Lime Creek Odyssey

Steven J. Meyers

Description

As Steven Meyers writes, an odyssey need not involve a long journey, simply a profound one. First drawn to Lime Creek for its fly fishing, this stream serves as Meyers’s muse in seven transcendent essays that explore journeys in the discovery of self, of home, and what it means to be human. The essays also explore loss and grief, of finding healing in the powerful presence of nature and in the awareness and experience of natural cycles. The tender eloquence of his writing and his compassion for all living things make for a contemplation of place in the tradition of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Desert Solitaire.

EXCERPT:
The morning I spent photographing along the stream and in the dense groves of aspen that bordered the creek near where I had camped. My mood was quiet and my pace slow. Photographing is something like fishing. If you arrive in the woods with your adrenaline pumping and rush about madly exposing film, little that is good emerges. After time passes and you assume a less frantic pace, images start to come. The previous day and the night in the woods had already slowed me down, and I was seeing a great deal. After a few hours the sun rose above the shoulder of Twilight, and the light, though beautiful, became too harsh for the pictures I had in mind. I sat beside the stream to rest, empty my mind and enjoy the first rays of the sun. As I sat, I heard two sharp cracks, like those of a nearby rifle, and then heard a tremendous crashing. What I saw was a tall, dead aspen tree plunging to earth, its age having weakened it to the point where it could no longer stand against gravity. The earth pulled it down to the forest floor, where it would decay and become soil.
This is a relatively simple event that must happen many times a day in the hundreds of millions of acres of forest on this earth, but it was an extremely startling event to me. I have had limbs come down around me and even seen a few trees fall during storms. Never before, however, had a tree come down near me when there was no breath of wind and no apparent reason for it to choose that moment to fall. The morning, which had begun with magical light, was becoming more magical by the minute. When I rose to walk back to camp, a mule doe that had come close by, probably not seeing me, was startled by my appearance and bounded off into the woods, her hooves hitting the dirt and launching her into flight, four hooves at once, with a sound that I felt in my chest as much as I heard with my ears. Yes, this was indeed a special morning.
Later I broke camp, but before wading across the pool with my pack and moving on, I decided to search the water to see if there was any sign of the large fish I had spotted the previous evening. After a few minutes I saw a disturbance that might have simply been the water's flow broken by an irregularity in the rock wall at the edge of the pool, but having seen a good fish there the evening before, the disturbance took on new meaning. Even though I had little evidence to support the conviction, I knew it was a fish. My first cast to the spot was about a foot short, but my second was dead on, and a massive head slowly came out of the water to inhale my fly. When I struck, the fish dove for his home. I was able to force him out into the pool, where he raced about frantically, leaping, tail-walking, trying to escape. Several minutes later, I was supporting with both hands a 14-inch, fat-bellied, brilliantly colored rainbow trout, moving him gently back and forth in the shallow water at the tail of the pool. When released, he went straight for the undercut ledge of the rock wall. The pool had yielded what was, for Lime Creek, a very large trout, and also one of its secrets.
My hike back to the car through a sunlit autumn aspen wood was slow and filled with thoughts. Any fisherman understands the joy of finally seeing a large fish in a pool where for years he had suspected one, and the added joy of solving the problem of how to land it. Any photographer appreciates the pleasure of a morning spent deep in the woods with glowing light and the white bark of aspen. Any hiker knows the joy of a day, a night and a morning out in the woods, self-contained and happy. There had been all of this, and more: a crashing tree, a bounding deer, water ouzels moving upstream with me as I fished, ground squirrels and chipmunks chattering to me from streamside, a splendid wood, a glorious stream, narrow gorges and open riffles. After learning the joy of sharing this place with another and seeing it with her eyes, I was back. This time I was alone, but being alone was not the same anymore.
As the seasons move, we move, going through similar circumstances, but never in quite the same way. There is an old saying that you never set foot in the same river twice. Its flowing water changes. Cycles do not move in empty, meaningless circles—spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall to winter—only to repeat. As the seasons change, time passes and things grow. Some things die. No two autumns are alike. The world is filled with the processes of life, and time is not a simple matter of trajectories. Events are not predictable, and our cycles are not circles, they are spirals. Alone for me now means having been with someone. Alone is different for not always having been alone.
Acknowledgments
Preface to the WestWinds Press Edition
Introduction
Chapter 1 Of Meatballs, Swiss Cheese, and Sponges
Chapter 2 A Gothic Romance
Chapter 3 The Fisher and the Marten
Chapter 4 On Being Human
Chapter 5 Thoughts from the Real World
Chapter 6 Weaving the Tapestry
Chapter 7 The Naming of Names
Epilogue

