It is late.
I am tired but not tired enough.
Dawn is out already, the foothills all hunter orange, as if they've just staggered out from a night of excess. Dang them foothills, the nerve of 'em having gotten a little tipsy at Cabela's, and now, just making it worse. Trying to walk a straight silhouette but still drunk on last call in the hunters aisle. I see it all, even if I shouldn't. Even if I was due for shut eye hours back.
I stagger as well. Especially to not embrace the shock I feel over Summer's end and her turncoat ways.
It can't be for real, this change of sun and daylight. I am reluctant; witnessing another chapter of humanity's renewal. Damn our perpetual revolving status, cited and footnoted by the ever shortening days. Such truth is hardly absorbed willingly. I never gave my implied or actual consent to this haunting. I'd like to drop this class. Get me an incomplete.
I fight what my senses-especially what the pre dawn air, is telling me. This coupled with yesterday's last stand of late afternoon summer heat. I know where all this is heading and I'm pissed. This contrast, this transition time is bound to end up as yet another example of unpaid coaching time. A learning opportunity. Or as often it's put in corporate speak ruse-genuine "constructive" feedback.
As if anything these days in this land of Corporate Global Economies is genuine.
How dedicated I am to resistance. Intensely not seeing what I see. This involves a rare type of consistency and commitment, an embrace of surety. Why is it I never seem to attain such a focus when it's an activity that matters? For example, if say, we are talking about meeting performance outcomes.
But give me some fantasy. Or better yet, that haunting I don't want to admit, something I shouldn't still cling to, and then I can easily deny myself into oblivion or pretend myself into a parallel universe. These are the places I excel; oh witness the extension of endless energy resulting in after hours essays and pictures of sunrise.
My trucker friend Mikey told me last winter that I'd forever ruined the intrigue of denial for him. "Forever", he insisted strongly.
Mikey tells me this over chicken wings at Hooters and I told him nothing is ever totally ruined. Then Buffalo sauce forever sentenced my T shirt to rag status. Not ruined though. Just transformed.
The days shorten. Winter is close at hand. Snow will soon fly. White will replace color.
Some sauces, especially on 100% Cotton, are truly forever.
I can savor these seasons of change, except when I don't. Nothing is ever truly futile until it is.
But as hard as I try, and I can focus with the best of them on "try", concentrating beyond human measure, I know time is getting away from me. The seasonal transition is but the mark of another lost season. From Summer to autumn, followed by the seasons lined out as far as this heart may beat, time escapes me.
Tonight, crossing the guide meridian of a numbered box on my calendar, I met several loggers.
As a breed, they know change and denial and refusing to see the big picture looming. The mills are shutted. The hard rock mines vacant. The cattle ranches turned into guest ranches, then RV parks and finally sub divisions for second homers from California, Florida, and Arizona. All this followed by foreclosure signs. The woods, the farms, the mines, they tell their kids is no life for you. Stay away from a big rig, a big herd, a big crop. Get an education they beg.
The loggers, when they stand on the still slopes, or watch the geese launch from the hunting blinds, they know all about education.
With dawn over their shoulder tonight they head southbound, gunning it 20 over the posted limit. Hell bound toward lighter city lit skies, they ride briefly to be overcome by urban twilight. And then following the goat trails toward the foothills, like me, they'll land back into the darkness. Rising via switchback into the heights of this still rugged bush country across the range from our encounter.
Darkness and isolation. City lights and too much of a good thing. Each offer things I don't really need to be thinking about tonight.
Anyone who is working in the woods right now is living the hoot owl life. Skidders, those who fall the big sticks, and those who buck them up, and as my journeys lately attest, even those who run the big rigs, all of them are up at 1 am eternal. Together we are but lone headlights on chip sealed highways. Our tires whine under the serenade of K Chesney, Reba, and Sugarland. Sometimes my tread sings Trance. Sometimes theirs sing old time gospel or the harmony of running down the road with another gypo, the connections allowed by C B radio or jumped cell towers.
But soon enough I know they'll loose the blacktop, trading the whine of 85 mph for washboarded gravel and tight drop offs. Somehow, just like at yesterday's dawn, and the one before, they'll appear at the top of switch backed log landings. Thermo's up at 2:30 or 3 am, these are the last ghosts of big timber and the cliche of dying breeds.
