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Ghosts

Blanca Flats has never felt haunted to me in any way. This spiky, drought resistant ecosystem is alive with spirits -- wind, clouds, mountains, stones -- and with coyotes, snakes, mice, rabbitbrush and prickly pear. But ghosts?

I haven't felt any. Only the ghosts of my own memory. Sometimes they cross my inner vision in a continuous parade, sullen and relentless. Every mistake I've ever made, every regret I've ever cradled in my thoughts, every act of cowardice, every act of neglect. Steeped in solitude, this life forces a constant confrontation with the past.

The wind is an indifferent listener.

The massif is engaged in its own endless transformation.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Moon

If I'd never moved out here, I never would have known the intimate revelations of the moon. Its cycles and rituals are more complex than I'd ever imagined.

With each dawn, each twilight, each luminous midnight, I learn something about Nature that humbles me.

Freight Train

You can hear the freight trains coming for miles before their appear. It's a low, steady drone, combined with a gathering vibration that spreads from the floor through the marrow of your bones. Nothing captures the wild, lonely melancholy of departure like the train's whistle.

This photo was taken by EHB in March of this year, before the snow melted on the peaks. Now the snow is largely gone, and the massif will be bald for a month or two before winter starts to rev itself up again.

Loss

Blanca's presence in my life helps me cope with the sense of loss that haunts my subconscious. All of the friends, city streets, casts of light, poems that I've loved, buildings I remember seem to be constantly in the process of disintegrating, the way the mandala in a kaleidoscope collapses into colorful shards and light at the slightest shift of the tube.

Blanca brings the shards into focus. Just knowing that she's there -- always there, barring some act of war or massive geological upheaval -- brings the disintegrating fragments of memory to rest.

Widow

Maybe it's a sign that you've had too much solitude when you start naming inanimate objects. It's not just a matter of personifying them -- you start to seek them out, to rely on their reassuring, silent presence. These old wooden fence posts belonged to a ranch that no longer exists; the ranchers and their livestock have long since vanished, but the posts remain.

I call the post on the left "The Widow." The soft, silvered wood reminds me of a widow's shoulders, curved in quiet defense of her grief. I say a silent hello to the Widow whenever I drive by. She acknowledges me, and I acknowledge her.

Shed

Taken from inside our former neighbor's collapsing sheep shed. There are no livestock in the immediate area anymore. The shed is much older than the house our neighbor built. Old wooden structures like this are everywhere in the Valley.

Rain

This morning the air was suffused with the scents of sage, rabbitbrush and rain. A squall passed over. The wind bangs the screen door against the house. Maybe the moisture will draw the snakes from their holes.

I love these monochromatic mornings, when the mountains and foothills reveal themselves in layers of light and shadow. The mountains recover their memory, remember what they were and what they are becoming.

Greenhouse

This is the greenhouse that Eric has been building. Its plastic "walls" have been delivered and are coming soon. The young herbs and vegetables have been growing in our sunroom, waiting for frost danger to pass. In the San Luis Valley, that doesn't happen until mid-June.

I have an apple tree seedling that I've been cultivating. I found the sprouted seed inside a Pink Lady apple.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Subconscious

At first I wasn't happy with these evening shots. Then I realized that the massif's hulking shape is often how it appears in my subconscious. An enormous shadow, an immense and dark substance, still in the process of creation. The massif haunts me.

Truck

An evening ride with the dogs. The mountain comes into full view once we've crested the hill.

Gray

A swollen mass of clouds conceals the peak. When the mountain is masked this way, I feel a kinship to her. I want to retreat behind clouds.

The peaks generate their own atmosphere. Clouds mass around the summit -- I imagine the silent roil of the mist and wish I could be up there, enveloped, hidden.

Azure

A vertical cloud floats in a vertiginous expanse of blue. This dizzying glimpse of the azure reminds me why I love living at 7,500 feet.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Dawn

I'm learning more about light by photographing Blanca and observing the mountains throughout the day. The light at 7:30 a.m. erases most of her details, leaving her silhouette hovering like a one-dimensional symbol from a dream. The outline of the massif appears to have been scissored out of the pale dawn sky.

About 12 hours later, the alchemy of the setting sun will cast the peaks in gold, turn their shadows midnight blue.

Rabbitbrush

Rabbitbrush is one of the few plants hardy enough to survive in our arid, high-desert ecosystem. This shrub grows rampant in the sandy soils of the Valley, coloring the parched, empty rangeland with a faint suggestion of green.

Clouds and Shadows

Everything that surrounds Blanca reaches for the mountain, somehow. The clouds lower themselves to engulf her. My house extends its shadow to her. My eyes, lungs, heart expand to take her in.

Sometimes I complain that nothing ever happens out here. Yet the clouds' slow drama is ongoing. The sky changes from one moment to the next. In sunlight and moonlight, shadows carry on their intense, silent life.

