Green Mountain

First Day back on
Green Mountain

Yes, that's me. Four days shy of three months after my second knee replacement. (Thank goodness I only have two.) And I'm back on Green Mountain.

This is as high as we went. You can see the trail across the draw. The trail head is around the left side of the ridge and down hill.

Scott and I spent a little more than an hour hiking. We didn't go to the summit. We will one day, but this was quite enough for my first foray. Even though the trail we chose was one of the lesser steep ones, it was still steep enough. My knees did great, but breathing, that was the hard part. It'll take a while to build my endurance back up.

Any place else, cloudy skies would be dreary, but this sky was magnificent.

I'd forgotten how unstable I feel at heights. I'm glad I had my hiking poles with me. I'd also forgotten that feeling of near panic when I hear a mountain bike approaching. I did remember to get off the trail on the uphill side. That way if they caused me to fall, at least I'd fall UP hill.

Not many trees, but lots of flowers. Different flowers for different seasons. I missed the spring flowers, but there were plenty of summer ones.

  

         The yellow bloom is Prickly Pear       This is Dwarf Lupine, a close              

    The white is Bind Weed, anathema     relative to the beautiful plant          

to wheat farmers everywhere.             I planted this spring and              

                                            promptly killed.

Birds were also abundant. Western Meadowlarks, Black-billed Magpies, the ubiquitous American Robin, and one I'd not seen before the Western Tanager. The Tanager was fiercely defending his territory from a much larger Magpie.

 Bird Photos from The Cornell Ornithology Lab, All About Birds

Scott on the trail
patiently waiting for me.

Every little bit of the way I'd comment on how beautiful it all was and how glad I was to get to see it again. After two guys passed us on their bikes, Scott said that I also got to see MAMILs. which I misheard as mammals. I know coyotes and mule deer and the occasional mountain lion can be found on Green Mountain, but we'd not seen any of them. In response to my confused look he explained, "Middle-Aged Men in Lycra."

Looking down on Denver as it disappears in the haze.

Our town is between Green Mountain and Denver so we didn't have far to go home.

Happy, Happy Feet!

P.S. Although I seldom travel far from home, living in the midst of vacation-land as I do, let me recommend a blogger friend of mine who does travel and blogs beautifully about her travels -- Anabel Marsh, The Glasgow Gallivanter.

The Floods of Felsenthal -- a poem by Grace Wagner

Grace Wagner

The Floods of Floods of Felsenthal

Every November, so says my father, the floods follow the ducks to
Felsenthal:
blue-wing teals, mallards, black ducks and gadwalls,
They gather in covens and bring the rain
which soaks the shallow roots of the loblollys
who stand evergreen over the pine-needle stratum; the rain
which gluts the earth till it brims and breaks, flooding
until it fills the basin of itself; the rain
which gives new roads to the fish, crawpie and walleye, largemouth bass
basking beneath the pine-filtered light of dawn.

As the water follows the birds, so my father follows the water.
He takes me out on its face, breaking
the water's waiting tension with the prow of our canoe.
Here two months ago my grandfather stayed, camped close.
But the flood takes it all, swallowing campsites and parking lots, slow
Southern apocalypse meandering in oxbows and bottom lands,
gathering itself in sloughs and buttonbush swamps.

Now the loblolly pines grow from water.
A small hill rises artificially high, bearing the weight of man-
made brick and mortar, restrooms for the campgrounds
when the ground was still visible.
My father sits in front of me, back to the trees,
rowing us through their shining corridors.
We say nothing and the nothing echoes
back to us across the water.

I look over the edge but cannot see
the ground only three feet below me.
The water shows me the sky and pine-lace.
I look up and see the same vision, sky and trees,
a perfect mirror of the water.
The light ripples as I move
beneath it, concentric circles radiating
from the centermost point of my eyes;
mandala in pine and sky.

The ducks watch us, augurs with webbed feet
sculling beneath the polished surface,
their buoyant bodies swiveling
to watch us pass.
They know we are not here for them.
They know the rain will soak and sink 
into the land, damp leaves left like carpet
after a hurricane.
They know my father will die
some day and that I will follow him.

A tackle box sits at my feet, but my father does not
open it. Does not pull out the assemblage of jigs,
of spinners and spoons and flies.
The buzzbaits sit unsummoned, sullen
in their rubber skirts.
Today my father does not pull out the rod
or the reel.

He rows
in silence through the trees,
knowing as I know
that nothing
needs to be said.

This is one of nine poems by Grace Wagner published in the Spring 2017 issue of Skidmore College's Literary Journal, Salmagundi Magazine

Luka and Danna

Luka and Danna, a scene from Dead and Gone,

a work again in progress

Luka touched the blade against his beautiful Danna’s throat and held his breath.

Born outside convention, his mother gave him as much as she could. She gave him the Gathering and Galen, the physician, the teacher. Not his father. She’d not given him any father at all. But Galen delivered him and eased his mother through her last agonies and out of this world.

Danna would not be put through that pain. He would see to that. Nor would he let her suffer her father’s bigotry.

Dr. Porter was insane. What kind of man would kill his own grandchild? No matter how “normal” it might be. There was no reason to believe that this baby would be “less than” in any way. It might tend back toward the norm, yes. But not necessarily anything less than Level I.

