September 24

I stopped in at John’s place – Kiwi John’s, not Smiley John’s – to use the internet. He gets the same LinkSys wireless that Scott gets because he stays one floor below. “Yeah,” he said when I knocked, “come on in.” John is a New Zealander by birth, but has been living in the states since ’78. It’s easier to do science in the US. He’s gotten grants from the National Science Foundation to study the way ice breaks in Antarctica, and is getting medical training for his trip in our WFR course. In his fifties, John is our second-oldest student. His hair is thinning, like mine, but he is thicker around the middle and a bit more easygoing. Not that he doesn’t work hard – he works for several hours after class everyday, preparing for his research – but he doesn’t seek argument like I sometimes do. I think age has evened out his fractious side like erosion bevels a mountain range.

John is a very smart man who likes to laugh. He told me when I stopped by that I ought to pursue a general education at my young age instead of specializing. Lots of kids specialize too early and then lose out when the job they might’ve taken gets shipped overseas. Then he chuckled because he’s paying to send his 23-year old daughter, with an undergraduate degree in performance trumpet, through law school. “She’s very talented,” he says. “She’ll be the best trumpet-playing lawyer out there.”

The emails I answered from John’s kitchen table reminded me that a big world existed outside of Crested Butte, so when I left John’s place I told him I was going to buy a copy of the NY Times and that I’d bring him a copy, too. “Thanks,” he said. I was on the way back to John’s place from the grocery when I turned off the blacktop and headed into the National Forest to make some lunch.

I was bumping along the dirt road, swerving around potholes and listening to the squeak of Squatter’s shiny new spring-loaded camper couplings. John’s need for a newspaper didn’t seem urgent. The aspens are beautiful this time of year. Even in the crisp air of late autumn a few are still green. Some are bright orange, others already bare with their spiny branches reaching toward the sky. Some are red. Many of the aspens glow yellow, so bright and pure that they seem painted. They grow alongside firs, tall and stately in their deep green. Heifers graze among the trees because the Forest Service leases this land to ranchers, and the white faces and chestnut bodies of the cows move among the trunks. They graze out of the trees and into the open grass of the valley, concentrating their efforts at the bottom where an unassuming creek has leveled the terrain.

I passed a cow that had died recently. In the last day or so. Its feet stuck up into the air and its stomach was bloated with the gases of internal decomposition. It was on the side of a hill, not quite down to the creek. The coyotes and buzzards had not yet found the body, so the cow looked like a cheerily hefty heifer that was rolling to scratch its back. Birds had not yet pecked out the eyes. The cow wasn’t moving. I wondered if the rancher knew it had died. I stopped the truck to get out and take a look, but as I reached for the keys I saw two guys farther down the valley in the floodplain. They were practicing their golf swings, using the cow as a target. As I watched one of them swung and the golf ball sailed high, floated in the air, a white dot against the sky, and then fell a few yards short of the heifer with a thud. I had to laugh. The cow didn’t mind.