dispatch from the edge

Some Creekside Meditations on Moving Water

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By Peter Anderson 1. Where you sit determines the water’s alphabet. In the everyday shade where the horsetails grow, a white wave washes-washes-washes over a fallen tree. The letter “s” is shaped like moving water and sounds like steam rushing through a kettle spout. Right here anyway, “S” is this creek’s favorite letter. Yes, Yes, …

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson Trip Advisor Snowflake Museum, Monarch Crest, Colorado Date of Review: 12-15-2068 Reviewer: Fern the Flatlander We had heard about the Snowflake Museum from friends in Kansas City and decided to make a pilgrimage for the holidays. The kids of course had never seen snow, though they had heard the occasional story. Our …

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Some Bunkhouse Advice for the Perplexed

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By Peter Anderson Dear Nun-2-Slim, I am 5th generation here and I don’t know my neighbors anymore. Seems there’s more strangers hereabouts than family, friends, or acquaintances. We can’t hardly find enough Ladies of the Frontier anymore to bake pies for our fundraiser. I been here 85 years and sometimes I don’t know where I …

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Dispatch From The Edge

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By Peter Anderson

It is hard enough to explain the game to someone who does not know it. It is even harder for them to understand why you love baseball enough to watch it. It is soooo slowwww, they say, and they are right, but for me anyway, that is part of the game’s appeal. What a waste of time, others say, and who am I to argue? For them, it may well be. But here at the end of the road, watching baseball on a slow summer evening is like drifting down the meanders of a familiar stretch of river – it’s lazy and it’s dreamy and it keeps calling me back.

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Dispatch From the Edge

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A Wilderness Alphabet By Peter Anderson   Let their names remind us of our shared inheritance 100 million acres, roadless and wild. From Absaroka to Apache Creek … From Ansel Adams to Allegheny, hallow Black Bear and Great Bear, be a witness for Bald Knob and Big Gum Swamp, in Copper Salmon, swim like one, …

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

1. One winter afternoon in 1974, I knew how good a hockey goalie’s life could be: skates sufficiently dull to slide around in the crease (but sharp enough for stability and precision), pads snug and riding well on legs, good light and clear vision though the eyeholes of a fiberglass mask, glove hands moving with speed and accuracy, kicks to right and left bouncing out shots along the ice. On a breakaway, the player I dreaded most hit the post after a risky cross-body lunge on my part. Good mojo held up until the third period clock ran down to all its lovely zeros. We came out on top. Just barely.

Before the rematch with our big rivals later that season, someone from their squad sent me an unsigned note (prophetic as it turned out) made up of letters cut and pasted from a newspaper. It said simply: “Anderson … Your ass is grass.” Soon that dreaded skater was back, drifting out toward the red line and receiving long breakaway passes from his defensemen. He beat me a few too many times that day – a gloomy denouement in an average, though occasionally transcendent, goalie career. Never again would I experience the adrenalin-infused task of guarding the net in such a big game, but the lure of a good day on the ice remained.

2. This mountain lake lives in shadow. The sun is a rounder … stays away longer each night, and sleeps it off behind the ridge during the day. The winds come down off the mountain, sweeping skiffs of snow across the ice. A father pulls on his skates, so much easier now with plastic and Velcro than it once was with leather and lace. He tests the freeze, first around the edges – a few feet thick – then out in the middle – clear and so deep, he can’t tell where the ice leaves off and the black water begins. He skates as fast as he can, grateful this sprint is his own – no whistles, no coach. He slides one blade in front of the other, leans into a wide rink turn, and carves two thin white lines that follow him out to the edge of the lake where his daughter, still wobbly in her new pink skates, glides toward him. He takes her hands in his and skates backwards, looking over his shoulder for stones frozen in the ice, then back at his daughter, steady now, who sees only what lies ahead. 

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Dispatch From the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

“How long are you going to be around?” my 13-year-old daughter asked Hester who was ringing up our groceries at the Mercantile. Some years ago, Hester, left town for a while after her husband died. More recently she returned and now has her old job back. Though I don’t know for sure – we are really only acquaintances – I think she went back to Montana to get a little family support, while her son, who had been pals with my older daughter, was making his way through high school. He’s doing well now, I learned, as I ran my credit card through the machine that I have never quite mastered. Credit? Debit? Slide? Insert? Graduated from high school, Hester’s son is apprenticed to an auto mechanic in Missoula who works on Fords, Chevies and Subarus. All good news. But it was her reply to Caroline’s question – how long she would be around – that really caught my attention. “For the rest of my life,” she said.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

It is the gleaning season. Somewhere in the Bible, he recalls, the farmers leave the remnants of their harvest for the hungry. It is still so for those who know where to look. As the high aspens begin to turn, the sandhill cranes circle above the valley before settling into some shallow wetlands down by the dunes. They will spend the night there, safe from predators. Early in the morning, they will fly west across the valley to glean the leftover grains from vacant farm fields. In a few days, he will rattle by that same field in a beat up Chevy with New Mexico plates, scanning a dusty county road for russets jostled loose from the big potato trucks as they ride the ruts and bumps toward a warehouse in Monte Vista.