Luka measured Level I both mentally and physically. His IQ in the high 130s. He stood a little shorter than the norm for the Martian Colonies, but on a par with Earth-born. Danna was off the charts. She was the product of her father’s research, his amalgamation of the best available genetic material. The result of her father’s ambition. And now she had defied the man.

Luka loved her and she was carrying his child – Luka's child, not the great Dr. Porter’s engineered child.

Kneeling on the bank of a rushing creek, her head bowed, Danna held her dark hair back with her right hand and waited. She had wiped her car’s memory and destroyed her mobile.

Across the creek a green swath of grass defied the late snow. Both held in early morning shadow. The sun glowed against the top of the cliff face rising high above them.

Luka let go his breath. A thin red line followed the blade. The blade so sharp that she felt nothing. He applied pressure to the small cut just below her left ear. A chip, smaller than a grain of rice popped out into his hand. This was the last link between Danna and her father.

Lampedusa -- a Review

Lampedusa is an excellent 2016 two-part Italian mini-series starring Claudio Amendola as Coast Guard Commander Marco Serra and Carolina Crescentini as Viola the administrator of a refugee reception center.

This production gives human faces to the unimaginable numbers of refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea in dangerously inadequate water craft and to the people who try to help them.

Commander Serra is just the kind of fiercely independent hero, we love and the military brass hates. He trusts and supports his crew doing the thankless, but courageous job of saving refugees even if it means bucking orders. And sometimes saving local fishermen from an aggressive Libyan navy who tries to confiscate their boat, their only source of livelihood. (Somehow, it never occurred to me to be concerned about Italian fishermen in the Mediterranean. But of course their work can take them off the coast of the Libya, the same Libya of the infamous Benghazi attack in 2012.)

And Viola has the equally thankless and courageous job of welcoming destitute people and then trying to provide for them until they can be relocated to a more permanent encampment on the mainland. Depending on insufficient funding from the Italian government and the sporadic beneficence of the world at large, she must provide food, shelter, medical care, etc., etc., etc. to these needy people.

Commander Serra rescues a young boy Daki from the sea. He turns Daki over to Viola. Neither of them know that Daki's mother and younger sister were left in Libya until she can manage to get them on another boat to Italy.

All this in the midst of the Lampedusa community, a community with its own needs and concerns. That community is divided between those who have historically welcomed and helped people coming through in search of a better life and those who want to protect their way of life on the island.

Lampedusa's economy depends on fishing, agriculture, and tourism. Just like the real island, some of the people in this drama depend on tourism for their daily bread. And getting people to come to a beautiful island for their holidays when their enjoyment may be disrupted by bodies in various states of decomposition washed up on the beautiful beaches. Or the swim-with-dolphins excursion interrupted by a distress call from a vessel sinking with too many souls needing rescue. For them the refugees are not welcome at all, not even temporarily.

This is a fictional account of the altogether too real circumstances of Lampedusa. As the European territory closest to Libya, it has become a prime transit point for irregular immigrants wanting to enter Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It is an Italian island 127 miles southwest of Sicily. In point of fact it is closer to Libya than it is to Italy.

According to Wikipedia, Lampedusa has an area of about 7.8 square miles and a population of about 6,000 people. We are talking an island just a little more than one-half the size of Liberty Island, the home of the Statue of Liberty. And a population of about the same size as Flathead, Montana. Ever heard of it? Me, neither. Other than being in the middle of the proverbial nowhere, I doubt the two communities have much in common.

According to the UN Refugee Agency more than 150,000 refugees made the crossing between Libya and Italy with the likelihood of dying during the attempt at one death for every 47 arrivals. Can you imagine your little community of 6,000 hosting an influx of that many people for whatever short interval of time until they can move on to what they hope will be a better life.

How bad must the circumstances be for a woman to take her eight- and ten-year-old children to a country where she's never been and where she does not speak the language? On foot, many miles across hostile, unforgiving land. Then unable to all get on a questionable boat to cross the sea, she chooses to send her ten-year-old alone. She knows many people have died trying to make that crossing, but she sees the danger as less than the danger of waiting until they can all go. She sees the opportunities for him as greater than the risk. That is not only Daki's fictional story, but the real story of real people.

What do I know about refugees or, for that matter, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea? I live in Colorado. Our economy comes from the supersectors of natural resources and construction, leisure and hospitality, and education and health services. The federal government is a major economic force with military bases and offices and labs connected to all the government agencies.

Colorado has abundant National Forest land and four National Parks that draw millions of tourists every year. It is notable for its concentration of scientific research and high-technology industries. Other industries include food processing, transportation equipment, the production of machinery and chemical products, and the mining of metals such as gold, silver, and molybdenum.

Instead of the beautiful sea and sky that Lampedusa enjoys, we have the mountains and sky. Colorado now also has the largest annual production of beer of any state. Denver is an important financial center. It is home to professional sports teams from Roller Derby to Rugby and Lacrosse and includes ice hockey, soccer, and all the regulars like football, baseball, and basketball. What "white privilege?" We have "Colorado privilege."

Lampedusa the TV mini-series brings to us a visceral sense of these people's reality in a way that we can kind of begin to actually understand them.

The only access to this production that I know of is Amazon MHz. I don't know what that is, but it's out there. I just happened onto the mini-series on our local International Mysteries channel. It is worth looking for.