20mm, composed of two rows of overlapping images that combine to show a large portion of my view. The blue in the ice, lit by low, afternoon light, is the result of minerals trapped within.
Last Light At Lone Peak shows one of Montana's iconic ski mountains as snow squalls lift during the absolute final seconds of light. I shot this from several miles away in the Porcupine Creek Drainage of the Gallatin, using Nikon's 300mm f4, slowing my shutter to give a wispy sense of motion to the flowing clouds. The color is not enhanced in any way and is simply the result of filtered sun low on the horizon and far to the south. This was a wonderful way to wrap up my year of shooting, an image perfectly winter during a beautiful and quiet time of the year.
And then I hear the spirit of the New England poet, Robert Frost, never one to coddle another artist, say wryly, "Miles to go, you lazy bastard." I point to my speedometer, hovering near the limit, but Frost is unmoved. Evidently, the confines of a modern vehicle confirm his suspicion of sloth.
"You haven't taken a single picture in two weeks," he says. "I hope you like eating snow."
Plenty for the feast, I think as I pull off the highway onto a narrow, two-track that parallels the Gallatin River for a couple of hundred yards before ending in a snowy parking lot at the base of steep mountains. I've come to photograph a resting stream, tucked in under covers of ice, her flow a shadow of the June torrent I saw when I was here last. I've come to spend a short day in these empty woods, in part paying homage to winter, in part begging for its mercy and the arrival of an early spring. I've also come to remember past winters and, having lived the majority of my life in the North Country, have no shortage of memories.
"I'll be spending my time alone," I say firmly to Frost who waves me off and heads toward the Gallatin with a bamboo rod in his hands.
My earliest memories of winter in Northern Vermont meld together into colors and emotions, both predominantly gray and blue. I remember wiping cold condensation off a windowpane, steadying myself with a hand gripped tight to its ledge where chipped enamel was as thick as sedimentary rock, my chin even with the sill, peering out at a world which overnight had transformed to white. Earlier that fall, as I sat strapped into a highchair in our kitchen, I'd seen a weasel peek up from a hole in the floorboards. A "stoat" my father had called it, before explaining that it would turn white in the winter. Looking outside at fresh snow, I wasn't sure whether the change in weather was the weasel's doing or if, like the magic spell cast over the land while I slept, it too now appeared the same, changed instantly from brown to white overnight.
What I did know was that I didn't much care for this new set of clothes the Earth was wearing. I didn't care for my own - the bulky snowsuit my mother zipped me into before I was allowed outside - either. I didn't care for its hood, pulled so tight that its sides eliminated any peripheral vision, rendering the world in those directions a distorted scene of itchy, faux fur. I didn't like the way dry burdocks, the only "plants" that I could find, clung to my knit mittens, and worse was the way they pricked my lips when I bit them off the yarn, using my mouth like a turkey plucking their seeds. I didn't like the way my toes, inside the boots with the polar bear logo on their tongues, grew as cold and hard as the frozen ground I would kick at.
I remember staring down our Brownington driveway to the wood line west of the house, naked hardwoods the color of cobwebs guarding more distant expanses of softwoods whose blueish tint transcended simple color and became, in a word, cold. On the horizon was Jay Peak, the first mountain whose name I learned, its craggy tip looking out over the Northeast Kingdom. I didn't figure it liked what it saw any more than I did.
By my third winter, I'd seen enough to understand that it was not only my least favorite season but also the longest. Peeling clumps of snow from the tops of my boots and setting them on our woodstove, watching them dance and hiss, was all I could think to do to hasten spring's arrival, but even then my young mind knew that eliminating a few handfuls of ice wouldn't exactly have the robins showing up tomorrow.
There were few events between the end of Vermont's deer season after Thanksgiving – an electric time of year whose urgency and nervous energy I could sense many years before I was old enough to carry a gun myself – and that day in early March when water trickled down our driveway and steam from sugarhouses rose like pillars into the sky, that I looked forward to. Cutting a Christmas tree with my dad was one of them, watching it shed a mist of snow as it shivered from the blows of the axe, then riding back to the car among its branches while he dragged it from the woods. Almost as fun was decorating it with my mother, opening boxes of glass ornaments whose varied colors and shapes I'd forgotten, so that under each lid lay new surprises.
It is similar with this Montana stream, so different this morning than it was six months ago that I feel as if I'm seeing it for the first time. I'm wearing hip waders over wool pants, hoping that by walking up the middle of the brook I can capture both the flow of water and the stillness of ice, particularly where it has gathered on fallen trees above the current, frozen spray turned sapphire-blue.
It's slow going over slippery rocks, their crowns above water coated in clear ice, their bulk below the surface as sleek as polished glass. I creep along taking slow, small steps, fully aware of the difference between a water-resistant camera like my Nikon and something entirely waterproof, and right away begin finding what I've come here for. With myriad trees stacked across the brook, discovering my ice stalactites is no more difficult than examining the underside of a fallen pine. Hanging in shapes ranging from stilettos to bulbous teardrops, they shine all up the creek, water trapped in its solid form, waiting like the rest of the world around it for spring.
I pick my way along for half an hour before climbing out of the water, forced onto the bank by a logjam ten feet high. On the downstream side, a deep pool has formed between boulders, the most likely spot I've seen so far for a trout. There's one in there, I think, tucked against a slab of granite, hardly moving, a silver shadow under black water. Subconsciously, I choose a spot a few feet upstream where I'd drop a worm, imagining it disappearing into the depths, feeling the thrilling pull of something unseen on the line.
"I'd expect you to be a worm fisherman," Frost says from the top of the logjam where he's materialized. "Too much work for you to cast a fly. It's a sad sight watching you wallow along, seeing you nearly lose your footing at least five times, and in water no deeper than your calves. Best stick to drowning worms."
Before I can think of a proper retort, he's gone, vanished into the fissured bark of a lone cottonwood. It's a huge tree with roots taking 800 gallons of water a day in the summer, its leaves thick on the south-facing bank where sun has shrunk the snow. I switch to my macro lens to take a quick picture of a single leaf suspended in ice – the world in miniature as it awaits the next season. My shutter clicks and I remember the cottonwoods in our neighbor's yard, chains hanging year-round from their lowest limbs, waiting to hoist deer each November with the patience of this leaf.
There were no deer hanging from the chains on the January night my parents dropped me off there when I was eleven. They'd been butchered six weeks earlier, their rib cages now poking from front-yard snow, the arching bones picked entirely clean by blue jays and feral cats.
"Good day for a five-pound trout tomorrow, Jake," John Curtiss said by way of greeting. Orleans County's most seasoned and successful hunter and fisherman was taking me ice fishing in the morning, bringing me out onto Willoughby, the deepest lake in Northern Vermont, where we'd use live smelt run down more than a hundred feet below the ice, trying for lake trout.
4:30am was never further away than it was when I lay down on a small couch that night, watching the glow of a wood-fired kitchen stove fade, listening to the sounds of an old house settling in the cold, straining to see the hands on a small clock radio on the other side of the room.
I'd wanted to catch a lake trout from the moment I first learned that they lived in the frigid waters of that glacial lake, the cut between Mount Pisgah and Hoar above as much a landmark of the Northeast Kingdom as Jay Peak. There were local legends about divers who'd gone into the water off Route 5A, swimming down beside underwater cliffs, clicking on their headlamps only to be so traumatized by the size of the fish they saw that they'd vowed never to scuba dive again.
There was a tale of a team of horses that broke through the ice one spring night during the Depression and how a fisherman eight miles away on Crystal Lake had dredged up their harness two years later, proof of some subterranean passage.
I'd heard of men who'd been towed around Willoughby by fish they'd hooked from boats and, after seeing more than one black and white front-cover photo of prodigious lake trout appear in our weekly paper, was convinced everything I'd heard was true. I was going fishing for a legend with a legend, and there was no way in hell I was going to get a wink of sleep.
And then, after hours awake, certain I'd never drift off, I woke to the clock radio blaring Alabama's "Roll On 18 Wheeler." I'll never forget it, or much else about that winter day. The boom of ice under wheels of a heavy pickup truck, the rising snow devils that spun across the frozen surface at sun-up, the taste of black coffee spiked with exactly one capful of Jack Daniels, and the sheer joy that only a boy doing something he loves with men can feel. We didn't get a five-pound trout, but we caught a few over four, by far the largest fish I'd ever caught, and hauling them up on heavy handlines remains one of the best memories from my childhood, as good a way as I ever found to break the monotony of winter.
Above the logjam, the creek falls through a series of steeper pitches, pockets of deep, foamy water between banks of shelf ice and leaning trees. I collect photos of the current over colorful stones, water blurring smooth during a long exposure, find places under the ice where clusters of lavender icicles crowd together, and try a few shots looking up through narrow gaps in boulders that don't quite work for me.
Where the terrain flattens out again, I spend twenty minutes photographing a wilderness scene of light and shadow perfectly bisected by a dead pine lying a couple of feet above the water. A curtain of blue ice drapes from it, reaching toward the current below, and winter sun, low in the sky, lights it well. It's beautiful, but so quiet that there is also a sense of loneliness here. A feeling that everything I see exists in some sort of suspended animation, a circuit breaker for life tripped until April.
As water flows around the legs of my tripod, I tip the screen on the back of my camera up to examine the photo I've taken, a reasonable representation of what my mind sees here.
"It appears as though your camera does the lion's share of the work," Frost says, peering over my shoulder. "A good thing for you, too, as I have every confidence you'd handle film as poorly as a fly rod."
For an instant, his reflection in the water at my feet appears to smile before he says, "Now, take Bentley. A true Vermont artist there. All those beautiful snowflake photographs and without the aid of a color television built into his camera. What vision that photographer had."
"Keep it up, old man, and you're apt to get a bath," I say, though I'm not completely capable of holding a straight face either. I turn slowly downstream to face him, but he's gone again, vanished just as the sun dips behind a tall mountain, casting the creek into deep shade.
I press on, wading up an increasingly-narrow channel, the stream diminished now by a handful of tributaries I've passed. In places, snow bridges the water from bank to bank, the faint gurgle of its flow the only indication of its passage, but in others, where it drops more sharply, it's still visible, the same ice the drew me here beginning to glow the way everything cold in nature will do during a winter afternoon.
One more photo, I tell myself. Something that says winter on this small brook. Perhaps up ahead where the rush of water speaks of an open stream. I remind myself to move slowly, my feet beginning to feel the cold on the other side of their alpaca socks and rubber boots.
I'm not sure whether it's the drop in light – the first shift from this world into one of dreams - or the fact that throughout this walk my mind has been split between the task at hand and thoughts of winters long ago, but when a pair of chickadees flits across my path I see redpolls in a Vermont chokecherry so clearly that I rub my eyes.
A flock of more than a dozen redpolls arrived on a January day when I was six, landing in the bare limbs of a chokecherry near our Irasburg garage, puffing their feathers against an Arctic blast that they were no strangers to. Drawn to anything with color, particularly during the long months of winter when its absence is so noticeable, I bundled up and went outside, determined to hand feed these ruby-crowned visitors from the far north.
My first order of business was corralling my twenty-pound, semi-wild cat, Lynx, who was at least as interested in the redpolls' appearance as I was. He sat motionless beneath the chokecherry, a stiff wind rippling the long, gray hair under his chin, yellow eyes fixed on the branches above. When I knelt a few feet away and called, he came reluctantly, submitting as much as a cat ever does to a trip indoors draped over my shoulder and a spot in front of the wood stove where the rest of my family wisely gave him a wide berth.
With the predator locked away and my jacket pockets full of seed, I returned to the chokecherry tree and found a spot on the ground partially sheltered from the wind by a sheet of tin that had blown off the top of our woodpile. I tossed a handful of cracked corn and sunflower seeds onto the snow a few feet from me and waited, willing myself to stillness. After ten minutes, a large male redpoll began working his way down the tree, hopping from limb to limb, making choppy progress toward the ground like a pinball falling through obstacles. On the lowest branch, he cocked his head to look at me and when I didn't move he fluttered to the ground, chose a whole sunflower kernel, and quickly flapped back into the tree. Before he was finished cracking open the seed on a slender limb, others had followed suit, flying down together, some landing less than two feet from me, close enough to see the small scales on their legs. When I pulled my hands from my pockets, they were gone in a whir of pink and gray wings, but returned quickly to the ground, and soon had cleaned it of anything worth eating.
I sometimes wonder now, more than 40 years later, if everything I remember from my childhood happened as I see it. The images are vivid enough so that I believe it's so, but it's still difficult to fully embrace the idea that for half an hour a flock of wild birds really did hop all over me, landing on my hat, perching on my legs, eating with the confidence of domestic chickens fed everyday. I can see them doing it - squabbling over the choicest morsels, breaking seeds open on the toes of my boots, landing in my open hands where I marveled at how little they weighed.
I can see them flying away together when my father banged open our side door a little while later and asked if I'd help him carry wood from the pile to the porch. He would take four or five pieces, cradling them in his left arm, while I insisted he find the largest single chunk for me to wrestle in. I remember the first piece that I carried that afternoon was yellow birch, its tattered paper brushing my cheek as gently as the wings of a redpoll.
The light is fading quickly now as I set up for my final photo, a panorama of woods and water and snow before it is too dark. I'm still wondering about the redpolls when my shutter opens for the final time, and, seeing them more clearly than I can imagine a warm day in May just a few months from now, I decide it happened exactly the way I remember. Perhaps we are closest to nature when we are children, before we have become cynical enough to believe that there are things that shouldn't happen. In our innocence, uncluttered by scientific explanations, why couldn't there be a little magic left in the world? Why couldn't a redpoll's wing touch a boy's cheek and their eyes not meet over a meal of seeds on a cold, winter day?
"Sounds like the start of a poem," Frost says. "Not a very good one, but everyone must begin somewhere."
"I think I'll stick to photos," I say.
"Ah, a thousand words," he responds.
"Ten thousand of yours," I tell him as we both crack a smile. And then I'm alone in evening woods, a couple of miles from from my truck, on nearly the longest night of the year.
You can see some of these images, plus others, in my New Releases section here.]]>
The older I grow, and the more aware of life's – any life's – ephemeral stamp on this world that I become, I find myself greeting fall with greater sadness than I did when I was a boy and it's arrival meant only that Northern Vermont's hardwood leaves and native brook trout would mimic each other in new shades of crimson. Today, I feel winter's silent, lonely call all around me and I shake my head in pure disbelief - even as my forehead beads with sweat, the world is falling off summer's downstream horizon.
I blink hard, my eyes squinting against bright sun, and as focus returns I watch a dragonfly hover on golden wings before landing on a dead willow twig. I circle him, putting the sun behind me, careful not to let my shadow fall across him, and set my tripod down less than two feet away. I've got my macro lens on and as I focus on this insect's eyes, unchanged for nearly 300 million years, I think of a picture I saw as a child of an ancient map of the known world, its borders bounded by the words "Here Be Dragons." My shutter opens, freezing this flying, unaltered face in front of me, and again I see that map.
I have sought the land of dragons since I can remember. The draw of what lies around the bend, the view from farther afield, the source of a river, the summit of a mountain, or the terminus of a trail is primal, while my interest in the tame and fondness for the known has always been minimal. What lies down the overgrown path wanting wear, and what, more importantly, lies beyond?
When I was nine years old, dragons and their like resided not terribly far from the farmhouse where I lived, a stone's throw from the Quebec border. Our house butted up to the "pasture," a tract of land perhaps 20 acres in size that like much of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont was a couple of decades beyond seeing regular mowing. Wild apple trees and alders, some large enough to climb, had sprung up among dense clumps of meadowsweet and tangled patches of red osiers, volunteers eager to reclaim their birthright and hold upon this clayey land. With perseverance and toil nearly equal that of the hill farmers who first cleared that ground to graze sheep and dairy cows, my friends and I had established a network of trails that, after riding hundreds of miles across on single-speed bicycles, had become narrow paths of packed dirt. Moldy sheets of plywood, pilfered from a neighbor's barn, spanned cattail swales where, if we got a good run at them, we could coast through without getting more than our tires wet. At the base of a steep hill whose slope was pocked with rock outcrops containing carnivorous sundew plants, we positioned a weather-checked tractor tire beneath a ramp of better plywood – lifted with more care from a construction site – to create a jump. With dull hatchets, we removed the limbs of thorn apples we deemed most likely to blind us, beat the occasional stubborn birch stump down into the ground, and hacked enough blackberry canes away to more or less preserve the skin on our legs while flying through our spider web maze with the precision of a barn owl cruising its home territory at full speed in the dead of night. From Beautiful Hill, a name we collectively bestowed upon a vista at the far side of the pasture where three colors of violets bloomed beneath chokecherry blossoms in the spring, we could look south across the cut of Lord's Creek to ridges of mature maple and white pine and beyond them to a choppy horizon of rolling mountains which called to me from the moment I first saw them.
I wanted desperately to give in to this Sirens song and explore those hills, but doing so would have meant disobeying my father's stern warning not to go across the creek. My friends and I could do about what we pleased as long as we followed that single commandment. Our apple fights, and our fistfights, the crude pit traps we dug fully believing a burdock-leaf-covered, shallow depression would ensnare wild game right up to bull moose, and even our penchant for lobbing ripe chokecherries into the road in front of cars – preferably white ones – were activities chalked up to boys being boys. Lord's Creek was the edge of our world, and we were not, under any circumstances, to venture beyond it. I had stood on its banks more than once, staring across the deep water into the unknown, where the groan of a tree moving in the wind became the throaty call of a pterodactyl, and the distant mooing of unseen cows had to be a herd of Pleistocene bison.
During late summer in Vermont the year I turned 9, when Lord's Creek had been reduced by drought to a quarter of its size in the spring, I asked my father if I could "skip" across it to explore the far side.
"What's the rule about going across the creek?" he offered as reply without looking up from the book he was reading. When I started to plead my case, treading dangerously close to "back-talking" in an era when it was both forbidden and punished swiftly all across Northern Vermont with a spanking, he lifted his eyes to mine and without the slightest hint of a smile – one that sometimes meant that what he said could, at my own peril, be taken with great latitude – told me, "Not one more word."
That was that. Summer turned to fall, and eventually the wild apples my friends and I pelted each other with grew too wrinkly and soft to hurl, and our forays into the pasture were replaced by games of king of the hill, played out on fifteen-foot piles of snow plowed out of our driveways. Still, on cold days when our living room woodstove heated only a small portion of our old house, I would look through frost-cloaked windows toward the grey hills I wanted so badly to see up close. What was the pterodactyl doing now, I wondered?
The ancestors of this Montana dragonfly in front of me knew all about pterodactyls and doubtlessly found them less bizarre than my large camera lens. This insect swivels his head, nearly all eyes and capable of seeing everywhere except directly behind him, and lifts one leg to his mouth before launching into vertical flight. I watch it disappear over a line of small cottonwoods between me and the Yellowstone River, gone into an impossibly blue sky but one that undeniably doesn't contain as much light as it did a month ago.
My path today veers around a small pond through native grasses and squat junipers. Passing close to one of the trees, a second dragonfly takes flight, landing so gently on a bowed stalk of wheatgrass that the plant barely trembles. I get a few shots from the side, but when I move toward the dragonfly's head it speeds away faster than my eyes can follow.
Before I stand up and stretch, I notice a bumblebee on a red clover flower. Through my lens, it looks like something out of a Star Wars movie – an alien creature with frightening mandibles and a dark hood. I watch it clean its tongue of pollen, wiping its length with clawed feet, then notice how ragged its wings appear. I've seen bumblebees this time of year that can no longer fly, clinging to the remainder of their lives by crawling from flower to flower. This one pays no attention to the touch of my finger on its fuzzy head, intent only on feeding. I pet it for a moment, as though with my caress I might add a few more warm days to the year, then stand and walk away quickly.
A yellow-winged locust lifts noisily into the air ahead of me, flapping over the trail, landing in the tire track of a bicycle where it blends perfectly with the tiny ridges of gray soil. The track is wide, evidence of one of today's popular mountain bikes, an invention of the future when I received a 10-speed road bike for my tenth birthday.
"You be careful around that creek," my father said to me a week after my birthday. "If you go across, do it where it's rocky and not muddy, and if you can't see the bottom find a different place."
And just like that, permission to seek my dragons had been granted.
I unwound my baseball glove from the handlebars of my bike, loaded my hatchet and plastic thermos full of lemonade into a canvas backpack, and with the push of young legs full of adrenaline sped off into the pasture. I remember now, nearly 40 years later, how alert I was. How sharp my senses were. How I noticed a blue flag iris leaping from a tuft of buttercups, swerved to miss a tiny, red bellied snake as it slithered across my path near the rocky remains of a long-gone-barn's high drive, and how I was able to follow the zigzag flight of a woodcock that I flushed from the edge of a copse of grey birch with laser-guided precision.
It wasn't until I stood on the brink of Lord's Creek, after wading through tall saw grass and skirting the remains of a rusting car frame, that I had my first feelings of unease, a sense that in the land of dragons things more terrible than the pterodactyl might lurk. I stared down into the water, through my reflection where horned dace minnows quivered, to a streambed of rock. And then, with a quick look back toward Irasburg, where the top of the Protestant church steeple seemed to rise from the summit of Beautiful Hill, I plunged off the edge of the Earth.
On the far side of the stream, where water ran from my pant legs and oozed from my sneakers, everything was different. The wild cucumber vines grew in tighter curtains. The skunk cabbage was taller, the air cooler and charged with electricity, and the splayed track left deep in creekside mud seemed far too large for a moose. I unbuttoned my backpack and gripped the rubber handle of my hatchet tightly, ready to strike down either the anaconda I imagined lying near the creek or a charging triceratops – the one whose track I now followed up a gentle slope to a stand of large white pine whose boughs undulated in perfect synchrony – a single living thing breathing deeply in and out.
In heavy shade beneath the pines, the temperature was ten degrees cooler, the ground carpeted in thick, fallen needles, devoid of the underbrush so prevalent below hardwoods. As my eyes adjusted to the lack of sun, I took aim at the smooth trunk of a pine and hurled my hatchet. It spun end over end and struck the tree with the back of its head, not burying its blade into the bark the way I'd hoped, but delivering a blunt dent whose edges gleamed with golden pitch. Not bad, I thought. If the triceratops comes, I'll be ready. I expected to see him at any moment, armor-plated head hurtling along on short, stout legs, but all I found in the pines was the remains of a lean-to partially sheltering a few faded pages from a Playboy magazine and a couple of crushed Budweiser cans. It wasn't an entirely disappointing discovery – a couple of the photos retained enough detail to momentarily make me wonder if it wouldn't be better to watch one of these exotic women stroll across the forest floor than to be charged by a dinosaur – but it was also proof that the land of dragons lay further than I'd come. I put my hatchet back in my backpack, along with a single page I folded delicately, and pressed on.
The locust doesn't allow me any type of photo, but a few hundred yards further where I veer off my path into a field of wheatgrass and dried sweet clover, I begin spotting northern blue butterflies. A hatch of them has emerged, and dozens fill the air, so similar to Vermont's spring azures that for a moment both time and geography blur.
As I photograph one in the shade of taller grasses, afternoon sun barely lighting his pale wings, and then a pair close together near the summit of a single stalk of grass, I remember chasing their eastern cousins with a net my mother sewed from curtain material about the time I ventured across Lord's Creek. While I focus on a third butterfly, fanning its wings in preparation of flight, I remember one from decades ago that, after extricating from my net, left a glowing, blue powder of scales on my small fingers. Even at the time, I was conflicted over wanting to believe that it had imparted some type of magical fairy dust to me and fearing that I had stripped it of something vital. I offer my finger as a perch to the one in front of me, a meaningless apology of sorts to butterflies it never knew existed in a place it's never been, and when it declines I move carefully away.
I wasn't terribly careful leaving the tall stand of pines in Vermont when I was 10. No self-respecting dragon would make its home among the detritus of beer-drinking teenagers. His lair would be further away, closer to the hills I'd stare at during winter. Onward then, I decided, across a fence equal parts barbwire, page wire, and mossy rails, around an impenetrable clump of thorn apples, through a damp seep where forget me nots and deadly nightshade bloomed, to a forest of mature sugar maples among whose trunks lay partially-buried sap buckets, some vented by the blast of a shotgun.
I drank my lemonade sitting on a fallen log where a line of black ants marched through a forest of British soldier lichen, and then feeling refreshed, with renewed hope of discovering the unseen, set a course toward the crest of a ridge peeking above a line of cedar trees.
The hike toward that ridgeline, a waypoint that vanished as soon as I entered the cedars, was my first lesson in how much country can lie between what I see in the distance and where I stand presently. I walked for an hour, first believing I would crest the height of land momentarily, then wondering if I'd veered off in the wrong direction, finally feeling as though perhaps my destination lay in an entirely different dimension – the visible but unreachable home of dragons.
At a spring, where water flowed from a crack in igneous rock pocked with what appeared to be a record of fossil bird tracks, I decided to turn back, though not before I broke off a piece of stone with my hatchet, hoping to release the creatures that I believed were entombed within. The dark shard, a souvenir I wanted to take home, flew ten feet to the edge of young beech trees whose waxy, green leaves entirely hid the world behind. I searched for it for several minutes before deciding that it had been swallowed by this foreign land that refused to relinquish even a small piece of its secrets, then took one look into the beech trees where the largest bone I'd ever seen protruded from the ground.
A mammoth skeleton. That's what it had it be. The Earth's grip upon it was unyielding, even when I wrapped both hands around it and leaned away with all my strength. This was a great leg bone, I thought, and buried not far below would be the skull, complete with sweeping tusks. In a fever of discovery, I hacked at the ground all around this bone with my hatchet, sinking its blade into damp soil where it clung as though gripped from below by the mammoth's guardians, protesting mightily my efforts to remove it.
There are still small patches of snow on the peaks of Montana's Absaroka Beartooth Range, quivering on the horizon through the haze of early autumn. I'm familiar with some of those peaks I think before I begin retracing my steps to where I've left my truck, but many have not yet heard my footfalls. What adventures lie ahead, I wonder as I stop to photograph a bee fly on an aster and a tiny jumping spider among the chips of cedar mulch near the base of a young aspen?
It always seems to take longer returning from than walking to. It was another lesson that I learned when I was ten, following my course back from the land of dragons with a bone protruding from my backpack, its concealed base coated in wet, black dirt, pulverizing a tattered photo of Susie Krabacher into unrecognizable shreds. Some of the landmarks I'd passed earlier that morning I vaguely recognized, though their reverse-angle-appearance didn't entirely account for their diminished size or growing sense that they hid little more than the occasional whitetail deer tracks I encountered. In the stand of pines where I'd picked up the photo, I found the tree whose bark I'd scarred with my hatchet, a tendril of sap seeking the ground below. It wasn't much of a mark I decided, evidence of a blow insufficient to change the course of a triceratops during a scenario I now believed unlikely at best.
By the time I reached Lord's Creek, picking my way through flora indistinguishable from that on its more-known bank, I was having doubts that the bone I carried belonged to anything more exotic than some hapless Holstein cow. It was a possibility that frightened me more than the thought of encountering an enraged dinosaur, disturbing enough so that with some ceremony I offered up the bone up to a deep bend in the creek, letting it spin end over end out of my hand toward a smooth surface reflecting alders and jewel weed. Better to relinquish it while there was still a chance of Pleistocene origin than have it identified by my mother as bovine.
I wanted, as the scene dissolved in a wash of spray and ripples, to hear the trumpeting of a mammoth or see the shadow of a leathery-winged reptile cut across the ground. I stared hard and listened long before slowly fixing my gaze on the hulking shape of Irasburg Mountain to the distant west. Okay, I thought. Next.
** Please take a moment to check out my New Releases, photos of Northern Vermont during the height of fall**
New Releases]]>
"Oaky, buddy," I say to the bear track, "you asked for it. It's Poncho and Lefty, and it ain't Willy Nelson signing it."
If the grizzly doesn't decide that in order to protect the integrity of great, country music he must kill me, I image he's hastily putting distance between us.
I'm five miles into an eight-mile climb to a remote, alpine lake in Montana's Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness, arguably the most rugged piece of unbroken country south of Canada. On the surface, I'm hoping for a panoramic photo of this seldom-seen body of water at sunset, crimson sky reflected on the surface of a lake that may not, even in the middle of July, be entirely free from ice.
That's the rationale for this punishing hike, but the truth of what brings me here is more complicated. Take the magnetism that wild places exert on me, sprinkle it with the overdue arrival of summer after a prolonged, cold spring, mix in some urgency to explore during the high country's shortest season, give it a dollop of more urgency to do it while my legs still can, and throw in the uneasy recognition that already the days are not as long as they were a month ago, and you've got the bulwark of the recipe that draws me here.
I entreat the wilderness to pray for Lefty, too, and then my voice trails off. The whale-back ridge I've been climbing has ended at a curtain of ancient trees, scarred by lightning strikes and sculpted by winter wind, their bark home to varied mosses and lichens that have lived upon their trunks longer than we've been an independent nation. They guard a steep decent down a north-facing slope that takes me back in time, summer lost to deep shade and a pervasive chill from tenacious snow banks whose tops bear similar evidence of harsh weather. The effects of erosion are on full, miniature display here. Snow canyons cut by wind now deep with brown spruce needles run into broad moraines where last night's rainwater spread out and froze in crystalline sheets. The lower side of one large drift is in the process of calving onto the sprouts of spring beauty flowers, flowers whose blooms have come and gone from most places nearly two months ago. A few feet uphill from the crack, a pillar-like formation remains, snow hardened by the tread of a wolf, his weight compacting it enough to see evidence of his footfall remain longer than the undisturbed flakes around it. I imagine him gliding through here one night long after the grizzly has gone to bed for the winter, his nose searching for elk in one of the sage openings I climbed through earlier.
Further down the mountain where snow claims the majority of ground, my route zigzags between patches of bare earth near larger trees whose trunks have reflected sunlight and melted the ice. At the base of a leaning spruce, I find the skull of a calf elk, the bone porous and stained a deep, mineral-brown. I pick it up and examine its crushed base, the signature of a mountain lion, then set it gingerly back exactly where it laid. In time, it will become part of the soil and perhaps give home to the seed of a spruce that will one day be raked by the antlers of another elk who has lived beyond this perilous first year. There's something comforting to me in this collective sense of purpose in nature – a cycle we label with beginnings and ends but is better described as continual transition. I wonder if somewhere along my journey I have seen a flower containing molecular pieces of the lion or taken a breath of air composed of oxygen released by trees whose roots were fortified by the siblings of this elk?
A mourning cloak butterfly with wings as ragged as a turkey vulture's floats by and lands on an alder leaf. It looks tired, as though it is ready for whatever comes next, and as I walk through its flight path I breathe deeply, hoping to inhale some atomic morsel of what has always been one of my favorite butterflies. Even if I don't, if I'm unable to bring anything from this insect along with me, I believe it's possible that the air fanned by its wings contains something from the saber toothed cats that once walked here or the great, fern-like trees which grew millions of years earlier.
At the foot of this ridge, several hundred feet below the mourning cloak, my trail crosses a milky stream brimming with snowmelt. It races downhill in a pell-mell eagerness to transport winter toward the Gulf of Mexico and, still thinking of nature's connective properties, I smile envisioning a marlin filtering water through its gills that has already passed those of a brook trout a few thousand miles away. I look hard at a sleek log spanning the stream, water lapping over the top of its smooth surface, and decide to search for an easier crossing. The marlin doesn't need anything from me just yet.
