The Aspen Guard Station is a
log cabin in an aspen grove in the San Juan National Forest, 12
miles north of Mancos in southern Colorado. Built by the Civilian
Conservation Corps in the 1930s, the guard station once housed fire
crews. Today, the cabin is home to another kind of seasonal worker:
writers and artists participating in a residency program sponsored
by the San Juan Public Lands Center. This past August, I was one of
them.
The cabin had water, a woodstove, propane lamps, a
stove and refrigerator, but no electricity and no telephone. What
the Forest Service described as “historic, but eccentric” sounded
like just what I wanted. I live in the wired world of San
Francisco, but the novel I’m writing is set at the turn of the last
century. Two weeks without television and Internet access would
help bring me back in time.
Our route followed summer
storms, from Barstow to Kingman to Santa Fe. Hail whitened the
fields outside Chama. We bought a week’s worth of groceries
in Durango, and on the other side of Mancos, we rattled up the
forest road with books, papers, camping gear, Glenn’s guitar and my
Olivetti manual typewriter.
We arrived just before
sunset. The trees lit up in aspenglow, pink lanterns with bark
shades 30 feet high. By the time we’d unloaded the Jeep, the
corners of the rooms were dim, the woodbox and shelves of
paperbacks already gone gray. We scrambled to locate flashlights,
candles, matches, and instructions for the propane lamps.
Nightfall at the cabin was a revelation: When the sun went down, it
got dark indoors, too.
The first night’s scramble became
an evening ritual: Light the lamp over the kitchen sink to cook by.
Light the candles on the table to eat by. Light the Coleman
twin-tube lantern to read by. These small lights did not illuminate
a room; they let us see the darkness.
At the end of the
day, when we turned off the last lamp, the one over the bed, the
mantle would hold onto the glow like a reluctant second sunset.
There was a softness to the cabin’s indoor night.
The walls were thick, 10 logs high. The burnished wood had the
patina of an old violin. Our pine table and benches were
CCC-carved, original to the guard station. In one of the paperback
anthologies I found a poem by Gary Snyder called, “Things to Do
Around a Lookout.”
It began: “Wrap up in a blanket in
cold weather and just read.” We did that. We went out on the porch
to feel the cold; we opened our ears to the quiet. There were
sounds, of course — a faraway rifle shot, the hissing of
propane, our own voices — but there was no noise. Night came
in and sat by the stove, the wolf taming itself, wagging its tail.
The shadows were dreams waiting to happen.
Mice skittered
across the floor all night long. But the evenings of sustained
darkness made our bodies ready for sleep. We slept well and deeply.
On our last night, we heard elk bugling, a sound like I
imagine northern lights must look.
That first evening
when we drove up the forest road, I expected a residency: two weeks
at a guard station in Colorado. What I got was an opportunity to
inhabit all the hours of the day. Unelectrified nights turned out
to be as essential as our daily writing and hiking. There should be
some word like “enlightenment” that means what you learn from
darkness. The creative counterpart to shedding light, endarkening,
bringing dreams and restorative sleep.
Sea-level natives,
we hiked to just short of 12,000 feet at Sharkstooth Pass. City
dwellers, we listened for bears: The snapping of twigs in the
forest turned out, every time, to be high-altitude cows grazing. At
Windy Gap we were surprised by the spires of Monument Valley
resolving out of the haze some 120 miles away.
In its
last two lines, “Things to Do Around a Lookout” makes a swift turn
from its listing of present activities, mundane or aesthetic or
essential. What to do next is suddenly the end: “Get ready for the
snow, get ready / To go down.”
Back home, the days are
getting ever shorter. We have passed the autumn equinox. We are
moving toward December’s winter solstice. When the sun sets
here, I turn on one lamp instead of two, or sometimes none at all.
I shed some needed darkness. I let night fall.
Erica Olsen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). She
lives and writes in San Francisco,
California.
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