What can I say about the onset of autumn? What words are there to describe such beauty? How can I make you understand the glorious beauty and the way it makes me feel? Will it help if I confess that for eight weeks from the middle of August to the middle of October I rose each morning with happiness and purpose? That’s a record to be proud of. Will it help your understanding when I say I did not feel that sinking feeling in my chest, that hollow sucking down that makes one wonder about the health of her heart, during that entire eight weeks. In addition, I had no qualms, no anxiety regarding all the music activities and performances in which I was involved. Let me repeat; no debilitating, paralyzing anxiety for two months! If autumn be the fount of long life and happiness; linger on oh many colored leaves and sooth my heartstrings!
What a joyous season this has been! It takes me back, oh so many years, to a heartache fraught time in my early 20s. Yes, relational stress was mine in abundance. Nevertheless, fall came on and with it an ebullience so strong a neighbor remarked, “Wow Cherry, you really bloom in the fall, don’t you?” Affirmative. And now, just a few millimeter marks beyond my mid-sixties, I can say the same. It is truly the autumn of my life. It is the now or never season. Time to complete the bucket list and finish strong. May I bloom like never before. May I revel in the season and embrace the beauty of fall in perpetuity. May the glorious colors, the golds and reds and yellows and orange refresh you as well and may the health and glory of fall linger on and on in memory and add warmth and glow to your winter. And if you are in the autumn of your life? – May it be your best season ever!
There were moments when she felt no pain. No pain from recent bodily injuries. No pain from heartbreaks of the past. No pressure and throb from stress. No emotional upheaval. No bereft of loss. No memory of embarrassment. No lingering thought of failures behind to threaten the brilliance of future success. Yes, there were moments when she felt no pain. Most frequently those moments came when she was surrounded by beauty. Because beauty heals.
Friends don’t let friends miss out on all the good things in life – or – Purple Bliss is just an Emotion on the Water
The first thing you need to know about Janice is that she is older than I – by about four days. This is not the case with so many of my friends. I have a friend of 43 years who never lets me forget she is younger – by four months. Yet I will forgive her generously for this age bias because she accompanies me on beautiful hikes – even invites me. We have enjoyed many adventures together. Thank God for my newer friends who admit they are older. But the thing about friends – older and newer, younger or elder – is that friends don’t let friends miss out on all the good things in life.
Yes, I have friends with an uncanny ability to sniff out the best things in life and then foist them on me. Take Linda, for instance, she tracked me down in Canyonlands and proceeded to hike me to her favorite places in my own backyard. Then, she came to visit me at Glen Canyon and beguiled me with stories from her Lake Powell memories. But more importantly, we kayaked down 11 miles of the John Wesley Powell route of the Colorado River from Ferry Swale to Lee’s Ferry and I have pictures to prove it.
Janice and I have more things in common than just our June birthdays. I met her through Sweet Adelines so it may be safely assumed we both love to sing. But what, I ask you, is ever safe about singing? It is such a gateway drug. First you are sitting on chairs and then practicing on risers and before you know it you are preforming on stages and soon you find yourself not only singing in the streets, but dancing in the streets. I have made many unique friends in this way.
So yes, Janice and I have a June birthday month in common, we are both about 5 foot three or four depending on how you round it, we love to hike and travel, we share a love for singing – and we were both working in public schools at the time we first met – I as a music specialist and Janice as a resource teacher. But in one area, Janice and I are complementary opposites. Janice is a champion foister. I am the foisted upon. Definitely to my benefit.
After my first stint with Sweet Adelines, I moved to Seattle. Janice kept in touch. When she found out I was coming back to Colorado, she immediately engaged her recruiting persuasion. Why would I not want to sing tenor in a newly minted quartet? Sigh. Four of us made beautiful Musique together. But no. Singing and dressing alike was not enough. We must do bonding activities together – the chorus that plays together stays together. Janice and two other Sweet Adelines were going kayaking on the Colorado, would I come?
I was stubborn and full of lame excuses like not having a kayak or PFD. But Janice knows how to foist. She had an extra kayak and PFD. She told me when to show up. She gave me specific instructions on what to wear and what to bring. Those Adelines laced me into the PFD, seated me in a vessel, handed me a paddle and shoved me off. Up ahead, Janice led in her Purple Bliss. Bringing up the rear, I floated in Janice’s original hunter green kayak, taking to the water like a duck.
When I know it’s right, you don’t have to ask me twice – but they did. We also floated the Gunnison that summer. And I spent a fair amount of time kayak shopping in local sporting goods stores.
