Playing In the Shadows

Winter has come to Evergreen, Colorado. The temperatures no longer threaten the seventy degree mark. Even in the midday sun’s warmth there is a hint of deep cold, the suggestion that this is only the beginning of a long freeze. This year the snows are arriving late. It is mid-December and yesterday, for the first time, we had continual snow. It didn’t amount to much, five or six inches. It was a wet, thick snow that froze on the roads as the temperature dropped.

    

This time of year when the sun falls to the other side of the mountains the cold invades quickly, leaving no doubt that the seasons have changed. The sun no longer bakes the house as I work. Snow falls in clumps arrhythmically from the branches of the pine trees that surround our house and beats drum-like upon the roof. As if to provide more evidence of the coming weather we have begun boarding a mouse, his presence announced in the form of an empty candy wrapper in a kitchen drawer, crumbs trailing away to places unknown.    

Following the day of snow my daughter Madison and I are hanging out together in the living room. Her mother is in Boston for the weekend on business. Madison is looking out the window and singing a children’s song with wonderful rhythm and melody, even though the words are jumbled. She stops singing and says, “It’s raining.”

    

When I look there is only brilliant sunlight and snow being blown from the trees by the breeze. “No, that’s snow.”

    

“Snowing, “ she says, and then, “I wanna go outside.”

    

Moments later Madison is bundled up and excited as we head outside to the driveway. It is late morning and though the sun is near its apex it is still quite low in the sky. Only yesterday, it seems, the dry scorch of heat that defines summer in these parts was with us. Now the trees and rock formations cast long shadows across the land though it is close to midday. The whole mountainside is painted with brilliant strokes of sunlight and darkened areas of shade. And in and out of the shadows slip the ghosts of the past.

    

These ghosts do not belong to us--not yet, anyway--they belong to the explorers that came long ago. They belong to the native americans that called this place home for centuries. They belong to the land.

    

Evergreen is in the foothills above Denver, 7400 feet above sea level. Before being settled by the white man the Ute indians called this place home. The Blue Sky People, as they were known to other tribes, spent their summers at higher elevations, following the bison, elk and deer. During winter they would seek the valleys and lower elevations, again following the nomadic wildlife.  Though they were relatively small in number, other tribes would rarely challenge their hold on the land. The Utes were fierce and cunning warriors. When attacked they would use their knowledge of the terrain and often retreat to higher elevations until the time was right to go on the offense.  The “Shining Mountains” were their home, their fortress, and they were so adept at using the landscape and adapting their tactics that it took the Spanish and new Americans two centuries to conquer them. Long after other tribes had been forced into submission the Blue Sky People were riding their horses into battle and defying the white man’s will.

    

Like all things on this earth, western man’s insatiable desire for more eventually got the best of the Utes. Today the remaining families of the Ute tribe live on a small reservation that begins in southwest Colorado and extends into southern Utah. It is a far cry from their former home which extended from southern Wyoming down to Santa Fe, New Mexico and across to central Utah and the Salt Lake Valley. Unfortunately, life on the reservation has severed their ties to the land, forests and animals, to what defined them. Their culture and beliefs are dying slowly under the influence of commerce, Christianity and television.  

    

Early on the pioneers and new settlers attempted to impale the Utes with Christianity. But the Utes--at least early on--could not comprehend the white man’s God. To the Utes the Christian God was superficial, and Christian rituals were based on abstract ideas. The Christian lacked the close, physical spirituality that was a part of everyday life for the Ute. And the Christians anthropocentric views were at odds with the Utes who believed the forests and animals were an inseparable part of the afterlife.

    

The Utes believed in a Great Spirit, a God of all things. To the Utes, as with many tribes of Native Americans, the Great Spirit lived in the sun and was present in all living things. And the afterlife was seen as a place like earth, only better. The hunting was good in the afterlife, dancing was always a joyous event and the forests were never-ending. The afterlife was like life on earth, only void of the tragedies and heartache.

    

This mountainside here in Evergreen where Madison and I now walk was once the hunting ground for bear, mountain lion and Ute. Today the mountain lion lives in the back country. His numbers remain strong because of his stealthy behavior and shyness toward man. He is the ultimate shadow-boxer, but even his future is questionable. Occasionally, when the winter storms have made food scarce, one will make an appearance near to this spot, near town. If he lingers, or attacks, he will be shot, and the world will be depleted again to the nth degree of one of its riches.

