Mountain Weather
Photo by Jake Tovar
In the mountains, weather can be very erratic. Its difficult to know when one day you'll be sweating on your drive to work and cranking the AC and when you'll be forced to put on a sweater or raincoat. There is a certain bliss to loneliness and the mountains reinforce the idea that yeah, besides the trees, the squirrels, the deer, the coyotes, and the wandering spirits, you are alone with an ever-shifting sky over your head and ever-shifting dust under your feet.
I killed a snake driving into town not that long ago. A bad omen to be sure. My tires twisted its neck so hard that its decapitated body slapped against my back-right window. It was beautiful, I know that even though I didn't see it for very long. Its whole life from egg to adolescent to adult was journeyed in an animal simplicity of focus and contentment until it was ended radically by my routine and anxious trip to Walmart. Roads, highways, cars, tires together spell out the utter indifference humans have to the rest of the world. Ugly fences dot rolling countryside and coarse gravel rubs raw fertile ground.
Its plain to most everyone that our common anxiety and alienation is homemade and self-induced. Totally our fault. All but the most thick of us admit that everyday. Yet we stay on the same roads thinking they'll get us somewhere. We count every minute as we are trained to valuate and therefore calculate rest into the ever constant working day.
But as I see the mountain rain wash away foot trails and retaining walls made over months and years in a matter of minutes. I know that the heavenly spirits of fire and light, water and ice are just waiting to stop the clock and radically end our aimless wandering.