“1/26/82 Early morning. Cigarette and coffee. A mysterious tone, like a deeply-pitched marimba key or the tones arrived at by rubbing the edge of a champagne glass, but very deep ~ repeated about once every two seconds, of about 1/2 to 1 second duration, appearing to originate outside the cabin. So early, so dark, so rainy, that I won't bestir myself to track it down; indeed I luxuriate in the generosity of an existence that provides so many mysteries, that I can waste opportunities to unravel their tangles and reveal the knots that bind them to the fabric of existence.
It's early. Dark. The two rains wash the cabin ~ the one original rain, with its barrages of small drops; and the derivative rain falling from the oak branches high above the cabin, with its larger, louder drops typing over the page of my roof, secret messages from the ether, if I had ears to hear.
If this had been snow, I would have weeks on end of skiing in and out of my cabin to look forward to. As it is, the past few days have been warm, and the snow had been melting rapidly; the rain should knock it down even faster. Moody Ridge road is rapidly deteriorating on the grade next to Hartze. A soft trench has been churned down into the roadbed below the snow; it would be lovely if the first quarter mile of Moody Ridge road were paved. It would be lovely if the Green Valley Trail was forgotten by the General Public.
Strong winds, no hint of dawn. New messages composed and typed with reckless abandon on the roof. Extremely rapid key-work; only a demonic energy could manage such outbursts.
Blue-green algae very happy in the sunshine, click together into mandalas, big grin on their faces.
Now sleet, goddamn it, tapping its code on the big window, little clinking clicks or clicking clinks, and it ain't supposed to be ~ I want rain, rain, rain, rain to erase the snow below the 4200‘contour. For a while. I want to bring my wheelbarrow back from the McClungs.
[...]
~ Night... hmmm; how to put it? That it was a stormy day, rain and sleet splattering down in cool steadiness, the big brushes of pine needles bent and waving in the wind, singing their mournful tunes. That I skied out in the Slush and the Sleet and got Pretty Wet before I reached my Toyota. Slurped on out Moody Ridge road and sped in to D.F. to find my mailbox empty yet another day...”
“1/26/99 [...] I have also been corresponding with TNF about the Towle Brothers Railroad and the possibilities of making a trail along its course; I have shown Bill Slater, one of their archaeologists, over the section from Bear River up to Lowell Hill Ridge. Perhaps something will come of this.
I continue to work on developing a trail connecting Lovers Leap to the Gold Run Diggings and Garrett Road, and have done a little trail work at the Lovers Leap end, and quite a lot at the Gold Run Diggings end. Recently I have been doing a lot of exploring in search of an old trail leading to Bogus Point from Canyon Creek, which I hypothesize once existed, and the main problem has been that there are many old trails here and there on that slope. On my last trip, just before the flu struck, I found an extremely promising trail forking off from the main Canyon Creek Trail near the first waterfall vista point.
[Russell Towle's journal]
 |
| Snow on Moody Ridge, January 26, 2002 |
No comments:
Post a Comment