Photo by Doug Schnitzspahn
Labor Day weekend camping on Kenosha Pass and I am up early. The dog notices and licks my hand and face. My eight-year-old son stirs. The sky is not yet light. “Let’s go for a walk,” I say.
Soon, the two of us are wandering up a dirt road in an aspen grove, not saying anything, not needing to. We reach a high meadow as the disc of the rising sun shoots the dry grass full with golden light. Below us, there’s the big expanse of South Park and silence. It’s one of those moments, when time stops or lolls along, when I have forgotten about all those deadlines for this magazine and others, when I don’t care that my phone has no service, when I feel very little difference between who I was when I was my son’s age and who I am now.
The dog chases a bird. My son sits and plays with a blade of grass.
It has been so long since I have experienced a morning. A morning with no work, no races, no objective.
I have been reading a lot of Whitman this past year. He spoke to me once when I was young. Then I forgot. When I was in high school, I didn’t care much for Whitman, just another dead poet you were supposed to read. Even when I studied poetry and writing in graduate school, I stayed away from old Walt: Too simple. Too much repetition. Too easy.
Something has changed now. I read these lines of Whitman the other day and they have stuck with me. It’s as if he is speaking directly to me, as if he wrote these words just for me to be thinking about them here looking out on this view on a morning in Colorado: “Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams, / Now I wash the gum from your eyes, / You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light / and of every moment of your life.”
I also learned this year that one of my ancestors, a lighthouse keeper by the name of Phineas Mundy, fought for the Union at the battle of Chancellorsville, a bloody, bumbling defeat for the North. Walt Whitman was there, too, working as a nurse, seeing how there was very little difference in the faces of the dead. I think about that battle up here. Our lives are blessed, lucky. For some of us, the biggest challenge in our day-to-day life is how we will be able to fit a mountain bike ride into an over-booked schedule.
When it comes down to it, that is good enough, but I am not satisfied. We face growing, massive problems, and though we may not be called on to volunteer to fight in bloody battles, we still have a deep responsibility. The Earth keeps getting smaller. Climate change threatens to wipe out species (already I see it happening first-hand in great stands of whitebark pine in high alpine meadows that have been reduced to dead brambles). We keep pressing in on wild places—the last rhinos are being displaced by palm-oil plantations in Sumatra, oil wells suck out every last drop. I am complicit. What can I do?
I think about what it would mean to habit every moment of my life, and I think I can try, that I can both be a part of this life up here, blissful and enjoying this place, and also aware of the real dangers facing our planet. We have to try. We need the dazzle of the light.