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Dispatch From The Edge

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By Peter Anderson

I tell her I need to replace the glass top of an electric range. I tell her how the bear broke into our house, stood on top of the stove hoping to find some goodies in a nearby cabinet, and fell through the glass instead. “I understand,” says the woman on the customer hotline in Tennessee. “We live in the mountains, too.”

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Dispatch From the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

We are in a library in a small mountain town. Another late spring storm has just arrived, bringing with it rain, hail and several inches of new snow. A traveler who has pitched his tent at the campground outside of town sits in this library looking at the weather through big windows facing the storm. He is grateful to be here in a warm place, reading about a National Geographic expedition to the Arctic. Sometimes armchair travel is so fine, maybe even better than the real deal.

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Dispatch From the Edge

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by Peter Anderson Road weary after the drive up from Page, I stop in Kayenta, near a handmade espresso sign on a sheet of plywood, and I follow the arrows – coffee this way – through an opening into a courtyard and into the Blue Shepard Coffee Shop. Try a cool, refreshing Nava-Joe, says another …

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Dispatch from the Edge

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by Peter Anderson In October of 1960, I saw Nikita Kruschev ride by in an open car, waving to a hostile crowd of onlookers. Kruschev, the leader of the Russian Communist Party, was on his way to a Long Island estate where Russian diplomats from the UN occasionally stayed. I remember him as a portly, …

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson
Dear Griz,

Old Route 66. The Mother Road on the eastern edge of Flagstaff. Near the Great Wall Chinese Buffet, Bubba’s Real Texas Barbecue, and Purple Sage Motel (American owned), we are sitting in the customer lounge of the Econolube. An oil change is rarely just an oil change for this old Dodge, with a big fender dent, a wandering right headlight, and 140 G’s on the odometer. “All four tires are cuppin’ real bad,” says Calamity Jane, the service manager. “You’re a blowout waiting to happen.”

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

Dear Matt:

Sorry I missed your wedding. The East Coast seems further away than it used to. And I’m sorry I haven’t met your honey. Now your little boy is two maybe three and soon you will be driving him to school. When you were here, I was carrying Rosalea up the trail.

She is twelve now, Caroline is seven, and we are still here on the side of the mountain. If it weren’t for a stop sign and a slight rise in the grade once we get down to the valley floor, I could almost roll the girls out to school in neutral. They humor me on our morning rides when I play them my classics—no not make’em smart Mozart, but Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland, 1968. Today, the intro to Gypsy Eyes, Mitch Mitchell laying down his base drum top hat groove – boomchazz, boomchazz, boomchazz, boomchazz. Jimi slides down the neck of his Stratocaster – can you hear it? – as we are losing altitude.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

The Free box outgrew itself. Now it’s a shed on the edge of town, roof rimmed with windworn Tibetan prayer flags, old mattress leaning up against front wall spray painted with the words “No dumping.” The cardboard box from our garage contains some lightly used fairy wings – still the rage in preschool fashion – and bench seat covers from Autozone, which won’t add to the clutter for long. But I worry about the mini John Deere tractor/sprinkler taking up shelf space, since it’s November and a big winter front will soon bury the few lawns in town.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

Eastbound clouds stall out over the high peaks of the Sangres. Others, low and gray, drape the big valley sky to the west. It is a restless season. I imagine the bears are on the move … such a fierce hunger before the big sleep, and the rose hips are ripe. A bull elk climbs slopes so thick with pinyon and juniper, it’s hard to guide his big rack through the branches. He is moving away from last night’s smoke, the hunter’s fire. And he is moving away from my wife Grace and I, who are walking and talking quietly on the trail below him, watching the white dog as he noses through a pile of old cow bones.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

Around our house, some of the biggest piñon and juniper trees I’ve ever seen offer us a little shelter from the wind and weather that often blows in hard from the southwest. Nearby, a little to our south, a line of aspens that follows Crestone Creek down the mountain adds to our sense of enclosure and harbors warblers and western tanagers during the warmer months, as well as a colony of turkey vultures.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

I live on the outskirts of Edgetown (aka Crestone), barely into the old Baca Land grant (now Baca subdivision), at the end of suburban and the beginning of wild, just east of a creekside riparian zone, on the high end of the piñon juniper and the low end of ponderosa, on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley and the western flanks of the Sangre de Cristo. In between our place (8,300 feet) and town (8,000 feet), rain turns into snow. This place is a threshold where roads end and trails begin and where the horizontal meets the vertical. Edges like ecotones, those zones where ecosystems meet, are diverse, full of life, and worthy of exploration. I look forward to checking out the edges, both cultural and ecological, and dropping you a line from time to time. – Peter Anderson

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