This should be the view from our gate this Monday morning, but it’s not.
After a whole day yesterday of rain at this elevation and snow up high, one would expect all of the peaks to have at least a rime of the white stuff. This ridgeline? Not a single snowflake.
There’s snow on Wheeler, of course. A faint dusting on the southerly ridge of Spoon Mountain, not remotely enough to cover the tundra. Scattered patches of white along the uppermost ridges of Pueblo Peak. Most of it will be gone before the day is out.
At this moment, we have the clouds and fog, trailing bands wrapping themselves around the peaks like a shawl and forming their own bright white backdrop to the equally bright gold of the aspen leaves. The pale wan sun of the morning seems now to have found a home in their branches, each amber leaf a ray of golden light.
It sounds . . . hopeful, and there’s a way in which it is, but it means less on that front than those looking for symbolism might think or want. The fact of the matter is that golden leaves are normal for this time of year, but so is a good amount of snow on the peaks, and while we’re at last getting the former, the latter remains stubbornly elusive now.
Indeed, even the image above that is the subject of this week’s photo meditation was already outside our norm, even if we didn’t know it then. At the time, it seemed one of those rare and welcome aberrations: unseasonal and mysterious fog, rain here and snow up high, hauntingly beautiful weather perfectly suited to the waning days of October. Back then, sme fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago? It seemed a gift, a blessing.
Now we know it was simply one of the early signs of disruption, a precursor to disintegration.
To collapse.
I know the colonial world is tired of hearing us say it, but collapse is where we are already; in something of this scale, by the time you can actually perceive the changes in real time, it’s already too late. We should already be on a recovery and reclamation trajectory, but that world stubbornly insists that “awareness” is sufficient for “prevention.” Of course, it also insists that forcing disabled folks to use paper or metal straws will change the world, while it burns jet fuel at epic rates and forces new pipelines through unceded Indigenous lands, violently pulls rare minerals from endangered earth and uses Indigenous tax dollars to fund billionaire vanity subspace flights.
And of course, it’s all done without a single pandemic-mitigation measure, not a mask in sight.
No, we have no interest in mincing words anymore.
Outside the window, the fog has not yet lifted; indeed, more of it has moved in to enshroud the more northerly peaks. The air is cold, the chill edge of the wind sharp as a scalpel, yet nt quite cold enough to deliver that first snow of the season. But we are at last moving into temperatures more usual for this time, and that is cause for celebration.
And of course, with each amber leaf its own ray of golden light, the aspens bring the sun to us now.
~ Aji
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