Peter Anderson

Some Creekside Meditations on Moving Water

by

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, …

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson The night the fire came over the ridge, I happened to be walking near downtown Salida when I saw a large four-legged shadow in someone’s yard. Big dog, I thought. Only it wasn’t a dog. When it walked under the streetlight in a back alley I said hello to a bear, a …

Read more

Postcards to Blanca Peak

by

By Peter Anderson 1. Dear Blanca, On this postcard we see you from the north. The clouds have saddled up on your high ridges, where for a while, they will stay, until they realize you’re not going anywhere. Then they’ll get restless. One of them will say something like, “Hey, I’m gonna get me a …

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

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 …

Read more

Some Bunkhouse Advice for the Perplexed

by

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 …

Read more

The Road to Chimera: Chapter 1

by

By Peter Anderson What follows is the opening chapter of a mystery-in-progress set in a fictional San Luis Valley town that may bear some resemblance to the town where I live. Ray followed the road through some cottonwoods and crossed the bridge over the Gonaway River. It had been almost twenty years since he and …

Read more

Dispatch From The Edge

by

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.

Read more

Dispatch From the Edge

by

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, …

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson All winter long, this lingering dissonance: I say “beautiful day,” and the blue sky mildness is real and pleasant enough, but so is the uneasy notion that our good fortune now will cost us come summer. The weather “pleasantries” we exchange carry only half of the truth. The other half, too unsettling …

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

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. 

Read more

Dispatch From the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson As you head into the good cheer of the holidays, you run into an old friend on the corner downtown between the bank and the post office who happens to be hauling a hydraulic wood splitter. And you have several piñons, decimated by an influx of beetles, which have been downed and …

Read more

Dispatch From the Edge

by

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.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

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.

Read more

Dispatch From The Edge

by

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.”

Read more

Book Review – Heading Home Field Notes

by

By Peter Anderson
Conundrum Press, 2017
978-1-9422-8021-7; 84 pp.; $14.99

Reviewed by Lynda La Rocca

Short, but sweet – and wistful, sad, thoughtful, funny, poignant, or filled with longing. That’s how I’d describe the essays that make up Crestone-based writer, teacher and poet Peter Anderson’s latest book, Heading Home: Field Notes.

These lyrical musings, which the author describes as “a collection of flash prose and prose poems,” are true songs of the open road, a road that stretches invitingly and seemingly endlessly before this man who starts down it independent, unencumbered, eager to learn and experience and explore.

It’s a lonely road where, paradoxically, one is never alone and “everyone [is] a good buddy just waiting to happen.”

It’s also a road Anderson is still traveling, albeit now with the quiet certainty that it always circles back to family and to home.

Along the way, Anderson revels in the vast sweep of the West with its moon-cast shadows and wide-open spaces, snowdrifts and high deserts, mountain ranges and deep forests.

He encounters mule deer and cougars, watches turkey vultures soar the thermals, and waits for bats to emerge from an abandoned mine. And he introduces us to rodeo clowns and waitresses, long-haul truckers in backwater cafés, a Navajo family stuck with his own family in car-repair limbo at the Econolube, friends separated by distance and death, and friends reunited over a beer. He falls in love and becomes a father who teaches the basics of pond hockey and air guitar and comforts his two girls after their ducks fall victim to a stealthy predator.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

I must have missed one of the rock cairns that marked the trail and walked off the map, but I did find a fine camp in an alpine meadow, with an island of spruce shielding me from elk grazing the waning tundra sun in a snow-rimmed cirque a mile or so off toward the Continental Divide. If my inner compass was a little off, so what? This was a fine place to be lost. As the elk herd approached, a slight breeze came with them, floating my scent off toward the sun which had gone down behind a distant ridge. As far as they were concerned I wasn’t there. Even when the walls of my tent billowed out in an occasional puff of wind, I didn’t exist. So they came closer and closer and soon I could hear the cows and calves mewing and bleating to one another on the far side of the spruce.

Read more

Nomadic Poetry – Querencia

by

Querencia By Peter Anderson Is the space where we are most at home The sound of the word takes me to water, to the river maybe, the nose of a kayak in the heart of a wave, as it spills over a ledge curls back upstream, crests and falls again crests and falls again and …

Read more

Dispatch From the Edge

by

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.