A hundred yards upstream, at the base of a talus slope more snow than rock, I pick my way across the creek, stepping on a natural bridge of boulders while wondering if the lion that killed the elk calf might not have done the exact same thing at some point. They don't mind water I know, but, sharing many of the traits of their smaller, domestic cousins, certainly don't mind keeping their feet dry either. If the lion crossed here, his final jump to the far bank, above a dark current churning along below, was more graceful than my own.
My route rises fast now, up from this V-shaped gorge along a smaller brook unable to contain its water between the banks. It flows over the trail as many places as not, exploring stands of thick, young lodgepole pine, testing the land for a more direct course.
The creek will one day flow straight as an arrow I know, but today both it and I weave a circuitous path. Where the trail isn't under water, it's muddy, and I can feel the damp prickle of water forming on my socks and am not interested in washing my feet this way. I no more than think it when the sky cuts loose with heavy rain.
"From above and below," I say out loud as I dig a raincoat from my pack. While zipping it up, the scents of plastic and cold rain combine to elicit, strobe-like memories from my childhood – moments on spring streams in New England - as though this falling water has completely eroded the sediments of forty years' worth of memory, exposing moments that I see as clearly now as I did then. Perhaps something in one of the droplets has circumnavigated the globe, touching me once more. Not impossible I decide as the memories fade into a curtain of heavier rain and I press on.
I measure time by the passing of the squall and my boots filling with its water, funneled down my raincoat with great accuracy. When both are complete, I find myself in a mountain-ringed bowl not far from the lake that I've come to photograph. I crest a rocky swell and it appears all at once, a few acres of green water contrasted against an unsettled sky and tall, dark peaks. I'm likely the first person to see it this summer, and that means something to me, even if I'm unable to explain exactly what, but from a photographic standpoint it's an unremarkable image. I frame a few shots that I don't take, unable to discover any angle that approaches what I'd hoped to find here.
Sunset isn't as far off as it would have been a month ago, but it's still a few hours away and I've got to weigh the possibility that it will not be colorful against an eight-mile walk back to my truck in the dark with sopping wet boots. I'll give it a couple of hours I decide, setting my sights on a tall waterfall across the lake. It's a tough climb through massive boulders whose heads peek from drifts of snow more than 15 feet deep, and my pace is slow and careful. In more than one spot, I see crevasses down which a detour would mean, at best, a broken leg. After half an hour, my nerves are frayed and I submit to common sense and give up trying to reach the falls. I follow a path of rock to the lakeshore and at its edge find a buttercup that's broken through the snow and blossomed. As I stare at it, a fly, seemingly one who's materialized for the sole purpose of pollinating this single flower, lands and begins probing the stamens, yellow pollen sticking to its head and feet. How far will it fly before touching another flower, I wonder, ensuring that next year more blossoms will welcome this ephemeral summer?
A low rumble of thunder reverberates behind me, more confirmation that I made the right choice in turning back from the falls. It comes again, this time sharper, as lightning peppers one of the high peaks less than two miles away. I see the next strike, a jagged bolt that appears to touch down twice, its second exclamation turning grey granite momentarily pink with blinding light.
As the next bolt rockets down a few hundred yards from me, the deafening crash of thunder causes me to flinch, though I know the lightning has already missed me. Like a soldier ducking the whine of a passed bullet. And then I smile, thinking that in less than the span of ten minutes Nature has showed both a delicate and devastating omnipotence. The power that draws the fly to the buttercup is no less than the force that delivers the lightning.
Rains come, and my choice of whether or not to wait for sunset is now an easy one. I dawdle at the edge of the lake where my trail begins its downhill journey, not quite ready to leave this place yet, watching sheets of moisture wash in from the east. With a dark filter on my lens and an umbrella over my camera, I take a 90-second photograph, capturing what seems physically impossible – the progression of time in a single, two-dimensional frame.
And then I don't stop walking again until I come, entirely by chance, across the calf elk skull. Approaching from the opposite direction in the dim light of an overcast evening, nothing looks the same as it did earlier, and I have to pick up the bone, tracing the bite marks, to be certain it's the same one. For the second time today, I place it back on the ground, sitting next to it this time myself while I eat a candy bar. There's something as familiar as rain and plastic about wet hands and chocolate, though the memories they bring this time are disjointed. I catch glimpses of them like the mountains above the lake I saw, drifting in and out of view behind clouds and rain. A station wagon door closes alongside a dirt road next to an iron bridge spanning a fall brook. The peeling label on a small, glass bottle of iodine comes into focus above wide boards in a dusty, country store. A railroad spike covered with creosote lies in the foreground of a scene on a lake where a red and white bobber dances on north-wind waves. No vision is complete, yet their sum bespeaks a happy childhood.
"Chocolate and wet hands," I say before wiping my fingers on my pants and retrieving my camera. I want a photo of this elk skull, but can't make anything look remotely like the way the scene feels. I give up, but before I summon the strength to stand and continue I look at the photo I took of the lake. I stare a long time, lost in thoughts of lions and elk, brook trout and marlin, flies and buttercups, boys and men.
Souls, I decide. That's what it looks like. The gathering or depositing of souls. Before I rise, a drop of water beads on the brim of my hat then falls. I catch it on my tongue.
**I hope that you enjoy the following photos, some from this hike and others from more journeys into Montana's summer alpine country.**
Pine Creek Lake begins to shed ice. June 27, 2019
Falls Below Pine Creek Lake. June 27, 2019
Upper Cradle Lakes, Madison Mountain Range. June 30th, 2019
A pair of grayling prepare to spawn in the inlet to Heather Lake. July, 2019
A fly finds a single buttercup bursting from a snow drift. July, 2019
A storm gathers over Bear Basin, full of summer wildflowers. August, 2019
Hardscrabble Peak, in Montana's Bridger Range at first light. July, 2019
Frazier Lake, Bridger Mountains. July, 2019
It's one week shy of the spring equinox, and it's nineteen degrees below zero. I wanted to drive further upstream along the Yellowstone River for the season's first Milky Way photo, but the temperature keeps falling. I swing off the highway, tires crunching snow along what, on most years, would be a dirt road. This year it looks like a snowmobile trail. North wind slides grainy serpents of ice particles from the plowed banks across my headlights' beams, and I wonder if my equatorial mount will even fire up.
Twenty minutes later, it does grudgingly come to life, its motor protesting with a steely whine, and I'm able to find Polaris through the polar alignment scope before my breath freezes on the glass and obscures my view. I wait in my truck while my camera, wrapped in chemical hand warmers, opens its shutter for a series of half a dozen photos, each three minutes long. Two more shots with my equatorial mount off, and I'm packing up, popping ice on the Yellowstone as her coats grows thicker replacing the sound of my complaining motor.
It's hard for me to believe, even though I possess some instinctual understanding that no one season ever lasts forever, that this valley is on the edge of infant spring. Yes, there is dim light on the eastern horizon where a month ago there would have been only darkness, but it's now twenty-two below, one of the coldest mornings of the year. Winter certainly digs in its heels.
March 20, 11:40am.
A little sun today, and high enough in the sky to melt a bit of snow, if only because of the angle it finds our tipping Earth from. It's enough to provide the impetus I need to get out of the house and search for whatever tiny signs of spring I can discover. In Livingston, where a few hardy wood ducks brave the winter along the Yellowstone, the drakes probably don't look much different than they did in January, but in this mid-day sun on this day of nearly-equal light and darkness, they appear more vibrant.
The geese seem noisier, their squabbles more heated, their impatience during this false spring more evident. They're ready to fly north but the weather isn't having it. Today, in the sunshine, I believe they are as fed up with winter as I am.
"Hang on a little while longer," I say, small words of encouragement meant as much for myself as the geese.
March 21, twilight.
There is probably some catchy name for this full moon I've come to photograph, driving more than 200 miles from my home for a shot of it rising above one of my favorite homesteads on the edge of Montana's eastern prairie. Perhaps it's the blue moon or the wolf moon or the super-blue-wolf moon.
I've got my 500mm Nikon telephoto hooked to my camera, both locked down on a heavy tripod, pointing at a home abandoned during the Dust Bowl from more than a mile away. Here, far away from the mountains still full of snow, the prairie shows obvious signs of spring and I cock my head to hear what could have been a meadowlark. It could I decide, just as easily have been my winter-strained imagination, and the fact that it doesn't call again lends more weight to that possibility. I toe a small, broken agate out of the gravel at my feet, its ferrous designs like miniature, prehistoric ferns, then look up at as the moon begins breaking the horizon. One photograph later, a shot of the distant and of distant memories – not exactly mine, though I've seen my share of homes empty and fall into disrepair when other family farms went under – and the world drifts fast toward night. I once believed I heard the echoes of children playing in the dooryard of this house, and before I leave I listen hard, startled for an instant by the liquid chortle of a sandhill crane on the edge of earshot, a harbinger of true spring whose voice blends with those of children in my head.
March 27, 7:50am.
Say what you will of the robin, but for me and my life in the North Country it has always been the red wing blackbird who carries spring in its voice. It's snowing this morning, heavy wet flakes falling straight down like haggard goose feathers, coating the ground under my rubber boots, leaking from the brim of my hat like a visor cut with pinking shears. I shiver, but I'm not really cold, standing at the edge of a tiny wetland while a handful of male redwings stake their claims to patches of cattails above still-frozen water. They fluff their red epaulets in grand displays of disdain for this snow squall, filling the air with raspy song, filling my soul with relief that we are "turning the corner" into spring.
In half an hour the snow is gone, banished by a north wind pushing billowing clouds down over the Bridger Mountains, some parting to reveal bright sun. I stay another hour, until I've seen enough of the red wings to assure myself they are real and not the fantasies of a man succumbed to cabin fever. They posture and pose and pull at the seeds of last year's cattails in a frenzy of activity that can only mean we are truly headed into spring.
April 6, sunrise.
The day breaks warm and windy on the shores of Big Lake in Central Montana where a windmill turns to greet the rising sun. The water is open here, rafts of ducks and geese riding the swells, small flocks of swans passing overhead on their migration to the far north. There is a hint of green to the land, though where I stop to photograph a willow near the remains of a long-gone homestead it hasn't penetrated the deep, dead grass of last summer. It will soon, I know, aided by the rain which moves in shortly afterward, blowing in curtains across this flat land of stubble fields and sage.
At anther homestead, this one refusing to settle into the ground, defiantly insisting that at least a part of it still remains among the living, I set my camera to record a minute of the storm in a single image, an angry, wet sky proving that the break-up between Earth and winter isn't necessarily an amicable or easy one.
April 20, 1:45pm.
Where a day before I saw only the curling edges of fallen leaves and stubborn snow, today there is a crocus in full bloom. It's a deep violet color like the ones I remember poking from the ground tight to the house where I grew up in Northern Vermont. I knew, within a few inches, where each of the bulbs were, and would pick at the soil on days of sun when reflected light from the house warmed the ground, hoping to reveal a stubby, green shoot. Like those days forty years ago, it only took turning my back for this flower to appear, and I'm as happy to see it now as I would have been when I was a boy.
May 5, 6:18am.
I'll be damned if I'll let a "Road Closed" sign derail this morning's plan for a sunrise shot in Paradise Valley along the Yellowstone River. I snake my truck by the dented, metal sign and proceed undaunted until I nearly plummet into a 12-foot ravine cut across the lane by snowmelt. Far enough, I guess.
Like the Earth's final transition from early spring into something not quite summer, this sunrise changes fast and doesn't last long. Dark clouds turn silver and then pink and then back to silver. And then a silver sheriff's deputy car follows my tracks around the sign I disregarded and parks next to my pickup. He's friendly and instead of chastising me asks if I've seen anyone else around. Someone who is reportedly living on private land without the owner's permission. I haven't seen anyone I say, without adding that they've certainly picked a pretty spot to set up shop.
May 10, 9:06am.
The swan turns into the morning sun and fans its wings, feathers glowing as though lit not by our closest star but by fire within the bird. I snap a few photos then watch while it swims out into the Yellowstone's current to join its mate, drifting downstream together into a world fully in the grasp of spring.
May 10, 2:14pm.
A little group of pasque flowers blooms near a snowmelt-swollen creek in the Upper Gallatin River drainage. I love them, not only because they are among our first wildflowers in Montana, but because they mimic crocuses – albeit a wilder, prettier version. I wait for an ant to traverse its way across a fuzzy stem before taking a series of a dozen photos with my macro lens that I'll later stack into a single, well-focuses image.
May 11, 5:45pm.
A Sheridan's hairstreak butterfly lands on sage for an instant, allowing me one shot before zigzagging away on fresh wings. It's green on green in a land free of snow and full of hope. Herds of elk dot distant hills, their heads all down while they graze, while closer, between where I stand and the hulking shape of a dead Douglas fir tree – a good nest tree, I think – a male mountain bluebird cuts across my vision, a laser-straight line of intense color.
May 12, 8:43pm.
The sun is still up, shining a very narrow band of golden light across the Madison River Valley below Sphinx Mountain, some type of sundog or stunted rainbow appearing in the sky above. As I watch and photograph, it all fades at once, night racing into view, eager to claim its shortened hold on the land. Seasons have changed I think, passing by in long days but short weeks and months that, if possible, are shorter still. That's the way with all of life I suppose. It's all going somewhere, at an accelerated pace it seems. At times I question the worth of spending it as I do, understanding that in some ways it's shorter than a good sunrise. I'm thinking about it as the first star appears over the Madison and an owl's call signals an end to this day. And then I'm thinking about it again, later at night, in bed on the verge of sleep where once more I believe I hear a meadowlark. I want to keep listening, want to hold on to those notes that part of me knows aren't real, but my grasp on consciousness has no more power than winter's on this land. "Call once more," I imagine saying. "One more time." And then I sleep.
* You can view many of these images in my New Releases collection by clicking here. *]]>
I believe that in the coming weeks I will have more exciting news regarding this work I've done. It continues to gain popularity as art the world has never seen before.]]>
When I was a boy, growing up in Northern Vermont, I kept a "trout journal" chronicling my fishing adventures. It's fun for me to read through it now, nearly 40 years after my first entries, reliving those days I spent pursuing brook trout with my father. The choppy, pencil-printed words detailing the things I found in the woods – rusted maple sap buckets peppered with birdshot scars, skunk cabbage plants bursting through stubborn snow drifts, or a mottled grouse feather – timestamp the very beginning of my love affair with the wilderness.
I pulled that journal out of my gun safe in Montana a few nights ago, almost 2000 miles from where I began it, and opened it to a random page. I read the last entry from the 1980 season when I was eight years old, a boy heartbroken by the notion that he couldn't fish again for six months. It had been a cold, rainy day shortly before Halloween, with fallen maple and birch leaves spinning downstream, the naked limbs of their trees stretching into low clouds. My dad and I had spent the afternoon on the Barton River, where he had cast his royal coachman fly into riffles for two hours without a strike. I had watched him intently, knowing that if his rod bent with the pull of fish he would hand it to me, listening to strings of geese high overhead where their calls all seemed to be saying farewell to what I loved doing most.
As my eyes passed over the printed words, I could see the broken, 19th-Century gin bottle I'd found leaking from a sandbar, heard my father's optimistic voice saying we'd try another bend in the river, and then later on our way home remembered how we'd stopped for Wise brand potato chips and an ice cream sandwich, an incongruous snack on a day when rain felt as if it could change to snow.
The journal entry, and the 1980 fishing season, ended with the simple sentence, "Goodbyes are very hard."
They haven't become any easier for me, though as I've grown older I've come to understand that they are a part of life, and I try to view them with less sadness than the boy who cried when his Vermont fishing season and summer days afield with his father ended.
Still, today is difficult. I'm sitting on a tiny patch of south-facing, glacial gravel in an oceanic expanse of snow toward the end of what's been one hell of a long winter in Southwest Montana. Less than one hundred yards from me, a bull elk is doing the same thing. He's been sleeping most of the morning, curled into a ball, his chin on his forelegs, lying in the sun like some type of antlered cat. But now he's awake and looking at me, my scent no doubt stirring wisps of primordial fear, tempered I hope by the time of year and some understanding that my days as hunter ended months earlier. Either because he recognizes this or is simply too weak to care, he itches at his ear with a hind leg, a few feeble strokes with a well-worn hoof, then closes his eyes again. This bull is dying, and I'm spending a silent day here saying goodbye, tipping my hat to him and also to change.
On an early-June evening in 1995, also chronicled in my fishing journal, I was the one throwing a coachman while my father looked on from the riverbank in our hometown. I had taken a Payne bamboo rod, custom built for my grandfather when he was a young man, now reserved for special occasions. Bats swooped low over the water, feeding on a hatch, some cutting so close that I could see their clawed feet tucked under their leathery wings. As day gave up the ghost, fog forming over the water the way it does when night will be clear and chilly, I set up on a good fish. My dad watched silently as I played the trout, something he'd done thousands of times since he'd taught me to fish when I two years old, but then, when I lifted the big brown from the water by its tail, exclaimed, "Mister man, now that's what I call a brown trout!"
It was the largest fish either of us had caught on a fly in a Vermont river, some over 20 inches and thick through. On any other night, it would have been headed to the taxidermist's, but that evening I returned it to the river, a fitting goodbye from a boy striking out for Montana in the morning.
Less than ten hours later, my beat-up Ford Tempo loaded with most of my worldly possessions - notably a shotgun, rifle, and the Payne fly rod my father handed me in our driveway before hugging me goodbye, I began a 2000-mile journey toward a land that I was certain would become my home.
A week later, on my first fishing trip in Montana – a day spent negotiating a maze of swollen beaver bogs at the foot of the Pintlar Mountains - I found four shed moose antlers, a mineral-stained, ancient buffalo skull, and I caught a better mess of brook trout than I had in New England in over a decade. Ecstatic, I called my dad that evening and told him that when he came to visit later that summer he'd better plan on staying a while and brining a whole bunch of grasshopper flies. I couldn't have agreed more when he told me that it sounded as though I was in exactly the right place.
Butte, Montana may have been exactly the right place, but I didn't think that using my journalism degree to get a straight news job at the local paper was at all the right thing to do. It wasn't in keeping with the frontier existence I had envisioned, or with the secret plans I had to write novels the way my father did. I'd carve out a readership in the West the way he had in New England. So, instead of a cubicle, computer, and newsroom, I bought a chainsaw and interviewed for a job cutting timber. The only question my employer asked me was whether or not I'd cut my leg off, to which I fervently replied that I hoped not. He said that he hoped not, too, and with that I was hired.
My first day in the woods ended with my hands stained dark from lodgepole pitch that had leaked through the thin, cotton gloves I wore, my ears ringing from the roar of my saw, my back aching from bending over for more than 10 hours, and a new appreciation for the jaws of hungry horseflies. But my last thoughts that evening, lying in bed more exhausted than I'd been in years, were of the cow elk I'd seen on the way to the woodlot and how they'd simply vanished behind a billowing curtain of mountain fog – visible one second and so completely gone the next that I wondered if they'd really been standing there.
I wanted to hunt them. To shoot a great bull. To feel dried blood on my hands and the weight of what would surely be many heavy packs of meat. I wanted to hunt them with the same instinctive need that had drawn me to the sport even before I began keeping a fishing journal.
I was three years old when my dad took me to look at a couple of buck whitetails hanging from a neighbor's tree in Vermont, admitting to me years later that he believed the sight might be too disconcerting for a boy my age.
"I was quickly disabused of any such notion," he'd said, recounting how I'd walked up to the larger of the deer, wrapped my hands around his antlers and solemnly announced that I would shoot many of them.
My dad and I could never trace the lineage of my need to hunt. Everyone in his family, back as far as he could remember, was a fine fisherman but like him had too much empathy for other wild animals to pursue them with a gun. He owned a single-shot, 16-gauge shotgun and would, when I was ten or eleven, sometimes carry it when we walked in the woods, but if it hadn't been for me pestering him night and day to hunt grouse I doubt it would have seen much use. I was a "throwback," he often said, and while he fully supportedmy hunting it was never something we shared like our time on a trout stream. Thinking of those elk I'd seen on my first day as a logger, I figured some day maybe he'd join me on a Montana hunt, even if he didn't do more than keep camp during the day.
I cut timber for almost ten years, rattling around nearly every corner of Montana in a 1983 Toyota pickup on my days off, happily living paycheck to paycheck, building a collection of Yellowstone River agates, moss-covered shed elk antlers, a prodigious stack of rejection notices from magazines where I submitted unsolicited short works of fiction, and a couple of letters from law schools where, during a moment of weakness, I'd applied, been accepted, then came to my senses before enrolling. The seasons rolled along like the Big Hole River at peak runoff, and my twenties passed in a blur of everything I loved doing outside, including many August afternoons in the Pioneer Mountains where my father joined me once a summer to catch brook trout.
Sitting here today, the elk now on unsteady feet, grubbing at the ground where he has already eaten every blade of grass longer than the whiskers on his muzzle, I have the odd sense that those early days in Montana occurred during an entirely different lifetime - a jetlag so severe that when I say it out loud, "Nearly a quarter century ago," it simply doesn't seem possible.
Through this bull's antlers, I can see a horizon of deep snow on a distant ridgeline where the wind blows it in curly wisps, tendrils of white spiraling into the blue sky. I imagine that this bull knows that country and I wonder if he shares the same odd feeling that time runs as fast and straight as an arrow? Probably not, I decide, though when he lies down again and shifts toward the west wind blowing from that horizon, his nostrils flare. Perhaps the sun has warmed spruce in some high seep there enough to bring its scent this far. Perhaps with it come dim recollections of wallow mud and the crackle of dead limbs smashed from tree trunks by strong antlers during the rut.
There's something strikingly out of place about a day of bright sun with the infant stirrings of spring in the air when this bull grows weaker and weaker. I think he's six – maybe seven years old – and while I don't know what that translates into in elk years, I believe it's a full life. He's known what it means to be a herd bull, seen fear in the eyes of other bulls who backed down without a September fight, and, aware of it or not, has no doubt fathered bulls approaching their own time to claim a harem. A thousand years from now there may well be elk here who can trace their heritage directly back to him. There's not much more for a bull to ask for, I think, as he opens his eyes and swivels his head to look at me again.
Yes, I'm still here, and I anthropomorphize too much. This bull probably has no interest in saying goodbye to anything, save perhaps his curious visitor he wishes would get the hell out of here.
In my early thirties, when I dropped my last lodgepole, landing it neatly between a pair of others I'd spared, I couldn't wait to say goodbye to my logging career. I was ready to walk – no, to run- away from it and never look back. Ready to shuck off a starving artist's lifestyle that, despite the publication of a couple of novels and a slightly higher acceptance rate for essays, had bankrupted me. I'd had more than a bellyful of sharing a three-room house with packrats, choosing between a gallon of milk for my fridge or a gallon of gas for my truck, and thinking up lame excuses for my increasingly-impatient landlord when my rent was invariably late.
On a February morning when my Butte thermometer showed eleven below zero, I gassed up my truck – thank you, Visa – and drove nearly 300 miles to the Clearwater River Drainage in Idaho. I spent the afternoon fishing for steelhead in a light sweater, soaking up 50-degree sunshine, feeling the pull of powerful fish that had come all the way from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. As the day faded, I drove back to Butte, and the following morning threw everything I owned into a small U-haul trailer and spent the next 700 miles on I-90 en route to Nashville, Tennessee.
The dogwoods and daffodils were in full bloom when I arrived, ready to give city living a shot for a few months while I helped my brother-in-law out with a construction project he was supervising.
There are worse things for a young man to do than spend a little time in a city like Nashville. I played on a heck of an adult baseball team, loved the anonymity that I found in nightlife crowds, didn't object to being paid well – in cash – for a day's work, and traveled throughout the South, a transplanted Yankee coming by way of Montana, which I quickly learned was a better place to introduce myself from.
Then, on a late summer day that arrived with just a touch of something other than sweltering heat and humidity, I rented another - even smaller U-haul trailer - and headed west. On the edge of the Missouri River outside Saint Louis, I stopped in a pull-out near the Arch and looked in my rearview mirror at a hazy horizon, saying a quiet goodbye to the South, uncertain what the future held for me, fully convinced that whatever it was lay back in Montana.
This elk seems more relaxed now, content to lie still as the sun cruises toward its zenith, opening his eyes occasionally without really focusing, lost in sleep and I hope dreams, too. He never doubted for a split second where he belonged, I bet, born in some of the best country to be an elk in, though I smile wondering what he thought when his first set of spike antlers dropped from his head on some late-spring day years earlier. I've seen animals stare at their reflections in water on more than one occasion, and I'm guessing there was some instinctual relief when this bull noticed larger, velvet-covered antlers growing back when he lowered his head to drink later that summer.
It's got to be a rough and tumble existence for a bull during that second September. A freshman at homecoming, circling outside the glow of the bonfire, envious of everything going on closer, foolishly unafraid of the senior he picks a fight with. I'm sure that under this bull's coat of thinning hair are the scars from those early brawls, hard lessons written in permanent, striated lines carved by the tines of larger elk.
In time, this bull taught the same lessons, I know. That's the way it works in Nature - no malice, no revenge, only adherence to a blueprint thousands of years old, a perfect roadmap to the survival of a species.
Our map is less defined, I think, smiling as I remember the eagerness with which I signed up with an explosives company servicing a gold mine upon my return to Montana. Might as well add miner to my resume of logger and writer and homebuilder, I thought. Anything that pays the bills and allows me time in Montana's wilderness.
It wasn't bad work and when, two years later, the company asked if I was up for running a large job in the eastern part of Montana, I jumped at the chance. I didn't tell them that the sweetest part of the deal happened to be the fact that this job bordered the very ground where Chuck Adams had arrowed his largest bull elk, once the archery world record.
So, on my thirty-fifth birthday, I found myself working 18 hours in a coal mine owned by the Crow Indians, diving head-first into corporate America management in a part of Montana that didn't feel anything like the mountains I'd called home. The summers were boiling hot, the winters cold and windy, but the pay was good, the benefits excellent, and once more time slid by on rails.
I didn't have quite the time to fish, hunt, and explore Montana the way that I had when I was logging around Butte, but my father and I continued our annual August trips to the mountains for brook trout, returning year after year to the same streams where we often wondered if we were the only ones to ever cast to these voracious trout. They weren't big – most under ten inches – but, as he said, were as pretty as the places they lived.
A few years ago, during one of Montana's early fall days when the high country awakes to frost and the sky is as blue as the haze of color around a brook trout's red spots, we fished several miles of tiny stream that flowed through patches of mature timber and meadows of blooming sage. We fished past a rusty, horse-drawn hay rake, its tines thrust into the air by alders which had taken root beneath it, the sagging timbers of a long-abandoned homestead, and a small series of tepee rings above a tight bend in the creek where I found a beautiful, red jasper hide scraper. That evening, as embers from our fire drifted skyward toward millions of stars and a lone elk bugled in the distance, I almost asked my dad to come back and join me in November for a few days. Instead, we talked about many of the places we'd fished together for the past forty years.
He asked me once, shortly before we retired to our tent, if I was as happy then as I'd been during my first few years in Montana when I would often call him up, as I'd done after my first fishing expedition, eager to recount some new adventure. I thought about it a long time and finally said that Montana was a great place to live.
My father headed back to Vermont a couple of days later, and on the day I was scheduled to return to work I woke up, looked in the mirror, and with dumbfounded disbelief, found myself smack in the middle of my life. Instead of driving to the mine, I rolled to the top of Beartooth Pass in the Absaroka Range, hiked to the edge of a no-name, alpine pond, and sat on a large boulder until a north wind that kept the mosquitos at bay had chilled me to the bone.
I watched clouded sulfur butterflies dancing with stunted, blue lupines, saw the shadow of a golden eagle zip across the water ten feet from shore, heard the whistles of hoary marmots, and caught a clump of winter mountain goat hair as it floated by like milkweed silk. As tiny waves distorted the tracks of a few elk who'd come to drink early that morning, erasing their hoof prints from mud specked with iron pyrite, nothing – literally nothing – in the entire universe seemed as important to me as spending more time in places exactly like this. When I climbed down from that oblong hunk of granite, I knew my days bound to a desk where I worried about profits and loss, regulatory reporting, engineering design, and a 401K were as numbered as the remaining ice-free days on that pond. With a mindset equal parts fear and determination, I said goodbye to it all in an instant.
No worries about retirement for this bull elk, I think as I watch him shift in his bed as the wind swings out of the south. Here in the wild, old age is a rarely-afforded luxury. Animals often see their lives fade from the peak of physical fitness to the very end in the matter of just a few months. A tiny bit more snow than usual in February, a spring that breaks just a week or two late, or an unusually heavy snowstorm in April are all that separate the living from the dead.
I'm not going to sit here much longer, I decide. As much as I might like to think it, I've got no part in this bull's world. Mine may not lie among production reports and quarterly sales projections, but at best it runs only along the periphery of his. I look at my camera, motionless on its tripod, the tool I've chosen now to help show parts of the natural world as only I see them, then peer through its viewfinder at the bull. His eyes are closed, and while I'll leave soon I won't move quite yet.
As clouds stream fast overhead, joining and rolling like the surf of an inverted sea, I think about my fishing journal that I read from the other night. Before I returned it to my safe, I thumbed through the couple of hundred pages between 1980 and its last entry, one I made years after I stopped catching Vermont brook trout, and again I'm struck by both the pervasive nature of goodbyes in life and also the difficulty with which I confront them.
The learning curve for me and hunting elk in Montana approximates the curvature of our Earth. Each time I believe I've got something figured out, I'm proven so wrong that I wonder if I'll ever master more than a few general principles. It's with growing suspicion that I view the bulls on my wall as examples of elk which, like some of the Crow Indians who worked for me said, "gave themselves to me."
Still, I was determined to invite my dad along for a hunt. We'd do it once, completing one of my bucket-list wishes, and I might even go out of my way to see our week conclude without a bull on the ground. I had a general game plan for how I'd ease into the proposition over Christmas that winter, sitting around a lit tree in a world full of snow, strangely optimistic that he would agree.
Instead, while the smell of balsam fir filled the house where I grew up and a pair of wood stoves strained to keep us warm against a biting cold front straight down out of the Arctic, we talked fishing and baseball. A couple of weeks earlier, during a trip to the local doctor's office for some antibiotics to kick a stubborn chest infection, Xrays revealed that my father had advanced lung cancer, the result of the massive radiation he'd used to treat prostate cancer nine years earlier.
We talked about writing – about how a life lived on the fringe of comfort but close to dreams often lends itself to stories. We talked about hunting some, too, once more perplexed by how the need to do so had reared its head so strong in me. I showed my father photos from that elk season, pausing to let him study the bull that I'd killed. He did so for a long time before smiling and saying, "What a beautiful animal."
I was able to spend almost three weeks at home with my parents. During that time, while I filled the side porch with split firewood, helped my dad to and from various appointments with oncologists, and made sure he had a steady of supply of popsicles and ice cream to ease the ever-present pain in his throat, I watched cancer take his voice, his ability to walk without a walker and to write with a pen, and some of the light from his eyes. I hated it with a vitriol unlike anything I've ever experienced, frustrated that we – cancer and I – couldn't meet in some dark alley where I could cut its head off and hack it apart with a hunting knife.