Seven years later I was still single and kayakless, but I now had a good deal of experience under my belt having rented all manner and style of kayaks for recreation. Sit in. Sit on. Inflate. Deflate. Lake. River. Back-haul. U-haul. Tie in the truck. Shove in the van. Mount in the kayak carrier. Kayak carrier – what a great concept! Janice bought one – a kayak rack – for her motorhome. The rack was second hand – and came with two kayaks. Worst of all for Janice – and best of all for me – Purple Bliss would not fit in the carrier. She was too skinny – at both ends.
And then Janice began her attempts to foist Purple Bliss on me. It took her two years. During that time she visited me twice at Lone Rock. She dined me, tried to wine me, hiked with me and once even lent me the hunter green kayak to go exploring slots in the nether regions of Lake Powell. Every time I mentioned kayaking on social media, she followed up by promoting Purple Bliss to me.
In early October I arranged to meet Janice at her place, ostensibly to sign two of my books which she had ordered on Amazon, but with a covert motive to kayak shop – to see if the purple kayak would ride on top my car. Janice let me do it myself. It fits and rides charmingly. We finally agreed on a price. The transfer took place ten days ago. Janice has released her favorite vessel and I am adoption happy. I have been on the water four times in less than a fortnight.
Purple Bliss is a specialty kayak built by Emotion and brokered by REI. She is designed especially for a small woman. She weighs only 34 pounds. She is a thing of both beauty and independence. I can hoist her to the rooftop of my Rav4 (aka Silvergirl) and take her down – after all, she weighs less than a grandchild – even if she is 10 feet long. We go everywhere together – just the two of us – with a step stool and a purple and red paddle and a red PFD. Friends don’t let friends miss out on all the good things in life.
She is the type of girl who thinks a daily bath is essential to survival. Never mind if it is cold water, warm water, hauled water, stream water or the lake. It hasn’t always been that way, of course. As a child, like most children, she was required to take baths – one on Wednesday before midweek church service and the other on Saturday night in preparation for Sunday services. Sometime in junior high, daily bathing became a ritual of choice. It gave continuity to her schedule and provided the confidence that results from making one’s best effort to look nice. It also caused her parents to chide her for wasting water and to expound on thrift. Nevertheless, the bathing habit remains her eccentricity. She considers water from the tap an essential. She luxuriates in hot water, whether hauled and heated on a woodstove or available via a simple turn of the faucet handle. Hot springs are an ultimate extravagance provided just for her by Mother Earth.
When Forest Bathing became the new trend and buzz word in 2016 (the idea of shinrin-yoku-a taking in of the forest atmosphere – had been around since the 80s in Japan) she took to it like a duck to water. To get out and take in the forest atmosphere, bask in the great outdoors, soak in the beauty; that too became an almost daily habit. And what a luxurious habit it is! One day a ponderosa forest, the next replete with aspen, a third day piñon-pine.
Forest bathing does not have to involve splashing about or getting wet in water, though it frequently does. The best days are those she hikes for miles and returns to a hot bath or shower. No substituting one for the other; she will have her bath and forest bathe too – every last day of her life if possible.
Her ultimate daydream includes a long hike followed by the almost delirious indulgence of a hot-springs dip surrounded by mountains and conifers. Throw in a piano by the fireside and a savory meal cooked by someone else and she will know she has died and gone to heaven. But that hasn’t happened yet. So, for the time being we’ll leave her with a daily hike and a clawfoot tub filled to the brim with Epson salts.
That’s the trouble with getting outside, it’s as bad a reading a good book. It’s dangerous. It fills you with longing. But at some point, getting outside or reading a good book also fills the longing.
I’d rather go hiking than pay for 50 minutes of therapy.
Either way, the first 45 minutes consist of working through stress and with hiking you usually get a bonus hour or two of enjoyment after that.
Sometimes, when I go hiking, I am so overcome by the beauty of my surroundings that it makes me weep. Sometimes, when I go hiking, my thoughts are so deep they make me weep. Sometimes, when I make music – or hear music – it makes me weep with the sheer beauty of it all.
But I’d rather cry at beauty, than to cry at ugly.
A couple weeks ago I staffed an outdoor event for a weekend in Escalante. On the way home, I stopped at a public piano in Tropic, pulled out the chair and proceeded to play my heart out for about 10 minutes. A woman of my generation – a gracefully aging flower child – sat on the park bench close by and applauded encouragingly.
When I had done and went inside the market to purchase a snack, the woman found me and engaged in conversation. She was touched by the beauty of music and confessed to videoing my mini concert – seemed to ask permission. We talked about beauty – the unexpected beauty of music in surprising places – the beauty of the world and her habit of picking up ten pieces of trash each day – the beauty of the souls who had allowed her to sleep in her car in their parking lot overnight.
We exited the door together and as I cut diagonally toward my waiting auto I heard her squeal of delight at discovering a large praying mantis. It was indeed a magical day. But what happened next was ugly. A large overall-clad man (Overalls on a Sunday morning – so don’t blame the Mormons for what I am about to relate) descended from his big truck and called, “What is it?”
