An early-morning hike in the Boulder Mountains late in June. We were looking for a wolf den but found only solace and silence.

    It’s a gnarled and tortured form, charred branches angling, leafless, lifeless. These pathetic limbs sway in the afternoon breeze, a trunk protruding from patches of blackened earth, dirt that once fed this wretched remnant of a bush its life.
    Ten months have passed since fire swept this valley, choking the sky and ravaging the forest, driving out its wild companions. To the west, higher still in the drainage, are divisions of towering charcoal trunks, rank-and-file monuments to the sheer power of Mother Nature in her rawest of moods.
  My attention returns to the bush. It is quite dead, destined for decomposition, but there’s an unmistakable aesthetic to its form. It’s a beauty that’s accentuated by the life threading the encircling meadow. Slender blades of Great Basin wild rye grow in twelve-inch-tall clumps. Yellow bunches of arrowleaf balsamroot and purple bluebells crowd the blackened mat of ashen earth. The fire’s evidence is clear, but the beauty in the rebirth is stunning, a resurrection one might not have thought possible having seen the sheer scale of the flames that incinerated this place.
    The sun is slanting through an exanimate stand of timber, and my head rises to meet its rays. I shoulder my pack and work my way west toward the heart of the burn, wondering if it’s where I should go.
    There’s a nearby creek that twists and tumbles over a rocky bed and smiles into meandering oxbows. The waters play with happy momentum in the waking day, producing syllables that tell subtle secrets if one pauses long enough to hear. The verve surrounding the creek is unmistakable. It feeds sedges and willows, which are growing with more vigor than parts of the valley where water is more sparse. But, still, everywhere things are growing. Everywhere there is life. Everywhere it is beautiful, and that beauty is because of the vigor of the growth, but also the contrast in the landscape, simultaneously dead and reborn.
    Much of what burned will never live again. The gnarled bush near the canyon’s entrance is forever gone. But the land is resilient, and it flowers still, growing in new ways, in fact invigorated by its own destruction. So on I walk, plodding toward the center, smiling at my purpose, and wondering what will become.

I probably have some thoughts to write, but they're beyond me at the moment. Follow this link to a photo essay on Andy Post, who passed all too early last week. Here's a link to Andy's obituary from the June 26 Denver Post.

I'm working on another Web site, www.westernperspective.com, and my ideas are still really rough. I figured I'd post a page to try to get my gears ticking. It's little more than a brainstorm, and it doesn't link anywhere. However, I welcome ideas, visions or perspectives on content, design and/or overall purpose.