It was snowing hard on the morning I had to return to Montana, still near enough the winter solstice that at 7am there was no hint of light. I stoked the wood stoves, touched base with my sister, en route to Vermont from her home in Nashville, then watched my dad rise from the living room couch where he was sitting, shove his walker to the side, and take three steady steps toward me to give me a hug.
"Down the road," I said before walking out the door.
"Down the road," he whispered as loudly as he could.
I was on the upper Missouri River, tied up with a big, male rainbow that was hanging stubbornly in deep water, when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket two weeks later. I wouldn't have had it with me if I hadn't been expecting the call, but I let it ring without answering. On the other end of the country, as tiny snowflakes fell from a sky that smelled like wood smoke, my dad lost his short battle with cancer. I wrote about it that evening in my journal, and the large rainbow that I eventually landed and, in his honor, released. Unaccustomed to writing more than my name in longhand, the letters weren't as neat as the ones beside them from thirty years ago, but in a short passage describing how, when a five-pound rainbow strikes, I can feel heft and power and disdain for all on the other end of the line, I said goodbye as best I could.
It's time for me to say it again, this time to this bull elk, and once more the exact words to use elude me. A picture then, I suppose, something entirely beyond his realm of comprehension but meaningful to me. I don't allow my eye to focus on the elk's ribs, etched against his coat, or the lack of grass on the ground where he lies, seeing only the larger picture of a great animal in great country, frozen for a split second, not at the end of life but in the here and now. Then, just as I begin to press the shutter release, he tips his chin back, closes his eyes, and bugles a single time. It's not the powerful voice of a bull in September proclaiming his dominance, but a more airy, hollow song that quickly gets caught in the wind, blowing north over my head, sound waves dissipating like the ripples on the surface of a river as a large trout propels itself back to the deep.]]>
I remember when I began taking star trail pictures - invariably leaving my camera to its remote with incorrect settings that resulted in mornings of viewing unusable photos. It is been a trial and error process, but one not without some humor. I've had mule deer lick the lens of my camera, seen great horned owls perch on top of century-old buildings I used in my foreground, seen the tracks of a black bear who walked tight circles around my tripod, and occasionally, if returning in the dark to gather my gear, have wondered, "Now, just where in the hell did I set this thing up at?"
I have always loved the sky at night. The depth of our universe - what unimaginably tiny portion of it we can see - the soft band of the Milky Way, arcing across Montana like a celestial rainbow, or the orange glow of a harvest moon. Drawn to all things off the beaten path, night sky photography is another way for me to explore what often goes unseen.
Please look at the link attached here, and share it, too, a film created from some of this year's Insight Astronomy short-listed entries. They are stunning across the board, and I'm fortunate beyond fortunate to be a part of it.
Looks like I made the July 23 edition of Newsweek!
Here is a link to an article in Country Living that features all the shortlisted entries. Some remarkable photography!
I built a small fire near the obsidian shards of prehistoric hunters who had doubtlessly looked up into the same sky I'd come to view. I waited, swatting the occasional mosquito, straining to hear the final calls of birds bidding the day goodbye, watching the stars appear in a sky that drifted from the color of brushed aluminum to a velvety black.
I took the photos I'd come for between 11:30pm and 12:30am, then loaded more than 50 pounds of gear onto my back and, with the aid of a headlamp and random songs played from my phone, walked through the wilderness back to my truck.
It's Milky Way season out here in Montana - that time of year when the core of our galaxy is visible over the southern horizon for a few hours immediately after complete darkness. I've been photographing it from one end of this state to the other, showing life here contrasted against a sky where it's hard to imagine that there isn't life somewhere. I hope that you enjoy these images, all available on my site, and that while looking at them you feel some of the wonder that I do.
"Badlands Midnight"
"Schoolhouse Rock"
"Worlds Collide"
People often ask me if these Milky Way photos are "fake." The simple, truthful answer is, "Not at all." I use a 35mm lens on my Nikon camera, mounted on a motorized, equatorial mount which, when properly aligned, moves at the same rate our Earth spins in relation to the stars. This allows me to capture a night image in excess of 3 minutes without getting the "trailing" present on stars which would be apparent without this mount. It also allows a lower ISO which translates to less image noise and greater detail. I take one image with my mount turned on, and then immediately, without moving my camera, take another with it turned off. Because my camera is moving slowly for the first image, everything on Earth is slightly blurred. In the second image, the foreground is sharp and blending the two together is very easy since the overall image contains the same sky and foreground.
You can view or purchase this image in my New Releases or Night Skies section.]]>
Much of our mountain snow is gone, torrents of gushing water bound for oceans on both sides of our continent, rivers groping lowland fields of crops, and sometimes subdivisions, while weathermen announce the "hundred-year flood" with statistics like gallons per minute, crest height, and photos taken from drones that show lakes in place of terra firma. Carp have seen clover and ospreys have fed their young with goldeneye shiners caught from among shelterbelts of Russian olives where great horned owls have caught voles during the other 99 of these years. Like the smell of lilacs, I have been aware of this, though peripherally, taking a long time to awake after so hard a winter.
The deer and elk that survived our interminable season of ice have been rewarded with meadows of taller grass then I've seen in my nearly 25 years in Montana. Visible ribs and resigned eyes have been replaced by sleek coats and, if I may be so presumptuous to define their expressions, pure joy. The seasons have tipped fully now, ready to begin inching back toward that day in December when all this will seem as impossibly far away as the glacial expanse of white which defined the last solstice.
A year ago I wrote about climbing a tall mountain to shoot the Milky Way, my way of making the most of the day with the least darkness. Six months later, I took a long drive through our long state, determined to squeeze every drop of light from the day that sees the smallest amount. What to do now, I ask myself after my requisite two cups of strong coffee? A trip I soon decide, a decision as hereditary as my predisposition to coffee, though the journey this year will be bounded by the price of gasoline and lifestyle choices that have made that price a good deal more painful than last summer. Such is the cost of being drawn to the arts I think as I load my camera gear into my truck and roll out of town, my gas gauge hanging in the position that an optimist would call half full. The realist in me takes note of the green, digital numbers announcing that in approximately 116 miles I'd better find myself near a filling station not opposed to accepting Mr. Visa.
One of the many wonderful things about living in a state like Montana is the ability to go somewhere new every time I set out and still not see nearly all there is to see. You can climb the dozen tallest peaks, fish the 25 best rivers, and learn one or two mountain ranges reasonably well enough to feel at home in them, but there will be alpine lakes, prairie coulees, twisting creeks and shaded north-facing stands of dense pine you will never lay eyes on. With that in mind, I decide to go somewhere new, compassed only by that inclination.
An hour later, after more than a few nervous glances at my fuel level, after creeping up a road more rock than dirt, after passing a makeshift campsite containing both an oversized RV and undersized teepee, I park next to a locked, iron gate where the National Forest Service says further travel will be on foot. Fine by me, and finer still when I see that beyond this gate the only sign of traffic is the splayed print of a moose who preceded me when the ground was damp.
A western tiger swallowtail drifts by me and immediately more follow, tracing the road the way their smaller, more vibrant cousins did a brook on the New Hampshire and Vermont border one day more than thirty years ago when my father and I explored another new place. Clough, its name was, and we fished it upstream to a falls impossible for trout to traverse though above it there were fish – small brook trout with backs greener than any we'd ever seen – a subspecies exiled to this spot for the past ten thousand years. As more swallowtails glide by me now, for a moment it seems all years between have come and gone as quickly as this summer has replaced this spring. All the more reason to get going I decide, following the moose tracks away from my truck into country that's never heard my footfalls.
My path winds up, as most do when they leave civilization in the Rockies, past the stump of a lightning-shattered fir, a hillside of lupines, and across a scree field of lichen-coated granite. Where it briefly runs flat, the leaking tentacle of a snowdrift far above me crosses the trail, and all along this rivulet silver blues and spring azure butterflies fan their wings. I screw on my macro lens, drop to my belly, and wait for a shot of one facing me, another blurred to a haze of blue in the background. Further, where the trail begins climbing again, I catch a delicate, orange tip butterfly resting on a clump of sage-green moss. My shutter clicks as some vague awareness of time's passage washes over me, a memory of iron spikes driven into the rock banks of Clough to hold back white pine logs destined for mills along the Connecticut River in the 1870s seeming both near and distant.
Onward now, through blue wings rising around me, further into new country and old memories of other summer days when blackfly bites ringed my ears, undeterred by the acrid odor of repellant. Where my path – gone by way of natural progression from a two-track to a game trail to a faint line of slightly-darker ground, traversed perhaps centuries ago by nomadic hunters – passes under an escarpment of lava rock, I spot the trunk of a silicified tree weathering out of its tomb. Six hundred thousand years ago it was encapsulated here when the caldera under present-day Yellowstone National Park spewed millions of tons of ash into the sky. I reach out and touch it the same as I did the iron rods on the banks of the Vermont stream, acknowledging the past in the moment of the present, the eons and decades similarly distant, similarly close.
With a small piece of the petrified tree in my pocket, I turn straight uphill and push toward ground which, by virtue of elevation, still resides in that in-between time neither winter nor summer. In a clearing where bright sun touches matted bear grass and bubbly pieces of clear agate, I take a picture of a hairy pasque flower, always one of the earliest to bloom in Montana, always reminiscent of the crocuses that heralded spring in New England.
My legs are strong this year, the result of running many miles, the result of some acknowledgement that I am in the summer solstice of my life, and even where the climb becomes steeper they carry me along up this mountain and through this day with minimal effort. Both pass as imperceptibly yet as undeniably as the time between my discovery of the iron spikes, the touch of my hand on the petrified tree, the focus of my lens on the pasque flower, and the rumble of an ancient earth torn apart to leave a crater for Yellowstone Lake.
A snowdrift. Pocked like the surface of a windblown lake, brown with dust and fir needles, it clings to shade below massive fir trees. I'm not the first to cross it, following in the footsteps of melted elk tracks, strands of the animal's winter hair left on the ice, both souvenirs of winter that have found each other through the magnetism of seasons. Above it, I discover that this mountain is really just the shoulder of a much larger peak a few miles to the east. I think about turning that way toward the treeless summit but that would mean a longer step backward in time than I wish to make. I've had my fill of snow this year and will walk west, gradually downhill, remaining more firmly in early summer.
In an opening blue with silvery lupines, yellow arrowleaf balsamroot strewn among them like randomly-scattered sunflowers, I sit down to take a picture of a tortoiseshell butterfly. Just as I begin to lift my camera, a male calliope hummingbird, the smallest North American bird, fresh from his journey up from Costa Rica, zips into view. Our eyes meet as he fans the lilac-colored feathers on his neck in a colorful display to say these are his flowers, but before I can get a picture he's off like a beam of green light, gone as completely from this moment as the days of Connecticut River log drives or the sound of a hammer striking a star drill along the creeks high above them. Gone as irrevocably as all things in the past dating back to whatever astronomic force began this universe. Perhaps that's why I'm so drawn to photography I think as I focus on the tortoiseshell. Perhaps it's my way of bowing to the intrinsically human desire to somehow hold onto time, an endeavor equally impossible now as it was whenever our ancestors first had enough self-awareness to attempt it through their drawings on cave walls. The moment is gone, but the likeness of it remains. I freeze the butterfly on a light-blue aster, wondering if the digital representation of this split second might someday catch someone's eye the way the petrified tree caught mine.
My day in new country wears on with other snippets of it recorded by my camera, still more, like the hummingbird and a pair of elk I surprise in their beds, recorded by my eyes. The afternoon is clear, the forbearer of a clear night when I'll want to once more capture our home galaxy. That will mean a nod of thanks to Mr. Visa and a journey of many miles, and that means at some point soon I'll need to wind my way back to my truck. But not just yet. For a few more minutes, I will take macro pictures of orange lichen on pink-gray granite, watch a few more swallowtails float like October aspen leaves after a hard frost, stare at the rosy throats of spring beauty flowers, and run my hands over the fissured bark of a fir tree whose seen this solstice come and go five hundred times. I'll carry a grouse feather, mottled and soft, because it is my nature to seek and find things, even as simple as this feather. I will take a picture of a small waterfall, the cascade blurring to water as smooth as river fog at daylight. I'll follow a mourning cloak butterfly that never lands, kneel to capture the face of a ladybug, hold my breath while shooting a glacier lily leaning over the shoulder of a fairy slipper orchid. On this longest day, I won't hold back time but by god I'll make the most of it, believing fully that I've spent it entirely true to myself in a manner as worthwhile as any I can imagine. And when, miles away as the last rays of sun fade from a sky that's held them longer than it has in a full year, when night begins its march toward its own December glory, when the feel of grainy snow under my boots and course elk hair between my fingers is as much a memory as the Wise potato chips my father and I ate along the banks of Clough, I'll point my camera toward the center of our galaxy and deny myself sleep until that too has become a memory preserved.
Please take a moment to check out my new releases, all pictures of spring and early summer here in Montana, including a couple of my best night sky images. You can view them by following this link.
New Releases
In front of me, across the river and beyond a couple of miles of juniper-studded foothills, the Yellowstone Range shoves into the sky, peaks over 10,000 feet high showing off their treeless, snowy summits under the soft light of a few million stars. I'm waiting here, shivering and rubbing my hands together for warmth, watching for the gassy core of our Milky Way galaxy to rise above these mountains so that I may photograph it for the first time this year. There's no moon, and yet the night pulses with seemingly more than starlight, my eyes now well enough accustomed to its dim glow to pick out a beaver's silver, V-shaped wake as it swims upstream through slack water near shore. Above it, the dark silhouettes of geese cut through the night en route to some early breakfast further downstream. All around here, the world is waking up from winter, the infant stirrings of spring signaling Nature's intent to begin a shift in seasons.
I feel it, too, an instinctual relief and renewed energy making it easier to rise in the middle of the night and drive what approximates the entire length of Vermont, the state where I grew up, to be here during the single-digit hours of early dawn to take a single photograph. Fall has always been my favorite season, though one has never arrived entirely devoid of some innate sadness – the ragged butterflies, the bittersweet warmth of shorter days, the heavy dew that becomes heavy frost. Autumn, with its overwhelming sense of unequivocal ending, can be loved but cannot be joyous in the same way that spring can.
A fish slaps the surface near the hulking shape of a boulder wearing a headdress of lighter-colored sticks, the remnants of last year's high water. Before summer, this wig will be borne away, carried to some distant, downstream logjam as the Yellowstone crests feet higher than the top of this stone. It seems a long way off now, but staring at stars over the mountains in the east I know that's an entirely relative perspective. I think about it for a moment, the countless millennia this cycle has repeated here, the bond between river and earth strengthened as one cuts away the other. Again I hear the great horned owl, and again its mate answers.
I stamp my feet and shake the small pouches of dry-chemical hand warmers I've brought, speeding their reaction with oxygen in the air, their growing warmth spreading from my palms up my arms. I've aligned the motorized mount on my tripod, the equatorial mount capable of replicating the rate of our Earth's rotation in relation to the stars, to true north, and switched it on. A pale-green LED signals the silent motor is working, but our galaxy is still half an hour from where I want it for this picture. Still partially hidden behind the great mountains that keep drawing my eyes their way. Like the proverbial watched pot, the Milky Way's core seems stalled on the back side of Emigrant Peak, enthralled perhaps with the view of the Absaroka Beartooth and its thousands of square miles of unbroken wilderness. I've seen it, too, from a jet flying between Billings and Salt Lake City, and I don't begrudge the stars their extended examination.
I laugh out loud. It's not even quarter of four in the morning, I haven't seen so much as a set of headlights in nearly an hour, and I'm standing out here shivering, imagining the stars peering down on country sporting six feet of snow. Waiting for that first line of grizzly bear tracks to cut a trench down the slope of some north-facing peak.
A puff of air – not yet a breeze – like the night exhaling softly in deep sleep, carries a scent I haven't smelled in months. It's dirt, the celebratory aroma of a ground beginning to thaw, and instantly I'm back on the front porch of my Vermont home thirty five years ago, a boy with his nose to the wind, uncontainable happiness sweeping me up, thrilled beyond all measure by the realization that winter is not interminable. And all because I've smelled dirt.
In the spring of 1981, and by spring I mean a day of sun in early March when the glacial, roadside snowdrifts on Irasburg, Vermont's Route 14 first relinquished a trickle of water, my dad and I bought one dozen tin maple sap buckets. They came with Pilgrim-hat lids, designed to slide over their rolled rims and keep rain – or more likely snow – from falling inside, 12 galvanized, hollow-tube taps with hooks to hang the buckets on, and one drill bit the right size for boring holes in sugar maples.
The buckets, even stacked together, wouldn't fit in the trunk of our Nova, and rattled noisily in the back seat between the Irasburg General Store where we bought them and our home a short distance away. I liked the sound. The metallic clanking spoke of doing something. Of making things. Of joining, if only in a small way, the families who boiled sap into syrup every spring, sending white columns of steam into the sky, offerings to the gods to bring spring, but slowly.
A good sugar season with a long run of sap needs sunny days and cold nights. A cycle of freeze and thaw during which Vermont's iconic maples can drink from the earth every day for three weeks. Too warm, and the run will be over too quickly. Not warm enough and the sap won't flow. I knew this by the time I was eight years old and riding home with our buckets, though I can't now remember exactly when I learned it. Perhaps it is knowledge acquired instinctually, imparted from the Northeast Kingdom at birth, like a love for the Red Sox or an understanding that come the second Saturday in November nothing in the world is more important than hunting whitetail deer.
By 1981, WD-40, the aerosol, fix-all lubricant, had been around for almost thirty years, though never in the Mosher household, where we accepted the Northeast Kingdom's inclination toward – and affection for - oxidation as simply the way things were. When a door latch rusted shut, you tapped it back and forth with a hammer. If the nut holding a lawnmower blade in place grew round with rust, you beat a pipe wrench onto it when it needed loosening. And when, if all else failed, as it did with my attempts to turn the chuck of the hand drill I'd found in the attic of our garage, my mother would dab a little sewing oil onto it, golden drops falling from a tin, rectangular can sporting a bright-red spout. Like the sap buckets rattling, I liked the sound of the oilcan flexing in and out as my mother oiled the drill, the chuck eventually spinning in my hands, ready to accept the bit my dad bought for tapping maples.
If the drill wasn't one hundred years old, it was knocking damn hard on that door. It was a U-shaped contraption with a round, flat, wooden knob on the back end polished to a burgundy sheen from countless hours of resting against a man's palm while he turned the drill, the entire apparatus a very small technological upgrade to the T-handle tools used in barn building that preceded it.
I wasn't tall enough to drill a hole in the prodigious maple tree in our front yard in the right place. I could do it – by bracing the handle of the drill against my thigh and leaning into it for all I was worth while I cranked, but the ensuing hole was too near the ground to hang a bucket on. I watched my dad, enviously, as he carved a hole in the tree a couple of feet above mine, the bit chewing through lichen-covered bark before sending damp, curly cuttings of white wood squirming from the hole. I watched as they bounced down the trunk to the patch of bare ground where sun, reflected from the tree, had exposed some brown grass.
"The Abenaki Indians were the first people to make maple syrup," my father said while I hammed a tap into the hole he drilled. "At some point, someone must have tried burning a green maple log in a campfire and then tasted some of the sap that bubbled out."
From the next hole, I selected an especially long cutting and placed it in my mouth. It didn't have nearly as strong a flavor as the wintergreen-infused yellow birch twigs I'd nibbled on while fishing, but through the wood came a hint of something sweet, gone in an instant, leaving me wiping my tongue on the back of my hand, flecks of lichen sticking to it as they had the cutting.
To the honking of horns from several passing cars, we hung five buckets on the tree in our yard, and before the last hole was drilled sap was flowing from the first, plunking onto the bottom of the bucket with another pleasing sound. In a land of ice, not all was frozen.
We hung the remaining seven sap buckets on two trees towering from the ruins of a stone wall in a neighbor's horse pasture. My father pulled me down there in a large, wooden toboggan, past reddening clumps of osiers, the bounding tracks of snowshoe hares, and a lone, wrinkled, wild apple lying on top of the snow. He let me drill one of the holes, balancing on a bread loaf-shaped granite boulder around which a portion of the old wall had been built, as he sang Luckenbach Texas, humming for all the words except "Waylon, Willie, and the boys," a refrain he sang over and over.
By the time we got back to our house, I could no longer hear sap hitting metal in any of the buckets on the first tree we'd tapped, falling quietly onto a shallow layer of liquid instead. It ran well until the middle of the afternoon when the wind swung to the north, blowing hard out of Canada with a winter chill. When I woke up the following morning and peered under the lids of the buckets, I saw that during the night the last drops of sap had frozen, hanging from the taps like the icicles from the eaves above our porch.
The sap didn't run for three days, though I did my best to will it from the ground, my inspections of our buckets becoming more intense both before I headed to school and again immediately upon my return. When the cold snap broke on the fourth day, and the sun rose warm over Allen Hill, it was as if the trees knew to make up for lost time. The sap flowed so fast from our taps that I could barely count individual drops. By early afternoon, the buckets on the tree in our front yard were more than half full, cakes of frozen sap floating in them, melting faster I believed if I chopped at them with the tine of a pitchfork I'd unearthed the summer before while digging for worms to use fishing.
Shortly before supper, my dad lashed a plastic garbage can into the front of the toboggan and we trudged down through the pasture, sinking deep in soft snow. I was elated to see that "my" bucket had at least two inches more sap in it than any of the others, a result of its position directly below the tree's largest limb, my dad said. One at a time, we dumped the buckets into the garbage can then carefully retraced our steps, trying to keep the toboggan in its own track where it packed a narrow path. With the sap from the tree in our yard added in, we had almost twenty gallons – enough for half a gallon of syrup.
The following day, a Saturday, was warm again but for some reason unknown to all except the maple trees, the sap didn't run as fast. My dad let me take the toboggan by myself that afternoon, showing me how I could step inside the loop of clothesline he used to pull it, placing the rope against my waist to use my legs as much as possible. It was a relatively flat shot to the trees in the pasture, and I belted out "Waylon and Willie" much of the way there, stopping once to look at large, melted tracks that cut across the ones my dad and I had made a few days before. The trek back was harder, and I had to rest five or six times, but as more and more of our house came into view I sang louder, eventually heaving into the driveway with eight gallons of sap sloshing around in the garbage can.
My mother began boiling as soon as we finished supper, cooking the sap in the metal tub-like pot she used to seal canning jars. I had to stand on a chair, its wicker seat sagging and doweled legs wobbly, to see down into the boiling vat, and after my second view of the foamy, rolling surface, my mother said no more. She didn't need a broken chair or a broken son. So I sat at our kitchen table as the room grew damp with condensation, the ceiling above the stove beading with water, listening to the rhythmic roll of boiling sap. Every fifteen minutes, my mom would add more, ladling it from the garbage can on our side porch with the same pot she used to boil the eggs that we'd colored for Easter the year before. The boiling would slow and then resume its pace, the windowpanes throughout the downstairs of our house shining wet with round balls of water.
While my dad sat on our living room couch and read, my mother and I talked in the kitchen, discussing the diminutive size of the tomato seeds we'd planted in peat pots, the possible identity of the beast which had plowed through the snow near the pasture maples, tracks too large I thought for any earthly creature, and what my stub-tailed cat, Lynx, might be doing out on the town, feeling the call of spring. We wondered when I'd see the first butterfly of the year, and whether it would be a mourning cloak or tortoiseshell. I asked her how many more times she thought it would snow, and if she would help me build a mouse trap in our cellar using a bent handsaw blade and dental floss coated with cheese. The small wall clock, hanging in its copper-colored shell, read seven, then eight, then nine.
It was after ten when sap turned to syrup, dripping slowing from the fork my mother dipped into the kettle. She poured it off into canning jars, liquid the color of standing, autumn field grass just before the sun falls over the horizon. Extra fancy grade, we both agreed. And then I fell asleep as mice rolled something inside the lath walls of my bedroom, the world outside crawled through a cold night, and the enveloping sensation that nothing could be better than being a boy at springtime held me tight.
The core of the Milky Way has summited these Montana mountains now, and if I'm to make anything of this long night I'd better take a few pictures. I level my camera and open its shutter to begin one of several three-minute exposures, the equatorial mount turning it imperceptibly slowly, following the motion of the stars along their nightly arc.
As it captures a little of the world above, I sit on the bank of the Yellowstone, listening to the water, looking up at the sky, and wondering how in the hell time has gone by so fast. The maple tree in the front yard of my boyhood home, planted shortly after the house was built around 1870, came down six years ago. One of its seedlings, planted near the stump of its father, is already fifteen feet tall. The kitchen wallpaper, left peeling and loose during the 1981 sugar season, was replaced long ago, and new, double-pane windows throughout the house have never shed a tear of condensation. Like any old, New England home, it still has a few mice, though with its walls packed with blow-in insulation they've been forced to find new bowling alleys. The footfalls of a new cat, this one with a complete tail but claws as thick as a bear's and a fang that leaks from its mouth like a saber tooth, keep my mother, living there alone, company.
By the time I spot the beaver again, swimming back downstream, the eastern sky is as silver as his wake and the Milky Way is fading into another day.
"You've seen this all a million times," I think silently, watching the brightest stars in our galaxy dim with coming dawn. "Seasons and trees and families. Rivers and mountains and owls."
As if on cue, the pair calls again, their voices together now, I think. I answer them, in my own language, introducing them with unabashed bravado, to Waylon, Willie, and the boys.
"Ain't nobody feeling no pain."
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Less than three weeks earlier, it was a man. He lay down on a sidewalk, pulled a satiny sleeping bag - the kind I might use on a summer night when my only care is wondering if clouds will roll in and ruin a star trails picture - up over his head, and shivered until he died.
It's been a hell of a winter in Montana, and it's not over yet. A ride through the central part of our state looks like a tour through the Siberian Steppes. Hundreds of square miles devoid of the tracks of anything living. An oceanic expanse of wind-sculpted snow, packed deep and hard, refusing to relinquish its death grip on a landscape that should be solidly into early spring. The occasional rough legged hawk crouches on a power pole, white chest feathers rippling in the incessant north wind, grey-gold eyes scanning for voles, most of which never venture from their subterranean burrows. Apart from him, there is nothing.
That's Nature, I think, as my tires pull through a two-foot drift across the little road I'm driving along. Its animals always, even on easy winters, compete for the thinnest margins of victory in the game of survival. Stopping to look out across acres of sage where only the tips of the bushes peek above the snow, it looks like this year Winter is wrapping up a no-hitter, still throwing a hundred miles an hour in the bottom of the ninth.
Fifty miles south in Billings, where refineries work around the clock producing gasoline, artisan coffee shops serve dark, rich espresso, craft stores peddle artificial plants and wood-carving kits, and the nation's fourth-largest-grossing Walmart sells everything from winter tires to fresh cilantro, people can still die of exposure during a winter like this.
We call them "transients," giving them a politically-correct name that rolls more easily off the tongue - and our conscience - than "homeless." A name that softens the reality of it, not for them but for us.
In the distance, grainy snow blows from the top of a drift seven feet deep, curling into the sky like an icy dust devil. We are all transients, I think, as I churn ahead, but most of us don't rely on a thirty-nine dollar sleeping bag to keep us warm on below-zero nights. Most of us have a home. A place that we are so familiar with that something as simple as moving the location of our kitchen garbage basket will throw a wrinkle into our routine - try it if you don't believe me, and see how often you head to its previous location with dripping egg shells or a soaked paper towel.
On a rise where my road begins falling off toward the Mussleshell River Drainage, a fuzzy line of cottonwoods fifteen miles away, I park and watch a tumbleweed freed from the highest strand of wire on a fence skitter across the snow. It slides more than rolls and then suddenly, bestowed with the power of flight, springs into the air and spirals up thirty feet. A strong gust of wind hurls it south, across the road in front of me, then dashes it to the ground where it resumes its earth-bound slither. I watch it until it vanishes, swallowed by an invisible fissure in the land, one of the prairie's many unseen dips and draws. One instant it is there, and the next it is simply gone.
I wonder if that's how it was for the man and woman who died on the streets of Montana's largest city? One breath here, one instant later no more. The blink of an eye, the beat of a heart, the tiny, involuntary twitch of a finger or infant beginning of a dream, and then an irrevocable relocation to some other dimension.
Drugs or alcohol may have been a factor in both deaths the newscast I listened to said before an uptempo, electric guitar began its intro to the next song on the radio. There was no mention that Montana has just cut nearly 2 million dollars from its Medicaid insurance programs designed to help people battling those addictions. Nine hundred thousand dollars of state funds and, because our federal government has pledged matching amounts to whatever our state can spend to fight this epidemic, nine hundred thousand dollars there, too.
In the dooryard to a long-gone homestead, marked only by a single, defiant tree and rusting frame of a hay rake, I park and turn my truck off. I grew up in an era when addiction wasn't labeled a disease. When it was the chosen route of someone weak of mind or lacking morals. When it was treated punitively through incarceration and social ostracizing. When we addressed our family member's struggle in whispers or, more frequently, not at all.
We have moved forward since then. Scientific advances have allowed us a better understanding of how the brain and body respond, uncontrollably, to the psychological and physiological effects of chemicals. Therapy-based treatments have proven more effective than punishment-based prison sentences, and a system of support has been shown to best prevent relapse. And yet, at the height of a nationally-declared opioid epidemic, when major US drug companies have admitted their sales practices of pain killers have been irresponsible, when methamphetamines and heroine are readily available in every corner of America, when our nation struggles with growing numbers of people hooked on the most potent chemicals our bodies have ever been exposed to, we will strip money away from the avenue to hope. We will cut from those whose voice is to weak to protest. We will label our neighbor - and, as prevalent as drug use has been become, that is not an exaggeration - as undeserving of the level of assistance we deemed necessary just last year.
It is virtually unheard of for the addict in the early stages of dependency to seek help. It is not until a rock bottom far below what many of us can entertain as possible has been reached that the person afflicted with addiction walks through the door of a treatment facility. Life by then has devolved into something barely recognizable by even the most common standards we take for granted to bound daily existence. Jobs have been lost, family units destroyed, dignity left by the wayside, and any sense of self worth subjugated by a body's need for its next high. Fourteen-year-old girls will sell themselves, and fifty-year-old men will steal from their incapacitated parents, beating them if they object. The man and woman on the street, for whom drugs and alcohol play leading roles in their deaths by exposure, have no path to wellness save perhaps Medicaid insurance. To think otherwise, is as misguided as to believe "transient" implies a lifestyle akin to backpacking through Europe as a privileged, American teen.
Part of our history as a species is written in needle tracks on arms, pocked faces of meth addicts, unblinking stares of heroine users, and the patterns of broken car window glass, smashed in the dead of night by someone hoping for a wallet under the seat or an iPod in the center console. History will record that, alongside decisions to chip away at the catch-nets of social assistance. To take more from those who have already lost everything. To empower ourselves by hurting instead of helping. To devalue and marginalize and categorize not addicts or transients or the mentally ill, but fellow human beings. Instead of stripping away their funds, we should remove their labels. They are people. Men and women born to fathers and mothers. Children who laughed and cried and dreamed exactly as the rest of us. Mirror images of us, save perhaps one fateful decision.
Montana spent millions upon millions of dollars fighting the worst forest fires in our state's history last summer. Brave volunteers died battling these blazes, and most were only extinguished when they ran out of fuel to burn or by major weather events. Our state coffers were emptied, and now those among us least likely to object, least apt to raise a concerted voice at the polls, least prone to public outcry will pay a price. That is our response, and it will be written, too.