“A praying mantis,” she replied in wonder.
“Well, step on it!” he snapped, “they don’t do anybody any good.”
I know this is not true. I have also learned that I am not called to set the whole world straight; to backtrack 30 feet across parking lots to be a know-it-all because of something I overheard. All the same, I felt guilty about abandoning that lovely hippie to the ugliness of yet another stranger.
Subdued, I continued miles on down the road, contemplating. I hung a left into Bryce Canyon City and on into a park where natural beauty and wildlife are respected and protected. I took a hike – a long hike – and my spirit was restored.
I would so much rather cry at beauty than at ugly.
My favorite work commute is Cottonwood Canyon. Ostensibly I came to Page, Arizona to work as a buyer and retail manager, but my underlying motive was to move a bit further down the Colorado River – to see ever more of the great outdoors and sandstone terrain. I knew the job would require a healthy amount of travel, calling on and merchandising seven small non-profit bookstores spread across southern Utah and Northern Arizona. The imperative inherent in the job description was to get to know the landscape of the public lands within my jurisdiction of Glen Canyon Natural History Association. Once I understood the area, I would design and order merchandise that interpreted the landscape; a mug here, a T-shirt there, all merchandise to help educate, tangible trinkets to take home as talismans, memory triggers of time spent in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area or Grand Staircase Escalante.
My business route takes me on a sweeping grand circle of sorts. Down past Navajo Bridge, Lee’s Ferry, Lonely Dell Ranch; Up Highway 89A to Kanab; passing turnoffs to North Rim of the Grand Canyon and Pipe Spring; Highway 89 past the turnoffs to Zion and Cedar Breaks; Across Highway 12 past Bryce Canyon; several stops within Grand Staircase Escalante and through Capitol Reef, a detour to Bullfrog and Hall’s Crossing; Highway 90 with Natural Bridges in view as well as the buttes that are the Bears Ears; possibly 261 through Cedar Mesa and down the Moki Dugway to 191; continuing on Highway 191 to join Highways 163 and 160; and back to Page. It takes several days to drive this loop, more than a week if I called on all the stores in one trip. I prefer smaller loops. Along this route there are numerous opportunities to choose other back roads and lessor known shortcuts.
My favorite work commute is Cottonwood Canyon. When you take Cottonwood Canyon you experience a variety of colors and geological features. You get out and away from the paved road and any traffic. You can usually go there in a regular car (not so if it is raining or has recently been raining).
All the colors of a commute up Cottonwood Canyon
There is no early morning drive I like better than that dirt and gravel road. It gets me to Cannonville 40 minutes quicker than taking the paved route through Kanab and it gives me a panorama of beauty, a kaleidoscope of ever-changing light and colors of sandstone.
Grovesner Arch soon after sunrise
If you have the luxury of a day off rather than a business commute, several beautiful trailheads are accessed along the way and there is even a written guide to the Geology of Cottonwood Canyon to interpret the rock layers you see. Cottonwood Narrows is a spectacular little hike that can be done in minutes short of an hour if you have a car waiting at the opposite trailhead. If not, double your time and hike back the way you came in, or walk back to your car on the dirt road. On your hike you will enjoy both shadow and sunshine, a little bit of narrow slot canyon, and you might even see a few small arches in the rock walls towering to either side.
She didn’t even flinch as she pressed “submit reservation.” Nor did she deliberate long over ordering the lunch for $13.00. It was not clear from the information if she was allowed to bring food and she well knew her propensity for hunger on the river, or anywhere in the out of doors. What do we work for anyway but to give ourselves a treat once in awhile? A mini vacation. An early birthday gift. A reward to ourselves for staying at work nine hours a day and often going in on weekends. This was a reminder to herself why she is even here in this town on the edge of the river.
“So what’s a $100 dollar bill between best friends?” she asked. Me, Myself and I.
A trip to the beach just the day before in 99 degree heat reminded her of the necessity of sunblock. Don’t underestimate burn potential of reflected sun. So when she arrived at Colorado River Discovery to check in, she went straight to the counter and requested fragrance-free sunscreen. The clerk read the ingredients: hypoallergenic, gluten –free…. she laughed at sunscreen needing a gluten free label. “I’ll take it,” she said. She gulped at the $10 price tag, but did not reconsider. A moment later, as she slathered on the expensive, but quality, goo in bright hot sun she had no regrets. An hour later, eating lunch on a raft with fingers, camera lenses, sunglasses and nearly everything in sight greased with sunblock she acknowledged the necessity of gluten free-or at least non-toxic, sunscreen. It was a fabulous trip. The river is beauty. The river is nature. Nature has healing powers. Beauty can restore. And it did.
Putting One Foot in Front of the Other, Hiking for Life!