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Nature
• Colorado

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780871083265
• Langue: English

Extrait

L IME C REEK O DYSSEY
STEVEN J. MEYERS
Text and cover photograph 1989, 2016 by Steven J. Meyers
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Lime Creek Odyssey was first published in the United States by Fulcrum, Inc., Golden, Colorado, in 1989. Published by WestWinds Press, an imprint of Graphic Arts Books, in 2016 with new typography and design but without the portfolio of photographs.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyers, Steven J.
Lime Creek odyssey / Steven J. Meyers.
pages cm
First published in the United States by Fulcrum, Inc., Golden, Colorado, in 1989 -Title page verso.
ISBN 978-0-87108-325-8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-87108-326-5 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-87108-327-2 (hardbound)
1. Natural history-Colorado-Lime Creek Region. 2. Lime Creek Region (Colo.)-Description and travel. 3. Lime Creek Region (Colo.)-Environmental conditions. 4. Nature-Effect of human beings on-Colorado-Lime Creek Region. 5. Meyers, Steven J.-Travel-Colorado-Lime Creek Region. 6. Meyers, Steven J.-Philosophy. 7. Philosophy of nature. I. Title.
QH105.C6M47 2016
508.788 38-dc23
2015034594
Designed by Vicki Knapton
WestWinds Press
An imprint of