It's cold inside my truck when I crank the engine, but a hell of a lot warmer than it was when two people froze to death sixty miles away. Before I shift into reverse and begin my sojourn back, I stare at the bare tree in front of me, billowing clouds streaming past on the same north wind that's blown all day. A picture, I decide, of this place on this day if for no other reason than to prove I was here. I step out into the wind, focus quickly, my hands already feeling the bite of a bitter cold, and just before I press the shutter notice that the clouds above the tree, their finger-painted appearance smearing the horizon, have formed a heart. It's incongruous with everything I'm feeling, but sometimes that, too, is Nature. I wonder if there's any chance it's some type of sign - one from that other dimension we will all eventually transition to? I click my shutter and, as if by way of reply, watch the clouds shift and feel the sting of wind-driven snow on my face.
** You can view this feature photograph, Frozen, and many other new pictures by clicking on this link and visiting my New Releases section of this web site.
Creatures of sight, we fear what we cannot see, I tell myself, rising early on this day of shortest light. There is no blue-grey rim of dawn on the horizon at 6am, only flickering stars, pinpoints of light on the velvety dome of night, tiny frost crystals between us giving them the appearance of motion - light that has taken millions of years to reach Earth deflected at the last moment by frozen moisture in the air.
Nature's heart beats slowly this time of year in the North Country when we have tipped as far away from our sun as our orbit allows. Rough legged hawks cap telephone poles in the prairie, their feathers fluffed against the north wind, their eyes scanning the endless sea of snow for a mouse who's ventured from his subterranean home, either to replenish seed stocks or, as I like to think, reassure himself that there is still sky above. Windblown tracks of deer and antelope scar the drifts, while the occasional coyote stands silhouetted against snowy sage, but for the most part the land is empty.
My coffee cup, a stainless steel vat approaching keg size, could use a thorough cleaning. I half-heartedly chisel at the quarter-inch of sludge in the bottom, my spoon turned back, vanquished by this sedimentary build up.
"Black strap," I say out loud, like maple syrup made from the last run of early April's sap, when it cooks down three shades darker than amber. I fill the cup with the entire contents of my coffee pot, stir in a little eggnog and honey, and contemplate what to do with the day ahead.
A race, I decide a few sips later. A contest between me and night to see how many places I can visit. How many things I can photograph across as many miles of Montana as I can drive, the only boundaries being dawn and dusk. It will be a celebration of day when night looms largest at both ends.
Few things invigorate me like a journey. It has been that way since I was a young boy, always incapable of sleep in a car, my eyes glued to the road ahead, the principal player in an experiment in the unknowable future where, with every passing mile, the possibility of seeing something new becomes reality. Around the bend. The need to see what lies there has fueled my life more than anything else.
Not much lies on I-90, the interstate spanning most of Northern America, when I roll onto it heading west out of Billings half an hour later, and, between Albany, New York and Seattle, Washington there are disappointingly few bends. Too straight a course for me to stay on long, but I'll push ahead for now, still in total darkness, chasing night when I've a better chance of catching it than on any other day. With my view confined to the strip of two-lane, an unnatural blueish hue thanks to LED headlights, I think again about our innate fear of the dark.
It isn't just the dark, but for many of us it is the unseen and, more in particular, the unfamiliar and different. We must have walked through hell as a species to fear so deeply what is not like us. Suffered hundreds of thousands of years when virtually everything outside the tiny environment we were able to know intimately and could feel safe in spelled mortal danger. Once upon a time, self-reliance and isolation had to have helped us get a serious leg up. Aided a beast devoid of fangs and claws in its quest to exist, the most important journey any creature sets out on.
Perhaps that is why this fear of darkness and difference is so easily tapped today. Why it is such a motivator for us to throw up shields or take up swords. Why, when someone points an accusatory finger at a segment of society - global or local - a little outside our narrow realm of "normal," we are so quick to label it dangerous, so eager to see it eliminated.
I'm neither amazed nor surprised at how quickly we can single out another human being who, save one or two minor differences - skin color, religion, notion of love, political doctrine - is a mirror image of ourselves and subject him to persecution. Persecution in the name of a society safe only through homogenization. As technologically advanced as we've become, our pure evolution is more closely tied to the laws which govern the evolvement of all species, moving at the same pace which morphed grizzly bear to polar bear, better suited for a life in the arctic. The need to feel safe in a world of dangers is as intrinsically tied to our DNA as our ability to walk on two feet. Beat the drum to sound the alarm of threat, and we will fall in behind by the legions. Whether that threat be communism, or homosexuality, or conservatives, or liberals, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam or Paganism, if we point the finger passionately enough, damning it with adequate charism from a pulpit of sufficient height, we will raise an army of those in opposition.
It's ironic, I think, passing Columbus without any hint of day in my rearview mirror, that the instinct which helped us survive so long ago may be our ultimate undoing. It's not logical, but then, that's the whole point. The whole reason that subscriptions to the evils of difference are so easily sold. Our fears of the darkness, the differences, the things unlike ourselves in even the smallest ways, fly to the forefront without being subjected to any test of reason. They are coded into us and must be held at bay by intellect and measured thought, two characteristics of the human being less easily stirred to action than its primal fears.
Enough for now, I decide as I hurtle by Reed Point, realizing as I do that my headlights' beams no longer beat back the night the way they did fifty miles ago. Short as it may be, day is coming, and under a sky as expansive as Montana's, the pre-dawn and post-dusk never last long. Before I reach Big Timber, the tops of the Crazy Mountains glow a rosy pink with the first rays of sunlight at ten thousand feet. Thirty-five miles further west, where I swing off the interstate in Livingston, sunlight, coming from its most southernly angle of the year, has found the back of my truck.
I'm not sure if the wood ducks I discovered along the Yellowstone River here in early spring will be around now, and part of me doesn't want to look. That part prefers to leave their magical appearance on a gray afternoon in March a memory all to its own, untainted by an unsuccessful search for them today. And yet, here I am, bound to seek things by virtue of who I am, and I see that the wood ducks are here as well, a handful of drakes and hens refusing to move south while there is still a pocket of open water. I don't spend as much time with them as I did nine months ago, but I snap a few good photos - a preening drake, a pair of them cropped to panorama-length on shelf ice, a hen fighting sleep on bare ground, and another drake caught during a gust of 40mph wind, his ruffled feathers blown every which way.
The sun cuts a low arc through the sky this time of year like the late-winter Milky Way when it spans the heavens, a far-off rainbow of stars tight to the horizons. It's bright this morning, but not high, cropped close at both ends by the night, which lingers in my mind if not in my eyes. I need to backtrack to Big Timber now, but I'll use the Frontage Road - that ubiquitous avenue paralleling our Western interstates, wherever I can.
Part way between Livingston and Big Timber, near the town whose hopeful name, Springdale, I've always liked, I crane my head out the window with my bazooka-like 500mm telephoto and catch a shot of a flying golden eagle. It's a primitive-looking bird, clinging to a fierce dinosaur ancestry with pride, and I can well imagine his up-turned wing feathers sporting claws.
In Big Timber, I head due north, a direction I seem innately drawn to, though I crack a wide smile thinking of Harry Dean in the movie my father revered, The Missouri Breaks, saying, "The further north you go, the more things eat your horse." Yep, probably so even today. I keep smiling until a cloud cuts in front of the sun, jolting my attention back to the few remaining hours before night, turning my mind once more to our fear of it and tendency to shun the extraordinary.
It was for that reason that physicist, Stephen Hawking, cautioned against our headlong rush to find extraterrestrial life. He pointed to how indigenous peoples have fared here on Earth after contact with "civilization," and noted that perhaps the desire to tame and conform and conquer is present in other forms of life as well as our own. If something has the capability of traveling millions of light years to reach us, he said, it could likely dispense with the human race without much trouble.
We will make good inroads toward that end ourselves, I think, if we don't begin to better accept each other's differences. It's hard for me to imagine a time more punctuated by worldwide hate and anger than the era we live in, emotions being stoked right here under the pretense of national pride and devotion to safety from the highest office in the land. Fly the flag upside down and prey upon our predisposition to fear, and in droves we will turn against the different. Hell, barely more than 300 years ago, a millionth of a hair's breadth on the evolutionary scale, we were hanging people for witchcraft. We are, beneath a layer of coaxial cables, high-speed internet, form-fitting clothing and comfortable transportation, largely the same beasts today.
Today, it isn't witches. For the Pakistanis, it is the Indians. For the Hutus, the Tutsis. For the Israeli, the Palestinian. For the Shiite, it is the Sunni and for the Serb it is the Croat. And here, across our own country, the fires of hate and discontent are more fickle, fanned by winds touting unsafe national borders, the sanctity of marriage as defined strictly between a man and woman, the liberal left as the foe of the conservative right, and self-reliance so strong that we forge our own path in regards to climate change, throwing the findings of more than 170 countries directly under the bus of employment fears.
I try, when I need a little hope, to tell myself that the world and mankind is as it's always been, the only difference being now we have an information superhighway making us aware of strife in realtime. We have a media whose ratings seem to move in inverse proportion to the number of positive stories. I know, however, that we have something else, too. Our battles against one another have produced weapons designed to be so efficient at killing that we can now credibly threaten entire countries. Put all of civilization against the tip of the spear if need be. We can unleash a destruction greater than the Earth's ability to heal in any timeline one generation - or one thousand - can remotely begin to grasp. We have the wherewithal to hold humanity in the balance, protected by a notion that we will use restraint.
I suppose so far we have. The Minuteman ICBMs, many housed right here in Montana, where their parabolic-arc flight toward Russia - or anywhere else we decide to send megatons of death - best begins, have not launched. And yet our president carries with him everywhere he goes the codes to call them from their silos should need be.
I was a fighter for years, and I know the necessity of a good defense, but contests of fists aren't won by avoiding punches. That's what I think when I hear the world's eagerness to develop supersonic delivery vehicles for nuclear warheads - means of launching them from high-altitude aircraft where they begin flight toward Mach 10 without a readily-detectable heat signature. Where they can come at their targeted destination so fast and eventually so low to be virtually invisible to radar and certainly unstoppable. They are first-strike weapons. Ones of offense. Ready to deliver the power of the sun to millions of people who are deemed different in some way from those who send it.
In Harlowton, with the real sun about as far overhead as it will shine from today, I turn back east and begin cruising through semi-arid ranch land - the edge of the Great Plains - loosely following the Musselshell River, avoiding wherever possible a main highway. I pass below steep bluffs where, on a hot afternoon in August a few years back, I found a beautiful lance point knapped from a transparent, Montana agate. Two hundred years ago, this river bottom would have been full of buffalo I think where I cross the icy channel on a narrow, iron trestle. Clearly, restraint hasn't been our most-often played card.
On a dirt road whose name I intentionally don't look at - preferring instead to guide myself more generally - I see a rough legged hawk on a weathered fence post up ahead. With the click of a button, my driver's window rolls down, and slowing, steering with my knees, I thrust my telephoto out into the air. I stop seventy feet from the bird, still facing away from me, and then, as he turns his head and fixes me with a golden eye, get one picture before he lifts off, the farmland behind him entirely lost in the background, a pleasing color of, well, winter.
I drive on, carving the route of a drunk snake, twisting this way and that, the thrum of tires on gravel the only sound while clouds stream fast overhead. On a small height of land, a long ridge separating long drainages, and without the usual shelter belt of Russian olive trees for protection, an abandoned house stands, its wooden siding weather blasted, a jagged hole in one of it's road-facing windows staring like the ruined eye of a cyclops. I stop and walk into the yard for a wide-angle picture then close my eyes and try to imagine kids playing here. There's still a hint of that energy I think, though veiled behind a darker desperation, like blue sky above thunderheads. What I feel more, standing next to one of the prairie's ghost ships, is a resignation to the powers of Nature when crops don't grow and winds blow heavy with dust. I sense that when the family left this home no one looked back. The sound of my door closing is hollow and far-off when I roll away, making no effort to look in my own rearview mirror.
There is more snow here, packed in the road by a couple of sets of tire tracks, already blueish with the first indication that day is waning. Reluctantly, when I come to a T, I swing right, the direction of where my trip must eventually end. I follow a broad bottom where a creek with alkali banks the same color as the snow coating them in places flows between rounded swells of sage and yucca and then, where the trail rises over one of these hills and, without warning turns ninety degrees, spot the steeple of a church in the distance. It's a place I know, where I once photographed kissing horses on the eve of my June birthday.
There are no horses today, and no indication anyone has been here since the snow. It lies unbroken all around, as pristine as if part of a life-size gingerbread scene. I wonder if there will be a Christmas Eve service here? Candles and hymns giving light and song to the night three days away? A nearby mouse, tucked in a grass nest under the snow, wondering what odd noises fill the night?
I sit in my truck next to this church for a long time. We have forever used religion to punctuate our differences, I think. As the sun walks closer to the snowy, Absaroka Beartooth Range behind me, I am struck by two things. First, a comforting feeling of global connectedness through recognition that in their founding many religions - whether honoring Christ, the Buddha, or Mohammad - affirm a goodness in humanity, espousing kindness for the sake of kindness alone. Second is the more stark realization that across the Earth we have subjugated this message to justify unspeakable evils. Like taking light and tricking ourselves into believing it is darkness. Can there be a greater heresy than to malign our fellow men and women in the name of a god who we worship as good, I wonder? What idiocy is it to hate because one man prays facing east, another to the cross, and still others to the spiritual gods in Nature?
From the Crusades to the jihad, our fear of differences is so strong, our need for safety and certainty and one-size-fits-all so large, that we take the greatest unknowable in our entire existence and wage war in its name. Refusing to acknowledge this innate urge for barbarity resides within us, we push it off on some deity, killing and enslaving and raping and torturing, all in the name of holy righteousness. Who are we - any of us - to judge the fate of another's soul, based not on deeds or devotion or love and kindness but purely on what or who they put their faith in?
Again, enough. The shortest day of the year is winding down, and I don't want my last daylight thoughts to be here at this church. I point my truck downhill and step on it, eventually descending below the snow line where the world rests in muted shades of brown and gray and in the west the sun approaches the horizon. I've got time for another picture, and in front of the cement steps belonging to a home long gone, another tombstone from the harsh pioneer life, position my camera to record the transition of day to night.
What can I do I wonder, facing so much darkness? Be unafraid, I think, for starters. Refuse to allow an innate fear dominance over a rational mind. And keep seeking, too. Keep ferreting out different angles through which to show our world. Embrace the unique with recognition that it is the exceptional and not the ordinary that makes for a beautiful picture and, for that matter, a beautiful life. I'm convinced of it, as surely as I am that if our race has a lengthy future it lies with acceptance and not rejection. We must believe that the collective whole of humanity is worth infinitely more because of and not in spite of our differences.
The longest night of the year is here when my camera stops, and with it a prickle on the back of my neck that says more is unseen now than an hour earlier. But I won't go just yet. I'm going to sit here on these steps and revisit in my mind the wood ducks, the flying eagle, see again how the rough legged hawk bent into the wind from its fencepost perch, listen once more for the sounds of children playing in the dooryard of an abandoned home, and smile thinking about a mouse puzzled by Christmas hymns.
The New England poet, Robert Frost, wrote about doing something similar on a distant anniversary of this same night, watching his woods grow dark and fill with snow. Tonight I think, without the sensible horse he had to question his lingering, I'll stay longer, though the miles I have to travel are undoubtedly, if not hopefully, more. I will stay until all but the dimmest stars turn on, blowing warmth onto my hands, walking the permitter of this foundation when my feet get cold, listening for coyotes to sing or a great horned owl to call.
That's what I do, and by the time I leave - by the time I've made my statement to the night that I am not afraid - for the first time today something occurs to me. Tomorrow there will be more light. Just before I climb into my pickup, I stare at the North Star until my vision blurs. I wonder if anyone else, somewhere close to this line of latitude, has thought the same thing tonight? I think so, I decide as I crank my engine. More than one person, too, I hope.
"More light," I say out loud. And then I'm rolling.
As always, the photos with labels below are listed on my site, as is the cloud-stack feature picture, "Stairway."
"Why don't you go up to the Newport Daily and see if they'd put you on as a stringer?" my dad suggested a few days later.
I was reluctant. Northern Vermont teenagers were supposed to work in the hay fields. Or in the woods cutting pulp - four-foot sections of softwood for paper mills. Or driving fence posts down through glacial till more rock than soil. Jobs that would tighten their forearms and, at least while they were young, give them strong backs. All the better if they came away with a chainsaw scar, a mashed finger, or temporary limp - red badges of courage attesting to their toughness. Little chance of that with a notepad, I figured, working for a newspaper.
But, it was an era when a father's suggestions really weren't. They were edicts phrased enough like questions to make a boy feel slightly more independent than when he was simply told what to do. So, mostly because I knew arguing would do no good, and partly because I figured there was a better chance that Roger Clemens - the great hope of the 1987 Red Sox - would renounce his record salary, tossing the horsehide for free - than that a newspaper would hire a boy, I reluctantly agreed.
"All I want to know is if you've got a driver's license and if you can write," Terry Albee, managing editor of the Newport Daily Express, asked, cutting off my much-rehearsed introduction.
Yes to both, I replied, and just that easily was hired - for five dollars and eighty-seven cents an hour - as a part-time reporter, a notch above the stringer position my father had suggested I offer.
My first assignment was an Albany selectmen's meeting at which all the routine business of one of Vermont's smaller towns was talked about in round-table format once a month. I sat in the back of a dimly-lit room, my pen scribbling non-stop, taking down conversation like a courtroom stenographer, sure I could spin the most mundane hour and a half into a tale worthy of the front page. I drafted out the story later that night in my bedroom and the following morning, long before the sun rose and burned the mist off the Clyde River behind the Newport Daily Express, was hammering away at a keyboard hooked to a large monitor where green letters and a blinking, white cursor strobed.
Forty-five minutes later my masterpiece was saved to a 3.5" floppy disk and proudly handed to Terry Albee, who took it over his shoulder without looking away from his monitor or missing a single puff of his cigarette.
"Stick around," was all he said, so that's what I did, taking up as unassuming a place in the little break room as I had the night before at the selectmen's meeting. I was trying to get the courage up to pour myself a cup of coffee when Terry stood up from his desk and barked, "Mosher, you still here?"
"Ought oh," the sports editor, who I knew through his coverage of my high school baseball and basketball games, said on my way back into the newsroom. He smiled and winked as I walked into the world of journalism where the first lesson I learned was that you could take a well-crafted, two-page story, complete with suspense and climactic drama, and eviscerate it to less than three paragraphs.
"You're not writing a book," Terry said. "You're giving people the news, and that's ALL you're doing. You write a good lead and then, as concisely as possible, you tell what happened. And that's it. Nothing more. Read this," he said, pointing to what was left of my article. It didn't take long. "No opinions, no feelings, no extra.... no extra shit in it. Got it?" he asked, and before I could answer the lines disappeared, replaced with a page layout where something wasn't fitting to his liking. "God damn," he said, and then again, as if a more forceful invoking might yield his desired results, "God damn!"
That was almost 30 years ago. Back when the only internet I knew was the AP "wire" which national stories rolled off every morning. Before I'd seen a cell phone, much less a smart phone, and a full 15 years before I could imagine taking a digital picture. A lot has changed. Most of the editors I worked with in Newport have passed away. Most of the reporters there now - I assume - carry laptops, and I'm willing to bet it's been more than a few years since a kid arrived at 4:30 in the morning to work in the complete blackness of the darkroom, fumbling around with film canisters, winders, clothespins, and developing solution. My writing, undoubtedly much to the dismay of Terry Albee's spirit, has swung a wide berth away from the newsroom style of direct and to the point.
That's okay, I tell myself. After all, I'm no longer recounting a Brownington elementary school board's decision to pave - or not - an outdoor basketball court. Or lugging a boxy, Pentax K1000 camera around, hoping my indoor subjects remain stock still while I press the shutter, allowing a beam of light to hit my "high speed," ISO400 film. I'm not, as Terry Albee more than once reminded me, invoking the same deity with the same forcefulness that he did my first morning in the newsroom, working in "black and white."
"Black and white," he would say, his finger jamming into a random spot on yesterday's copy. "That's what news is. You see? No opinions, no guessing, no personal this or that unless you're doing an editorial, which you won't be. The only thing that matters here is the who, what, when, where, why and how. Nothing else. See the world in color, but report the world in black and white."
That, including the years I spent getting a degree in journalism, was the best advice I ever got, and I wonder now, scrolling through CNN on my phone, what the hell has changed? When did so many of our national news agencies decide that simply presenting the facts wasn't good enough? That we need them spun toward one of the poles, liberal or conservative, politicized to conform with an agenda, left or right, loaded up with subjectivity, and then spit out in bold, headline letters as news. At what point were we, as the people who read these articles, deemed no longer worthy of coming to our own conclusions based on facts? No longer in need of opposing views? This intellectually inferior?
It's insulting. Not just to the standards of journalism, but to the public as well. And worse, it erodes the credibility of what has always been an important check against tyranny, radical societal trends, and injustice. It is the modern day version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, played out in large-font type exactly like this morning's CNN top story, "8 Words That Should Scare the GOP."
That's not an editorial, flagged as an opinion, or buried down below stories on our looming tax legislation, advances in North Korea's missile program, or, heaven forbid, a human interest piece with a happy ending. It is, according to CNN, the most important news at this point in the entire world. A headline with the word "should" in it. It would be stricken from the lowliest high school newspaper, crumpled and hurled to the floor of the smallest newsroom in the most rural part of Vermont or Montana, and, had I ever presented something similar to Terry Albee, would have resulted in a dressing down the likes of which I shudder thinking about.
We are living in a time when many major media outlets apparently view their purpose - perhaps their most important role - as taking the president of the United States to task. That man, Donald Trump, whether raging on Twitter about LaVar Ball, the outspoken father of three (unenviable) basketball-playing sons, or throwing full support behind a Senate candidate who said that the last time America was great coincided with the owning of slaves, has done nothing to deserve otherwise. From his insinuating that a current US Senator would trade sex for campaign donations, to his monikers for world leaders, to his late-night rants on social media, he exhibits a fundamental lack of respect for the position he holds, trampling roughshod over virtually every notion of presidential dignity. And I can say that here, clearly my own opinion, well outside what should be the confines of straight journalism.
Sure, it's news when Trump proclaims the ruler of North Korea "Little Rocket Man." It's worthy of reporting, but without the whole host of subjective adjectives - bellicose, inflammatory, confrontational, belligerent - that so often accompany it, speculation about his state of mind, and the highlighted opinion of one reporter regarding his fitness for the job. Statements by our current Commander in Chief, left accurately intact and standing on their own, speak better than a reporter's interpretation of them. Reading the "news" these days, I find myself wanting to jump to my feet and cry, "Objection! Calls for speculation! Reporter is testifying!"
Somewhere along the way, whether in the drive for ratings in this world where a video of an obese man falling in Walmart may garner a few hundred thousand views online, or through a fear that readers are incapable of stitching together facts, or with a misguided sense that this is investigative journalism exposing some deep-hidden evil, our news is rarely black and white.
Still, many of us rely on the news to help form opinions for matters as important as who we wish to govern us. We grew up believing that behind this news there was stringent fact checking, a high level of impartiality, and a faith in all of us to make an informed, personal decision based upon the situation. Not upon a network's take on the situation. There was a place for that - in editorials - if we wanted to know the personal opinions of people working for various media companies and, when these organizations were deserving of the high regard in which we held them, those were often important opinions to get.
In todays' world, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and NBC rammed Hillary Clinton down our throats while they marginalized and dismissed Bernie Sanders. I saw it after each primary debate when Clinton was lauded and Sanders was barely taken seriously. I often wondered if I had witnessed an entirely different debate than the one reported on.
Across the aisle, FOX stumps solely for the Republican Party. I would argue, with so much of the country reliant upon the media for news, that both are counterproductive to a democracy which, in theory, reflects the will of the people, not the will of a corporation driven to guide those people. I would argue that journalism comes with a sanctity for the truth and a duty to present it, untainted and free of agenda. That anonymous sources had damn well better be vetted, enough time taken playing devil's advocate to validate the truth in a feature, and, when opinions are offered, they come from people willing to give direct quotes, not from the personal data bank of one reporter.
What's the end game, I wonder? The furthering of an agenda, either liberal or conservative, through the constant filtering and slanting of our world's happenings? Apparently so.
It's an era of buzzwords - ideas and movements prefaced by a hashtag and minute-by-minute trend monitoring. Website hits, Google searches, and page views dictate how long a theme remains current and to what lengths a reporter must go to keep it fresh in the minds of viewers. After the deserved fall of Harvey Weinstein, how often have I opened a news app on my phone to see the top story involves decades' old accusations of impropriety against someone else? Well, that's an important tool of press - to give voice to people who have not found it elsewhere in a system which has failed to recognize them. But how often have these stories focused so strongly upon the accusations that I come away certain of someone's guilt? It's almost as if, caught up in the rush for headlines, we've abandoned the principal of presumed innocence. How dare someone deny making a lewd comment twenty years ago? And, who really cares if they deny it or not? An accuser has come forward so that is story enough.
I was working one late afternoon at the Newport Daily Express when I was seventeen. I'd learned how to write a lead by then and, the same sports editor who I'd met in the break room my first day on the job, had given me a column's worth of space for my less journalistic essays, making it easier to pare down everything else I wrote for straight news. I took a call from a man who swore up and down that a local car dealer had reneged on a six-month guarantee provided with the sale of a used car. He was convincing, said that he had some documentation, and pleaded what sounded like a very believable case. I took careful notes and then, when we hung up, called the car dealer who, predictably, denied everything vehemently with more than a few choice words for me.
The following morning I was excited to run it all by Terry Albee, and I'd done enough passable work so that this time when we talked we did it away from his monitor and the constant distractions it provided. He listened to everything I said and when I finished explained exactly why there was no story - at least not yet.
"You've got one person saying one thing and another person saying the opposite," he said. That happens all the time, and we aren't in the business or airing everyone's personal gripes. Now, if you've got four or five people all claiming they've been screwed by this car dealer - people who have filed civil suits in a court where a judge has agreed there's enough evidence to proceed - then that's the start of a pretty good story. This, as it stands right now, is just an argument. Arguments aren't usually stories. The truth, which is what we need if we're going to run with something, is probably convoluted and lies somewhere in between what these two guys are saying."
Today, the accusation is the story. Yes, it will be alleged, but the story will roll hard down the line on the word of one party. It's a print now, prove later mentality that does little to affirm my faith in our media, even when time bares out the validity of original reports. When it doesn't - when retractions are offered, reporters suspended or fired, and apologies issued - the entire media's credibility is irreparably damaged. Sadly, by the time some of these errors come to light, lives have been altered. The press and its followers have acted as judge and jury and their sentence drags on well beyond any attempts to make amends.
Maybe it's our decreasing attention span. The fact that so many of us have gotten used to swiping left, swiping right, scrolling up and down and, in less than 100 characters and well under 15 seconds, getting all the information we think we need. Doesn't leave a reporter much room to flesh something out. A glorified headline and a few sensational sentences thrown up tabloid-style and it's on to the next hot topic.
There are certainly media companies better than others, and even the ones I'd rank well down the list don't earn the title fake news from me. I'll leave that trumpeting to someone else with a pun very much intended. But they aren't black and white either. My hope is that we will begin to see through that. That we will be leery of the superficial, read with a sense of caution, and, hard as they may be to find, seek opposing views before jumping to conclusions. If that is no longer the responsibility of the media, then I believe that the onus shifts to us.
I believe that the best decisions come with the best information and that we have an obligation to ourselves to be well-informed. We have the wonderfully unique ability on this planet to be able to question. To analyze. To, at the very least, make certain that what we see, hear, and read passes a basic litmus test of sensibility and logic before we embrace it. Not doing so is, in my bluntest, black and white estimation, being less human.
** As always, these photos (some of them black and white) of ice crystals and December landscapes, including the feature picture, "Geometric," can be found on my photography site.
"Lonely" by Jake Mosher
"December Rose" by Jake Mosher
"Homestead" by Jake Mosher
"Winter Park" by Jake Mosher
"First Snow" by Jake Mosher
"Patched" by Jake Mosher
"Don't do it," I say, and that, along with two dollars and nineteen cents, will get you a cup of coffee at your local minimart.
I've never been terribly good at following my own advice. I prefer to think that my repeated attempts at bending the laws of common sense when it comes to my own being is more old-fashioned, Northern-Vermont stubbornness than egotistical, but at some point I have call a spade a spade.
I knew this. I knew it as surely as I know that sap runs on sunny, windless days in early March and that, also during the same cruel month of extended winter, the Red Sox will always win the World Series. And to my credit, I hesitated a solid ninety seconds – maybe even a full two minutes – before getting out of my car early in the morning on a damp September day when rain came the color of Memphremagog's fall waters and the wind blew from Quebec, the ever-present odor of wood smoke there in my mind if not on the breeze. After more than a quarter century, I needed to see the place again and this day was as good as any other to violate my better judgment.
A boy doesn't and never did – even in the Northeast Kingdom – become a man when he kills his first whitetail buck. That's a more arduous journey with, thankfully, a few other stops along the way. Still, for most of us, especially in the 1980s, it was a box that needed checking off. I X'd mine on a slate-gray November day when a young deer high on Irasburg Mountain made a mistake and I didn't. And now I'm going back. Not just to the county or the mountain or the general north-facing strip of hemlock, but to the exact spot where I stood the better part of thirty years ago and fired a bullet which, in many ways, has compassed me ever since.
To rationalize deviating so sharply from my philosophy that places like this are best seen only once, I'm going there to ask myself a question. Two of them really. I want to know, fast-approaching middle age, with my feet planted firmly right back where it all began, if I'll ever find the sense of home I had so completely on the evening that two friends and I dragged a five-point buck off the side of a Vermont mountain. I'll ask that, and also for the answer to the most paradoxical part of my being: how can I, often with camera in hand, be a lover of animals and also, each year during November, go to unimaginable lengths to kill them? I'll ask myself, and if Irasburg Mountain, that patriarchal figure on the Western boundary of where I grew up wants to join in, though I won't hold my breath, I'm hoping he won't hold back.
I am blessed, or more likely cursed, with an inability to forget. Oh, I might rumble around my house at a complete loss to recall where I placed my truck keys an hour earlier, but then, a year or more down the road, I'm apt to see them so clearly in the spot I left them that I could draw the direction each faced on its ring.
There's a "condition" assigned to this type of memory – nomenclature given to those who can remember verbatim conversations from the age they first learned to form words. Mercifully, it has different levels of involvement and mine presents as "moderate." I don't remember each second of my life. But I remember most of them, and in detail that makes distinguishing past from present challenging. There is an immediacy to memories that time can never dull.
It has its upsides, I think to myself as I get out of my car in the exact spot where my mother dropped me off nearly three decades ago, thermos of hot chocolate and peanut butter and jelly sandwich tucked in a fanny pack below my hunter-orange, satin jacket. It has its downsides, too, I know, looking for the thick, low-forking alder I stepped out around just across the barrow pit. I can see it as plainly as I did on that morning when I was a kid. The crotch has collected a few icy leaves, a luminous, milky lichen grows on the north-facing side of the left fork, and for a moment I debate whether it's better to step through the notch or go around the whole tree.