Read more

Dispatch From the Edge

by

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 …

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

What I had in mind when I set out hitching home from Cortez one morning thirty some years ago, was making it back to a girlfriend’s house in Poncha Springs. Instead, I ended up in the Saguache County Jail.

As the day began, I had every reason to believe I would ride a wave of good fortune all the way to Poncha. It was a glorious, green, early summer day on the road and I had gotten in a few quick rides to Pagosa Springs. I was watching the high waters of the San Juan roll by, when a flashy Jaguar with Arizona plates, came to a stop on the shoulder up ahead. “Where ya headed?” said a jovial fellow from Phoenix who had been driving since the early morning hours.

“Poncha Springs,” I said. 

Read more

A Crestone Pyramid Update

by

By Peter Anderson

The nightmare would begin something like this: From the western flank of the Sangres, I am looking down on my home territory, out across the windswept savannah of the San Luis Valley toward the usual landmarks – San Antonio Mountain and the south San Juans off to the southwest, the La Garita Range to the west, even a few of the great Sawatch peaks off to the north. But there is a new mountain in the foreground … no, not a mountain … it’s a man-made pyramid … a pink pyramid four hundred feet tall. What the … ?

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

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, …

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

The vultures are leaving their roost over by the creek. They follow the Rio Grande south until the climate suits them. The sandhill cranes are flying in from the north, sometimes barely visible in the high skies as they circle, gather themselves and get their bearings; sometimes their weird cackling call precedes them as they emerge from low-slung autumn clouds. Elk are bugling for mates, bears are scavenging for extra calories before the big sleep, and coyotes are on the prowl for unsuspecting house pets. Here at the end of the road, summer drifters who came to town with little more than a sleeping bag are dreaming of sunshine and saguaros or maybe some seaside town in southern California, hoping to set aside some cash for the road. This is a restless time.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

How do you know when a place has become a part of you and you a part of that place?

Thirty-five years ago, I lived in a small cabin under a very big sky. Like Crestone, it was at the end of the road. Well, not exactly at the end. You could drive a jeep over the Divide in the summer months, and many people came up there to do just that. But come winter, this all-but-abandoned mining town was the last stop for the county snowplow. For a few years, I was the only full-time resident there during the winter months.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

I used to live in a Wyoming town known for its consistently high winds. On the rare occasion when the wind quit blowing, everyone fell down. Spring is our high wind season here in the valley–maybe not quite as constant and harsh as in Laramie where my neighbors used to measure wind velocity with an anvil on a length of chain – but significant nonetheless. I’ve witnessed brown clouds of dust bowl proportions carrying newly plowed soils from Hooper and points west to the foot of the Sangres.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

Other than a blue hole off to the west, from which a late afternoon sun throws a promised-land glow over the hills south of Del Norte, we are driving under a woolen-gray February sky. Crossing over the Rio Grande, gusts of Wolf Creek wind carry billowing sheets of snow down the frozen river toward the ranch where my daughter and I are headed.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

You are at the glory hole and you are waiting for an emergence. The air coming up from a hole in the side of the mountain is cooler. You look down into the shaft of this abandoned iron mine and feel a slight breeze, but you don’t see much. It is a dark portal into a deep cavern.

Think of this time as akin to that twilight transition between waking and sleeping.

What is about to happen is not unlike a dream. At first, it is only a deep stirring, somewhere in the darkness below you. When you finally notice some movement you see only a few bats, ascending like shards of night sky into the twilight. These are the first of several hundred thousand Mexican free-tail bats soon to follow.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

By Peter Anderson

The black fox, which is really a red fox, came by again this morning. Members of the red fox species – a misnomer as it turns out–may be gray, silver, sometimes tinted blue, and, most dramatically, moonless midnight sky black. I know the black fox is a red fox because it has a white tip on the end of its tail.

I also know why the black fox is here and why it keeps coming back. This fox smells duck. On previous visits, it may have spied its prey, potentially a very succulent prey at that. Our ducks were a gift from my wife’s brother, a rancher in the Animas River Valley, who worried, quite frankly, if they would survive our ignorance of fowl behavior. But they managed well here, setting up house in the relative safety of our growdome greenhouse, while Uncle Johnny’s ducks north of Durango met with misfortune via several red-tailed hawks.

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

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.”

Read more

Dispatch from the Edge

by

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.

Read more