a little coffee

Today I understood that nature and I will never be best friends, but, at times, we can get along.

Last night, I was finally ready to get on board with this outdoorsy, nature thing when I looked up into the night sky and saw the Milky Way.  The Milky Way!  It looked like a thin layer of static smoke in the night sky- and behind and all around that were a bazillion twinkling stars!  I’d never seen so many balls of burning gas at once before.  I don’t know when was the last time I saw the Milky Way- if ever.  Even in Austin (at 23,219 people it’s a metropolis compared to these hamlets) I thought I had a terrific view of the stars- compared to Chicago.  Standing in the backyard I clearly saw the Big Dipper!  Oh, how naive I was!  Awe washed through me as I gazed above the treetops- and then I hightailed it inside because I thought I heard wolf howls.

Awe gave way to bitterness when the silence and the blackness distracted me from sleeping again.  Ugh. 

To shake myself from my zombie state, because three cups of coffee wasn’t doing the trick, I decided to hike up Mt. Telemark.  The open path hugged the forest line and ran roughly parallel to the ski slopes as I climbed further and further up, stumbling on rocks in the path and avoiding bees feasting at the yellow wild flowers. Grasshoppers leaped and fluttered around me, some jumped up and kissed my elbow. I tried not to think too much about snakes.  I didn’t encounter anyone on the way up (or down) and the self-imposed solitude (in the daylight) refreshed me. As I crunched on dry grass and kicked up dirt, I remembered playing in an open fields with the neighbors when I was a kid.  How satisfying that crunch was.  How we played games- I often fantasized I was a brave explorer or archeologist, delighting in digging holes, searching for important rocks and pealing layers of dry dirt after the field flooded.  Today I was Christina: Fearless Conqueror of Nature!  Explorer Extraordinaire!  

With a haphazardly drawn map, I was confused by what path I took. I think I marched half mile to the top and just guessed when I reached it- I expected to see a Congratulations!  You Made It Without Falling Down the 45-degree Incline!  Alas, no sign.  But it didn’t look like I could climb any further so I surveyed the area, kicked some grass, stirred up some more grasshoppers and their friends.  I was exuberant.  On the climb back down, two deer bounded in front of me.  Well, 15 to 20 feet below me. I would only momentarily panic with memories of wolf sitings- they like to eat deer? And I would only make one wrong turn that for a few confused minutes plunged me directly into the woods. 

But standing on top of Mt. Telemark, the wind whipping my hair around and the brilliant blue sky shining down on me, my body had finally woken up.  I felt a rush of “I can do anything!”  I imagine Sir Edmund Hillary felt damn near the same thing.