Evening Clouds

Sullen clouds gathering over the mountains. A walk at twilight. A restless current in the air. The dogs won't settle down -- Jake races straight at me, skirting a head-on collision by about an inch.

One of the clearest memories from my childhood: summer afternoons driving through rural New Mexico on the way to California, evening squalls, air swollen with rain and the scent of sage. Sometimes I think those memories led me here.

Talking

We are off the power grid here, but we do have access to telephone service. Buried cable crisscrosses the ground in a silent network. The phone lines were installed in this sparsely inhabited area of Costilla County under a federal grant, in hopes that all of this open space would be developed and settled.

I don't know that any of our two or three neighbors takes advantage of the phone lines. People out here don't seem to talk very much.

Here, the wind does most of the talking. Howling, whispering, sighing, singing to itself. I think the wind's overbearing voice -- the wind that blasted tons of sand across the plains to create the Great Sand Dunes -- is one reason why the area will never be successfully settled.

Massif

I love the term massif. The word plunges straight from my brain to the pit of my stomach. It holds everything I know about this mass of the earth's crust, which isn't very much.

I started this blog so that I could learn more about her, but I'm not naturally inclined to absorb facts. I tend to forget them immediately if I don't write them down. From my research (and the sticky I left for myself on my desktop), I know that the Blanca Massif includes four peaks, and that the highest -- Blanca, herself -- hits 14,285 feet in less than 5 miles.

When I think of the word massif, let it settle in my mind, I see an aerial view. I see the topography from above, absorb the vertiginous grandeur of her ongoing creative act. She is still in the process of being born.

Because "mass" is a verb of action as well as a noun. Slow, steady, deliberate action, like the movements of the Earth that are creating her, inch by inch, century by century.

When I first moved from California to Colorado, I ached for the ocean. I felt landlocked in Boulder, where I lived at the time. I was afraid I'd eventually suffocate with the sea so far away.

Then one foggy morning, I left my apartment and glanced up at the Flatirons, which loomed over my neighborhood, and I realized that these misted, motionless vertical slabs and peaks were not motionless at all. Like the crests of giant waves, they were rising and subsiding -- only their trajectories required eons to complete. The ocean was with me; it would always be with me, and in the massive crests and crevices of the mountains, I can capture its immense, rolling space with my finite human eye.

Gender

I procrastinated for months before starting this project. At first I attributed the block to my usual bugbears -- lack of motivation, lack of time, mental fatigue, general failure as a human being -- then it occurred to me today that there was another reason I wasn't taking the photos or writing the text.

A 1.8-billion-year-old granite block is too big to be ignored.

This afternoon, it hit me that I was caught up on the gender identity of the mountain. In Navajo tradition, Tsisnaasjini' is male. But I have always thought of Mount Blanca as female. It didn't seem appropriate to use the Navajo name in this blog while referring to the mountain as "she," but it appears that I don't have much of a choice.

Defining the gender of a mountain is like defining the gender of a deity. If there's an internal dissonance between the prevailing concept of the deity and your own, you may drop off the road, at some point. And you'll either follow your own sense of the sacred, or you'll give up your faith.

Or your project, in this case.

As much as I respect the Navajo interpretation of this sacred directional mountain, Blanca is an overwhelmingly feminine presence to me. The comfort she gives me, the shape she lends to my days, the profound sense of reassurance that I find in her vast, glorious indifference, are feminine.

She's the Sacred glimpsed through a window in passing, as well as the Sacred viewed outdoors in frank awe.

Clarity

After a stretch of hazy days, the milk-white sky is blue again. The smoke from the wildfires seems to be dissipating. In Native American healing traditions, some winds carry illness. This morning's Southwest wind feels cleansing. This wind's voice is fierce, but its touch is gentle.

I like to zoom in on the peaks so that I can see the contrasting textures of trees, then the bare expanse of rock above the treeline. Some of that granite is over 1 billion years old. My whole lifetime equals the length of a brief dream in the long, slow sleep of her creation.

Every day I see a new detail, a crevice or a crater that I hadn't noticed before, and my fascination with her deepens.

Veiled by Smoke

You can only see a ghost of her at 7:45 A.M., she's so thickly veiled by smoke from the wildfires on the other side of the mountains. Every morning, smoke masses into the San Luis Valley and settles. By evening, the winds will have cleared the curtain a bit.

Her silhouette hovers on the horizon, a faint etching in the haze.

Her Names

Tsisnaasjini'
Dawn Mountain
White Shell Mountain
Mount Blanca

I've seen her almost every day for the past two years, with the exception of a few weeks out of the country and a few days out of town here and there. She overlooks the sea of dry rabbitbrush, prickly pear and tumbleweeds where I sail in my little A-frame ship.

Tsisnaasjini' is the Sacred Mountain of the East, one of the four directional mountains that represent the boundaries of the Navajo Nation.

Almost every day, I've thought to myself that I should acknowledge her somehow. This is my attempt to express the joy she gives me.