No such question of route this morning. The alder has long ago given way to poplars, some of which stand thirty feet tall. Their crowns are a golden hue of stubble fields at last light, but the leaves below the canopy are still green, clinging to summer as long as they can. I stare at them and nod. I haven't been here to see this place change, another warning that what I'm doing may not end well. Still, I wipe my mind and stride off in the general direction I need to go, following that internal compass all people raised in the North Country, where a close horizon obscures distant landmarks, possess.
Might as well begin kicking over the questions I need answers to I decide, plowing up a logging trace fast losing ground to the wide-leafed moose maples happy to grow in its humped center. I'll tackle the tougher of the two first I think where, through some combination of sense of direction and old memory, I veer from the logging road down over a bank choked with hobble bush.
My father didn't hunt. Not really. He owned one gun, a single-shot, 16-guage shotgun made by Harrington and Richardson, purchased new in 1964 for $16. I remember the first time I saw it lying broken open below my feet in the back seat of our lumbering station wagon we used to poach mossy rails from an overgrown hill farm for the fence my dad was building around our Brownington home.
"That's a gun," I said to my mother when she turned around in the front seat. I knew it through an instinctual recognition – one that may not say much good about our cultural ties to weapons.
"It is," she said, "and it's your dad's and you must never touch it."
I sat quietly, the wheels inside my two-year-old brain whirring forward to a time when I knew that I'd be doing a great deal more than touching it. I'd seen the whitetail deer hanging from our neighbor's trees in November – gray denizens of the wilderness brought down by men with wool coats and thick beards. Men I already wished to be. I remembered the night that a black bear climbed into the pen with our donkey. Loud, terrified braying, a bare light bulb clicking on over the stairwell in our house while my father searched for a flashlight. I laid awake a long time waiting for the crash of a gunshot – whatever exactly that might be - and when none came I was outraged that my father hadn't dispatched a bear, one with the audacity to practically come into our home.
"I scared it away," he told me the next morning, words which met a silent, icy stare from his young son.
More than forty years later, as the trickle of water over stones carries to me through the tap of water landing on leaves, I realize that I have no memory of ever making a decision to hunt. From the time I stole steak knives from my mother's dishpan to take into the woods and hurl errantly at grouse, hunting was something I gravitated to with no more power to dissent than this brook has to stop its downward flow toward the Mississquoi River.
Pushing upstream past where the brook nineties around a mossy, granite erratic, the first thing I see that has remained unchanged since the last time I was here, I have visions of the barred tail feathers of grouse, the scaly skin that falls over their closed eyes, and my sister's springer spaniel I'd sometimes take with me when I hunted them. Then, when I hear the rush of one's wings nearby, I am hard pressed to understand if the bird flushes now or a thousand times within my mind.
It's time to leave the bank of the brook. I've got to hook a little north or I'll run into the seven-foot dam of the 10-acre dead beaver bog at the western base of Irasburg Mountain. I know this and also that I've already gone too far and will likely have to fight through whatever remains of the great alder swamp where I shot my first Canada goose. I did it as matter of factly as I would have the grouse I was there to hunt, knocking it out of the sky without hesitation.
I was fourteen, and sitting with it on the edge of a bog where asters still bloomed and a kingfisher called from the naked limbs of a waterlogged spruce, I first confronted the duality I've come back here to address. I understood then, running my fingers through downy breast feathers, that this particular bird would not be one of the ones to bring me great joy the following spring when their north-flying Vs passed over a still-wintry landscape and their encouraging calls drifted to a boy desperate for spring. It was a fleeting thought, lost to a boyhood eagerness to find my father, walking along a high field edge while I hunted, and show him what partridge hunting had yielded, but it has come back to me in years since, a gnawing, hollow sensation that in bending to who I am I've betrayed who I could be.
I step over a miniature peninsula of mud holding the faded print of a black bear and see the large, cinnamon-colored one that I hunted for three springs in a remote mountain range in Montana. We played cat and mouse on steep hillsides where glacial banks of snow cast long shadows and fed streams like the one I walk along today. Driving past those mountains in the dead of winter, I liked thinking of the bear sleeping up there, unaware of the great gray owl landing nearby, the howling of wolves, or the thunder of elk hooves racing below. Then one evening in late May, as bitterroot flowers opened wide and pink and our Earth lolled toward our sun enough to prevent a frost, he walked out fifty feet from where I sat. I killed him on auto-pilot, exactly as I'd done the goose, then sat with him a long time, looking at the fur between his broad toes, his yellowed, worn teeth, and the scars on his head from a lifetime of proving to other bears that this mountain range was his.
I had come there to hunt bears and I never quite wished that I hadn't shot him, but I was acutely aware that something important would be forever absent form this place. Absent from my relationship with it, too. Struggling under a bulging pack of hide and meat, moving slowly through the single-digit hours of late night, the irony of killing what I understood, even before I pressed my trigger that I loved, weighed heavily on me. When, close to my pickup, I found the melted tracks of this very bear in a shaded spit of snow, I swore off bear hunting, easy to do with a punched tag. It was a resolution that lasted until the following spring when something stirred deep in sleeping bears and also inside me. Time to hunt again.
Believing that any animal would prefer being hunting by someone who holds a deep affinity for it rather than the man who fires a bullet parallel the beam of a blinding spotlight is anthropomorphisizing. They are programmed to survive, and all else is irrelevant.
I'm not making much headway in answering how two beings of polar opposite inclinations can reside within me when I reach the edge of a soupy land more water than soil. The path ahead appears a hopscotch trail of dark-green cowslips, old beaver staubs, wet ferns and the very occasional patch of terra firma. I choose my first step poorly and sink my boot well under black water, pulling it out with a sucking noise that confirms fetid mud below the surface. Angry, I reach further with my other leg, this time going in nearly to my knee.
Good and wet now, I forgo any finesse and charge through the swamp, knocking my way out of a dense stand of alders where land finally turns to land. And then I hear a voice.
"A young bull moose, crazed by the rut, running pell mell after the amorous scent of his cow could scarcely have made more noise."
It's a true enough observation, though I don't like it flung up in my face.
"I wondered when you might chime in," I say toward the mountain ahead of me.
"I've been biding my time. Hoping you'd learned a thing or two since your last visit. What is it you say, 'wish in one hand…"
"You've become a cantankerous old bastard I see," I say as I begin walking, wiping mud from my jeans with my hands, then wiping my hands on the smooth bark of slender beech trees.
"Old is right enough," the mountain says. "And that's something you won't live to be if you insist on floundering around in the muck on days like this, dressed as though you're ready for a summer night out on the town."
It's impossible to argue with mountains, especially this one. I glance at the goose bumps on my arms and wonder why I didn't wear a jacket.
"Beat a hasty retreat back to your car and leave this fool's errand for another time."
The words seem to come from all around me at once.
"Not exactly my style," I say.
"No. Well, pride goeth before the fall. Just try to get beyond my crest before you keel over. The west wind will carry the stink of your carcass off into the valley below where I won't be smelling it."
I can see the top of the mountain a mile away through ash limbs, its rocky spine traced by weather-sculpted hemlock.
"How about you just go back to eroding in silence?" I say. "Might rain for a week straight."
For half an hour, I walk in an increasingly hard rain, retracing my steps up the mountain, once in a while recognizing a boulder or a tree – a yellow birch reaching its limbs for another like the outstretched arms of a lover, a beech scarred its entire length from bear claws during a fall heavy with nuts, and a lone sugar maple whose base is ringed with discarded sap buckets. I look now as I did years ago for other maples and again see none.
Did some farmer's wife cook down just enough sap, boiling it away on a wood-fired kitchen stove, to make a Mason jar's worth of syrup? I'm unaware of a homestead within a mile of this tree but haven't a better explanation. Less of the buckets protrude from the ground than when I last saw them. Slowly, as leaf litter builds soil, they are vanishing. I doubt I'll ever see them again, and this thought brings a cross of sorrow and fear while the rain drums all around me.
Ahead, the land has been logged, though I think at least twenty years ago. The deep ruts of a skid road hold soft maple saplings three inches through, interspersed with the tall canes of long blackberries. It's a thorny barrier I'm better off going around than through, and I swing north to dodge the clear cut.
"I was rather looking forward to you thrashing through that tangle," the mountain says. "Are you sure you don't want to have a go at it?"
"Sometimes the quickest way there is the longest way around," I say, proud to use the old, Vermont adage.
"Speaking of which," the mountain replies, "you'll go round and round and never find what you've come for. I change more than your Montana forests of lodgepole, so content to wear the same look for hundreds of years. Much less rigid up here, we are."
"More talkative, too," I say with a smirk. "Too bad there's no oil to frac for. Give you quite the enema."
"You've a sharper tongue than your father," the mountain says quietly.
"A quicker left hook, too," I say.
"Yes. He lamented both to me on many occasions. What was it he said? Oh, yes, 'Can't a week go by without a uniformed officer of the law showing up in my driveway?"
Those teenage years were a long time ago, I think, though this revelation brings a host of memories not entirely free of regret.
"I was unsympathetic," the mountain says. "I told him he was his own fool to name you for a whiskey-running, bar-fighting, deer-poacher and expect anything else."
"What else did the two of you talk about?" I knew my father spent many afternoons walking and cross country skiing along the hedgerows of fields where their war with the woods, skirmish lines of golden rod and meadowsweet, marked the active fronts.
"We speak about all manner of things," the mountain says. "It's the best conversation I've had since the great sea dried up and I had to stop conversing with whales."
I stare at a log more moss than wood until my vision blurs.
"Speak. You said 'speak'," I whisper.
"Did I now?" the mountain booms.
"Yes. As though you still talk. Do you?"
"Never mind. But by the way you're shivering you'll be able to have a nice chitchat with him yourself if you don't get the hell out of here soon."
I am shivering. Hard, too. I rub my arms vigorously then slap the water off my hat on a peeling white birch.
"I've already told you that you won't find the place you've come looking for. Might as well pack it in."
"Don't bet on it," I say, mustering all the resolve I can.
"That's exactly what I'll do," the mountain says. "A gentleman's wager. And a timed one at that because I don't want your death on my conscience for another billon years. I'll give you forty minutes. If you can find where you did that embarrassing bit of whooping and hollering after killing one of my ridge runners I'll answer your question."
"And if I can't?"
"When you can't, you'll high-tail it out of here without ever knowing."
"High stakes," I say.
"Not at all," the mountain retorts. "The men and women who cleared my slopes a hundred and fifty years ago to graze a few sheep and milk half a dozen Holsteins played for high stakes. This is paltry diversion for me. Clock's ticking."
The day I killed my first buck, on an afternoon of light snow with the temperature penduluming back and forth across the freezing point, mist blowing over the mountain like clouds through a ruined rain forest, I crested the peak well south of where this clear cut has forced a detour. I turn sharply in that direction, nearly falling into a cellar hole obscured by raspberries and half filled with the rotting trunk of a massive maple which toppled over before I was born. An arrow of British solder lichen on its punkie face points toward a pair of squat cedars, odd to be growing at this elevation, whose frond-like limbs shelter a gnarled lilac.
"Your doing?" I ask the mountain.
"Don't be ridiculous," it answers. "Purely coincidental. I would neither dwell further on it nor dawdle longer."
I wonder if down below the fallen maple in the cellar hole lie the remains of a cook stove? One upon which a pot hissed and sap turned slowly to syrup?
My mother and I boiled sap from the great maple in our front yard when I was a boy. We boiled it until the kitchen wallpaper peeled and the horsehair and lath ceiling bubbled with heat blisters. Thinking about it brings something akin to homesickness, another recognition that I've chosen to walk away from places I love - a mountain range with one less bear in it, a kitchen dripping steam. It seems I could no more give back the dead bear than return to the March evenings when I'd draw off half a pint of fancy maple syrup, saving it for holiday pancakes when everything in the world seemed safe and certain and exactly as it should be.
I'm moving quickly now, down the spine of Irasburg Mountain to the south, and also back through time, feeling the smooth stock of an early, Remington .270, cold through the damp, yellow gloves I wore. I'm looking for something I remember from the last time I was here, following a wall of granite with a limited number of crevasses I could have weaseled my way through. In ten minutes, I come to where the peak rolls off to the east, the Black River oxbowing through cut cornfields below me. I'm looking back in time further now than the day I killed my deer, remembering the two-year search my father and I conducted along that river for a fabled place where brook trout gathered by the hundreds each October to spawn. On the afternoon we found it, when a cast line went taught with the weight of a large trout as wine-red maple leaves spun slowly downstream, a drake and hen wood duck whistled overhead, their shrill cries fading to the liquid slap of a tired, big fish's tail on the surface.
I spin away from the river before the memory consumes me, but in a sense it already has, thoughts of time and home and an achy uneasiness that what I'm here for today may indeed be beyond my reach. Retracing my recent steps, I pause at a rift in the granite low-wall then decide it wasn't where I passed through. A few feet further take me to a fat hemlock, however, that I remember as clearly as though I'd carved my initials into it.
"Right here," I say out loud. "I climbed up right here."
There should be a stand of limby, dead spruce here, I know. Trees where three sleeping porcupines rested and I debated shooting them because I rarely came home with unfired cartridges. I'd looked at them a long time, finally deciding against it because my great uncle once told me it was illegal to kill a porcupine where he lived in New York's Catskill Mountains. They are one of the few animals a lost and starving man can kill with no more than a stick, he'd said. So on that day the porcupines slept undisturbed.
The trees should still be here I know, but they aren't. I look back and forth and begin second-guessing my recognition of the hemlock. Overhead, leaves stir in the first wind of the day and a woodpecker hammers out a search for insects. I follow the noise to a limbless spire of wood, and as the bird creeps into view, its beady eye finding me, I see the raised outlines of fallen trees all around this one. The porcupine trees.
"If not for the woodpecker," the mountain grumbles.
"Like the cedars," I say, unable to hide a smile.
And then I recognize everything. The natural swayback I walked through to the ledge of rock where I ate my sandwich, sticky, raspberry jelly leaking through bread onto my hands. Thirty-one steps from the ledge take me to the edge of a stand of beech, taller now by three times than they were when the first buck whitetail I'd ever seen in the woods bounded out of them toward me. I watch him come, the strike of hooves on wet leaves lost to the swish of my coat as I raise my rifle, finding him magnified six times there in my scope. His shoulder, etched with muscle, moves through my crosshairs and the gun goes off. And then the deer is gone, lost in balsam so completely that the far-off echo of the shot is the only proof I have that any of it happened.
The balsam, too, are larger today. Well beyond the height of practical Christmas trees. I weave through them, step for step with my younger self, seeing where I found the first ruby drop of blood, further off the track than I thought it should be. It lay in crystalline snow, and I picked it up, smearing it between my fingers. The deer was bounding, all four feet landing close together, covering fifteen feet with each leap. Where its hooves bit into the ground next, there was more blood, a spray of it on snow and leaves, but then for two jumps I didn't see any.
Moving slowly, both now and then, I lift my head and see the hand-sawn stump where the buck piled up, little more than a lump of moss now. I don't realize the rain has stopped until a ray of sun, nearly as wondrous an appearance as the buck years ago, glints off a barn roof east of Irasburg on Burton Hill.
I sit down, sopping leaves soaking through the seat of my jeans in the precise spot a deer once died. I can see both of Irasburg's church steeples as well as the leaning pine guarding the common. As the beam of light cuts west through the village, I am flooded with memories from both home and abroad. In rapid, snap-shot succession, I see bears and mountain lions and wolves and elk, animals I've killed in huge wilderness two thousand miles away from where I sit.
Inseparable from these, I watch myself tug the deer down from this highest point on Irasburg Mountain to a flat, hardwood bench where I fumble through gutting it, something I'd never seen done. I drag it by its small antlers until I hit a logging road, leaving it and my coat, nearly running the two miles to the closest house where I call a friend who calls another friend, both showing up in a brown, Ford Ranger a few minutes later.
With common, teenage disregard for a vehicle's well-being, we crawl the truck up to within a quarter mile of the buck, sliding it down together, heaving it into the back where, many times on the short ride to Irasburg, I turn around to be sure it's still there.
Then, watching myself loop a rope over a beam in my garage to hoist the buck, I begin to see more animals outside hunting season – calf elk, fall moose, great horned owl chicks, sleek red fox and a spotted bobcat with three kittens. The shutter clicks of cameras come faster than water drops forced by the wind from their overhead perches. Sunlight fades for a moment then reappears brighter as a patch of blue opens above me.
Autumn leaves shine bright all around, but what I'm looking at is a dark Route 14 in front of the garage that held my deer, a truck's taillights growing dim toward the common, a sense that what will always be one of the best days of my life was winding down and also that I was nearly ready to say farewell to much more than good friends for the night.
What if I'd missed, I wonder for a moment? Would that have changed the course of my life? Would the small, rat-hole apartments, seasonal jobs, barely-drivable cars and trucks and constant fear of being completely out of money all so that I could spend a month or two hunting each year be entirely unknown to me? Would I have been all man with camera instead of man with camera and rifle?
And what of this sense of home that has eluded me almost from the moment my first deer died? I said earlier that no boy becomes a man with the killing of a buck, but nor is he ever all boy again. We take something and give something. An irrevocable trade. Still, the security - the sanctity - of a world bounded by the slap of a baseball on a cold catcher's mitt, the clink of dishes in the sink after a family dinner, the smell of maple syrup and coffee on a morning when there is no more to do than whatever pleases me, it has all been well beyond my grasp for many years.
A blue jay calls behind me, somewhere back by the remnants of the porcupine trees. I'm aware of it, but my thoughts are still on home – the safety of a childhood home I should say – and I'm thinking about a life that has rolled along faster than the Black River when it crests its banks with snowmelt each spring. Faster than Idaho's Salmon River, where it pinches down in the canyon and February sun shines only a couple of hours a day on the fishermen, myself included, who wait for the tug of steelhead, often freezing in vain.
"You humans are an odd lot, and I must say that the Moshers are stranger than most." Until the mountain speaks, I'd totally forgotten about our wager. "By your standards, and now even by mine, I've been here a long time. I've spent quiet eons under water and also under ice. A Plesiosaur's bones once settled very nearly where you sit. Another time a mammoth, and there weren't ever very many of them around here, walked the length of my back. It was all by itself and seemed lost, and I'll admit to wanting to help it more than I could. That's more than I can say of you when you encountered your wayward goose up here.
"Pine grew on me for eight thousand years and then were cut down with the rest of my trees. Sheep came and then cows and then one night there were lights on after dark in the village down below. Not the warm glow of lanterns, but brilliant electric lights. People built homes here and then they fell down and the forests grew back. I've been the same mountain through it all."
I look around through the dappled light pocking the forest floor, not entirely able to visualize a mammoth tromping by.
"You say that you miss your home. That perhaps hurling yourself to the winds of the world wasn't the best choice. Now I'll counter by saying… no, by telling you that it was the best thing you could have done. Trust me when I say that seeing the same country as a boy, a man, and then an old man, day in and day out, is a difficult sight to behold. You evaluate differently, even with a memory like yours, gauging it forever in the here and now. Lost almost entirely, like dreams you never fully remember, is your childhood view of where you live. It's been run through the wringer of life. Gone in a square and come out a circle whose ends never quite meet.
"Maybe the price of one of my deer the last time you came up here was a forfeiture of that boyish view. I've been accused of driving a hard bargain a time or two before. But by leaving – by getting up and out – you tucked this part of the world, this little sliver of Earth, away somewhere you were damn certain it would stay safe. And it has, and I'm envious of that. Don't ever confuse your childhood love affair with this country with home. You'll chase a time more than a place and wonder how, though your feet fall where they once did, you feel so differently. Let home be where the end of each day finds you, not where you fell asleep as a boy."
"That sounds like something my father would say," I reply. "Maybe not the part about the goose, though."
I hear a deep, rumbling laugh that, like the drumming wings of spring grouse, seems to come as much from within me as without.
"That is the only part I pilfered straight from him," the mountain says. "He'll be mad that I told you and probably won't speak to me for a few days. Then he'll get over it and want to know more about the whales or the Indian moose hunters or what tectonic forces drove my heights so far above where I sit today."
"That sounds like him," I say, my eyes drifting down toward the Black River again, down toward the nondescript stretch of water where brook trout have gathered for as long as there have been brook trout. Just how long that's been is a question I suspect has already been put to this mountain.
"So," I say, "my second question."
"I'm glad we're getting to that," the mountain says. "I was beginning to think I'd be mere grains of sand before it came up."
"Then perhaps you won't be so long winded this time," I say.
"I won't, but only because you ponder such a trivial thing. You came into this world a seeker. A hunter, if you will. It chose you and not the other way around. Yes, there have been animals that wish it wasn't so, and there will be more to come, no doubt. Even mountains don't understand all the workings of this universe, but I do believe there is a point to much of it and part of that involves following what we're drawn to. It is our responsibility. A duty. Some of what keeps things chugging along the way they're supposed to. Could there be a greater wasted life than one spent by a moose wishing it were a bear? A mountain wishing it were a desert?"
"You and your grains of sand may be one some day," I say.
"That is so. On the surface. But I will always have been born a mountain. If the day comes when I bake under hot sun where nothing grows and am as flat as the surface of one of my beaver bogs at daybreak, there will still be times. Times when a breeze blows or night falls or the thousand-year rains dampen my soil. I will remember then, just as you may some day remember the bugle of an elk, the flush of a grouse, the way a certain deer looked through a boy's rifle scope. Your hand will twitch even if your legs can no longer carry you and your heart will quicken. You will remember who you are. And that may be the best any of us can hope for. So you love wildlife and also to hunt. Embrace them both and be grateful for more than a one-dimensional existence.
"And now, with this unexpected break in the weather, I doubt you'll die of exposure up here. But don't come back. Not to this same place. Maybe you needed to see it today, and maybe I didn't entirely dislike our talk, but leave this one alone now. Feel free to thrash around elsewhere up here. Carry a shotgun if you like, though with your waning reflexes I give my grouse six to one odds these days. "
"And you've lost bets before," I say quickly. "Tell me, did my father really say that about the goose?"
I look southeast toward Albany, then west to where the crooked nose of Jay Peak juts into the sky, then north to rolling mountains in Quebec. I wait for an answer, listening to the wind in overhead leaves, the patter of the rain they still shed even in the sun, the hushed sweep of ferns, and the other sounds that make a mountain a mountain.]]>
I like to think – again during times when believing may make it so – that the mountains north of Stowe's ski slopes are only distant relatives. That Jay Peak, Pisgah, Hoar, Irasburg and Lowell are related to the Appalachians no more closely than a Scandinavian is to an Ethiopian. Instead, these peaks trace direct lineage to the younger, wilder, and much less civilized Laurentians of the Canadian Shield.
I suspect any argument to the contrary comes from those who've not crossed the Victory Bog and wondered just how in hell they suddenly found themselves in Northern Quebec's black spruce taiga. Or canoed into Memphremagog's South Bay and not seen the St. Lawrence delta. Or flushed a spruce grouse from a bed of thick caribou moss in the Wenlock Woods and not pictured a watery Labrador and heard the howls of distant wolves.
And so, with the certain support of my French Canadian Vermont neighbors, by the power vested in me as a Northern Vermont native with a duty to be obstinately independent, I declare the Kingdom's mountains the southernmost reaches of the Laurentians.
I spent this fall among these mountains, sleeping more nights under a Vermont sky than I've slept in over two decades. I watched an autumn marked by record high temperatures descend over a triangle of the world where I spent my youth, reacquainting myself with back roads, tannin-stained streams, thick orchards of wild thorn apple, and high meadows of gone-by goldenrod where monarch butterflies sought the nectar of low-blooming red clover. As snow fell over the Montana mountains where I live, I came back to Vermont to watch its hardwood ridges mimic the colors of its spawning brook trout. I came back to immerse myself not only in the changing seasons but also in what, if I was forced to describe it in a single word, is home. With the luxury of being able to give it a longer moniker, I'd call it by its proper, more widely known name, the Northeast Kingdom.
Vermont's Northeast Kingdom has always been more than a place. Yes, geographically it has reasonably defined borders, essentially encompassing all points north of the junction of routes 15 and 100 near Morrisville, but in appearance it isn't all that different from what you find across the eastern bank of the upper Connecticut River in New Hampshire or the little, Adirondack villages west of Lake Champlain. What sets it more apart is its insistence that the wheels of change grinding through New England meet resistance equal to that its farmers encountered from its glacial till and tenacious scrub forests when they first put plow to ground. In the Northeast Kingdom, the 21st Century has not quite been stopped in its tracks, but it has been hobbled. And I love it.
It also breaks my heart. As our world races forward on the rails made from smartphones, digital streaming, IT-based industry and fluency in various keyboard languages, places exactly like the Northeast Kingdom are left standing on the side of the road, thumb out to passing cars which speed by rarely and never stop.
Change is inevitable – I think it all the time when I see marine fossils on top of 10,000-foot peaks in Montana or ground being broken for a new home in Orleans, Vermont. It is a dynamic part of existence, necessary to ward off the stagnancy that leads to extinction. The law of "adapt or die" is as old as the first single-cell organisms which, through some chemical alchemy, moved of their own accord from undersea vents in our Earth's mantle. We've been doing it ever since, with the exception of a few creatures like the dragon fly and nautilus that evidently got it so perfectly right on their first go-round that they are exempt. For the rest of us less-fortunate beings, we've been forced to change, quite drastically, in order to continue being part of all that is.
What changes are in store for the Northeast Kingdom, I wondered on a clear October morning when I set out with little more purpose than to see where the day took me? On the common in Irasburg – that mid-village green with one great, white pine, a weather-battered bandstand, and grassy Little League diamond, the backstop still stands. I parked near it and saw myself at ten years old pitching to my dad from a lopsided rubber held in place with rusty, 20-penny nails. No grass grew on those base paths then, I thought, remembering games of whiffle ball my friends and I would play against the backstop screen until summer evenings finally crossed the threshold into night and even the newer balls reserved especially for that time because they were bright white grew too dim to see. We'd go our separate ways on ten-speed bikes then, grudges over bad third strikes and balls hit just fair or foul fading out as the lights from fireflies clicked on. Sitting in my car thirty-five years later, I had the quiet, melancholy sense that change has eliminated all such games from this backstop.
Down School Hill on Route 58 then to where another now-grassy lane kicks off parallel the Black River. I parked near the "Road Closed" sign and walked among still-blooming thistles above the water. The road went through when I was a boy, around the "gool," we'd say, past a small sawmill and deep holes where all the village boys, myself at the top of the list, believed giant brown trout lurked. If they did, we never caught them, pulling the occasional rainbow, odd perch, sucker, and bullpout from water we flailed to a froth with Zebco rods and reels, hooks baited with snake-like night crawlers plucked from town gardens with the aid of red plastic flashlights and quick hands.
The saw mill is gone now, stories of the beaver that washed into it during spring's high water and bit a worker on the cheek when he bent to ask it what it was doing there lost to more and more people each year. Change, I thought, noting there's nothing in the sawmill's place today.
Next, on to Orleans and up along the Willoughby River past Clay Hill and Evansville to the T at Route 5A. Willoughby Gap, the glacial cut between Pisgah and Hoar, pulls me south a few miles to the beach at the north end of the Northeast Kingdom's deepest, coldest lake. I park and dip my hand in the fall water. Nothing's changed here, I think, feeling the bite of the frigid depths where lake trout fin in near total darkness.
So long, cell service. The one bar of 1x blinks away on my phone as I drive south along the lake on a narrow road pinched between deep water and high cliffs. Willoughby is uncharacteristically calm today, and I notice a loon close to shore, ripples from its dive spreading slowly toward white birch whose leaves are still green. Beyond it, somewhere between where it took its plunge and the opposite shore, I sat in an ice shack one January morning with John Curtis and learned about catching lake trout when I was a young boy. I drank strong coffee spiked with exactly one cap-full of strong whiskey and waited for the red flags on our tip-ups to spring skyward.
I wonder if the mossy roof on John's house, abandoned shortly after his death years ago, made it through last winter? I'll check sometime while I'm in the Kingdom, but not today. Today, I keep south, driving slowly enough to earn a honk from a Connecticut car behind me. I ease back on the gas and drop my speed another five miles an hour, smiling as the Volvo rockets by in one of only two passing zones along the lake.
At the south end of Willoughby, at another beach looking back through the Gap to the north, debate rages over the state's proposal for a larger parking lot and recreation area. Today, there are exactly two cars at the trailhead where hikers can jump off on trails. Seems plenty of room I think to myself, happy that people from the Kingdom will still fight – tooth and nail sometimes – many of the proposals coming from Montpelier.
And then I pass a fallen-in farm, hardly the first I've seen today, but a stark reminder that the ways of Washington, if not Montpelier, seldom benefit this part of Vermont. Maybe no one anticipated the irreparable harm NAFTA would do the small, Northeast Kingdom diary farmer, allowing subsidized Canadian milk to pour across the border. It was an extinction level event. No other way to describe it. Almost overnight, the little hill farms where generations of head-strong, ingenious, tough-as-nails farmers battled the elements each day to send a few hundred gallons of milk out every week shuttered. Pastures of timothy fell first to red osiers, meadow sweet, and golden rod, then to grey birch and poplar and finally to sugar maple and beech.The Kingdom is still reeling thirty years later, trying like a punch-drunk fighter to find its feet.
Maybe it won't. I know that's a possibility, hooking east at Burke to drive up the Passumpsic River toward Island Pond, past more leaning milk barns and overgrown pasture. When I left Vermont for Montana nearly 25 years ago, full of a young man's certainty that the footing this country would find would be exponential growth, I wanted no part in witnessing that. Now, approaching the edge of Brighton, I wonder if it might have been better – somehow more hopeful – than the continued onslaught against once-vibrant farms by a hungry forest. Change. We can predict with certainty its occurrence, though rarely guess the form in which it will arrive.
The Wenlock Woods between Island Pond and the Connecticut River hasn't changed much, and in this vast, sub-taiga wilderness I take solace in knowing it won't, at least on its surface. Preserved now in the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge, the Nulhegan River drainages, once paper company land, are now public acres open to fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking. It's always been one of my favorite parts of the Northeast Kingdom, a tentacle of places far north, where the scent of spruce and slap of a beaver's tail mix with dense alders and the deep indentations of moose tracks.
But even here change is at work, I know. Vermont's warmer winters have ushered in winter ticks that chew the hair from moose and their numbers are falling off a cliff. Far from a Northern Vermont phenomenon, climate change is touching all corners of the globe. Adapt or die, I think again, wondering if trading moose for the tufted titmouse and wild turkey is worthwhile. Not for the moose, I decide at the Connecticut River where I swing south, hoping that along its fertile banks I'll run into thriving farms again.
I don't. Not many of them. More dilapidated houses set close to the road, built when getting a sleigh from the barn to the rolled-snow highway was done in as few feet as possible. Broken windows, vine-cloaked front doors, and caved-in roofs. Like fossils from another era. I park in a pull-out and stare across the Connecticut at New Hampshire. Atlantic salmon once swam past this very spot, I know. Catamounts roamed the White Mountains I see on the horizon, and Abenaki Indians paddled birch bark canoes around this same bend in the water. I feel these things like half remembered dreams long after waking and am left with a strange sense of loss I can't explain. All gone many generations before I was born, I sense their energy still present. Like the moose lost to ticks, the changes that brought about their disappearance were not welcome.
