Relatives in Town and Some Daily Snow Zen

Thursday morning, rather late. Snowing vigorously outside and accumulating. Fortunately it is a very light snow. I'm going to let it fall today and clear tomorrow. Or Saturday. I hope.

We are right on schedule. Talk in the mornings is about warm climates, sun, and sailboats. Or cheap apartments and sailboats. Or just sailboats anywhere warm. Or anything and anyplace other than right here on this ridge with all of this snow about us. Year six. Is there any escape?

Went to town yesterday to do a little business. We had lunch at the Wolf where we also saw and briefly talked with my cousins -- Jack and Jamie  and their spouses. Saw Jack and his wife Diana again outside the market and talked some more -- mostly about getting Zoe out on his ranch in an attempt to let her work some cattle. May follow up on that one, but it is both hard and awkward for me to talk with Jack...not his fault at all it's just that our lives (he is a lifetime rancher, I am a retired officer turned recluse and amateur intellectual) are so very different. Returned home with our groceries and a bag of same for some neighbors. We are buying them odds and ends this year for the first time. Usually eggs, inexpensive wheat bread, milk and occasional other simple fare (yesterday it was Colby cheese). They do not make much money at all and buying food is hard. Even so they gave us almost 40 lbs of elk at Christmas. Also, if Ed  didn't plow these roads up here in winter, and wasn't available for the occasional handy-man emergency (i.e. helping me put in a culvert to divert spring runoff away from our leach field) it would be near impossible for us to live here year round. So buying a bit of food, and giving him a small amount of cash each month is the very least we can do. And we'll keep on doing it.

And today, the falling snow is the main feature. The NOAA forecast has progressed from "light snow, little accumulation" through the all-too-familiar build-up to Winter Storm Watch and, this morning, Winter Storm Warning with "significant accumulation" and "extremely hazardous driving conditions." I know that they have their computer models and experts to interpret the various charts. I also know that they wait until they're pretty sure before they issue the warnings. But. I can almost guarantee that a 'snow event' forecast several days out with apparently little impact will become a 'major snow event.' hours before whatever plans we might make based on anticipated 'light to moderate impact.'are set to begin and then unravel. I can 'model' the advance of these warnings with almost 100 percent accuracy. My model assumes that NOAA's assurance of light snow in the forecast will become heavy snow when it's least convenient. That is something I can surely count on.

Sigh. So it is snowing, hard at times. Cold enough that the accumulation is staying mercifully light. That's the weather today. The weather now.

We will live in the present moving forward. Zen, right?

On Mountains, Forests, and Change -- A Zen Commentary

The following Zen saying has been much on my mind lately:

First there is a mountain,

Then there is no mountain,

Then there is.

A more narrow version of this, quite apropos to the Snow Range, would be:

First there is a forest

Then there is no forest

Then there is.

These offer a more personal 'Zen' to the experience of watching billions of mountain pine beetles kill vast numbers of lodge pole pines and Engleman spruce in the Medicine Bow forest. The original Zen statement about mountains is (I presume) a trick for getting the mind to comprehend the Buddhist concept of emptiness. It's not that a mountain doesn't actually exist, it's that even a mountain, as impressive as it might appear, has no intrinsic, unique existence. It is, instead, a sum of many things, all of them contingent on many interlocking processes, and it-- the forest -- is most definitely not an enduring permanent reality all on its own. So, if one learns to see even a mountain as a 'thing' that is conditional on many other things, then one can begin to view it in it's changeable reality.  Things are essentially, intrinsically empty. What matters is what actually is...without labels or mythic values.

The idea takes some getting used to. I used to see the Snowy Range as something that was and would be forever. After reading about John Love's descriptions of the geologic forces that molded these peaks, and that will eventually grind them down into something entirely different, I now know that this beloved range is anything but permanent. It is as it is right now, and even right now forces of water, wind, and underlying geology are subjecting 'it' to constant change. The fact that I cannot easily track these changes in the course of a very brief human life doesn't mean that the change isn't underway. Even the mountains, even the Snow Range are not forever.

And so it goes with this forest. I thought the Medicine Bow forest, as I knew it as a child and young adult, was forever. When the beetles started killing vast numbers of the trees that in their many numbers constitute this forest, I mourned the end of what I'd loved with pain and no small amount of bitterness. "How Dare This Forest Do This to Me!" To me? Well, not to me, or anybody else for that matter. Not even to itself. In fact, there is no 'itself.' The forest simply is, and as such change will inevitably come to it. We can debate what caused the explosion of beetles that killed all these trees: climate change, severe drought, lack of logging of older trees. Fingers are pointed in all directions attempting to affix blame. As if  knowing who or what to blame would do any good now. What I've learned is that change, even cathartic change, is part of the life-cycle of any forest. Fire, insects, drought, men and their machines -- all are part of the the interconnected contingencies that shape the lives of the plants and animals that make up the 'it' of a living forest. What the beetles have forced upon me is the opportunity to watch in the span of a few years, the kind of change that in geological time takes millions of years for the underlying structure of the equally changeable mountain upon which this forest lives.