    

The grizzly no longer roams these parts, no longer calls Colorado home. Among bears only the black remains, and his numbers, too, have dwindled. According to the Utes the bear and the mountain lion were the bravest of all animals. The Utes felt a special kinship toward them, and to the land they shared. In their loss from this region--the bear, lion and Ute--and the destruction of their habitat, we have condemned them to the shadows of our past. We are inheriting to our children and their children an empty world, a spiritless world and land. The spirit that connected the Utes and the bear and mountain lion is now an emptiness on the land that the white man is compelled to fill with concrete and brick, with flesh and steel.

    

At times when I look around me I am ashamed to be a part of this new world, ashamed that I cannot walk the elk and bison trails. To view the elk and bison from afar, from the front seat of my sedan, cannot compare to the thrill--the guttural, overwhelming, adrenaline pounding thrill--of rounding a corner and coming face to face with the beast. Its smell, its heartbeat (and mine!), its beauty and the momentary sidestep of time that always accompanies such episodes and breathes life into us and connects us. That standing still of the world--where the minutest detail is crystal clear--is all but foreign to us, but must have been common to the Ute.

Finally being forced onto reservations and having been force-fed Christianity for years, the Ute idea of spiritualism metamorphosed into a blend of Christianity and Ute beliefs. Alone in the mountains, twenty years after forced relocation, a young Ute was visited by the spirits. His vision would become the Ghost Dance and it would help to unify his people once again, in spirit and hope. The Ghost Dance was symbolized on T-shirts and performed at communal meetings. In his vision--and in the Dance--the young Ute saw the world swallowed up and for three days it was void of all living things. After three days the Utes, the forests and the animals were returned to the surface. The white man was gone for good. The Utes had endured their own form of Christ-like sufferings and their God had decided to return them to their world, clean and whole again.

It is a nice dream, but only a dream. The vision of the young Ute will never materialize. We are bulldozing, clear cutting, and homogenizing the planet. When we’ve accomplished this task, when we’ve laid asphalt to all that we can, where will there be any place that is so different from the next? When we’ve chased the wild from around us and within us what of the spirit will remain?

We have forced the wild to retreat to the shadows. And by exorcising the land of its spirit we are condemning ourselves to a reservation that, like the Ute’s, is empty and void. Native Americans know the road we are traveling--singular and cold, apart. To continue along our current path will certainly condemn us to being ghosts in our own world.

Madison has walked to a group of large boulders that overhangs the land below us. This precambrian rock reverberates with more than a billion years of history. It speaks to us in a voice we cannot hear but feel. Madison climbs gently upon the mass of granite, with its mixture of feldspar, quartz and mica. The rock vibrates silently, subtly, at a sub-atomic level, telling her of the great body of water that once covered it, of the dinosaurs that played upon it, of the grizzlies that rested beneath it.

Upon the boulder, perhaps hundreds of years old, are lichens of green and white coloration. In their time they have witnessed much. From their perch atop this rock they have seen the things we can only dream of, the things that are not written or recorded except in their cells. Buried deep in their DNA is the story of all that was, all that is.

The wind blows the branches of the pines above us.  It is as old as the rock, the wind, and it too has things to tell. It gently nudges snow from the branches of the trees. The snow is crystalline and shiny in the brilliant sunlight. I lean against a tree and tilt my head back toward the sun, and for a brief moment I drink it in, the wind, the sun and the rock. For a brief moment I disappear into the world and mix with it. I soak up the vibrations of all that is, scarcely comprehending but at least feeling.

    

Madison does not know of spirits and Gods or precambrian rock. She does not wonder about waste and destruction. She is twenty-one months old. She is concerned with security, knowing her mother and father are there, and will continue to be there, which gives her the freedom to explore and learn.

    

She plays in the mixture of shadow and light. The stories of the rock and wind, the grizzly and mountain lion--the earth--are whispered to her from the depths of billions of years. They are patient and eternal, these voices. They are inviting.

Disappear into the world, they offer.