P.O. Box 56118
Portland, OR 97238-6118
[phone]
www.graphicartsbooks.com
For K. B .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface to the WestWinds Press Edition
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
O F M EATBALLS , S WISS C HEESE , AND S PONGES
CHAPTER 2
A G OTHIC R OMANCE
CHAPTER 3
T HE F ISHER AND THE M ARTEN
CHAPTER 4
O N B EING H UMAN
CHAPTER 5
T HOUGHTS F ROM THE R EAL W ORLD
CHAPTER 6
W EAVING THE T APESTRY
CHAPTER 7
T HE N AMING OF N AMES
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T he writing of a book is no simple thing, and often it seems that it is as difficult to properly thank all of those whose contributions have made a book possible as it is to write the book itself.
A book like this one that is an amalgam of memoir and essay belongs as much to those whose lives have intersected with the author s as it belongs to the author himself, and each is deserving of recognition and gratitude. If I were to attempt such recognition here, if I were to do so as thoroughly as the circumstances that allowed this book to come into being require, I fear this acknowledgment would be as long as the book itself! I cannot name you all, but I will begin by expressing my gratitude to all who have made both the book and the odyssey the book attempts to portray possible. You know who you are. I am deeply indebted to you for your contributions both to this book and to my life.
A few, however, whose contributions to the book are truly great, must be named. Not to do so would be unthinkable. First, I must express my gratitude to Karen Boucher to whom this book is dedicated. It was her finding me and joining her life with mine here in the heart of the San Juan Mountains, her unbounded joy in the presence of this very special place that contributed most to my understanding of what it means to commit to, to make a home in, to truly dwell in place .
My love and partner for the past twenty-eight years, Debbie Meyers, embodies the rebirth wished for after the often terribly dark, cold winter of Karen s passing-the new season of spring anticipated more in hope than in actuality at the time the Epilogue to the first edition of this book was written. Debbie is that hoped for rebirth, the warm, green spring of new life that has, indeed, come again.
And finally I must thank the staff at WestWinds Press, my editor Kathy Howard, and most especially Douglas Pfeiffer. All I have dealt with at WestWinds have been gracious, supportive, and hugely capable. It is their talent and expertise that have brought this little book back into print. It was Doug s desire to see it in print again, his efforts to secure the rights for a new edition, his gentle guidance and encouragement that have made this book possible. For the arrival of this new edition of Lime Creek Odyssey I am forever indebted to him and hugely grateful.
PREFACE TO THE WESTWINDS PRESS EDITION
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it s not the same river and he s not the same man .
-H ERACLITUS
I n 1986, when the first chapters of this book were being written, Lime Creek appeared almost exactly as it does today. A few major avalanche cycles after particularly heavy winter storms have taken down slopes covered with trees and opened up hillsides here and there that were once densely forested. Young spruce and fir growing in the protective shadow of mature aspen that had risen from the charred forest floor in the aftermath of the great Lime Creek Burn of 1879 are now beginning to overshadow and will one day replace those aspen in a cycle of forest maturation that is ongoing. But the green tundra that surrounds the stream s beginnings as small furrows of trickling water above tree line, the alpine meadows and dense forests of its midstream meanders, the narrow, deep rock canyon of steeply tumbling chaos that characterizes the wild creek just before its confluence with Cascade Creek a mile or so above its joining with the Animas River several thousand vertical feet below Lime Creek s lush green beginnings do not appear to have changed at all.
But the region the stream flows through and the man who steps into that stream are no longer the same.
Those who have read the first edition of this little book already know that an extended essay begun in the attempt to explore one idea grew in the course of its writing into a collection of small vignettes that added another theme. The first edition began with the assertion that, in an age when bold journeys to distant places seemed to have captured the fancy of many readers (often to the exclusion of reading about more humble excursions), significant journeys of discovery did not require great distance and even greater adventures in order to be meaningful. In fact, that introduction asserted, perhaps the best place for such a journey of discovery was one s own home, one s own region, one s own place . A few months into the writing, my partner and love, Karen Boucher-K. B., was diagnosed with leukemia and within a year, before the book had been completed, she had died from the ravages of that disease. What began as an exploration of physical place, a collection of tales set in a valley we both dearly loved, became also an exploration of the experience of illness, loss, and grief, and the discovery of rebirth and healing in the powerful presence of nature and in the awareness and experience of natural cycles.
It was this rebirth that was anticipated, hoped for but not yet fully realized, that was metaphorically represented in the first edition s epilogue as the coming of spring, an inevitable spring that would follow as it must, as it always had, a long winter in the Lime Creek valley.
The first edition alluded to environmental concerns with an incipient awareness that sensed a reality climate science would soon confirm. The carbon emissions that we d been pouring into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, that we ve continued to pour into the atmosphere over the course of the thirty years since this book was begun have dramatically altered the alpine environment. Surrounding peaks once climbed in deep, firm, hard snow as late as early July now rarely hold snow (except in their most shaded north-facing gullies) much past May. Warmer, drier winters have seriously stressed the forests of the San Juan Mountains allowing cataclysmic fires to rage with a frequency and intensity they rarely demonstrated before, many of those fires fueled by acre upon acre of standing deadwood the result of beetle kill. The trees of those forests once suffered less stress because they had been well watered by deep, long lasting winter snows. The bitter, subzero cold that was once common in winter greatly reduced tree-killing insect populations. As a consequence, previous cleansing fires had been less frequent and far less catastrophic. On the Atlantic side of the Continental Divide, not terribly far east of Lime Creek in the Rio Grande River headwaters, the effects of beetle kill have been so severe, so extensive, that over great swaths of land few healthy trees remain.
Strangely, wonderfully, the worst ravages of climate change have not yet appeared in the Lime Creek valley. The winters are not as cold. The snow is not as deep. Winter doesn t last as long as it once did, but vast expanses of standing dead timber have not yet appeared. The high tundra still absorbs and gently releases the downpours from summer storms. Other streams in the region now quickly rise and become muddy during such spates, but for the most part Lime Creek remains clear. How long it will last, I do not know, but for now the Lime Creek valley is a place one can go and experience the world as it was, a place where one can imagine that there are still regions relatively untouched by the ravages of human population growth, modernization, and the now readily seen as not entirely wonderful consequences of industrial progress. For now, for a while, Lime Creek remains a place of natural beauty where one can go to heal a wounded modern soul.
There have been other changes.
The child I wrote about in the first edition of this book, my son, Daniel, who once roamed the dense woods that press up against the banks of some favorite stretches of stream, places I often fished while he played in and ex