Our world here now, like a new lovers, is engaged in the earliest days of a courtship, a tentative dance between season and storm, weather and light. In this place, the dance plays out across the craggy face of El Salto’s peaks, dawn kissing its deep lines with a limning and liminal sun, new and clouds holding it in a glowing and gentle embrace at twilight.
Now, too, it’s a good benchmark by which to measure winter and its shift into spring, a measurement that has shown us clearly, in recent years, how far our precipitation levels have fallen.
Time was, and not so very many years ago — fewer than ten, although it seems hard to believe now — that mid-February would have seen The Old Man’s brown face covered with white paint, little of his own skin showing through the snowy blanket. The image above, captured now night on a decade and a half ago, would have been shot on a day well into official spring, when the snows had already mostly departed, leaving only a dusting along the sharp-edged crags and cliffs. Now, it should be still white, particularly given the recent snows . . . and yet, there is less visible white this morning than on the evening the photo was taken.
The name of the outcropping is locally, colloquially rendered in Spanish: El Salto — in English, this land’s other colonial language, The Jump. The people who belong to the land from which it rises have other names for it. I have always called it The Old Man, not in derogation but in veneration, because from the angle of our land, it appears to be the face of an elder reclining against the peak, face turned skyward as if in prayer. Apparently, what I see in the rock face is consonant with one of its older identities, and, of course, in our way, the word “old” is not an insult, but an acknowledgment of the accumulation of experience and wisdom, something to be honored.
Only the lower side of the face is visible in this image, of course; the mix of cloud and glare of the setting sun shield his eyes from view. But the overall effect is celebratory, somehow: an opening up to the last of the light before the dark descends, a welcoming of the new warmth that will last through the indigo hours until the sun shines directly upon its face once again.
And this, too, is a tentative dance: our acceptance of the cold and the still-early dark that shifts and turns and trades places with our anticipation of the warmer light. It’s visible on the peaks and on the slopes, white receding to display a warm red earth studded with evergreen; visible, too, here at the lower-lying elevations, remnant patches of snow revealing a mix of mud and early green shoots as they cede the land to the sun.
And yet . . . the snow arrives tomorrow night, or so the forecast tells us. Parts of three days will be given over to winter once again, before spring makes its next temporary incursion. There will be snow this time next week, too, they predict. In this place, winter does not fully release its hold before May, or even June; last year, the peaks received a dusting of the white stuff every month of the year, even with the summer monsoons.
Still, for this day, the air is warm — unseasonably, unreasonably so — and the light is strong in the face of the clouds even now already gathering to the northwest. We have had a few hours of quiet, but as I write, in this very moment, the wind rises.
Today, the dance begins anew: tentative, yes, but at times also moments of wild fury that descend into serenity. The steps now are hesitant; they will find their footing in the hours and days to come.
So, too, will the earth, The Old Man and the land beneath and the sun among the clouds. And so, too, will we.
~ Aji
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