The Bugle Corps

Carol and I spent yesterday afternoon and evening at Rocky Mountain National Park hanging out with the elk. Yes, it’s that magical time of year again: the rut. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve made the trek to witness this amazing spectacle. This year was Carol’s first, and it was wonderful to be with someone experiencing it for the first time.

It was coolish, with a few sprinkles of rain, and the usual jam of not always very bright people trying to get a look. We began at my favorite spot near the Fall River Road, and watched a big burly bull work his harem and chase off a youngster who looked to still have a few years to go before he’d be playing with the big boys. On the east side of the road, a beautiful, big bull came along up the willow-lined stream and bellowed several challenges, but couldn’t get across the road to further his attempt. We got quite a close look at him:

Here’s the youngster who got run off:

And here’s some general scenery, including an amazing sunset:

We drove around to the Upper Beaver Meadows area after the action died down at Fall River; it’s a beautiful side road over on the south side of the park, but I’ve never gone up there during elk season. As twilight deepened, we listened to three bulls bugling and squealing up and down the valley, the sound echoing and carrying. We watched a big bull right down below us for quite awhile; he was by himself but just bugling away. Then suddenly a cow and her calf appeared from the edge of the forest; he couldn’t believe his luck. Instant harem! He trotted over to them and rounded them right up. Happy boy!

It was getting dark and we drove a little further along to find a big herd on both sides of the road, and at least three bulls in close proximity, all in full voice. It was finally too dark to really see anything, so we sat in the car with the windows down, bundled up against the cold wind, and just listened to chorus. It was even more eerie as darkness fell and that otherworldly bellowing and high-pitched squealing sounded from the shadows. Driving out, we came to a spot where we could hear them even with the windows rolled up! We pulled over and stopped and rolled the windows down again, just in time to hear two bulls, close by, in full battle: the clatter of antlers in the willow scrub, snorting, grunts, and bellows of rage. We sat in the darkness and just listened.

Missing

Carol is in Copper Mountain at the CASTA conference this week and I’m missing her like crazy. Her smile, the sound of her breathing next to me at night, the warmth of her curled up beside me on the couch. I’m no good at sleeping alone, any more.

Changing directions

I wish I had written this quote down; it really struck me when I first read it, and I have been thinking of it these last few days. More or less, it went like this: Pay attention to beginnings and endings; for they are the soul changing directions.

I closed a chapter of my professional life this last month, when I finished up with a client I’d been working with for five years. It was a good client and (mostly) a good relationship, but I was ready to move on to new creative challenges. And in my typical rush and busyness, I haven’t given myself much time or space to mark the occasion.

Five years ago I literally showed up on this client’s doorstep, invited myself in, and started working. It was not quite a year after my partner Sara had died after a short battle with a very aggressive cancer. I was in the early stages of re-inventing myself in many ways, including professionally. I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I just knew that I wanted it to matter.

Six months previous to that I’d taken a holiday trip to Mexico with some friends. We’d stayed at a very expensive resort on the Riviera Maya; a completely enclosed luxury world full of incredibly obnoxious American tourists swinging their senses of entitlement around with all the subtlety of baseball bats. It was a real eye opener for me, and started me thinking: what can I do with my privilege, with all my advantages, that will make me different from these dreadful creatures? There has to be a way I can use what I know how to do to help the state of the world, somehow, in a real way.

So that spring I started investigating the possibility of working with a nonprofit organization, doing media work. I talked to a few different agencies to get the lay of the land; the consensus seemed to be that social justice organizations, which would have been my first choice, were not likely to be able to support someone like me on their staff. I was told that conservation groups were doing much better, and was pointed in the direction of a group here in Fort Collins.

I checked out their website; what intrigued me was that although their mission was conservation-based, there was a strong social component to it as well. They didn’t just plant trees; in Central America they also built a kind of improved cooking stove that had a huge impact on women’s health and family economics. They were also beginning to work with the Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. I called their development director and made an appointment to meet with her and talk about what I could do for them.

Going back to work — the first few days — was incredibly hard. I had taken most of the year off since Sara had died, and that year had been unbelievably difficult and stressful, mentally, emotionally, in every way. It was good to have a place to go again, but hard to make myself sit in one place and concentrate. I was afraid that I’d forgotten how to — how to think, how to focus, how to get things done. My brain was rusted almost shut, it felt like. And in a new place, with new people, a new job — it was killer hard.

That was five years ago. In that time, working with them, I had the chance to go to Central America, to places I’d never imagined — climbing a volcano in El Salvador, walking through the slums of Managua, driving the Pan American Highway in Guatemala — to visit, many times, the prairies of the Pine Ridge reservation, to get to know the people there, do sweat lodge, sleep a cold November night in a tipi next to a firepit of smoldering cottonwood stumps.

But it’s all about continuing that process of opening up; opening the eyes, opening the heart, opening space in life for new things to come into. I am happy to move on and most of all enormously grateful to have had the opportunities — opportunities that came about because I was open to them. Embrace change. Be open. Be proud of where you’ve been, what you’ve accomplished; be excited for the future. And pay attention to beginnings and endings.

VSAB*

*Very Serious Adult Behavior

AKA “The Tractor Race”

[where:9040 Highway 66,Platteville, CO 80651]