    How often we look but don’t see, sniff but don’t smell, listen but don’t hear. Indeed, who have we become when we have learned to touch without feeling?
    Sometimes when my vision blurs and I seem to fail at these fundamental tenets of living there’s a Hawaiian word I ponder: kipukas. Literally, it means “openings,” and it came to be in the native Hawaiian tongue in order to describe the unique geological and ecological phenomenon that occurs when lava surrounds a portion of land, in effect cutting it off from the greater surrounding ecosystem. Kipukas are undisturbed islands where native vegetation and animals are protected from invasive species and the forces that have ravaged much of a surrounding landscape.
    They’re windows into what the land was before outside pressures mounted.
    We are, like the land, inundated by outside pressures. Childhood naivete and curiosity are eroded by life experiences. An ability to trust is undermined by a sense of betrayal. An inherent ability to heal is hindered by a drive to overcome and move forward. Our proclivity for sight is clouded by a drive to achieve that prompts us to look without seeing. That goes for looking inward as well as at one’s surroundings.
    As with the kipukas inherent to the lava flows on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, as well as on Idaho’s Snake River Plain, there are untarnished openings inside us, and we would do well to remember they’re there.
    Following two days on the river this weekend, I drove with a friend across Southern Idaho’s Camas Prairie. It’s a rolling expanse of sagebrush bordered by the snow-capped Soldier Mountains to the north and the Bennett Hills to the south. It’s a place named for camas roots, which bear beautiful blue blossoms called camas lilies in the spring. The roots from camas lilies were harvested historically by Nez Perce and Shoshone-Bannock Indians using digging sticks called tookas. The roots are said to taste like sweet potatoes.
    I’ve driven across the Camas Prairie dozens of times, perhaps dozens of dozens of times. I’ve seen this rolling sagebrush desert through the beams of my headlights, during sunrises and sunsets, and in four seasons of varying light. I’ve viewed it with skis on my feet, with a whitewater kayak wrapped around my waist, from the seat of a car, and with hiking boots on my feet. The salient fact is that when compared with many of the West’s jaw-dropping vistas it’s not inspiring country. It is, after all, mere desert: an expanse of sagebrush, grass and decrepit old homes and ranches crumbling with the passing of the high desert seasons and the ailing agrarian economies that prompted Europeans to move there in the first place.
    This weekend things were different. Perhaps my vision is attuned to the subtle nuances of light and shadow, maybe the timing was right—maybe both—but the hour-long drive across the Camas Prairie this weekend was among the most beautiful I’ve experienced.
    It’s been a long spring in the Northern Rockies, and the prairie has only just begun to bloom: arrowleaf balsamroot smearing the hills with yellow while cornices of snow cling to north-facing ridges, mirror-still pools of water lined with purple splotches of blooming lupine, antelope browsing on abundant green forage. The seasons are mixing on the Camas Prairie, and signs of life are combining with winter’s remnants.
    My companion, a life-long Idaho resident, is working on his undergraduate coursework and was compelled to share his newfound fascination with the stories the landscape tells. Having recently completed a geology course, he talked about how the land is more than rocks, trees and animals. It’s the product of millions of years of interrelating forces. It’s all the things that came before, he said, over millions of years. So much more than a beautiful view, a view that many people don’t even see.
    It’s like a story, I replied. Even the people who see it are often not aware of the story it tells.
    The sky this weekend dangled huge anvil-shaped thunderheads, the late-day sun peaking from between the mottled puffs of drifting cumulous clouds and casting long shadows across the prairie. Everywhere I saw images worth capturing, and I had to work hard not to stop. Not all of life needs to be photographed, after all. Sometimes living is enough. Sometimes.
    Speeding by a pool of water I noticed a barb-wire fence strung between crooked posts that protruded from the water and cast perfect reflections. A few minutes later I squatted at the edge of the pool looking through a lens and waiting for a red-winged blackird that fluttered nearby to land on top of one of the posts. I probed the pool, shifting left and right to bracket the scene at first with the fence posts, then with a nearby willow, then with the smooth curve of the hills in the background. As I did little rings appeared in the pool, and I pondered how the drops created perfect concentric forms that mingled with one another to create an impossible pattern that erased the reflection that had, moments before, been my quarry. As the rain intensified the rings grew both in number and intensity, thousands of perfect circles interacting with one another to rearrange the texture of the pool.
    It was one of those moments, an opening both of myself and by Mother Nature that revealed sights, smells and feelings easily taken for granted. We are so much more like the land than we usually consider. We’re drops of water of the same pond, concentric circles interacting to create a unique intellectual and emotional design that rearranges reflections reflected on before.
    And like the land we are stories that have been shaped by the events of our lives. Just as life affords kipukas through which to view things untarnished and beautiful, there are kipukas inside us. They’re windows that afford views into the stories of who we are.