The forest that was, is no more. And yet, there is a new forest on the way...that is a thing I, in my very brief human life, can see happening already. In this very present, the forces that formed the old forest are already at work creating a new one. It's hard to see what's happening in the winter, but a quiet walk -- in the moment -- in early spring as the snow recedes reveals the regrowth, the resurgence of the myriad of arboreal systems that, altogether, make a forest what it is: a living, changing, dying, and renewing system of many many things, living, dying and non-living.

Whatever a forest is, it is what is happening at this and only this moment. And this moment always is. Change is part of this moment and it is always underway...in an instant it is a different forest, a different mountain, always now, and always forever becoming something different, something new. There's a Zen to all that.

First there is a forest,

Then there is no forest,

Then there is.

A Break In a Bitter-Cold Winter

Since my last post we've had another bout of deep-below-zero weather ( 30 F below) and about two feet of new snow.   Between all that and a particularly vicious cold I'm sharing with Suzie I've been a might distracted.  Add to all that fun a failed hard drive on the computer I use primarily for writing -- it's been a rather difficult period in which to keep one's muse employed.

About that cold and snow.   A neighbor related to us that this is by far the hardest winter she's seen since she and her family moved to Ryan Park in 1983.   I can well believe it.   Usually February is the month when we look about and allow ourselves to think that this particular winter isn't so bad.  In a normal year, our home is surrounded by paths we cut through the snow, and the two driveways we maintain have two to three foot berms where the snow gets thrown by my invaluable Honda snow thrower (we call it Wall-e).   This year the paths have become deep trenches --canyons actually -- over which Wall-e struggles to eject the aforementioned new accumulations of snow.  The road which serves our property (as well as four other homes that see frequent visitation in winter) is a narrow and deep near-tunnel through which only one vehicle at a time can pass.   It is kept clear for us and our neighbors by two stout-hearted men each driving their own tractors with industrial-strength snow throwers affixed to rear drive ports.   These fine men drive their machines backward over all the miles of road that must be cleared in Ryan Park.  We do pay them, but they don't ask much.  In return they make it possible for us to live here without spending upwards of $40K for our own snow-clearing machines and then doing all that work on our own.  They have been hard at work this year in brutal conditions.   All of this is more or less what they and we take in stride in the normal winters.   This year there is a whole lot more of winter than we've had in the past.   We're managing.   Maybe we'll even manage to keep our sanity until spring finally appears -- in late May.

As for that hard-drive issue.   I am a loyal Linux user.   I taught the basics of that operating system and it's implementation on PC's for over four years.   In that time I became something of an evangelist for open source software and try to use it whenever possible (which is most of the time).   One of the beauties of Linux, in particular the Ubuntu version of that OS, is it's ability to run very nicely and flexibly on older equipment.  Old gear is what we have up here.  It's what works and it's what I can mostly repair if things go awry in a blizzard.   But.  Old hard drives are what they are and I lost one two days ago.  It resides on an old ATX-standard PC that I can -- or could -- dual boot into either Windows XP or Linux.   Now it's an XP machine only-- or at least for now.  I can live with Window$ for a while.  But pulling the XP system out of mothballs and getting it current again took me the better part of two days.  Another hit to the writing life.  

All is well for now;  a reasonably long (a week or so?) break in the winter seems on the way.  NOAA is confident (whatever that means) that a high-pressure ridge is settling in over the western U.S. that will give us sunny days and above normal temperatures into next week.  Forty-degree highs!   That should help pack and reduce this snow somewhat which is important as we usually get our deepest and heaviest snows in March and April.  Last year we received over seven feet between the 20th of March and the first week in May.   If we don't get some melting before all that, well,  we won't have windows to see out of on our ground floor.   That's not fun.  Here's to some melting!

Hopefully the weather will warm, the computers won't die, and I'll have time for some more enlightened writing.

More to follow.

Coldest Night in over 40 years

We took a great while to get started this morning as we were getting over a most unusual night. The temperature dropped to -42° F at 4:00 a.m this morning. It was -41° F at seven. According to Ed G. it hasn't been this cold here since the 1950's when his father (now deceased) recalled a stretch of -50° F weather. Ed's been here all his life -- 41 years -- and last night was a first for him. Us too. I do not relish a repeat.

This morning we opened the blinds on our various window shades in slow sequence. The idea was not to expose the entire house to all that cold at once and we needed time to allow the ice which had built up on the lower inside surfaces to melt so we could mop it up. So we took our time, had breakfast, and slowly let in the light.

I believe it was hardest for our Kelpie, Zoe. She's not one for spending all her time indoors, but with such extreme temperatures she really couldn't be let out for long. We did take her out at 5 a.m. (-41°), and let her out at first light (same temp). She didn't take long either time to do her business then return to the warmth of the cabin. All the same, as I came out here to write, her mood had turned decidedly quirky...she wants her morning walk and it's just not going to happen this morning. Temp should rise to about +3° F this afternoon, we will get her out then.

We've one more night of bitter cold ahead but it shouldn't be as extreme: -18° or so. Starting tomorrow temperatures more typical of winter in these latitudes will return. We're expecting twenties in the day, positive single digits at night and maybe some snow. Normal instead of scary cold.