At Concord, I jog west and eventually Route 2 brings me to St. Johnsbury, the largest of the Northeast Kingdom's towns. I skirt it and jump on I-91 and cruise north, over Sheffield Heights, through the beginning of Northern Vermont's spectacular fall foliage, getting off in Barton where I make my way over Burton Hill back to Irasburg. In the late afternoon light, I want to walk on Irasburg Mountain, beyond its high hay meadows, in the hardwoods where closed gentian flowers glow purple with light seemingly from within.
It was near there that I shot my first whitetail buck, caught hefty brook trout from beaver ponds where black flies ringed my ears with bites, learned how to properly lead a flying grouse with a single-shot 16 gauge shotgun, and once badly burned my mouth with a streamside brew of wild spearmint tea.
I park near the woods and follow on foot a driveway that turns to logging trace and eventually I know, the other side of the height of land where water drains south toward Albany, a deer trail. And then a man's voice.
"This isn't a street," he barks.
How astute, I think.
"This is private property and you can't just walk around on it."
I stare at the cigarette leaking from his mouth and then at him. A fine addition to the Northeast Kingdom from states far to the south.
"What are you doing?" he demands, as if the large, Nikon camera I hold isn't evidence enough.
Looking at Christmas future for much of Northern Vermont, I think without saying. Seeing a time not that far off when I believe Vermont's long-standing tradition of access to unposted private land will be a distant memory. Witnessing change.
I start back up the logging trace – enlightened now that it's no street – and smile to myself. Winters aren't what they were in the 70s perhaps, but they last a good long while. I hope this man enjoys them up here on his mountain. Like the energy of long-gone cougars and Abenaki, I feel the spirits of hill farmers who homesteaded a mile further out the non-street to the west.
"Christly deep snow this year," one whispers, a wrinkled, blue eye winking at me. I tip my hat, watch a monarch float over my car, then head down off the mountain toward Irasburg.
The only plan I've had for the day, if you can call some vague notion of a mental picture I want to attempt in-camera a plan, involves retracing some of my earlier route at dusk. In evening light, with sugar maple leaves burning jack-o'lantern orange, I wind my way over to Willoughby Lake then up Hinton Hill to Vermont's tiny Sentinel Rock State Park.
From the time it washed out from beneath a mile of ice as the last glacier trudged northward, the giant, granite erratic has stood guard over the lake, over much of the Northeast Kingdom. I remember climbing on it when I was two years old, a cutting, north wind battling bright sun in a war between winter and spring, matted, brown grass all around, a boyhood joy I could hardly contain propelling me up its jagged edge toward a rounded top from which I believed I could see the entire world.
I set up on the north side of this boulder, watching Northern Vermont slowly melt to night, waiting until the last glow of bronze light remains on the horizon. One picture then, and another an hour after dark from the same spot, this one showing the gassy clouds in the core of our Milky Way galaxy and a few of its billions of stars. Looks more or less the way I imagined it, and since it doesn't always, I'll take it.
It's chilly now, though I wouldn't say cold, so I'll stay a while longer. Beacons of huge windmills blink red in the distance, and I watch a car's headlights worm over the road between Willoughby and Crystal Lake. Mostly though, it's dark. A barred owl calls, doesn't get an answer, then calls again. This time, on the edge of earshot, another answers.
I listen, thinking about change. For generations, people from the Northeast Kingdom could do what they wanted. It might be hard – back-breakingly-hard, perhaps – but if a boy wanted to farm or a girl to cut hair from the side room of her home, livings could be eeked out. Bills could be paid, and if they couldn't banks weren't bad about waiting a month or so.
What now, I wonder? What do we tell the child born in Brownington Center who sees a field not entirely gone to woods and asks about clearing it? Buying a few milkers? Maybe trying to save the barn where grandpa worked before it falls down?
I'm still thinking about the inability I'd have to answer those questions when I drive into Irasburg, well after 10pm. Not much traffic around the common during the day, and hardly any at this time of night. I pull up on the south side of the backstop, park, and walk to home plate, only it's not there. I remember the bleachers on both sides where, after adult fast-pitch softball games, my friends and I would search for fallen Coca Cola bottle caps, peeling their grey liners out in hopes of revealing a 10-cent winner. Some are probably still buried there, I think.
I walk slowly from home plate, back through time 35 years to the backstop and large, dirt circle where I'd pitch whiffle balls. Almost unconsciously, I start into a windup and let the bright, white ball I see in my mind sail. Feeling a little foolish right at the end, I leave my arm too high in the follow-through. That's one my friend, Kevin Ingalls, would have driven high into the screen behind me where, at best, I could argue it was a triple and not a home run.
"Aren't you a man and a half," two eleven-year-olds would say back and forth before the wrestling matches that invariably ensued.
God, I can hear it, I think as I stare until focus is lost.
If boys have played here since we did, it's been more than 20 years, I'm sure. I hope kids still play whiffle ball somewhere, but I wouldn't bet much on them doing it in Irasburg.
A vehicle rumbles up Route 14 behind me, tires turning fast on pavement. A milk truck, I instantly think, then shoot forward to the present where a boxy recycling truck speeds north toward Newport. I watch its taillights whip out of sight then turn my eye on a dark, hulking Irasburg Mountain. For the first time in several hours, I'm reminded of being put off the property of a man up there. A man and a half, I think to myself, unable to contain a smile.
Turning to my car, I'm startled by the visage of the homesteader who appeared earlier, this time materializing about where our foul pole on the backstop was. He's looking intently at my faded Red Sox hat, so I begin the conversation.
"We just pissed it away again in the play offs."
He doesn't flinch, nor did I expect him to.
"Ain't had one who could really drive the ball since Williams," he says.
"Ortiz?" I offer.
He spits on the ground and acknowledges my point with a nod. "Weren't bad in the clutch," he agrees.
"How do you like your new neighbor?" I ask.
"That fella," he says dismissively then locks his eyes on mine. "Ain't the Appalachians up there, boy."
"No sir, it ain't," I say as he vanishes into the breeze that rustles the maple leaves overhead.
** Enjoy the following photos, pictures of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, taken this fall when, for a few days, Northern Vermont can lay claim to the prettiest place on Earth. They are all, including the feature photo, Willoughby Sky, for sale on this site.
Fire and Ice
Black River Covered
Hazen's Notch
Winter Stores
Windless in Albany
Morning Sun
Sugarhouse Road
Last Apple
Shelf Fungus
Vermont Barn
Dewey DNA
A Story Somewhere
Looking Up At First Light
Golden Rod
Edge of the Woods
Macro Mourning
Autumn Grass
Fall At the Gap
Birch Leaf
Leaf Blood
Rainbow Ridge
Character in Color
Cracking the Clouds
Today, the sky is clear. There is the unmistakable chill of fall, snow in the high country, a wintry-mix forecast for the coming week, and a deep sense of relief that the fire season of 2017 is behind us. As I sip strong coffee doctored with Vermont maple syrup this morning, watching the sun rise blindingly-yellow and bright, I am relieved, too, but I fear that our reprieve is seasonal.
Some will say that it always has been. That our lodgepole pine and Douglas fir, with their serotinous cones dependent upon fire to open and reseed the forest, are proof enough that as part of a healthy, natural environment fire must come. Natural is the kicker, I think, as I reload my coffee. And natural we haven't seen in a very long time, nor do I believe I'm being the least prophetic in saying in no uncertain terms that we will not see it return.
I stir a little raw honey into my French roast, rich with the flavor of September sage blossoms, and, like a cat, shift in my chair to follow the sunlight. From the time we first gathered in communities, realizing that with communication and teamwork we have the unique ability among our animal relatives to significantly alter our environment to suit us, we have left an indelible mark upon the landscape. We have spread across the globe like no other species, thriving in desert and tundra alike, bending all which doesn't conform to our needs, often with little care or consideration for consequences more than a generation out. In plain English, it's coming back to bite us in the ass, I think, and it's got jaws like a bear trap.
I saw a bear this weekend. A great, silver-tipped grizzly with a thin coat of fall snow on his back, fur already thick and sleek, so intent on eating that he never looked in my direction long enough for anything close to the picture I wished for.
We're a fickle lot, I thought even then. For a hundred years, we did everything in our considerable power to eradicate them from Montana, including trapping, snaring, shooting, and poisoning. We bid fare to wipe them out entirely, though even during the height of our persecution retained a certain reverence, immortalizing the cagiest of bears with names like Old Mose and Waab. And then one day with lessons taught by the passenger pigeon, we jammed on the brakes with both feet, sounded the alarm bells, called all hands on deck and threw our weight behind protecting them.
"Save the grizzlies," the cry echoed, and we did just that. We saved the hell out them, yet somehow expected them to ignore a hundred thousand years of instinct and stay in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, understanding that their indigenous, prairie homes are off limits this time. We politely asked that they refrain from mauling bow hunters, eating hikers, and being hit by automobiles, too. We suggested that they supplement their historic diet of elk calves in the spring with enough protein from other sources to help us protect dwindling herds. The bears? Predictably, or, evidently for many of us not, the bears have shown a very grizzly-like disdain for our desires. How dare they?
I desperately want a third cup of coffee. I've told myself two's my limit, but there's little more than a splash left in the pot and I can't see letting it go to waste. I pour it into my ceramic mug, a properly heavy coffee cup the color of late-autumn leaves fallen after a hard rain, stenciled with the tracks of a walking wolf.
I remember seeing a real wolf track, dotting the snow along a frozen, Montana creek, almost twenty years ago. I was struck by how large it was, giant toes crescent-mooning a pad the size of my hand, strides almost twice as long as a coyote. I followed with my eyes to where it climbed a wind-blown hill and disappeared into a horizon of heavy lodgepole. Woods are woods, I thought, but with wolves and grizzly bears they're wild.
Still, a part of me was uneasy. I'd seen gray wolves in Labrador, Newfoundland, with my dad during fishing trips when I was a kid. I'd watched them dogging massive caribou herds so large that it sometimes took more than a full day for one to pass where we cast our flies, animals streaming by all through the night. That's the predator-prey relationship they evolved in, I thought, wondering if our elk herds would sustain them here on the Montana landscape where, like the grizzly, we'd spent a century removing them.
America once had twenty million bison in it, I thought, staring at the wolf's tracks until my vision blurred and I had to blink. More than an ample prey base. But when we decided in 1995 that Yellowstone Park would be a healthier, more natural environment if the wolf's howl once more echoed across its geothermal features, bringing 14 animals down from Canada to start an American pack, had we taken into consideration the near-extinction of the bison?
Hell, no, I think as I upend my coffee mug, letting the last grounds-specked rivulet trickle into my mouth. We wanted wolves, but when they actually acted like wolves - decimating elk herds, eliminating local populations of moose, spreading to every corner of Western Montana, Northern Wyoming, and Eastern Idaho, we backpedaled, scrambled for some way to control their numbers, and tried to convince ourselves that what we witnessed was no more than Nature's uninterrupted cycle of perfection.
"It will balance out," I heard proponents of the wolf tell sportsmen complaining about drastic declines in elk and deer populations. "Give it time, and it will all balance out."
Well, they got that part right. Mountain ranges where I used to find hundreds of elk and for a time saw plenty of wolf sign, now have thousands of acres of prime habitat with very little of either. Yes, sir, things have certainly balanced out, and in many places you'll go a damn long time before hearing a wolf's howl or an elk's bugle. In many places, beautiful as they may be, there's a whole lot of nothing.
Time to stretch my legs. Get up and walk around. Anything to keep me from dumping another fistful of coffee into the brew basket. I'll make a circuit around the block, still early enough in the morning to have the sidewalk to myself, still cool enough to really feel like fall.
We Moshers are not known for dawdling, and in ten minutes I have to consciously slow my pace. I need a little more time away from my desk, but at this rate I'll arrive back at my front door before I've left. I force myself to stop and look at a neighbor's flower garden, daisies and hollyhocks still blooming despite a heavy frost a few nights ago.
We're a species of pickers and choosers, I think, staring at the beautifully manicured garden. Our subjective sense of aesthetics, combined with a relatively large brain that more or less gets most of us down the path from inception to completion, says we hack down the thistle and plant the lily. If the humming bird prefers thistles, no matter, we will plant it prettier lilies.
We mold the world around us to our desire for beauty and cuddly and cute and gentle. I can't imagine anyone, myself included, scouring the ditches for roadkill deer, hauling them into our yards, allowing the stench of death to waft through the neighborhood in hopes of attracting a turkey vulture. Not exactly our style, though I'm certain the vultures wouldn't mind. Instead, we build homes for the bluebird. Ornate, sometimes-shingled, often painted with details right down to shuttered windows, miniature representations of the houses we live in ourselves because after all, isn't that what the bluebird really wants?
If a spotted fawn, new to the world and the ways of suburbia wanders into our yard and lies down, how quickly will its picture generate likes on Facebook! We will be calling it Bambi, forgoing the starting of lawn mowers, backyard grills, and perhaps even our automobiles until its nap is finished and it's moved on. **
Staring at a recently finished front porch, I laugh imagining the reaction if a badger took up residence under it. Instead of gushing on social media about the "beautiful badger living under my porch," and the "wonderfully strange noises it makes" when I trod on the boards above him, we'd be Googling everything from animal control to local law enforcement. Meanwhile, the badger would be doing what it does best - being a badger.
On the other side of the street, across from the new porch, a house cat struts up a rock walkway and flops down on a door mat. I've always liked cats and admired their independence - their aloof nature and unbending resolve never to come when called unless it's precisely what they want at that very moment. Whoever owns this one, has installed a pet down for it to come and go as it pleases, and at this particular instant it pleases not to. It lies in the sun and rolls lazily onto its back, stretching its paws toward the sky. Has Fluffy just returned from a successful hunt, I wonder? Just come home after defeathering and devouring a sparrow? Heavens, no, Fluffy doesn't hunt. Look at how she sleeps on a lap and purrs. She's a sweetie.
I think about my own cat, a giant, earless, stub-tailed rescue cat who, for twenty-two hours of the day is perfectly content to run my life around his desire for affection and a bowl of milk. The remaining two hours? He's engaged in activity that leads to neighbors calling and angrily letting me know another cottontail rabbit has met its loud-squealing, long-drawn-out doom.
"Why can't he just be a good cat?" one of them asked me once. I was tempted to tell her that in my estimation there was none better, but instead I apologized and said I'd try to keep him inside more. What an inconvenient thing it is when a cat forgets it's not supposed to be a cat.
Perhaps some degree of anthropomorphizing is impossible, I think as I near my front door. Why else do I extend my hand toward the tired fritillary butterfly that passes slowly by, hoping he will "want" to rest for a moment on my finger. That he will "enjoy" it, possibly even taking some comfort at summer's end that he's found someone who "understands" him and recognizes his fatigue.
He doesn't land on me, but as he drifts by and out of sight around a juniper next door, a bee flushes from underfoot and I instinctively swat it away. Sure, butterflies are fine, but I draw the line at bees.
Back inside, I feel as unsettled as the storm front the weatherman says is barreling toward me from the west. I think about our fires again - the countless small animals that became part of the ash I brushed off the hood of my truck every morning. I think about our Secretary of the Interior, Montana resident, Ryan Zinke, traveling to Missoula as forests above the city burned and his laying blame on the door of the "environmentalists" who've made timber cutting on national forest more difficult.
That's part of it, I think, as I swirl water around my coffee pot, rinsing it ahead of tomorrow's fresh brew. And it's certainly easier to say that if we cut some trees there will be fewer to burn. That we will be "helping" the forest. Helping it be what we think it should.
But a harder truth is that Montana has been in a drought for more than two decades. That this year its summer rainfall in many places totaled a few tenths of one inch. That July temperatures soared above 90 degrees for more days than I've seen, and I keep pretty careful track. That our pika, wolverines, and high-elevation white bark pine trees are on the fast track to extinction because we are warming. Rapidly.
That's a more difficult pill for us to swallow, because we like to pretend that we are always in control and that we know what Nature "needs." That we're able to preserve some notion of unspoiled ecosystem where the seasons revolve in their natural, all-is-as-it-should-be states. That if the wilderness wants a wolf it's a simple as giving it one. That if a cat kills a cottontail rabbit we can show it the error in its ways and turn it into a "good cat." That if our Earth is heating up, drying out, and fires are burning hotter and longer we can solve it through better logging practices.
I look west out my living room window. The air is still clear, and we'll scribe a long arc around the sun before it darkens with smoke again. Maybe then we will make another push for the Forest Service to begin timber sales in earnest. For people to invest in the small towns where for many generations sawmills whirred. To get us back in the driver's seat of this thing we call Nature. To make sure everything churns along the way it's supposed to. That when it doesn't and things go awry to our sense of natural order, the fix is as simple as taking the next exit on a throughway and backtracking.
I look out the window once more. Bright, blue skies. My cat is at the back door wanting out, and I open it to turn him loose on the world. In my own interpretation of Nature, putting modern words in her mouth, I hear her telling us all, "Recalculating."
** Thanks to my Iowa friend, Don Shurr, who read this piece and provided the photo of the fawn. Good job, Don!
Today, summer is firmly in control. Even the approaching storm and my autumnal sense of change can't convince me otherwise. I'm at the trailhead to Glacier Lake in Montana's Absaroka Mountains, already sweating as I leave the beaten path in favor of my own course up a steep, boulder-strewn creek that appears to drop from the distant, western horizon, falling straight out of the smoky sky.
My lightweight trail shoes sink in wet moss where I pause to pick ripe, wild raspberries, their flavor reminiscent of a place, taking me back to Northern Vermont and an afternoon when my mother and I picked them there. A few feet further, I see the indentation of a black bear's front foot preserved in the moss, a record of its nocturnal pursuit of these same berries. It's probably sleeping somewhere in the snaking line of spruce that traces this stream between high peaks well above timberline. Perhaps I'll see it, I think, as I tighten the chest strap on my pack and drop to all fours, crawling over the creek above a patch of whitewater on the slick trunk of a Douglas fir lodged between ragged hunks of pink granite. Where I stand on the opposite bank, the knees of my pants now as wet as my shoes, an aster leans from heavy, streamside grass, pointing its blue-ringed face toward the sun. I stop long enough for one photo and then begin climbing.
My legs are slightly more accustomed to the rigors of near-vertical ascent than they were a month ago when I climbed the Beartooth to shoot the Milky Way. They protest less vehemently, resigned to their task of hauling me upward, letting me gain ground inch by inch. Back across the creek, on the side of a mountain scribed by a well-maintained trail, I see someone trudging their way up, too. I'm convinced they won't encounter nearly as much as I will, though that's more a reflection of my optimism, desire for solitude, and trail-breaking nature than any real difference in environment. This time of year especially, not many people see this corner of Montana, either from the packed gravel of a path or the timbered stream paralleling it a mile away. Still, the road less traveled by, I think, digging my toes into a cirque of shattered stone, a crescent carved above the stream during spring's raging high water.
An hour of scrambling over rock slides, slipping under leaning trees, and tightroping across others closer to prostrate, and I've found a patch of mountain grass at the base of knife-blade-thin snowdrifts. Here, seasons mix with fireweed half gone by and columbine just coming on. Most of it is the common, pale-yellow variety, but in the shade of a fallen white bark pine one blooms with delicate, pink petals encircling a center the color of late September aspen leaves. Maybe the weatherman will be wrong, I hope, as my shutter clicks and I start hiking again.
At the base of a hundred yards of haphazardly-stacked boulders ranging in size from basketballs to Buicks, lichen a dozen shades of green and yellow on their backs, the stream vanishes. I can hear it, rumbling in the mountain behind this curtain of rock, but there's no visible flow. It reverberates in my chest like the drumming wings of springtime grouse, churning unseen through some hidden cavern while I pick my way toward a skyline of hazy blue and the possibility of flatter ground.
A pair of young pika emerge to stare at their rare visitor. They look like the cross between a squirrel and cottontail rabbit, their round ears swiveling as I hunt through my pack for my camera. One decides that it's seen enough before I focus the shot, but the other allows me one picture then retreats to its home where by all predictions it will spend the entirety of tomorrow.
The stream reappears above the wall of rocks, and I follow it up through a sliver of valley toward a small lake. Mountain goat hair clings to the lower limbs of the trees I pass, rubbed off in June as these animals shed their coats that protect them from a savage, high-elevation winter. The goats rely on gale-force winds to blow snow from the rocky peaks, exposing grass and moss. Unlike the deer and elk, they remain up here all winter, but while they're probably not far away I don't see them today.
The little lake has good water in it I see twenty minutes later, fed by the stream I've hiked along and a series of half a dozen waterfalls along its upstream side. Part way around its shore, just as I'm thinking it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to unstrap my pack and rest my back, I come across an infield-sized patch of wildflowers.
Pink fireweed, yellow Jerusalem artichoke, and lavender asters fill each inch of space between the granite boulders which have rolled down from their lofty homes. Poking above the blossoms, they look like the gray backs of some ancient species of bear, while smaller stones ring this oasis, sharply delineating where mountain ends and paradise begins.
Here, in a pocket of summer splendor, I refuse to believe that I stand on the cusp of changing seasons. The air is alive with butterflies – nearly every species I've photographed during the past two months – while honeybees and their larger cousins, bumblebees, crawl over the flowers, their legs caked with pollen, the delicate hairs on their head as yellow as the background they land in front of.
There are limitless choices for the fritillary I watch spread his wings flat while he drinks.
He basks on top of one bloom then flits a couple of inches to another, crawling upside down to yet one more. In this moment, early in the afternoon of a September day, summer is preserved forever. Even as a gentle breeze stirs out of the west and some tiny, unrecognizable part of me trembles within, this butterfly somersaults in the air and executes a perfect landing on a swaying, yellow blossom. A day-flying moth, hoping for room to land alongside him, buzzes directly overhead, the same distance from my macro lens to catch them both in good focus, one clinging to its goblet, the other eager to share a drink.
A silvery blue, Montana's miniature morpho, circles an aster then lands facing me. I ease onto my stomach and focus on her, trying to bring out the white banding on her antennae, letting iridescent blue wings glow in light filtered through taller flowers above. She permits one shot then hurls herself into the air, landing on more asters in deeper shade.
She's a butterfly of spring – of the opposite end of the equinox – and I can't decide if her presence here feels hopeful or foreboding. I think about it a second longer as the breeze picks up a couple of miles an hour, then stand and sneak toward more Jerusalem artichoke where a painted lady, fresh from its chrysalis, circles in rapid flight.
As I wait for it to select a flower, an orange sulfur lands. These flighty butterflies are tough to get close to, glinting across meadows in July like pieces of wind-blown confetti, but there's limited terrain here and this one doesn't mind me sneaking a few photos. It won't open its vivid orange wings, but there's a hint of the color hidden within, ringed in pastel pink, its green eye trained on my Cyclops-like lens.
As I look away from the sulfur, the painted lady prepares to land nearby and a fast shutter speed freezes her just before touching down. She drinks for half a second then decides a different blossom suits her better, landing before a backdrop of green and pink, the crown jewel in this mountain garden.
I'm not really aware of passing time but lengthening shadows suggest I should move along, though not before a photo of a lilac bordered copper sharing a perch with a bee. Late summer has made strange bed fellows, I think, snapping a quick shot before turning into the mountain again and shoving off.
The streams drops in waterfalls over polished granite shelves above where it flows into the small lake, clear water giving itself over to gravity. I want to photograph these falls, but the sun has inched closer to the western horizon and the light is wrong. Instead, I settle for a narrow panorama in my mind, mountain, flowers, and falls each anchoring a portion of the mental picture.
Onward, and I don't look back. I'm breathing hard when I reach Glacier Lake at the head of the falls and the edge of the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness. My stream meets the trail from the parking lot, but the person I saw walking it hours earlier has come and gone and I have the lake to myself. I can taste the forest fires burning west of here, fires that have ravaged over a million acres of Montana this summer, more than any year in recorded history.
The patch of flowers far below where I photographed butterflies is a tiny smudge of color from here and I look from it to the sky and sigh. Endings and beginnings, I think, deciding that fire-ending snow might be a worthwhile price to end so much devastation. Of course, the painted lady, only a day out of her silky sleeping bag of transformation, has no way of knowing the life threatening cold may save thousands of her unborn relatives miles from here. Perhaps she'll find the underside of a cow parsnip – a broad, protective leaf to cling to where she can ride out the storm. If not, she could hardly have picked a better day or better place to be a butterfly than this one.
"And it isn't over yet," I say aloud into the west wind, noticeably cooler than an hour ago.
I teeter momentarily where the trail back to my truck, three miles away, turns from the route I took getting here, knowing I don't have the time to retrace my steps, still hesitant to walk among so many other footprints. With the sun at my back, I take a picture of the cascading water where it shoots toward the lake below then resign myself to walking the beaten path, placated ever so slightly by the hope that it's late enough in the day so that I won't encounter other hikers.
There is no one else at a round clump of Jerusalem artichoke to watch bumblebees drunk on nectar slowly crawl from flower to flower. It's a feeding frenzy with hundreds of bees working hundreds of blossoms. I sit down and watch them, ragged wings testament to a short and busy summer in the high country. These are members of their colony's last brood, and will not survive the coming days. Deep underground, a few queens will hibernate to repopulate the mountains next summer, but these bees are dining on their last supper. As my mind drifts ahead to that far-off day next May when warm temperatures expose south-facing slopes and the drone of wings once more sounds, I'm struck with sadness. Even as I photograph a pair of bees vying for the best position on a flower, I notice a long, leaden cloud appear in the north sky.
I leave the bees to the final hour or so of warm sunshine and strike off down the trail. As it loses elevation, I drop out of the green of summer and into the dull browns of dry, early fall. Lupine pods rattle in the wind, and withered leaves of arrowleaf balsamroot clack together like the yellow and red wings of the locusts I flush from the path. There can be no rebirth without death, I know, but I don't have to like it.
A mile above the parking lot the trail crosses a sturdy wooden bridge spanning a tributary of the creek I climbed earlier in the day. This is more than my pride will allow, and I turn abruptly downstream and begin bushwacking through timber that still stands even after a forest fire some years ago took its lives. These trees return to the Earth slowly, standing now with only their largest limbs attached, reaching to the sky like blackened, mountain cactus. In time, seeds freed from cones relying on fires to germinate, will burst from the soil and for part of a generation the old and new will share pieces of this mountain. Maybe that's what the massive, fallen fir I come across where the fire jumped the seep I'm descending is waiting for – the shade of new trees and cooler shadows to hasten the growth of moss that will in turn help complete its recycling.
I'm almost back to my truck now, almost ready to begin the long drive home. In a few minutes, I'll motor away from the Absaroka and won't likely be back until next summer. It seems a hell of a way off right now. As though mere moments ago I was watching leaves unfurl and celebrating an afternoon on which I didn't need to wear a jacket.
The last rays of the sun are shining off the roof of my truck when I spot a little spring flowing just off the stream I've followed down from the bridge. Where its water gurgles from the ground, a bit of summer remains even this low. The Jerusalem artichoke is looking a bit ragged and there aren't as many asters as grew higher, but a clump of bright-red paintbrush stands high enough to glow in the sun. It's exactly what I needed to see before bringing this journey to a close, and though it has no idea I veer in its direction, passing my hand over its flowers, their soft touch a memory that will help me through the coming months. The faint haze of pollen on my fingers a hopeful stain of things to come again.
I have come back to this place, high in the mountains of Montana on a hazy, September day to remind myself of this. To confine my world, if only for a few hours, to the smooth arc of a rod when a good fish strikes, the scent of summer gone by, the disconcerting feeling that through the warm temperature of high noon winter's tentacles already creep, and to pay tribute to something I've loved doing all my life. I have returned, as instinctively as the salmon which finds the pool where it was born after years in the ocean, to cast a line through time and space, letting it cut across a thousand memories of a thousand similar places where I fished with my father. Today, I am fishing alone.
My clock still runs on summer time, stirring me from sleep inside my tent a full hour before any hint of daylight. Like some oversized reptile needing warmth before motion, I slither awkwardly toward a small cooler, my sleeping bag wrapped tightly around me. It's Starbucks ice coffee this morning, full of the caffeine I need but entirely devoid of the heat I which I crave. I could have brought my Jet Boil – that ingenious flame thrower which has helped me make dozens of cups of strong, instant coffee over the years – but Montana is burning all around, hundreds of thousands of acres already gone up in smoke, so today cold coffee will do. I sip it at the screen door of my tent, staring out into a dark world where only the tips of dead spruce stand out against a sky whose eastern horizon is a half shade closer to the gunmetal gray of predawn.
It's a quiet time of year. Young birds have fledged, elk calves have lost their spots while their father's antlers have lost their velvet, and a tangible lull has settled across the land. Summer still controls the seasons, but her embrace is like a lover's at an airport before a long journey apart.
The uneasiness I feel must stem from a time when winter meant more inconvenience than shoveling snow and a truck slow to warm, I think, then allow my mind to jump ahead many millennia to a day on the opposite end of the solstice and opposite end of the country when I caught my first trout in Northern Vermont. I wasn't quite three years old, dipping a worm into a frigid, April brook while my father adjusted the straps of the pack he carried me in. I watched it vanish below the milky surface of a stream equal parts water and snow, felt the tap of something living – the tug of life electrifying the rod I held – and, though I was unsure whether it came from something living in the brook or was the brook – heaved upward with all my might. A five-inch, pale trout sailed into the air, seemed to hang for a split second against a backdrop of exposed hemlock roots, gnarled alders, and a stubborn drift of needle-covered snow, then fell to a gravel bar where flecks of mica gleamed. My father, perhaps forgetting his young son was tethered to his back in a contraption of bent aluminum poles and faded, blue canvas, launched off the bank, knocking me hard against his denim coat when he landed near the fish. There was no discussion of releasing it, and even before its last spasms of life had departed, crimson blood running from its gills, I held it. I see it now as though the decades between us don't exist, the hazy blue rings around its red spots, the white edges of its fins the color of milk poured in deep shade. It's a good memory, and a good place to start this day, I think, as I dress and step into the smoky world of Montana in September.
Walk up and then fish back. That's my plan, if I can call so loose a day's schedule a plan, but in less than half a mile the gravity of the brook sucks me in and I find myself false casting, stripping line, aiming my fly toward a sliver of water between narrow, grassy banks before I've even seen the sun. I'm rusty, and the fly falls short, in the stream but out of view. I listen for the telltale slap of a striking fish, but it's too early in the day and no insects are awake. I jerk the rod skyward, imbed the fly in streamside sage, and spend the next few minutes untangling the leader from stout, woody branches. Walk up and fish back, I remind myself.
There's a horse trail to follow, a dusty path pocked with cattle tracks and less frequently the sharper hoof prints of elk and deer. It leads across meadows where a pair of rusty hay rakes, sage grown up among their tines, stand as markers to some bygone family's determination. Beyond them, where fir crowd the valley down to a hundred yards wide, a rail fence snakes through the timber, another testament to man's resolve. Moss has taken root in the wood, thick, green hair growing heavy on the north-facing sides.
We're an egotistical lot, I think, stopping to take a picture. For twenty years, my father and I considered this stream "our" place to fish. Before that, it was someone else's – a spot to cut hay and chisel out a life inside mud-chinked cabins. And before that it may have been the favorite haunt of a fur trapper. His own private valley. This moss, much of it anyway, was here in 2012 on the last day my father and I fished this stream. It grows slowly and probably hasn't changed much, though in its steady consumption of these rails it speaks to the foolish notion that this country belongs to anything else. Though never uncomfortable in the woods, I feel something prickle the back of my neck and fight the urge to turn and look over my shoulder, subconsciously beginning to whistle, a rough approximation of Delta Dawn, another subconscious nod to another morning fishing with my father more than thirty years ago.