    Last Friday, May 9, I attended a barbecue in West Ketchum in the shadow of the towering cliffs on the east flank of Bald Mountain. The days are long now, twilight lasting until 10 p.m., but as we enjoyed the late-day light a depressing fact descended from the sky in light, steady flakes: winter in the mountains is long indeed.
    Breaths were visible in big huffs of steam as we sat around an evening campfire. A guitar appeared in my hands, a banjo in the hands of the man to my left, and our frozen fingers worked up and down steel strings in a mutual attempt to produce the sounds of summer bluegrass.
    On Wednesday, after another five days of intermittent snow flurries, I joined some friends from Colorado for a night of camping in the Sawtooth Mountains before they departed on the slow, clear waters of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River for seven days. I helped rig rafts on a bank of three-foot-deep snow, then watched them drift on a gentle current through a mid-day squall. “Sometimes you’ve got to lower your standard of living to increase your quality of life,” said emylie, a friend who’s variously hung her hat in Boulder, Denver and Crested Butte over the past three years.
    On Thursday, May 15, things finally began to warm up, and by Saturday morning the rivers had risen dramatically. A friend and I piled into a truck with kayaks on the roof en route to the South Fork of the Payette River, where the water was chocolate brown, and huge trees drifted by on surging currents.
    It’s a curious thing, releasing yourself to a flood-stage tide of icy water. I was first to don my gear and hop in the river, peeling into the power and rediscovering just how small a man is faced with such fluid strength. As is my instinct early in the season I fought the river for a while, paddling hard to attain eddies, forcing my kayak into places the river really didn’t want it to go, and I became acutely aware of the techniques I needed to relearn: specifically that of letting the river do the work, working just hard enough myself to cajole the river into putting me where I wanted to be. It’s a dance every river-runner knows, but it’s not always easy to find the rhythm, and I could feel my stomach twisting with stress as we approached horizon lines and boiling eddies.
    By somewhere around the sixth mile I began to work with, rather than against, the river, and my confidence improved. That’s when I remembered a term and associated concepts taught to me by a woman who worked as an Outward Bound instructor for a period of years.
    Transference.
    The idea is that athletic activities transfer, whether conscious or not, certain fundamental truths, and those lessons apply whether in the workplace, relationships or other athletic arenas. With rock climbing, one learns trust in one’s climbing partner, how to overcome unthinkable obstacles and how to move the body in gymnastic ways. In life such lessons are executed daily: trusting friends, coworkers and lovers; using determination to surmount difficult obstacles; bending with creativity to solve difficult problems.
    The skier learns how to look for open spaces rather than dwell on obstacles, and so, too, it works in life. We tend to end up where we're looking, so we must avoid looking too long  at what we fear.
     In mountain biking one learns perseverance and faith in his or her own threshold for pain. In life such a lesson applies in reaching long-term goals like writing a book or getting through college.
    And in kayaking, an activity that has taught me more lessons, perhaps, than any other, one has to learn how to relax and let the river do the work. It’s another lesson that manifests in life over and again.
    The trick, however, is that each lesson gleaned from any given activity can be applied in life at different times and in different ways, and for someone like myself who’s pursued a wide array of activities there are a variety of tools from which to draw. Really, this is the most perplexing part of trying to understand transference, and it’s something I’ll return to after I describe the ensuing day and a half’s events.
    At about the sixth mile we pulled to the side of the river to walk around an unrunnable waterfall. Returning to the current, we found that the most difficult five miles remained, and though the knots of apprehension were still churning in my stomach I rediscovered in myself the confidence I have in my ability to read a river’s currents and encourage it to put me where I want to be. By river’s end I wore a huge, happy smile.
    Two rivers remained that afternoon, each with progressively bigger water, and by sunset my friend and I sat on the tailgate of my truck in downtown Boise near a wave we’d spent two hours surfing. We went downtown for dinner and drinks. An older man named Steve seemed to take a liking to me. He shook my hand not twice, but six times, introducing himself each time. "You're funny," he said. "You're the funniest man I ever met. Have you heard of Chris Farley? You're funny like Chris Farley." By the sixth handshake, he kept my hand in his and leaned toward me, eyes open, and I realized he was about to kiss me.
    "Are you trying to kiss me?" I asked.
     He blushed, stood and proceeded to dance in the street for a while before returning with his hand extended. "I'm Steve," he said.
    We made our way to a friend's house by 2 a.m.
    My alarm went off all too early. I slipped out the front door, leaving my traveling companion behind, and embarked on another journey to the Sawtooth Valley where Congressman Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, was giving an early-morning speech. It was a magnificent drive that weaved along the meandering snakes of the Payette and climbed the northern flank of the Sawtooth Mountains at Banner Summit.
    With the cajoling of the car ride to caress my thoughts coupled with views of a caliber many people may never see I returned to some ideas I’ve been mulling for a couple years. They all come back to the idea of transference. Life is, in one sense, like paddling a river. You work, but only hard enough to encourage the river to work for you because as strong as you are you will not, and can not, overcome the river’s strength. But life is also like climbing, working deliberately to overcome obstacles that appear insurmountable, embracing faith that a summit is up there somewhere.
    Where my mind begins to strain on this internal dialogue is that without the mountain the river does not exist. The mountain’s snows and slopes produce the water supply and gradient required to make a river. And without the river the mountain would be a featureless mass of rock. The mountain is shaped by the river. The river is created by the mountain.
    So, if climbing a mountain and running a river require different skills, the former the determination to overcome and the latter a willingness to release oneself to an inherent underlying strength, how is one to know in life which skill is required to accomplish a given task? (And certainly these skills do not constitute an exhaustive list.) It’s a question I return to time and again. How is one to know when to climb? And how is one to know when to drift?
    He doesn't offer any insight on when to choose various approaches, or which could be more true, but veteran kayaker Doug Ammons sums up the river approach succinctly. "Using the river as a platform for metaphor, we are taught a great lesson by paddling here. Overpowering the river will not work. Only by working with the overwhelming currents will a paddler find success."
    Two hours later, after sitting through the congressman’s speech and bending his ear for a spell on some issues inherent to the politics that prompted my visit, I returned once again to a river. I released myself to the surging strength of the Yankee Fork, which also flowed brown and floated still more logs through its continuous high-water froth. It’s not advised, but I went alone, focused on letting the river do the work, finding a certain Zen that I’ve only discovered on the rivers of my life, a white room of meditation and contemplation that drowns the outside world away—for a spell.
    Three miles later I pulled onto a riverbank, disrobed down to my shorts and began to jog the three miles back to the put-in, executing the same kind of determination required from a mountain climber or mountain biker, that faith in one’s ability to overcome pain, to put one foot in front of the other with faith that the destination will arrive so long as you are determined enough to keep going.
    On the river and on the mountain it’s easy to know which skills are needed, and why. If only it were so easy in life.
    By Sunday afternoon I was back at the house where I’d attended a barbecue amidst snow flurries ten days earlier. It was easily eighty degrees. Shirts were off. A Frisbee flew abut. And a guitar appeared in my hands, a banjo appearing nearby.
    The rhythm of spring in the Rockies.