I can translate too many misunderstood traditions of the Selkirks, this broken but gonna try again common law marriage, this union candle lit by dirt and sweat, a place where each soul is forever committed to the love of dawn, only to be shut down and divorced from the dusted switchbacks by noons heated revenge. The Forest Service shuts the woods down during daylight. Fire danger they say.
So in darkness the hills hear diesel engines struggle and Jacob brakes protest the song of multiple marriages, and many wives later, each trip down is one where hope extends and belief claims a future trip back up. Whether its in a logging truck or on a trail horse or hanging on for dear life because "its a Jeep thing", our lives in these Rockies are all about up and down. Man up. Cowboy up. Cowgirl Up. Rider up. We go down resisting, unwillingly. Brakes smoking, praying hard, reins broken, down is something we deny.
Shit happens. Steering fails. Stingers shatter. Tires blow. Going up, these are things one can counter. Strong resolve can overcome any moment going up.
Down is about powerlessness and uncertainty. Down is getting through it.
Up is getting over it.
Yet for a brief moment the loggers and tree fallers pause, in solitude standing at the log landing, at timber line, up high as the first birds come alive and the coyotes finally settle, that is what keeps a good marriage healthy and each driver, each rider coming back for more loves these ranges more than they can quit 'em.
Racing past midnight, these loggers and I stand for transition. Yes it long past fire season. But it isn't. Red flag warnings get posted and then recalled. Winds stir off the desert basins, in turn encouraging bull pines to shed needles in a rusted carpet of ready! set! go! combustible fuels and fire hazards. Hoot owl restrictions and liftings. Repeat.
So for now hoot owl time remains. The Smokey Bear signs in town warm "Fire Danger Extreme". The stick haulers and suicidal tendency skidder operators, the men of the woods will set chokers, pray against sparks, working through the darkness and into dusk and twilight, sometimes stopping to gaze at the moon or the northern lights. Sometimes stopping to realize they don't have time to stop.
So I have my companions, these truckers of the stars, racing toward the few remaining hours of heavy dew, racing toward the only time allowed by the Forest Service or Department of Natural Resources to try to make a few rounds to the mills or the sorting yards. Trying to keep alive though these last decades of extraction, when lumber can still emerge from the woods, raw and scented, pitch heavy, moisture starved, and commodity price depressed.
I greet the log truck drivers, meeting them rushing toward me always on the same straight stretches. They running hammer down, stingers extending over the clearance lights of their cabs, their big hooded, tall gear forms silhouetted by lines of amber chicken lights, and maybe the ember of a cigarette illuminating their cabs. These men and women with their long hooded Pete's and K Whoppers and Western Stars, dancing across two lane, moon haunted blacktop.
Harvest moon, or a sliver of moon, it doesn't matter. Time is short for these woods and the loggers seem to sense this as they race past. They too denying they are forever gear jammers running from the inevitable, just as I. Racing toward and away from figurative and literal season. Full of dread and promise. Battered and still believe. Rising and falling and claiming elevation like promise rings from Junior High.
Sometimes I roll down my window, inhale their wake. Savoring what little diesel exhaust is allowed these days. Trading pine and cedar scent with alfalfa and meadow flowers or the stench of road kill with the fragrant nectar of Flying J or Truckstops of America, this is the fragrance of my life.
Some days the stick haulers catch me, they suspended up, with flannel shirts and Carhartts resting on the shotgun seat, their headlights illuminating my form. I pulled over on the side of the road, fading fast while leaning into dawn and just trying to wake up to get the last 30 miles home. Again there's no sound in the distance, just the sanctuary of stillness violated by need. Pissing away caffeine and stimulants, too much sodium and not enough organic green then gone again we each have our destination. We each have miles to make. We each are running low on time.
The air brake sounds, and once again motion resumes. CAT Motors sip fuel and reject idle. Yet the stars resume stationary. I turn into the broken yellow lines, headed north. Headed toward acceptance. Headed toward my own addiction to up and down.
And headed toward the dawn of whatever time remains.
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