On that day we'd stopped at a true country store – odd-dimension one-bys lending floor space to a hodgepodge of household goods mixed in with Wise potato chips, a battered Coca Cola cooler half full of ice and Nehi soda bottles, and a long, glass-topped freezer where I found a Hood ice cream sandwich. Back in our car, out of a north wind which said just because today looks like spring and you eat ice cream doesn't mean it's so, a scratchy AM radio station, 1490, WIKE, played the song. And then Angel of the Morning. And then for the first time, Luckenbach Texas. We were crossing a wrought-iron bridge built in 1928, the names of the town selectmen embossed on a plaque attached to its west side, when my father looked at me and said, "That, mister man, is a great song." I whistle a bar of it, too, the notes swallowed by forest and moss and time.
Here, the trail crosses the brook to skirt a willow bog where I've seen moose. I think about leaping out onto a midstream rock and then remember the Vermont woodsman adage, "Never go under anything you can go over, never go over anything you can go around." It doesn't specifically address jumping onto a wet rock, but I extrapolate a strong condemnation of the act and look instead for an easier crossing. I find one a short distance downstream where the channel splits and I can easily step across both forks.
The sun is up now, already high enough to make the shade of heavy timber feel good where the trail jogs through granite boulders and steeple-shaped spruce. I've covered nearly three miles and I smile, wondering how in hell I can remember which songs played on the radio when I was a kid but not much about today's walk.
And now, silent wings overhead. The barred owl glides, landing close to the trunk of a large, lodgepole pine. One photo, and he's gone, but my memory turns to the one my father and I found dead along a brook, balsam needles held fast in its talons, its neck broken from a misguided strike on a squirrel. We caught nine trout that evening. I remember writing it in the green-backed journal I chronicled our fishing in. We caught nine trout, saw painted trilliums and cowslips, and found a dead barred owl. 1984. Suddenly, I want strong sunshine. No more of this dappled world of long shadows and old memories. I pour on triple-time speed, not pausing until I break out of the timber into more meadows.
Another mile, I think. On the upstream side of Horseshoe Gate, my own moniker, much like the Chipmunk Brook, Mrs. McCormick's Brook, The Creek, and the other places I fished in Vermont without ever using their "real" names. In full daylight, I find it easier to remember such places, thinking back to alder-choked beaver bogs where peeper frogs drowned out all sound save the white throated sparrow's long call at dusk. Of air thick with black flies and the pungent odor of Deep Woods Off. Of hardwood forests where leaves fell after a night of October frost, each one a crisp footstep of winter drawing closer, some spinning down the brook my father and I fished, a boy's sadness at summer's end as tangible as the red and orange sugar maple flotillas drifting by above our worms.
I feel it again today. There is more this time, I know, passing the giant boulder where my mom and dad ate lunch with me ten years ago. Where my mother found a slender bluebird feather she later framed and mailed to me. Where peanut butter and jelly bled through bread and Coke from cans tasted warm and tinny. Where the same fly rod I carry now leaned against a pine stump whose mottled trunk we remarked on then and I find just as striking today.
It's time to fish. A freshly hatched mourning cloak butterfly fans its wings from the trunk of a squat pine, a colorful indication that the day has progressed sufficiently to awaken all insects, including the grasshoppers my fly imitates. I give one glance to Horseshoe Gate, see my father leaning on the rails in 2012, his features dissolving into the woods behind him, then begin catching brook trout.
I fish this day downstream through Montana's Stewart Meadows on Warm Springs Creek, but with each cast my line cuts across the Vermont streams of Taft and Snyder, of Cutler Mill and Clough, of Jacob's Chopping Brook and Stanhope. I leave footprints in the sand exposed during spring's snow melt like the wolf prints my father and I saw filling with water along the Chateguay River in Northern Newfoundland. I catch trout until my grasshopper fly is so battle weary that I exchange it for a heavy-hackled muddler that the fish don't want quite as much. I pass Douglas fir and Engleman spruce, but I see the cone-shaped balsam on the dam-side of a bog in the Northeast Kingdom where Band Aid boxes with rusty hinges held worms dug from compost piles of coffee grounds and squash rind and trout lay in a wicker creel lined with fiddlehead ferns.
In the early afternoon of early fall, I sit on a shaded rock where the stream bends through old trees. Forest fires are raging seventy miles west of me, tiny bits of ash falling like the snow my sister said drifted straight down through wood smoke on the winter day my father died. I was on the upper Missouri River that morning, not catching the brook trout he loved, but hard-fighting rainbows which, in the dead of winter when streams like Warm Springs lie buried under five feet of snow, I figured we could make an exception for.
I released each fish I caught that day, no doubt angering my namesake, a whiskey-running, veteran poacher, who succumbed to pneumonia after shunning his doctor's advice to abstain from fishing for Vermont rainbows long ago. At some point that day, while line sung through my guides and a heavy fish pulled upstream, he may have had occasion to admonish my father – to tell him he'd done a fine stroke by lending me his name but a bit more tutelage in the finer points of limit violations, not to mention the benefits of a fish-rich diet, would have stood me in better stead.
For an instant, I consider keeping enough brook trout to make a meal, but I fish on through the afternoon without doing so. They're beautiful, I think, and I like to imagine them here. I may catch some of the same ones next year when I return or, if it's five years again before my footsteps fall along these banks, perhaps some of their descendants
Time, like water, goes somewhere, and in the evening my time has returned me to the meadow where I began this day before sunrise. At some point, I'll have to make that last cast, I know. It's something I don't want to think about. Not just yet. I slow my steps, careful to fish every pocket. Each riffle. Any little place where an undercut bank might hold a trout.
I'm dragging my boots when I notice a colorful jasper hide scraper lying in the dirt of a mole digging. I wash it in the stream and hold it tight, realizing that the fir trapper I imagined earlier wasn't nearly the first person here.
"What did you see along this stream then?" I ask the sky as the sun falls. I get no reply, nor did I really expect one. That conversation will have to wait.
At last it is too dark to see my fly. The breeze is shifting and the smoke is clearing, and already stars are peeking out. I draw a long breath and exhale slowly. I may have already breathed some of the same molecules that my father and I did when we fished here five years ago. Or, perhaps some are part of the barred owl I saw. Make up a few of the grasshoppers I flushed near Horseshoe Gate. Lie inside a single scale of a single fish I caught. Maybe they've been absorbed by the brook, carried to the ocean, and fallen as rain halfway around the world.
I think about it again, later that night when the day's memories blend so completely with ones from so long ago that they seem a perpetual stream. No beginning, no end. As I lie on my back and stare up at the night sky, into the band of stars that is the Milky Way, I wonder if some of what I breathed today came from out there.
We live in a spiral galaxy, I know, but our view of it from here on Earth makes it look like a rainbow. A rainbow, or, it occurs to me on the verge of sleep, a river.
*You can see a larger version of this last photo by going to River of Dreams under my night skies collection, or by clicking on this link.*
I grin, and then, prone to indulge a rather dry sense of humor, think I'll experience plenty of moments heaving myself up the side of this gargantuan upthrust of granite. If I really want to slow things down, I could wear new boots whose gift of blisters would no doubt force me to contemplate each step. No, I decide, the metaphysical in me must be reined in. I lace up my old, well-worn hiking boots and lean into the slope.
The first hundred yards, as my lungs fight to fill against exertion and oxygen-deprived air, are always the hardest and should, if my reasoning stands, also be the longest. Perhaps that is so, but they melt away behind me, gone before I've even taken notice. Drawn to water, either through a life-long love of fishing, the few degrees difference in temperature its flow and trees overhead may provide, or an ancient, instinctual understanding of its life-endowing powers, I meander to a tiny stream. Not much more than the downhill remains of some hulking snowbank high above, I figure. Just enough trickle to pull me in and make sure I've got a roadmap to 11,000 feet. In its babble, it seems to speak a one-word direction: up. Lifting my head, I glance that way to where jagged rock meets cobalt sky. It should take me a long time to get there, I hope. A very long time.
Determined to be fully cognizant of every second, I accomplish exactly the opposite, finding myself in an open meadow of wildflowers without the slightest idea of how I got here beyond some vague understanding that I've been walking quite steadily for the better part of… I check my watch….an hour? I look at the blinking seconds and say, "You've played a nasty trick on me you, bastard. Now, set that hour back a notch and behave yourself." Predictably, the watch continues ticking. Forward.
Fine. I'll just sit down right here in the middle of lupines, mallows, asters, hawkweed, and balsamroot and soak up this pallet of color. I begin looking for a bee-free place to do that – to attempt being unaware of more than my immediate, gorgeous surroundings - when a sphinx moth whirs by my head and begins hovering over the yellow blossoms of prickly lettuce.
To hell with rest, I think, digging frantically through my pack for my 300mm telephoto. I snap it on my camera and begin hunting the sphinx, circling to get the sun at my back, ramping up my shutter speed in an attempt to freeze his hummingbird-like wings. I follow him from blossom to blossom, shooting as fast as my D500 permits, and in the span of – well, I guess I have no idea – stack 260 photos into my SD card. I review enough of them to be certain there are keepers in the bunch, then resume the uphill trek.
Much of the Earth hides itself from all but those who explore it. We few willing to look know that the prairie isn't flat, the desert holds a surprising diversity of life, the cold, north woods of winter are never completely empty, and that mountains in Montana sometimes take their own, sweet time rising to the sky. This one is doing it by degrees, I realize, ascending in steps comprised of steep grades and flat benches totally obscured until someone scales it. Driving by on "the road," I'd never know. I'd give it a glance and believe it takes a steady up-angle to its summit.
On one hand, I'm happy for the respite these miniature plateaus offer, while on the other a continued grade of just under cliff would stretch this hike out. Really make me appreciate this long block of time. Doing my best to slow thing down, I intentionally choose the steepest route to where the mountain evidently benches again, kicking my toes into the thin soil, trying to think about each and every footfall.
How am I supposed to do that if this ruddy copper butterfly, one of my favorite species, insists on posing for me? I dig out my camera again and follow its rapid flight, spending another unknown amount of time chasing it around a clearing until I've got enough photos of it with its metallic wings spread to be certain there's one in the bunch I'll be happy with.
"Be gone, you distracting, time-eating thing," I eventually say as it zig zags through the branches of a fallen fir toward more flowers. I debate packing my camera away and then, resigned to Nature's quite obvious interference in my plan to draw this day out, decide to carry it in my hand.
Back at the stream, without the faintest idea of how I've arrived here again, I follow it through jumbled boulders and the tangled remains of shattered trees borne down at the height of snow melt a month ago.
From the upstream side of a virtual logjam, a golden eagle flaps skyward just as the smell of death hits me, the rancid odor of decay fanned fast my way by beating wings. I freeze, all at once a boy again on the banks of a marginally larger stream in Northern Vermont smelling the dead dog before I saw it, its hair lost to the process of natural recycling, its purplish skin covered in iridescent flies. It was 35 years ago, but today, as I turn away from the stench, it was mere moments earlier.
This time it's an emaciated bear cub, dead two or three days, the victim of a natural world whose system of perpetuation involves making damn certain only the fittest consume the resources. It's a program which has worked for a few hundred million years, but I can't help wondering if this bear's mother had another cub? How long she might have stayed by this one's side? What she felt when at last the same nature which would not allow this bear's survival, which eventually turned bear to eagle, told her to walk away? As I walk away, I feel eyes on me – as though the universe is watching. Checking to see how far along I am on the journey to my own recycling.
"A ways off," I say out loud, as much to reassure myself as in response to what I'm feeling. By way of reply, I see the shadows cast by the boulders around me are longer, the sun is a bit lower, and the eagle is now a speck on the horizon far to the east.
My legs ache as I force them up and ahead at double time, hurling myself onward. It's a dull pain I know wouldn't have been there fifteen years ago, and when I stop to rub them I can't help smiling, giving another nod to dry wit, thinking perhaps the lengthening shadows were enough evidence of my finite life and that the point was made quite well without this additional aching.
I continue climbing, walking hard into late afternoon – certainly not early evening – passing fewer Douglas fir, more stunted spruce, and eventually putting all timber save squat, sub-alpine fir, behind me. I'm near the tree line now, that perfectly delineated height above which nothing relying on a trunk will grow. Here, in a wet meadow swarming with mosquitoes and awash with wildflowers, I come face to face with a sow black bear and her cub, both so intent on feeding they don't notice me. I have no way of knowing if she is the mother of the dead bear I found far below, but if she is I'm glad to see she had twins. I watch them for – what seems a long time – the cub snapping the heads off balsamroot, the mother digging under stones, the pair walking away together, an unmistakable look of wonder in the young bear's eyes.
After they've angled down the mountain away from me, I repack my camera and set my sights on the summit, still some 800 vertical feet above me. Patches of snow cover much of the ground here, packed hard to ice by wind and weight, receding only inches a day. I wonder when the bottom layer of snow fell on the largest patches? Decades ago? Hundreds of years? Or, at the very bottom of the deepest snow fields is there mammoth hair, trapped in the bed of an Ice Age elephant like the elk hair that remains after they rest in the snow today?
Where there isn't snow or rock, there are flowers. Every inch of moss, every bit of grass, and every plant I see sports a tiny, colorful blossom. There are only two seasons up this high, one much longer than the other, and all around life is making the most of summer. That goes for mosquitoes, too, and with each step I drive a hoard of them from the ground. There aren't many visitors to this part of the mountain with sufficient blood to entice the feeding frenzy that I have, and as I swat at my face, rub the backs of my hands, and continually brush at the thin cotton of my pants I'm torn between allowing a few of these insects what may well be their only meal and attempting to eradicate every last one of them. I strike a compromise, pulling a long-sleeved shirt and light gloves from my pack. The mosquitoes fortunate enough to find bare skin now are free to drink.
I suppose the sun arcs across the heavens at the same consistent rate it's done for millions of years. Today, the first I notice it falling more southerly than a month ago, it seems some civilization far to the west has fastened a hawser to it, yanking it furiously out of my sky and into theirs. It's plummeting toward the horizon now, and I need to reach the top of this peak for one of the photos I've come to get. It will be a foot race between our closest star and a man going uphill with a pack, but fortunately for me I don't have far to go.
I splash through a seep full of diminutive lupines and common arrowleaf, cross a slide of car-sized granite boulders, and haul myself up a snow chute to the crest of this mountain in time to catch the sun suspended between a line of evening clouds and more snow-clad peaks miles west of me. It hangs in place long enough for me to choose my wide-angle lens and frame one picture before saying goodbye, the world around me clinging to a golden light for the briefest of moments after it sets.
My attempt to draw out this day's length has failed, but I've come here for the night, too, and perhaps during this blue hour between light and dark I'll be able to feather the brakes of time. I need to drop back down almost a thousand feet into a rocky bowl where a lake not entirely free of ice glows pale blue and the Milky Way will rainbow across its surface after dark.
My legs are thoroughly tired now, reminding me again that harnessing time is an endeavor we'd better not pin our hopes on. They burn as I turn them down the slope, protesting with uncomfortable pain my decision to take them directly back the way they've come.
"Not exactly the same way," I say out loud, bolstering my resolve to keep moving if not their desire to take me.
I begin carving a new trail off the mountain, skidding over snow, picking my way down a talus slope of crushed stone, fighting through a stand of alpine fir with trunks more pitch than bark. The scars of life in a hard place.
In the same way I found the little stream I followed earlier in the day for the second time, I arrive at this lake with a jet-lag sense that yes, I covered ground and time to get here, though I can't really say how much of either. I set up my tripod on the edge of a high cliff overlooking water and ice, attach the panoramic head which will allow me to keep a level horizon shooting the span of the night sky, screw on my full frame Nikon D810, check my compass to verify where I'll see the Milky Way, then make my way down to the shoreline at twilight. A cluster of boulders juts from the surface a few feet out, four white granite rocks and one pink and, because I like the unusual – especially if it has a flat surface – I sit down on the pink one and watch brook trout rise for flies all around.
Their feeding is not as well-mannered as the big brown trout who gently sip an insect from Montana's rivers. These fish have precious few fly-filled evenings to feed and go at it with gusto, launching themselves fully from the water. As far as I can see across the surface, trout are splashing. It's a sight my father would have enjoyed, one we'd have talked about on frigid winter nights as this lake rests below three feet of ice. Perhaps we would have made plans to cast our own flies to them on another summer night like this one. Once more, the unsettling feeling that the harder I try to slow things down the faster they move washes over me.
And now, just as the heat of the day begins sliding from my rocky chair, the first star appears, a pin of light in a silver sky. I rise, and a brook trout over a foot long torpedoes away from my rock, a dark shape vanishing into dark water all below a darkening sky. For as vast as the Montana sky is, I'm always surprised at how fast twilight fades. I'll reach my camera above me before I need a flashlight, but only if I leave right now.
Halfway between the lake and my camera, under the protection of a small outcrop, a lone, yellow columbine is blooming and beckoning. Very well, I decide as I unpack my D500 and frame the shot, color against dark.
Now comes the night. Objects on Earth relinquish their hues and definition while celestial wonders show their own. Planets glow, meteors flare and leave momentary signatures of fire, and faint stars pulse red and blue. I can see the galactic center of the Milky Way beginning to take shape in the south, but the line of low clouds I saw at sunset is drifting in front of it and my picture will have to wait.
Nothing to do but sit here and be patient. Listen to the crickets and distant calls of an owl, feel the breeze generated by ground warmer than air, watch a train of clouds slowly chug away to the east. I close my eyes, only for moments I believe, and when I open them the entire sky is clear.
It takes seventy minutes - by my watch - to shoot the panorama I want, 96 images of sky, 12 of Earth. I'll blend them later and end up with something I hope represents what I saw. Something beautiful I can share with the world. But that's down the road. Right now, there are six minutes left to this day before another is born and I've got some long, downhill miles to walk. I light my path with the beam of a powerful headlamp, illuminating fifty, narrow feet of rocky terrain. I'll cover it and thousands more before I sleep.
I wonder as I walk if I'll ever come back to this particular place? Wonder if I'll return and fish for the brook trout or bring a macro lens and photograph wildflowers? I guess I can if I want to, I think, though much of my life has validated Frost's observation that as way leads on to way we are rarely back.
"Well, I'm here now," I say, aware that this day's life has dwindled from six minutes to a few seconds. I pause to look west, imagining a faint glow from the sun like the trails of the shooting stars I saw.
"Goodbye," I whisper.
* If you like night photos, please see my latest Milky Way image, At Black Butte at Midnight. You can view it here*
You should also look at Big Sky Nights, another new Milky Way picture
This year, I test drove Nikon's flagship dx camera, the D500. I ran it with Nikon's 300mm f4 PF VR and the tc-14e iii, giving me a whopping 630mm of reach, hoping to bring these colorful insects up close and personal and preserve more depth of field than when shooting with my 200mm Micro Nikkor, my usual choice for butterflies.
I shot entirely hand held at ISOs ranging from 100 to 500, and, depending on just how much I wanted to lose the background, kept my aperture either wide open at f5.6 or stopped down to f8. Most of my subjects were within a foot of maximum close focus distance - 1.4 meters, according to Nikon - and lighting ranged from bright sun to medium cloud cover. I used single-point focus exclusively, and generally ran average exposure metering, often with -.3 exposure compensation.
My first impression, after taking a little time to simply look around and remember just how beautiful Montana's mountain summers are, was that this camera/lens combo is light. I mean really light. Even with my Nikon MB-D17 external grip, I never felt like I was carrying more than my 24-70mm f2.8. I had the power of a very serious telephoto packaged in something sized for landscapes.
There are many great technical reviews of this camera and lens, most of which offer excellent information. For what I do - photographing nature in all kinds of different environments - all I care about is real-world results. Test charts are great, but I've yet to see one at 9,000 feet in the Rockies. That said, and understanding that criteria like sharpness and bokeh are rather subjective and often as much related to the user as the equipment, I approached this from the simple angle of whether or not it would work for me.
With literally millions of flowers to choose from, I rarely see a butterfly spend more than a few seconds on a particular blossom. Fast focus is a necessity, and the D500's much-touted autofocus didn't disappoint. The teleconverter did slow focus acquisition down a touch, especially the closer my subject was. It was never slow, but it did hunt periodically. Not enough to be annoying, but there were a handful of shots I missed. I used back button autofocus, and found this a great way to continually track the erratic movements of a butterfly on a flower. When focus was acquired, it was locked like a heat-seeking missile. The camera and lens didn't miss then, period.
Depth of field was definitely much greater than with my macro, especially when I stopped the lens down to f8. I was impressed that I could, even at 5 or 6 feet, generally keep sharp focus on the vast majority of all wings on the butterflies. That's saying something with as much focal length as I carried. When I moved back a few feet further, shooting from closer to 10 feet, f8 resolved perfect focus across nearly all butterflies, and the 20.8 megapixel sensor of the D500 captured enough detail to allow quite heavy cropping with excellent results.
This long-tailed tiger swallowtail was a little over 15 feet away, and a heavy crop shows detail that works for me seven days a week.
I'm not a bokeh connoisseur, but I loved the way this lens made backgrounds disappear. Even stopped down I didn't find them cluttered, and when left wide open it was pure magic. This great spangled fritillary finally gave me a broadside shot, and f5.6 really put the focus just on him.
Wanting to incorporate a Monet-style swirl of colors around this spring azure, it was as easy as opening up the aperture and waiting for a pose I liked.
When a painted lady landed close enough so that I had to lean back to focus, f8 gave me insane detail of her lower wing behind the eye while blurring just a touch of upper wing.
And anytime patience paid off with a fritillary going nearly horizontal, the lens held beautiful focus across the whole insect.
Over the course of the morning, I walked the better part of three miles and never felt any strain from the camera, which I carried around my neck on Nikon's supplied strap.
If I was going to do it again - and there's 100% chance that I will - I'll bring a tripod for shutter speeds below 1/500. The camera is so light, and I'm so often unable to take a sitting position when shooting butterflies, that overall sharpness would benefit from having a sturdier platform than I can produce when shooting slower than this. Nikon's VR worked as advertised, and with shutter speeds at 1/640 and faster, I'd be hard pressed to find much benefit from a tripod. Still, if I was going to blow some of these images up toward 20x30, I'd vote for being steadier. It's never a bad choice.
As the day wore on toward afternoon, I found a damp area where some of the last of our winter's snow was melting. Spring azures were stacked in like miniature morphos, giving me another opportunity to test depth of field. I'm sure I could quantify it more scientifically, but I was often able to get several of these diminutive butterflies in sharp enough focus to create a pleasing picture, at least to my eye.
Stop down a little, and again, focus goes right exactly where I want it.
Like Montana's short summer, my day didn't last nearly long enough. As evening approached and I began winding my way back to my pickup for the inevitable drive to civilization, moths began their quest for nectar. This one, shot at too slow a shutter speed to freeze its frantically-beating wings, reminded me of something from an early, discarded Star Wars set, tiny flecks of pollen visible on its proboscis. I watched it drink then veer crazily away toward the west and a sun sinking fast toward the horizon.
Just before I reached my truck, Montana left me with a prettier image when a lone little blue landed for an instant on a dandelion gone to seed. It paused only long enough to be aware of its mistake, but I caught it there. My shutter clicked, and then the butterfly and the sun vanished together. Somewhere overhead, a night hawk's wings buzzed and a breeze rippled the grass before me. Like most days in the field, this was a good one, made better by the results of Nikon's D500, 300mm f4 VR, and the tc-14e iii. It's a combination I'll be using time and time again for butterflies.
I was thinking about it all on a sunny day in Montana when the only thing that belied the coming of spring was an instinctual appreciation of more light than there had been a month earlier. The great horned owl I was photographing, sitting on her nest inside a massive Douglas fir snag, was sheltered from the biting north wind. Even the feathers on her head - those long, raised "ears" - didn't bend in the air that was hitting me square in the face, sailing down from a land where her relatives were all white and blended with a tundra landscape still covered in ice and snow.
I shivered and looked around, half thinking I could smell black spruce, half believing this north gale had rolled back time a full two months. As my brain came to terms with the brown, winter-packed grass around me and I realized fully where I was, I blinked hard and looked through my viewfinder again, into the yellow eye of a bird I've loved since I was six years old and saw one with my father on a Vermont trout stream. In the moments before night that evening, its silhouette sat dark against a silver horizon, its ears clearly visible as it watched us fish out our last cast. At the click of my dad's Orvis reel, its head swiveled 180 degrees, and like a miniature storm cloud giving way to a clearing wind it silently slid out of sight.
This Montana owl would do the same thing, I thought, if its instinct to guard its eggs was any less powerful. Bound by its ancient need to bring new generations of her species into the world, instead of flying away, it fixed me with an unblinking stare thousands of years old. I wasn't going to stay long, wasn't going to get any closer, and wanted her to understand I meant no harm. I said so, quietly under my breath, and wondered if she understood. No, I decided, she did not. After all, what do owls know?
My father used to say, half in jest, that if God had concluded his little experiment in evolution with the great apes it would have been a glowing success. Sometimes he'd wonder how far a silverback would be able to hit a baseball if so inclined. Or wish the brook trout in the Black River below our house in Irasburg had never been subjected to over-fishing and acid rain. Once, he told me he'd gladly sacrifice all civilization, including his own life, to drop from the history books the swing of one Mr. Bucky Dent on an October day in 1978 when the Yankees eliminated his beloved Red Sox during a one-game playoff for the American League Championship. I'd laughed when he said it, just as I did the other day thinking about it again.
I was driving west on I-90, clipping by Bozeman, Montana, at close to 80mph, and I have no idea what made me think of that. Perhaps something in the early-summer evening light reminded me of similar days as a boy - the lights of the American Legion ballpark I passed flicking on just then, or the smell of fresh-cut grass, or clouds on the southern horizon where a nighttime storm might or might not form. Whatever triggered the thought, I was happy to have it. And then I looked north toward the base of the Bridger Mountains and my smile faded.
The great apes sure as hell wouldn't have done this, I thought. Subdivision homes glowed nearly as far as I could see, their large, west-facing windows lit by the last rays of this day. Beautiful houses in beautiful country, and no end to them in sight. Not ever, I don't believe.
It was a sobering thought, immediately bringing me back to a plane ride I took last fall from Atlanta up to Boston on a clear day. Air traffic control had jogged us east toward Washington, D.C., then back west over Cleveland, and finally sent us straight as an arrow up the Pennsylvania and New York coast to Beantown. I had a window seat, unobstructed by one of the great, aluminum wings I usually watch - somewhat nervously - flex and bounce through turbulence, and from 33,000 feet could see our sprawl in miniature.
Downtowns flowerd into not-quite-downtowns which in turn petered out into strip malls with signs I knew advertised foot massages, deeply-discounted furniture, Starbucks coffee, 24-hour fitness centers, and walk-in-clinics. Then came true suburbia - perfectly sectioned lots big enough for azure swimming pools, green tennis courts, football and baseball fields, and the occasional front-yard tree. Beyond these were larger homes with more trees where vehicles crawled insect-like, a worker's commute well over an hour to the "real" cities. Next, where geography forced ingenious methods of building into cliffs, over ravines, and virtually on top of serpentine rivers, the houses were larger still. Where these ended, and it was hard to define that point exactly, ragged strips of besieged farmland, open to attack on fronts both north and south, ribboned between the next set of mega-homes.
Christmas future, I thought as I passed Belgrade, Montana, and picked up my first view of the Tobacco Root Mountains, snow-capped and jagged. Behind me, in the south-central part of the state, two great horned owl chicks had hatched into a world where they knew only their parents' soft, belly feathers and the taste of fresh voles brought as food throughout the night. They had no idea that I was thinking in time we will squeeze the last of the wild out of Amercia. Wring it dry as a desert. Pound every last inch of it into environments conforming only to us and our insatiable desire for more. No, they didn't know this.
I found myself breathing a little easier by the time I hit Whitehall and could see the Continental Divide looming in the west, a long line of mountains not much different than they were 10,000 years ago. As I drove into their shadow and watched my truck's thermometer confirm that outside air here hadn't seen the sun in an hour and was ten degrees cooler, I thought about the Clovis-style spearpoint I found near here ten years ago. A creamy porcelanite, the man who'd last touched it before me had seen mammoths. And he'd dared believe he could kill them with a stick and stone.
Research suggests that at the height of the Native American population, probably not long before the Columbus expedition, there may have been a million people in North America. Here, in Montana, it was a harsh existence of plains living revolving around the bison. As I crested Homestake Pass and dropped down toward Butte, following rills which eventually lead to the Pacific, I wished I could have seen it - grizzlies in the prairie, miles-long herds of bison, elk living far from any timber.
Undeniably, a hell of a lot has changed in 500 years, much of it just since Lewis and Clark were here 200 years ago. I believe, that while I can't see ancient Montana, I am witnessing its fastest transformation. Anywhere that has a view of mountains - doesn't seem to matter much which ones - ranches are falling. Dirt's being broken for new houses which are sold before they're completed and every year their price is going up double-digit percents. It seems a race to devour every square inch of habitable land - where, unlike horseback pioneers during the Homestead Acts, we come by jet and motor home and fancy automobiles and pay, in some cases, north of a quarter-million an acre.
It boggles my mind. In Billings, where I live, there are dozens and dozens of existing homes for sale, while equally that many are being built new. That's us these days, I thought as I retraced my tracks back to Yellowstone County from Butte a few days later. We want the latest and greatest and by god, we want it NOW.
It's reflected in everything, including my photography equipment, I realized when I checked in on the owls. The notion of taking a canister of film to a store to be developed, even in a one-hour facility, seems ludicrous. Instead, push a button on the back of my Nikon and see the image right in the here and now. And, if it takes more than a few milliseconds to appear, start shopping for faster CF cards, the next latest, greatest camera, and heaven forbid I don't have cell service and can't shop for it right there on my phone.
I watched the owlets, peering out into the world, one a little braver than its sibling, taking their first tentative steps away from their nest. They didn't know that my camera could meter light, align the horizon, take a series of pictures exposed for an HDR combo, or decide, entirely on its own, which part of the photo to assign exposure priority to. They didn't know that if it couldn't do these things, even just one of them, I'd be on to the next product in a heartbeat - as fast as Amazon Prime could get it to me.
Time moves in one direction. I've said it before, but it seems faster now. The start and stop dates of our Montana seasons seem less defined, blurring together into a whir of months going by at, tipping my hat to my Vermont roots, "a furious clip." I suppose this factors into my decision to step away from the certain life. To venture - this time with better perspective than I had when I wrote novels from a three-room house in Butte - back toward something I can invest more of my heart in.
I truly believe I'm seeing Montana's fastest changes, and that factors into my decision, too. I want to get out there and record things the way they are now. They way I see them. Photograph them when there's still some wilderness - a few places I don't sleep quite as well at night because there are a handful of creatures left there that might eat me.
It's going to go away, I believe, and I'll go on the record as saying that now. It will disappear one driveway, one rafter, one mountain lake-view cabin at a time, lost to our unquenchable appetite for more. I don't believe we have, as a species, the capacity to reign ourselves in. Not in sufficient numbers to have significant effects.
As the great horned owlets transformed from fuzzy balls more beak than feathers into something caught between young and adult, they weren't thinking about any of this. They were eating more, having more difficulty fitting their wings - simultaneously anyway - into their hollow tree, and spending more time in the limbs of an adjacent fir. Their parents would swoop in when I approached, always at least one of them, land nearby, give me a reproachful stare, and then fly a hundred yards away, no longer bound by instinct to protect the helpless. Perhaps they'd seen me enough to form some favorable opinion, or, more likely, were leaving survival up to their young. Nature demands that, I guess.
