Friday, July 29th, 2011

In the gloom of seven A.M. I savage my foot on a piece of flat, jagged sandstone that serves as a door stop. My toe burns and the pain signals overwhelm all other warnings, remembrances and questions and I lay there squinting my eyes shut and breathing hard for a while. Celeste offers a variety of over-the-counter solutions but I just lay there throbbing.

Later that morning the pain subsides while I'm uploading photos, and a tension begins across my shoulders as the tedium of cataloguing sets in. I really should be posting this travelogue but there is no time; our plans have become definite and cut across my intention like a flash flood. Soon we will be isolated in the cabin and internet connection is impossible.

Jim drives Celeste JoAn and I to the cabin and JoAn notices all the yellow ovoids that mark the cut pines off the ski road. "Did this burn?" she asks. "No, the beetle," Jim says. In a clearing on the left side of the road we can see the blotches of rusty red on the mountainsides: thousands of beetle-killed trees.

When we meet the Vanderhoofs and we're standing around the fire across the road from the cabin, the disaster seems far away, and Celeste says she's not convinced this part of the forest is in danger because of a major fire in 1906 and the subsequent reforestation by young, healthy firs and aspens. And the forest around the cabin does look green; when I take the trail to my bath hole I must slalom around tender fir and spruce saplings and giant stalks of cow parsnip. The creek is just as I left it, a beautiful confusion of silver and black logs, pink cobbles and white and gold gravel. The water looks gold deepening to brown in its bed; but when I put on my trunks– in deference to the Vanderhoofs and the rest who may be around– the water is clear– clear, clear, clear. The cold and motion surrounds me and supports me; there is no distraction or temptation, just cold and sand and quivering aspen leaves. I really want to stay and make minor improvements to the hole, maybe a bench, splash around building dams and altars of rock; but I must be visible and normal for Celeste, so I put on my dry clothes and climb the hill back to the fire pit, where Russ Vanderhoof, his daughter Danielle, Jim and Celeste are talking.

Danielle's husband Al arrives while we're there– a tall, amiable guy wearing glasses and a baseball cap with the face of Cookie Monster on the crown. The group talks of trees on your property, including our confrontation with the owner of the lot to the north over a butchered fir– old friends of Jim and Russ– Richard Brautigan.

Later, we all go in to join Russ' wife Robin, JoAn and Danielle's little girls for a profusion of picnic food– all of which Robin lays out cheerfully and efficiently. Russ, Celeste, Al and JoAn stay in the darkened kitchen and Annabelle, the youngest, half-sits, half-squirms at her place. Russ talks about canoeing in the Boundary Waters and Celeste recurs to the idea of buying a canoe and using it on the Yampa. A picture of a cliff filling our view as the green carries us along and the far-off yellow shape of a mountain lion tracking across its upper reaches occupies me for a moment.

Before we leave, Al gets us all to stand in a photo and I manage to shoot the group before I have to climb up on the deck with the rest. Jim, I think, is ready to go. We pull into his driveway when the sun is orange. Deborah is worried about Kobe, their cat. He's been making weird noises and now sits behind the couch looking morose. Jim, Celeste, Deborah and I group around him, talking to him like an infant, before Deborah can't stand it anymore and looks at the ceiling and laughs with a kind of resigned disgust.

We watch a biopic of Frida Kahlo and that night I have a heartbreakingly elusive dream about a beautiful black dancer who's enamored of me.

The next morning my toe hurts again.