    I attended an annual journalism awards banquet this weekend. It’s always an anticlimactic affair, but I had a run-in with a woman I haven’t seen for about four years, and, as we're both writers, we bantered about writing a bit. Specifically, she and I have both contemplated initiating manuscripts about the same topic, the event that crossed our paths in the first place.
    “It would have to be fiction, don’t you think?” she said.
    “Well, it would take a lot of I-dotting and T-crossing to make it non-fiction,” I said.
    “Yes, it would have to be fiction,” she said. “There’s too much there. We know too much about things we couldn’t really write about.”
    That might not seem to make sense, but it does.
    “I’ve been thinking a lot about writing,” I told her. “The past two years have been really eye-opening. Things like this banquet, journalism, PR and a lot of writing in general—I’ve been writing for a paycheck for almost ten years now, but I don’t think we ever write about what’s really happening. As journalists, copywriters, PR writers, we just skim the surface and often quite intentionally.”
    By that, I suppose, I meant emotions. They’re lurking everywhere, but we so seldom see people show what or how they’re feeling. Regardless of the specific emotion, from unchecked lust to overly romantic love, from kettle-boiling rage to hide-under-a-desk meekness, from dysfunctional jealousy to life-changing guilt, it seems to be what makes good writing readable. Show me the truth, and I'll show you a good story—likely a story in need of being converted into fiction to protect its characters, but a good story just the same.
    Nevertheless, I ran across a fantastic essay today in the May 2008 edition of “The Writer.” It’s a reprinted essay by the late Sloan Wilson, who authored The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The essay is called “How to become A Writer: Live fully and record your experiences to describe not only yourself but humanity.”
    The more I read these kinds of essays the more I detect parallels between writing, psychology and a certain kind of “Celestine Prophecy” form of spirituality, an old topic I've failed time and again at capturing in an essay. Short of rambling forever, however, I’m simply going to punch in some quotes from Wilson’s essay. That's the real reason I'm posting anything to the Internet this evening.

“The fear of emotion is closely coupled with the fear of self-revelation, which effectively silences most would-be writers.”

“I see few would-be writers who can’t write, but many who for various reasons can’t feel, see, hear or think … Lately, however, I’ve come to believe that powerful emotions are not as rare as they might seem to be. Most people have simply buried them so deep that they can’t find them when they look for them.”

“But unless a writer feels an emotion deeply, he can’t set it down convincingly, whether that emotion be worthy or unworthy. And the whole body of a man’s work is inevitably a mirror-image of his soul and mind. That is why writing is such a terrifying business, for after working mightily, a writer may find that he has finally succeeded in exposing himself fully a fool or worse. Some of the worst are in a sense some of the best writers, in that they leave no doubt ... about what they are—they don’t obscure the issue; they come right to grips with their sentimentality, their sadism or their other faults.”

“I once said that the way to write a love story is to fall in love and to have to tell somebody about it and to hell with the rules, if there are any.”

“Just as honest emotion isn’t enough for the violinist, it isn’t enough for the writer’s final draft, although it should be for his first one.”

“One should not try to be a writer any more than one should try to fall in love. The only good way to do either is in spite of oneself.”

“Young people take pen in hand to write about anything which they don’t know about or don’t care about, because if they know about it or care about it, they’re embarrassed to set it down.”

“In the classroom, I try to convince my students of something I believe, which is that no writer writes worse than he knows how to, and no emotion on paper can be faked.”

“All writing, whether it is autobiographical or not, is remorselessly self-revelatory in the same way that dreams are.”

“A man is what he writes, no better and no worse. Writers who are able to interest readers of any kind are invariably sincere, although some of them hate to admit it.”

“Writers of sentimental stories invariably turn out to be genuinely sentimental when you get to know them well, and it is impossible to write a convincingly sadistic story without having a real streak of sadism in one’s nature.”

“A writer cannot choose his audience; he can only be himself and let his audience choose him.”

“A fundamental modesty is one reason why many people can’t write. ‘If writing is really nothing but recording one’s own private view of the world, and if this is fundamentally nothing but putting oneself on paper,’ one student said to me, ‘why should I presume to think I have anything special to offer?’”

“…Regardless of their love of being individualistic, people are really much more alike than they are different. We are all drops of water from the same pond, and anyone who describes himself well, to some degree describes humanity.”

“People who talk about themselves at parties have acquired the reputation of being bores not because they talk about themselves, but because they lie about themselves, because they exaggerate their strengths and leave out their weaknesses. Anyone who could tell me what he loved, feared and hated most, what his hopes were, what his greatest triumphs and disappointments have been, would hold me spellbound. That is, after all, the only kind of person who has a chance of learning how to write.”