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Nature's Plan

By David Petersen

Found in: | Outside | Hiking |

Earlier this morning, my wife and her handsome black Lab bodyguard, Otis, were outbound on a typical up-mountain morning stroll, still climbing, when a sudden and ground blizzard - a heavy snowfall driven horizontally by a blasting wind -came screaming in from the west with no forewarning and was on them in an instant; a meteorological ambush. These mountain winter events generally are restricted in area and predictably blow out as quickly as they blow in, like springtime squalls, but are ferocious and potentially dangerous while they last. Even here in the sturdy comfort of the cabin, where I sat working while my little family walked, this morning's mini-blizzard was impressive. Visibility outside slammed to nothing in seconds; sunlight to twilight in an instant. The wind roared so viciously I was worried that the fork-topped old-growth ponderosa pine leaning from the hillside over this little wooden box might snap like a wishbone and drop several hundred pounds of death right smack on my slick-bald head. They're not called "widow makers" for nothing.
But mostly, I worried about my wife.
And naught to be done until the threat had passed: In such a holocaust of snow and wind, boot prints refill instantly, leaving no trail to follow. The loudest shout is absorbed by the din and reduced to a silent scream. And Caroline, spontaneous and independent, never volunteers where she's headed on her hours'-long daily walks, or by what route, assuming she even knows before she goes. (When I ask, her standard reply is "Oh, up the mountain somewhere.") That's a damn big somewhere and so it was on this fierce winter morn that she and Otis were on their own to find what windbreak they could and tough out the storm. Predictably, instinctively, she would shelter on the leeward side of some big tree, hunkering there as low as possible with Otis hugged close until the they could see to walk again . . . or, should this not be a squall after all but become a true and prolonged winter blizzard, I would find their frozen corpses emerging from the snow come spring.
Happily, it didn't come to that.
"From the moment the squall caught us," Caroline gushed when she returned - still bundled in her winter walking garb and zapped on adrenaline, trembling from the cold and sublimated fright, talking fast while hugging the woodstove - "I was snow-blind; could barely see Otis just a few steps ahead of me. I yelled for him to take us home but he was blinded too. The wind was blowing so hard it moaned - like a foghorn or one of those throaty train-whistle teakettles. The snowflakes were huge and dry and stung like sleet on my face. I ducked behind a big Doug fir and Otis had just tucked in close beside me when I saw a gray-orange leaf come whipping down at an angle just inches from my face and go skittering across the snow from right to left, then flutter briefly back into the air, only to get knocked back down again and disappear. By the time I realized it wasn't a leaf at all but a bird, a junco I think, it was gone, buried alive. I felt around in the snow until my hands went numb but couldn't find it. It was heartbreaking but there was nothing I could do."
Heartbreaking, of course. All death and suffering is. Yet, in the terrible beauty of nature, at least there is a plan.

This winter vignette is adapted from Durango writer David Petersen's memoir On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life.
(davidpetersenbooks.com)