Dawn comes this morning on a cold pale light, ready to fulfill its promise of, later, turquoise skies and a chill wind. These last few days, simply going out of doors is a humbling experience, air riven by the ferocity of an unseasonal north wind near-constantly.
If predictions hold, there will be more to come: A special weather statement has already been issued for this area from tomorrow through week’s end, promising still colder temperatures and a non-negligible chance of winter weather.
After such a long and brutal drought, it’s easy to become inured to the reality of it, to think, if only subconsciously, that we live in a milder climate.
In reality, the drought itself is proof that we don’t.
We know this here at Red Willow, perhaps better than most. This is a place of extremes — of elevation and climate, weather and elements, season and time. Life is known here for its very unpredictability, for a spectrum that is long and wide and deep and for conditions that swing like a pendulum, rapid-fire, from one end to the other.
And it is known for its ancient character, for the inexorable power of time.
Wings captured these images on film at this very season a half-dozen years ago, iconic landmarks beneath the blue of a perfect November sky. The small woods above looks much the same as it did then, if perhaps slightly less gold, the cottonwoods having already begun to shed more of their leaves than usual.
The small stand of gnarled cottonwoods, viewed from an angle different from yesterday’s image, was then still inhabited by the old warrior and his smaller fellow sentry. By the next year, when his old body had at last been felled by an outlaw wind, we all believed the stand to be dead.
And it was.
The broken trunks left standing decayed visibly, weathering beneath the sun’s withering gaze. Branches fell and bark disintegrated, crumbling like ash onto an earth waiting to subsume it.
And yet, a few years later, those still standing were resurrected. Not the old soldier on the left, of course; his aged body had been uprooted entirely. It was his time, although we mourned his loss no less for that. But those on the right, roots still held by the earth, would breathe once again, bodies revived and renewed by an accidental fire.
Time marches on, but it never leaves our world wholly behind.
Not far from that small center stand stood four other sentries, old twisted cottonwoods of substantial size and skeletal presentation — warriors naked of leaves at any season, clothed only in the armor of their rugged bark. They, too, were landmarks; when work and other obligations took me on the road, I always knew that sighting them again meant that I was nearly home.
The same outlaw wind that took the other guardian returned to take two of these, too. It came back again for a third in that same season.
Now, and for many years, all that remains is the one on the far right. The other three were uprooted entirely, bodies broken and cast aside. Someone took a chainsaw to what remained, yet never hauled away most of the pieces, and the trunks lie on the ground in segments like some ancient puzzle crafted in three dimensions, just waiting for someone to put them together again.
It wouldn’t work, of course. It was, apparently, their time as well. I can’t help but feel a certain melancholy on behalf of the lonely warrior that remains, the last of his kind in that space. And yet, he stands, still defiant, watching over the land at the foot of the peaks.
On this day, he and his hold lessons for us: lessons in humility, because time always wins, but also lessons in persistence, resistance, insistence, because we have a job to do, no matter the circumstances that surround us, the harshness of our conditions or the loneliness of our cause.
At this moment, this is the day. It’s time to get to work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