The owlets fledged one weekend while I was away. Too soon it seemed to me, but that, too, is the way of Nature. It was about the time we officially dropped out of the Paris Climate Accord, leaving 194 other nations to fend for themselves. On the final morning I walked to the nest tree and found the owlets gone, I came across one of the adults, the male, I believe. Smaller than his mate, he was sitting low to the ground and looked tired. I took a few hand-held shots of him then watched him flap into a tree fifty feet away, tuck in close to the trunk, and close his eyes.
"You did well to tolerate my intrusions," I said softly, hoping that somewhere, not far off, his offspring slept after perhaps their first successful hunts.
"Well done," I said. And then I walked away, headlong into a world I don't have a hell of a lot of hope for, one in which my legacy may be little more than photos. Some will be of owls, though they have no idea.
Like color, I've also been drawn to a quest. Seeking is in my blood as surely as granite lies under the shallow, Vermont soil where I spent my boyhood digging for old bottles in farm dumps, collecting rocks and minerals – sometimes chiseling them out of the frozen ground under our front porch when winter curtailed my searching elsewhere – catching and framing butterflies, and yes, even roaming the hardwood ridges near my home looking for shed feathers from the birds I loved seeing.
In keeping with my innate urge to discover, my favorite stories growing up were myths, and my favorites of those involved the arduous journeys of Odysseus and Jason of the Argonauts. My golden fleece, in a world so sadly devoid of Scylla and Charybdis, was a male wood duck, and I wanted one more than anything else on Earth.
I remember sitting in Frank's Steakhouse in Newport, Vermont, mesmerized by the array of big-game animal mounts the owner had collected from all over the world. The arrangement, which included a life-size polar bear and Alaskan brown bear gripping a crimson, sockeye salmon in its mouth, was not complete in my young eye because it was missing a wood duck. The giant caribou, the crossed swords, and the elliptical buffalo hide shield from Africa were all interesting, but without that particular bird the display fell short of the one I dreamed about.
Dreaming was all I could do until I turned 12 and completed hunter's safety – a rite of passage for all boys of my generation in Vermont – but once armed with that sacred certificate (and a light-weight 16 gauge shotgun), I began a quest for a wood duck. It's a search which has spanned three decades and more than 2000 miles, from the backwaters of north-flowing Vermont rivers to the great Yellowstone in Montana. That's where I was early this spring, packing a Nikon camera instead of the single-shot H&R I patrolled Northern Vermont with, lying on bankside ice and fallen leaves, my body willed to complete stillness, eyes focused on the wake from a pair of ducks about to pass directly in front of me. Thirty-two years of seeking was coming to an end, and with my face pressed close to my viewfinder, finger on the shutter release, I saw in vivid detail many of the places I'd looked.
There was Lord's Creek in Irasburg, Vermont, a much calmer stream during the October duck season than during the May rainbow trout run. I saw the pool on the bend just downstream from a wooden tractor bridge where a large male rainbow spooled all the line off my reel and hung tired on the surface forty yards from me. My father went into the water that day like an otter, and somehow he came out with my fish wrapped in his arms. I saw the creek's oxbows half a mile upstream from there on a sleety morning when my right thumb was too numb to cock my shotgun as a pair of drake wood ducks flew straight into the sky, rising like the Phoenix, colors disappearing in ice fog, shrill cries fading from earshot, vanishing like the hope I'd felt earlier that morning dressing in camo before our wood stove.
I saw a slough off the Black River, thick with fallen, rusty-yellow ash leaves, and remembered pushing myself up from my belly, coat and pants caked with mud, flushing a lone wood duck drake I hadn't noticed, watching helplessly as it flew safely out of range.
Other birds leapt from cattails along the shore of a huge swamp behind Round Hill, veering crazily in the sky while I stared from two hundred yards away, streaking south along the base of Irasburg Mountain, dots eventually lost against a horizon of naked trees.
Just before the pair of birds before me on the Yellowstone swam into my viewfinder, I saw myself slowly raise my shotgun on a day of unsettled weather and fast-moving, late-fall clouds thirty years earlier. I saw the drake turn unaware on the surface, its red eye passing out of sight, a ray of sun lighting the purple feathers on his back. Then the water exploded all around him as lead BBs smashed down, miniature geysers forced up in every direction, the smell of burnt gunpowder heavy and acrid. I stood dumbfounded as the surface settled, staring at a patch of water which moments before had held the object of my obsession and now held only the reflection of alders. Where had the drake gone? It was a question I'd tried to answer by stripping to my underwear and wading through every inch of the spring hole he'd been in. For an hour, while seasons battled overhead, I waded back and forth until my legs no longer moved of their own accord and I could not stop shivering. The bird had simply vanished, either entirely a figment of my imagination or, as I like to think now, pulled suddenly into some other dimension to extend my quest.
It's the seeking I love most, I thought, as I gently pressed to release my camera's shutter, swiveling slowly to follow the swimming pair. The hen heard the click, her eye fixing the location, her feet pushing her faster, out ahead of her mate.
"That works," I whispered to myself as I reviewed the picture, half wondering if it would vanish from my screen. It didn't, and like adrenalin at the end of one of my former boxing matches, draining so fast I sometimes felt nauseous, I realized my journey for a wood duck had come to an end. Again memories from long ago flooded in, this time in snap-shots of a broken zipper on the hood of my first Goretex jacket, a skim of ice glowing in the last light on the last day of a very distant duck season, and of a full moon near Halloween bisected by a V of flying geese. I lingered on the image from that night long enough so that when I blinked and found bright, afternoon sun shining on the Yellowstone I was disoriented. With a cry from the drake, the wood ducks turned and swam past me again, and on a stage of sunlit water, he posed, clapped his wings, and dove headlong beneath the surface.
Seemingly unafraid, the pair swam to shore and crawled up onto the bank twenty feet from where I sat, my shutter whirring. And then, on the edge of spring, on the edge of the Yellowstone, on the edge of needing to find a new quest, I witnessed a little bit of magic. A full two months earlier than I've ever seen a single wood duck arrive in Montana, they began touching down all around me, more than two dozen of them, landing on shore, in the water, and in the cottonwoods overhead, some so close my lens wouldn't focus on them. As inexplicably as one had vanished so many years earlier in Vermont, they appeared that afternoon in Montana, their plumage glowing in sinking sunlight. They looked curiously at me, no doubt wondering what type of cyclops stared at them, the large front element of my 500mm telephoto reflecting in some of their eyes. One admired his reflection in a puddle of freshly-melted snow while another swam in front of a mallard drake, ruffling his feathers in s show of splendor.
On shelf ice, a pair nestled close together, the drake sneaking a peck on the check before both closed their eyes.
I took 800 pictures before the sun fell behind the height of land which separates the Yellowstone drainage from the Missouri. In the waning light, one drake hopped onto a bench along a walking trail by the river. He shook his entire body then jumped onto the back of the bench, puffed himself up the way I've seen birds do on cold mornings, and called for a long time. Whether he sang to an unseen mate, was saying good bye to the day, or heralding night, I don't know. His red eye met mine as he continued calling. "Find another dream," he seemed to say.
I sat until dark. Until I could no longer see any ducks and my hands told me that despite the approach of the equinox Montana still rested very much in winter. I wondered what will come next for me. There will be something, I'm sure. After all, I'm a seeker. Another bend. Another mountain. Another day.
"There'll be something," I said quietly. On the edge of earshot, nearly lost in the traffic on I-90, a great horned owl affirmed it.
*Many of these photos are now for sale. You can find them under the North Country Birds tab, or search by title: Bed Head, Ruffled, Spring Friends, Peck on the Cheek, Hear ye, Hear ye, Mirror Mirror, Diver Down, and Two of a Kind]]>
Most of us boys in town worked for him, "bucking" bales during the summer. He'd hire us for a fair wage for the times, never subscribing to any notion that the bigger or stronger of us were more fit for the work, simply expecting us to do the job without complaint.
His wife pulled the baler, as soon as the night's dew had evaporated from the swaths of timothy knocked down the day before, and he drove the tractor and wagon while we muscled the bales in and stacked them. We'd start in the back of the wagon, building steps out of bales to line it all the way to its weathered top boards, working our way forward until, for the final tier, it took two and sometimes three of us to lever them into place. He worked us like men, talked to us like men, and if he ever paused to think about whether the work environment was appropriate for the rag-tag group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds who showed up on his farm each morning at 6am, gallon milk jugs equal parts water and ice slung through the handlebars of their ten-speeds, we rarely saw it. In fact, the only recognition he made of our age was tossing one of us a pair of thin, leather gloves if we'd forgotten our own, something we noticed he wouldn't do for the occasional man who came to work for him.
We'd fill the wagon, then enjoy a brief respite sitting atop the bales as it swayed to the barn, where the real work of getting the hay into the loft began. The oldest of us, the veteran of maybe three or four haying seasons, would unload the bales onto a chain-driven conveyor which inched them up toward the second-story hayloft where the rest of us waited in sweltering silence for them to begin thudding onto the hemlock floor, polished to a dull shine from seventy-years-worth of chaff. Inside the loft, we'd bucket brigade the bales to the farthest recesses of the barn, jamming them tight on top of each other, stacking all the way to the tin roof, leaving small openings around the cobweb-cloaked windows and fans with rusted blades which none of us could remember ever turning. When at last the bales stopping dropping into the loft, we'd climb down a rough-lumber ladder past empty Holstein stanchions and stagger out into the sun where, no matter the temperature, it was always cooler than inside the barn. In the empty wagon riding back to the hay field, we'd chug our water, compare our chaff-chapped forearms, and blow hay dust out of our noses. And then we'd do it again, sometimes six times in a day.
It wasn't just a way of life, it was life. All over Northern Vermont, single-family dairy farms ran much the same way, summer haying bracketed by twice-daily milking. It had been like this from the time our 14th state's first pioneers envisioned sheep and cows grazing where only pine and birch grew. As the forests fell and scrub brush was beaten back by saws and scythes, while horse and ox-drawn stone boats cleared remnants of the last glacier - a nearly-insurmountable number of granite boulders - and families hewed out an existence around what became New England's villages, the country I grew up in found its character, an identity it would hold for 200 years.
Tiny hill farms, where independence and ingenuity ran stronger even than Vermont's interminable winter, dotted a landscape which pit the mower in constant struggle against the forest. Between the farmer and the grey birch and meadow sweet was a tenuous truce - a mutual understanding that with the sacrifice of thousands of hours of manual labor came the spoils of a piece of ground more clover than hedgerow. A single season's lapse in work meant a gain of many yards by the ever-hungry woods.
By the time I was old enough to amount to any help in the hay fields, most of Northern Vermont's sheep pasture - the steeper ground where hay wouldn't grow and cows didn't venture - was grown over with third-generation forest. The thorny, wild apple gave way to poplar which yielded to sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech. Stone walls settled back into the ground from which they rose, and cellar holes, some with a single, gnarly lilac still guarding a long-gone door, filled fast with leaves and new earth.
It never occurred to me, sitting next to the remains of a mountain homestead one unseasonably warm November afternoon, my left leg in a cast, my cast double-wrapped in garbage bags, a deer rifle in my lap, that Vermont would change again. The sheep were gone, along with the hardy souls who grazed them, buried in family plots where listing, slate stones told a stark tale of hard lives measured between dates often less than fifty years apart. That was it I thought, the last big shift, done many years before I was born. I took the contemporary, family dairy farm as much for granted and as everlasting as the spring rainbow trout runs up our north-flowing rivers.
Beyond the borders of the Northeast Kingdom, that protected land between the northern-most Green Mountains, Quebec, and the Connecticut River, the world could hurtle ahead toward the 21st Century all it wanted. There where I grew up, where Little League rivalries were as fierce as any between the Red Sox and Yankees and there was perennial talk of secession on town meeting day, things would never change because quite frankly I loved them too much.
Well, love and youth are both blind, and nothing is immune to change. By the early 1990s, Vermont's Northeast Kingdom was losing its grip on its identity as surely as its fall, river-valley fog gives way to clear skies on a day of north wind. Heavily-subsidized milk poured across the border from Quebec, freed by NAFTA of any protective tariffs. The dawn of the electronic age was shrinking the world, giving tantalizing glimpses of a life outside Vermont to scores of teenagers who'd seen farming make old men and women of their parents before their time. The birth of a technological revolution drove more and more jobs into the metropolitan sector, leaving rural economies struggling for any foothold.
Some farms sold to the cavernous, corporate ventures needed to compete with Canadian milk. Others found buyers from burgeoning cities on the east coast looking for vacation property. A few hung on, filling niches for organic produce or serving a single customer looking for the particularly rich milk of Guernseys. Many simply allowed the voracious North Country forest its hard-fought victory. Children moved away, parents passed away, and the winter wind stripped paint, then shingles, then siding.
My first love affair had ended in loss too great to witness further. On an early, June morning in 1995, reminiscent of so many perfect summer days for haying, I loaded a beat-up Ford Tempo to the gills and headed for Montana.
I've been here almost 21 years now. I've watched the country around Yellowstone National Park, scorched during the fires of 1988, progress from a charred wasteland to forests of dense, young lodgepole pine. I've seen wolves, introduced from Canada, spread throughout the western half of the state. I've watched large towns become cities and cities bulge two-fold. I've seen small ranches morph into small subdivisions. I've seen barn roofs cave to the west wind, and prairie homestead cabins tilt southward. I've seen what I saw in Vermont - a shift away from family agriculture - and I've felt my heart break again. Like all heartache, it doesn't get any easier.
If someone asked me to sum up the 21st Century in one word, I'd call it hurried. It seems built around the here and now and the ideas of right this second, often at the expense of any consideration of longer-term consequence. Not just in Vermont and Montana, but all across the country there seems a push to urbanize. To sprawl. A couple of years ago, I flew from Miami to Boston on a clear day with views of most of our Eastern Seaboard. When will enough be enough, I wondered? Probably never. The beltway, the strip mall, the big box stores, and myriad cell phone repair centers so none of us will go "unplugged" for more than an extremely inconvenient couple of hours.
When I visited Vermont this past October, I drove the entire perimeter of the Northeast Kingdom, circling what I suspect will always feel more like home to me than anywhere else on Earth. Trending north up the Connecticut River, past now-closed country stores, broken fuel pumps sitting in parking lots more weeds than concrete, completely abandoned farms, and an undeniable advance of Vermont's woodlands, parts of it looked like Chernobyl - the beauty of nature against a backdrop of empty.
Not many more winters I thought, passing a barn that had shifted nearly all the way off its granite foundation, its grassy high-drive no longer in line with its hayloft. One or two wet, February snows... a December nor-Easter... the ground will claim the dead.
Vermont will change again, I know. As Boston reaches Manchester, New Hampshire, Hartford creeps closer to the sea, and New York and Philadelphia join hands, eventually the long winters won't deter growth, even in the Northeast Kingdom. New houses will go up and some people will wonder what once stood in the copse of alder and poplar on their property. What did those rotting timbers shrouded by new growth once support? Who might have carried the milk can pocked by birdshot - a headstone to a time long gone.
There wasn't much evidence left of the mountain farm where I sat as teenager, believing change would never come, when I returned to it one evening shortly before flying back to Montana. A soft maple had taken root in the cellar hole and grown fifty feet tall. The backyard apple trees had crossed a dozen times with their wild brethren, reverting closer with each generation to the thorny shrubs from which they'd been grafted two centuries ago. A horse-drawn hay rake, its seat claimed by someone for a porch chair, was nearly unrecognizable among hobblebush.
I stayed until evening, when the view through colored leaves of Jay Peak dimmed and the woods filled with silence, the still of fall all around me. Perhaps this place will remain untouched I thought as I started up a deep-rutted logging trace toward Route 58 and the top of Irasburg Mountain where I'd parked. But I knew better. I may not live to see it, but the west-facing view I had at sunset will beckon someone. Someday.
I can't really imagine what life in Northern Vermont - or Montana for that matter - will be like then any more than I could have predicted the changes I've seen thirty years ago. I'd lay a lot of money on whoever reclaims that spot not milking any cows though. Not waking in the night to the wail of a volunteer fire department's siren and the awful dread of not knowing whose barn, loaded with hay a little too wet, was burning. Not ever cutting more grass than a front lawn, sprayed heavily with pesticides to keep the black flies at bay in June.
All over America the epitaph to small farms is written in wind-shattered timbers, unruly patches of out-of-place day lilies, topless silos, and overgrown foundations. Sometimes, driving by a homestead in Montana, I'll slow down and take a long look, once in a while a picture. And sometimes in the prairie wind I think I hear the voices of a family at dinner after a day in the field. I can never quite make out the conversation except that it sounds vibrant. Defiant even. United in a dream. I listen harder and hear only the wind.
I thought about coming here for this shot a month ago. I've driven past this tree dozens of times in recent years, always admiring it, telling myself that sooner or later I've got to drag myself out of bed and see what she looks like at sunrise. Four weeks ago, during the longest nights and shortest days of the year, I simply couldn't muster the ambition. I wasn't entirely in the throes of seasonal depression, but like a bear who's fed well all fall and found the perfect spot to hibernate, my bed felt pretty damn good.
Yesterday, something changed. I was driving west on Montana's Interstate 90 in the late afternoon of a clear, winter day, subconsciously reaching up to flip down my sun visor, squinting against blinding snow, when it hit me - a month ago this would have been unnecessary. As I jerked my hand away, afraid that employing the visor might turn back time, a sweeping sense of accomplishment spread over me. A feeling of winning unknown to all who haven't lived in the North Country, where making it through the winter is no small feat.
"There you old bastard, how's that grab you?" I said out loud to a snow drift licking the top of a bulging fence designed to keep it from blowing over the highway. "You may not live forever after all!" A blast of north wind shuddered my truck in reply, and though my thermometer showed that I was cruising through air no warmer than 6 degrees I laughed. "The battle perhaps, but by god not the war," I said.
So here I am a day later, still riding the euphoric high brought about by celestial proof that Spring's infancy is upon us here in Montana. Listening to the geese increase their discussion - debating whether the morning's destination should be a patch of open water on the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone or a stubble field of grain - I realize I'm no less thrilled by today's earlier-arriving dawn than I've ever been. I take a quick glance at my lens to be sure no frost is forming there, then let my mind rewind all the way to the first year I remember becoming aware of lengthening days.
It was on very nearly the same line of latitude I'm standing on now, almost exactly halfway between the Equator and North Pole, though more than 2000 miles east in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. I was two years old, heading fast for three, looking out a living room window, surveying a Siberian-like landscape with what my father dubbed "a cold blue eye." The northern-most Green Mountains, a wavy line of distant peaks the color of shaded snow drifts, looked precisely as they had in November. Precisely as a boy who believed winter would never end imagined they would always appear.
And then, a shaft of sunlight. A ray of gold piercing the leaden cloud bank below with sufficient force to bathe the world in light more intense than I'd seen since the apple trees in our front yard held their leaves. I stood mesmerized, transfixed by what might as well have been an appearance by some wondrous god of rebirth. In an instant, I felt what every Vermonter has felt from the time its pine forests were home to Abnaki Indians - an overwhelming relief and innate recognition that the North's longest season isn't quite interminable.
Later, with tattered, brown snow pants dragging their cuffs under felt-lined boots, my father pitched a dappled-pink beach ball to me in our driveway, gentling it in underhand toward my cocked, plastic bat, allowing it to skate past him when I connected, bounding down the slope toward the highway, the year's first trickle of snow melt leaking in the same direction.
I blink back to the present where the wing beats of a hundred geese fill the air overhead, dark silhouettes pushing skyward. The flock swings north, their debated destination now settled upon, and I watch it V away until it's lost to a distant horizon hanging between night and day. It's time for my picture now, a shot of this tree with soft, pink light behind her, frost coating the barbwire fence between us, a sense of both chill and seasonal shift all around. My shutter clicks and it's done, a scene of transition preserved.
I'm cold now, but I don't want to leave just yet. I'll stick around and watch the sun boil up over the Pryor Mountains, its rays a bit stronger, its approach a bit farther north. I'll shiver and perhaps lose feeling in the tips of my ears, but I will embrace this day of more light, these precious moments when darkness ebbs a little sooner, the world is a little brighter and the universe more hopeful.
The perfect tree had to be a balsam fir. As surely as God was a Red Sox fan or Vermont maple syrup tasted better than any made in New Hampshire, a balsam was the only species fit to be taken indoors and adorned with lights and ornaments. I learned, before I was four years old, to recognize them in two ways. Their needles were flat and would not roll between my fingers if I plucked one, and the tree as a whole was never nearly as a full as the more tight-limbed spruce which, to a four-year-old, always appeared a better choice.
In early acts of independence, I remember leaving the trail my father carved through the snow, trudging off in my own direction where forward progression came with much struggle and sideways rocking - a trick all small children learn in the North Country to knock down otherwise-waist-high snow drifts - to the base of what appeared a postcard-perfect tree. It was a game I played with my dad, knowing there was no way I could trick him into cutting a spruce, and yet not entirely willing to submit to a sparsely-branched balsam without some effort to the contrary. My opinion counted, no doubt, but it counted a hell of a lot more if I voted for a balsam.
Eventually, I would. As the dim day moved toward dark, the clumps of snow hanging off the thick strands of yarn on my mittens grew to golf-ball-size, and a damp cold made its way through snow pants fifteen years the back side of Goretex, I'd agree that the next candidate my father suggested was indeed the world's most perfect tree. He'd shake snow from its limbs, disappearing momentarily behind a white, grainy curtain, and then, with warning to his curious son to remain clear, would swing the axe head low into the trunk. As the pile of white, pitchy wedges of heartwood grew around him, I'd watch the top of the tree expectantly, waiting for the first indication that it and terra firm would soon unite. When the steeple-thin treetop swayed at the stroke of the axe and did not rebound to vertical, my father would request my help pushing the balsam over and with all my strength - and my dad's hands high above my head on the tree where I couldn't see them - I'd shove it down, the last bit of wood shearing with a cold pop as it broke free of the stump.
It seemed like a long way back to the station wagon, tucked against a neighbor's dairy barn in a tractor-plowed driveway. My father would pull the tree behind him with the clothesline while I rode on its branches, the bare limbs of poplars passing overhead like the skeletal fingers of summer, and if there was enough snow in the road we needed to cross when at last we neared the car to prevent needles from rubbing off, I'd remain on the tree all the way.
A day later, after standing long enough under the eves to shed some of the snow it had accumulated on its way to our car, we'd bring the tree inside, decorating it with glass ornaments, some sixty years old, and strings of large, colored lights whose bulbs clinked together with a rich noise all their own as I helped unwind them.
Once lit, it was color, warmth, fragrance, and hope, too, I believe, standing inside our home while winter engulfed the world outside. It was also a damn long time ago.
I thought about it the other day driving from my Montana home to the Dollar Store in Billings, where four bucks got me a dozen of the cheapest size-C batteries to be found. With my wallet another six dollars lighter, I had half a dozen strands of battery powered lights, and a plan for this year's Christmas tree that needed only a clear night and a cooperative north sky.
Three days later, on an afternoon much like the ones I remember spending in the snow with my father, a favorable evening forecast sent me driving 100 miles to edge of Montana's plains where, during a summer walk in search of arrowheads, I'd found my Christmas tree for this year.
No balsam out here, I thought, wheeling onto I-90, so right from the get-go I knew it wasn't going to be a "perfect" tree. Well, judging by their collapse to the Cleveland Indians in the first round of the AL playoffs this year, if God was still a Sox fan he certainly hadn't offered any divine help at the plate. Perhaps things were changing. Perhaps a ponderosa pine would be good enough. Perhaps someone, somewhere, is selling a picture on Ebay of our lord in the clouds above Wrigley Field.
I smiled thinking about it, gunning my truck up to the western speed limit of 80 miles an hour, then remembered another year when traditions fell. I was eleven, armed with a department store hatchet, followed by my nine-year-old sister who I'd begrudgingly agreed could come and along and help look for our Christmas tree, provided she carried our lunch box and thermos of hot chocolate.
A hard-packed snowmobile trail took us up through the center of Irasburg, the village where we lived, then wound away from town and angled across overgrown pastures of wild apple trees and meadowsweet toward the distant, naked ridges of Allen Hill.
The day didn't seem as dim or the world quite a small as it had years earlier when I'd ridden back to our car on the trees my father cut, but the stillness of the season and sense of a long, hard haul to spring remained the same.
We poked along until noon, meandering off the trail, circling clumps of thorn apples and red osiers, inspecting with critical eyes eight or ten trees, all of which we found fault with. We ate peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, bread oozing a purple dampness, and drank luke warm hot chocolate, sharing a thermos cup, careful to drink from opposite sides.
It was thirty-some years ago, I thought, cruising further away from Montana's mountains, whipping past a landscape of wheat stubble and sage coulees, but I can still remember the sky-blue, satiny mittens my sister wore and how my hands had sweat inside my gloves, making them hard to pull back on after we ate lunch.
An hour into the afternoon, it began to snow. Small, crystalline flakes that either don't amount to much or arrive in advance of a real storm. The sky, without definition, didn't tell which type these were, and we pressed on, our tracks skirting stone piles and a pair of loose, triple-strand fences.
I believe we saw the tree together at the same time. Sprouted on the south side of large fir, it had grown shielded from the north wind. Ten feet tall and nearly as big around, we walked its perimeter twice, unable to find a single thing wrong with it. And then I picked one of its needles, easily rolling it between my thumb and forefinger. Spruce, without a doubt.
I looked at my sister and we both looked at the tree, the top of Irasburg's Protestant Church steeple visible on the horizon behind it. When I was four, my independence led me out of my father's footsteps through drifted snow. At eleven, on a snowy afternoon with my sister standing next to me, it decreed that the reign of balsam fir in the Mosher household was over.
My hatchet, while a prized possession, was far from sharp. It's rubber-coated aluminum handle was crooked from too many impacts against a large cedar tree I'd practiced all summer throwing the blade into. I'd gotten the hang of it eventually, calculating the hatchet's rotation well enough to stick it three out of four times, but it had come at the price of a bent handle. As I clubbed away at the tree's dense, lower limbs, fighting into the trunk, it twisted in my hands, one in three blows landing as it should.
Twenty minutes of hacking revealed a disproportionately large trunk, a beefy eight inches through with bark sporting sap bubbles the size of jelly beans. I swung the hatchet at it with all my might, striking it reasonably close to where I wished, and watched the blade take a quarter-inch bite.
Leaving I-90 for the final 25 miles of my drive last week, I remembered momentarily thinking that even with all the great, Northern Vermont determination everyone in the Northeast Kingdom possess, maple sap could be flowing before that bull of a spruce gave up the ghost. Still, I went at it with a vengeance, chipping away as somewhere behind those steely clouds the sun found its way to the western side of Irasburg Mountain and night fell. Brother and sister walked home together, crossing the village common - that green in the center of town - as the local volunteer fire department flooded it with light from their trucks and water from their hoses, the annual skating rink one night of frigid temperatures away.
The sun was still up and bright where I parked my truck on the edge of a long prairie in Eastern Montana, and it had shined brightly that next day in Vermont, too, a rarity in December, lending confidence to the two kids who once more headed out with hot chocolate, sandwiches, and a hatchet whose head was dark with pitch. Our walk to the spruce wasn't much further than mine to the little ponderosa I'd found, growing at the edge of a sand rock cliff, but it took much longer. As I stepped easily over a Montana barbwire fence, I remembered holding the top strand of one much lower down with all my weight, helping my sister across.
We'd spent the next four hours hacking away on that tree, eating a quick lunch, working in lengthening shadows until, ringed with hatchet scars on all sides, at last it sank slowly to one side, popping free of its stump, the butt now five feet up in the air, held high by thick limbs. Our grand plan of dragging the tree into our yard, where it would be a total surprise to our parents, quickly morphed into somehow getting it a hundred yards to a road our dad could drive on and pick it up with the car. This would be Herculean work enough.
I could probably do it in five minutes now, I thought, leaping out onto a narrow ledge sixty feet above the earth with my camera, lights, and tripod. Still, it was no small feat back then, and we'd reached the road just before sunset, the top of Allen Hill glowing a cold, bright white in the east.
I broke the news to my father that this year we would have a spruce, and I think he was secretly proud to see I'd made a decision entirely on my own, not in keeping with his, though there was talk of the similarity in scent between such a tree and my giant, semi-domesticated tom cat, Lynx. We lashed it to the top of a car no more than one model newer than the one we'd brought trees home in when I'd ridden on them, and the next day my mother filled a large garbage can with chunks of concrete to use as a stand and help steady it in our living room, where it reached to within an inch of the ceiling.
I've always liked decorating them, I thought, stringing out my battery-powered lights, watching a young ponderosa transform into something beautiful, if not oddly out of place. No one is going to see this here tonight I thought, save perhaps a mule deer or owl that comes by in the dark and wonders what these bright lights are all about.
Well, enough people in Irasburg certainly saw our spruce that year. It filled the room and was, among the trees we knew, the crown jewel. It stood while Lynx shredded the top of a boot box we kept our Christmas lights in. It stood while New Year's came and went, snow piled up to the bottom of our downstairs windows, and a January thaw sent it shrinking more than a foot over night. It stood, drinking more than a gallon of water each day, until the longest month of Vermont's winter was behind us. It stood, until with some sadness, we stripped it of its splendor and my father pulled it through our back door and out onto a brush pile where it remained for three years, sheltering mice and lending a summer perch to the brown thrasher who liked its now needleless branches. The day we burned it, when I was a teenager, wild cucumber vines had encircled it like the tinsel my sister and I had draped over it.
As I put the last strand of lights on the ponderosa, I remembered watching the smoke from the brush pile fire curl skyward and drift toward Allen Hill, a landmark not as distant as it had seemed a few years earlier. Lynx was gone then, though his claw marks remained in the box still used for our lights.
Things do hang on to remind us, I thought, setting up my camera as the sky overhead faded from blue to silver and the first stars winked on. I'd come home from college for Christmas one year and, while doing a little work to our back door, found a round needle wedged under the stop. We'd only had one spruce, so there was no doubt to which tree it belonged.
I could walk, even now I thought, from our front door to the exact spot my sister and I had cut that tree down. Maybe there would be a rotten stump covered in small shelf fungus, or maybe that window closed a decade ago and there would be only other younger trees. Either way, I could find it I thought as the night darkened and on the northern horizon the aurora borealis flickered.
I sat taking pictures of this year's Christmas tree until long, long after dark. Let winter come, I thought as I finally unwound the lights. But don't let it come tonight. Let us have a few more late-fall days. A few nights when we don't need a fire in the stove. A little time to remember summer. A little time to remember past Christmases before the holiday season hits full stride this year.
All the tree I'll have to remember this year is the little ponderosa which, for a few hours, wore a coat of lights. But I like that. And while I doubt I'll ever decorate it again, I will check on it from time to time. The crack it's growing from will spread. Its limbs will reach higher and its trunk grow thicker. An owl will land in it, a bobcat walk by it, and perhaps someone will even build a house within sight of it on the prairie.
Everything changes, I thought, stepping over the barbwire fence again on my way back to my truck. Years, and trees, and men. And then, just before I started my engine for the drive home, I laughed. I still can't picture God a Cubs fan.